Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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  1. MacGruber
    How much mileage can a comedy get from a single joke? Quite a bit, judging from the guffaws-to-groaners ratio in MacGruber.
  2. The Losers
    The Losers is the sort of pyro-heavy exercise parodied in "Tropic Thunder," and no amount of production polish can hide the hollowness beneath its junk-food high.
  3. Suddenly Naked
    Well-acted, sharp-looking pic seems more interested in sitcom diversions.
  4. Journey to Western Xia Empire
    A slowly inspiring saga of blood, sweat and horse dung, played with conviction.
  5. A Trial in Prague
    Sheds valuable light on a complex period of post-World War II Czechoslovakia.
  6. B-52
    Filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky needs nothing more than the cold facts surrounding this awesome weapon to get across a message about the importance of peace.
  7. Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
    A sibling survivor story of uncommon personal and political breadth.
  8. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
    "It's the ultimate Dogme movie, before the birth of Dogme," is how 79-year-old Lithuanian-born independent mainstay Jonas Mekas describes peaceful, enthralling assemblage encompassing home movie footage from last three decades of his life.
  9. Close, Closed, Closure
    Israeli filmmaker Loevy questions in voiceover whether one can ever really see the other's side, and the strain of this divide is felt in over-dramatic attempts to highlight individual victims.
  10. New Suit
    Another satirical view of the everyday insanity of working within the Industry, slickly made New Suit adds no special insight to the subgenre.
  11. Stealing the Fire
    Sometimes wavers, but its stylistic unevenness is trumped by its topicality.
  12. The Rose Technique
    Scheide's feature never quite seizes the potential for full-on "Stepfather" thrills or "Serial Mom"-style black comedy, leaving pic diverting but too mild.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eat This New York
    The docu, serving up interesting insights into the unique restaurant culture of NYC, should prove appetizing in urban venues.
  14. Union Square
    Its unvarnished look at life in the slow lane exerts a hypnotic fascination that could hook reality mainliners.
  15. Wake
    Though the characters are not particularly interesting in themselves, their dynamic remains consistently engrossing.
  16. Free Radicals
    An often compelling drama, marbled with dry humor and flecked with the supernatural, that provides food for thought but doesn't quite reach the brass ring.
  17. People Say I'm Crazy
    Fascinating and frustrating in nearly equal measure.
  18. Story of the Eye
    Evaluating this project in conventional feature terms is a lost cause; relevant contexts are purely avant-garde and pornographic. Suffice it to say that helmer's careful attention to framing camera, music and content signal primary allegiance to Art rather than Smut.
  19. September Tapes
    Gritty, engaging.
  20. The Cloud of Unknowing
    In service of an eerie Japanese ghost story, the spooky atmospherics prove surprisingly compelling.
  21. Imelda
    A balanced, evenhanded film about a subject who has always managed to provoke intemperate reactions.
  22. Freeze Frame
    Signals a talented newcomer in writer-director John Simpson and boasts a gripping central performance from popular British comedian Lee Evans.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme
    One of the film's strengths is its abundant performance footage.
  24. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    An especially dramatic, if needlessly frantic, work of polemical reportage on racism in America.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Other Side of the Street
    A diverting, if unspectacular, Brazilian drama centered on an aging female detective.
  26. Eros
    What might have been a cinephile's wet dream turns out instead to be seductive, stimulating and sodden, in that order, in the three-chapter reflection on love and desire.
  27. Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man
    Confusing lack of historical set-up considerably dims the potential luster of a great true story: Helmer Alberto Negrin relies instead on competently rendered but cliche-ridden melodrama of nasty Nazis and suffering Jews.
  28. Stalin's Wife
    Results are solid, if stylistically unspectacular.
  29. A Man's Gotta Do
    A cut above the average Aussie crazy-clan comedy.
  30. Lustre
    Uneven but affecting.
  31. Human Error
    Benefits from blend of live actors with computer-generated effects and backgrounds. Feature doesn't add up to much more than an enjoyable novelty.
  32. Chain
    Links narrative fiction filmmaking to avant-garde with vision and authority.
  33. Screen Door Jesus
    Winner of the Golden Starfish fiction competition at the Hamptons fest, pic's gutsy, madly ambiguous unleashing of a mixed bag of religious reactions attests to a genuine sense of regionalism.
  34. The Optimists
    Explores another courageous, little-known chapter in the saga of resistance and heroics during World War II.
  35. The Time We Killed
    The Time We Killed reps avant-garde vet Jennifer Todd Reeves' most ambitious work yet, a dense-packed feature-length black-and-white journey into a beautifully restless mind.
  36. Derailroaded
    As discomfortingly fascinating as listening to a couple's heated argument at a table near yours in a restaurant.
  37. The Swenkas
    Ronde demonstrates a painterly eye and ripe affection for these people, but as with "Jerusalem, My Love" he maintains a too-polite, worshipful distance from his subjects.
  38. 39 Pounds of Love
    Dani Menkin's documentary tracks his odyssey, which by nature is hard to be cynical about. Still, the feature feels padded even at 70 minutes.
  39. Trudell
    More hagiography than history, Heather Rae's long-in-production portrait of Native American activist and poet John Trudell has the uncritically admiring feel of authorized biography.
  40. Workingman's Death
    Pic reps a sequel of sorts to his 12-part "Megacities" about poor folk in separate burgs, and comes soaked in good old-fashioned humanist respect for the dignity of labor, but eventually grows a little monotonous.
  41. Standing Still
    Surfing the crowd in Altman-lite style, pic skims the surface entertainingly but goes limp in its stabs at seriousness, especially in the final scenes, which all but drown in emotional confrontations and hasty happy endings.
  42. Killer Diller
    Premise is formulaic and execution is predictable, but Brock maintains a lively pace while eliciting first-rate work from thesps.
  43. Police Beat
    Distinctive, physically ravishing indie is a natural for fests, but it's questionable whether this sometimes involving, sometimes obscure pic will have appeal beyond the specialty market.
  44. How I Killed a Saint
    Though weak in the drama department, the story of a brother and sister who love each other but have different political ideas and personal agendas effectively captures the tension of the time.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    La tropical
    Offers a rarely seen view of the barrio in Havana and demonstrates the importance of dance and music in dealing with pervasive racism and crippling poverty.
  46. Heading South
    Cantet's anticipated follow-up to "Time Out" supplants that pic's important issues with unexamined attitudes toward sex and the tropics.
  47. Two Sons of Francisco
    The unlikely success story of superstar Brazilian country music duo Zeze di Camargo and Luciano receives a polished if highly manipulative treatment in Two Sons of Francisco.
  48. The Groomsmen
    Burns' always impressive sense of place lends authenticity to the pals' perambulations, and the stellar cast brings a welcome overabundance of personality to regrettably one-note roles.
  49. My Grandmother's House
    Studded with moments of character-driven charm, with sparky 6-year-old Marina Pastor a particular joy to watch.
  50. Who Needs Sleep?
    A comprehensive, personal and surprisingly engaging look at how film crews routinely work hours far beyond anything that can be considered safe, healthy or conducive to a balanced life.
  51. Buzz
    Film traverses Buzz's career with reasonable depth, helped by good-quality trailers from several pics. However, one suspects there are a lot more stories Buzz could tell in a more rigorous format.
  52. The Dogwalker
    Though central dynamic is a familiar one -- old coot and young lost soul thrown together -- perfs, understated script and well-judged direction avoid too-obvious sentimentality or melodrama. Nonetheless, overall story arc is fairly predictable, and deliberate pacing sometimes risks dullness.
  53. Home
    Though no "Love and Diane," this modest film nevertheless reveals the fragility of hope in survivalist mentalities pre-programmed to expect the worst.
  54. The Decay of Fiction
    The attention given to constructing each shot makes for a hypnotic visual experience, while lack of a progressive narrative telescopes film's running time into infinity.
  55. Be with Me
    A curate's egg of a movie that starts intriguingly but becomes increasingly frustrating.
  56. Hard Scrambled
    Picture's retro feel is rendered pleasing overall by scribe's linguistic flair and the enjoyable cast.
  57. Hair High
    While his static backgrounds and stuttering character movement aren't likely to win over traditional animation fans, Hair High reps the high end of this "Sick 'n' Twisted"-type toonery.
  58. Conventioneers
    Filmmakers' own left-leaning sympathies are occasionally felt around the margins, but Conventioneers achievement lies in its honoring the sincerity and passion on both sides.
  59. The Magic Gloves
    Sporadically charming and quite amusing, but torpidly paced.
  60. Four Eyed Monsters
    Fascinating if overly self-involved Slamdance entry is among the few U.S. pics that deliberately smudges the line between non-fiction and invention as it tells how Crumley and Buice meet online and develop a relationship.
  61. The Empire in Africa
    Infused with a strong sense of moral outrage, The Empire in Africa provides more heat than light while attempting to explain the motives and methods of combatants who waged the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone.
  62. The Tiger and the Snow
    Like an Iraq-war mirror image of "Life Is Beautiful," actor-director Roberto Benigni's The Tiger and the Snow re-runs the successful structure and comic persona of the 1998 Oscar-winning film in a trippy fantasia about a poet who follows his love to hell and, in this happier ending, back.
  63. Guru
    Strongly cast, long-limbed yarn contains some of Ratnam's best stuff in its first half but script weaknesses mar the later going and film's overall impact.
  64. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    Sixty years after World War II, descendants of a prominent Nazi responsible for implementing Hitler's policies in Slovakia reignite debate over their heritage in emotional docu 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him.
  65. From Other Worlds
    Picture's leaps into the fantastic and rampantly farcical tend to be overextended, but finally don't detract from what is a well-judged, light entertainment.
  66. East of Havana
    The temptations of allowing a promotional video to seep inside a genuine non-fiction study nearly overtake East of Havana and its look at a bubbling hip-hop culture in Cuba.
  67. Black Friday
    Despite its large cast and complex criss-crossing from past to present, the movie rarely catches fire as an involving human drama.
  68. Eklavya: The Royal Guard
    The pic often plays like a Cliffs Notes version of a longer movie: Pacing and continuity aren't choppy, but there's enough material here for a full-length drama that would go deeper into the characters and their backgrounds. Eklavya is good as it is, but lacks tragic heft.
  69. The Go Master
    Perhaps the least accessible of Tian's films, this serenely elliptical poser will elude all but the most devoted arthouse auds.
  70. Private Fears in Public Places
    Despite a perfect cast of Resnais regulars plus the master's own impeccable crafting, the characters fail to grip, and with approximately 50 short scenes, development comes in fits and starts.
  71. Syndromes and a Century
    By the end, nothing much has happened, but all the same, picture casts a witchy kind of spell with its deep-breath pacing and undertow of unspecified malaise.
  72. The Treatment
    This offbeat charmer succumbs to the same airless artificiality that has claimed many recent efforts in the genre.
  73. Day Night Day Night
    Context and psychological insight are the major casualties of Day Night Day Night, a dramatically limited but strangely powerful portrait of a young would-be terrorist.
  74. Amu
    Admirably idealistic but dramatically awkward.
  75. A Man of No Importance
    Despite fine work from his actors and smooth technical polish, the more provocative elements of the tale arise awkwardly and grate against the early section's almost whimsical nature.
  76. Beyond Hatred
    Verite docu Beyond Hatred movingly accompanies the family of Francois Chenu, a gay man murdered by three skinheads in 2002, down the road to forgiveness.
  77. In Between Days
    Revealing without being especially compelling, In Between Days offers a bleak, rigorously naturalistic portrait of an Asian-American teenager's physical and emotional dislocation.
  78. Gandhi, My Father
    Classy production values and a textured lead performance by Darshan Jariwala are undercut by a lack of real drama in Gandhi My Father.
  79. Moving McAllister
    Ben Gourley packs this excursion with enough contrived quirkiness and latent angst to win over the college crowd, but adds nothing particularly insightful about his generation.
  80. Nina's Heavenly Delights
    Stereotypes abound, dialogue is conventional and pace scattered. Still, resulting stew is pleasant.
  81. Steal a Pencil for Me
    Fortunately, helmer Michele Ohayon ("Cowboy del Amor") treats her tricky subject matter with sufficient sensitivity to keep doc from ever seeming offensively flip or overly sentimental.
  82. Man in the Chair
    As a showcase for rising young star Michael Angarano and Christopher Plummer, pic offers the pleasures of connecting Hollywood traditions and generations in the spirit of Peter Bogdanovich's films about and inspired by the movies.
  83. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    Its extremely narrow focus on the death throes of an art form, rather than the art itself, limits its appeal.
  84. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    Overlapping with other recent documentaries, picture nonetheless presents a stimulating argument.
  85. Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise
    Helmer Bruce David Klein's near-reverential treatment is a nice contrast to the rough-and-tumble of tour life.
  86. Smart People
    Dysfunctional family seriocomedy is well cast, but characters and conflicts lack the sharper definition of similar recent exercises like "Little Miss Sunshine," "The Upside of Anger" and Noah Baumbach's films.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The First Saturday in May
    Picture successfully elaborates on the sorts of color pieces that traditionally precede the race on television.
  88. The Favor
    A pair of beautifully mismatched lead performances elevate a predictable drama to unexpected resonance in The Favor.
  89. Operation Filmmaker
    Picture raises pithy questions sure to provoke animated discussions pro and con. Credit Davenport for a mostly unbiased presentation that presents her own disenchantment in a balanced manner.
  90. Before I Forget
    If you've pondered how to order a round of fellatio as one orders a pizza or wondered what gay gentlemen of a certain age talk about, this touching glimpse of faded beauty and looming decrepitude fits the bill.
  91. American Teen
    Undeniably entertaining for its zippy presentation.
  92. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    Making music, making fun of themselves and making as much political hay as possible, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young set out to alleviate the public allergy to Iraq War films with CSNY Deja Vu, a doc that seems quite likely to effect a cure.
  93. My Mexican Shivah
    Culture shock often proves the stuff of comedy, but the sight of a silver-studded, sombrero-topped mariachi band breaking into a rousing rendition of "Hava Nagila" transports diversity into the realm of the surreal.
  94. Humboldt County
    Its low-key charms are considerable enough to engage venturesome ticketbuyers.
  95. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Deeply influential, even to his enemies, Atwater's career is viewed here with fascination and some sympathy.
  96. Just Buried
    Bloody and irredeemably misanthropic, Canadian funeral farce Just Buried nonetheless has enough charm to make for a sporadically enjoyable if wildly uneven entry in the growing body of cheeky corpse comedies initiated by Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry."
  97. Nights and Weekends
    Some may find the result boring or unpolished, but there's poetry -- not to mention a fair dose of comedy -- in the mix.
  98. Dostana
    Gay's the way, but the way's not really gay, in the fluffy and largely entertaining Dostana.
  99. The Caller
    Frank Langella's note-perfect, tour-de-force turn as a man elegantly shaping his own demise is nicely counterpointed by a shambling Elliott Gould as a bird-watching private eye.
  100. Brothers at War
    Provides some interesting perspectives but also veers dangerously close to vanity project.
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