Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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 2.3 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Date Night
    An uncommonly engaging date movie.
  2. After.Life
    The potent imagery never meshes with narrative logic in Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's first feature, promising more than it can deliver.
  3. The Black Waters of Echo's Pond
    This generic horror meller would be most at home debuting on Syfy -- perhaps double-billed with "Pinata: Survival Island."
  4. Everyone Else
    Simply fuzzy filmmaking of the worst sort.
  5. La mission
    Rather predictable in its major plot points and social-issue pleadings, the picture is better suited to cable than the big screen, but nonetheless offers solid drama with nice streaks of humor, warmth and local color.
  6. Letters to God
    While only the converted will likely see the redemption behind the manipulation, picture delivers a strong enough dose of spiritual saccharine to yield solid if not heavenly returns from its trusty target audience.
  7. The Square
    A tasty neo-noir from the James M. Cain school of lust-driven dirty dealings, The Square reps a promising debut by Aussie stuntman-turned-helmer Nash Edgerton.
  8. When You're Strange
    The Lizard King is a bummer in When You're Strange, Tom DiCillo's disastrously inane documentary ode to reptilian rocker Jim Morrison and his mellower bandmates in the Doors.
  9. Who Do You Love
    Ultimately an entertaining story about a deeply lonely man.
  10. Women Without Men
    Has striking moments comparable to the best of Neshat's potent imagery. But the script jettisons most of the book's more powerful sections.
  11. It Came from Kuchar
    Gleefully piles on everything anyone could want in a docu on the fabulous Kuchar brothers, whose deliriously campy zero-budget mellers -- with titles like "Hold Me While I'm Naked" or "Sins of the Fleshapoids" -- enlivened many otherwise somber evenings of '60s underground cinema.
  12. The Misfortunates
    Calling the Strobbe clan a working-class family would imply that some of its members worked (or had class), but none of the lowlife protags do in the visually robust and often hilarious Flemish tragicomedy The Misfortunates.
  13. See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary
    An outstanding documentary exploration of the travails of four deaf entertainers.
  14. Don McKay
    A film noir set mostly in broad daylight, Don McKay, writer-director Jake Goldberger's mild riff on "Double Indemnity," etc., works best as a showcase for its veteran cast, particularly Elisabeth Shue.
  15. Leaves of Grass
    A mixed bag of often mismatched ideas.
  16. The Thorn in the Heart
    This moving but far from revelatory portrait of a beloved family figure registers as too slight and personal for significant theatrical play.
  17. Why Did I Get Married Too?
    Married offers a positive, if melodramatically heightened, portrait of upper-middle-class African-American life, one broadly appealing enough to satisfy even the Nancy Meyers set, if only they'd give it a chance.
  18. Warlords
    Laden with gritty action, but with an emotional undertow that carries the drama even through its weaker moments, picture reps a strong comeback by Hong Kong helmer-producer Peter Chan.
  19. Breaking Upwards
    Happily, "Upwards" picks up immeasurably when three legit luminaries (Andrea Martin, Julie White, Peter Friedman) enter the picture as the couple's parents.
  20. Teza
    Ultimately rewards the viewer's patience with a potent sense of Ethiopian history and culture.
  21. Clash of the Titans
    This "Titans" reboot merely demonstrates that building a more elaborate mousetrap doesn't necessarily produce a more entertaining one.
  22. The Last Song
    A soapy meller that transitions the young pop star from the Disney Channel to the bigscreen while giving girls what they'd seem to want and nothing more.
  23. Hot Tub Time Machine
    Even by recent standards for mainstream comedy packaging, "Tub" looks dull and ugly.
  24. Chloe
    Sexual suspicion and game-playing spiral down from the exotically intriguing to outright silliness in Chloe.
  25. The Eclipse
    A film of such seductive grace, humor and startling side trips into buttocks-clenching ghastliness that auds won't know what to make of it (although it won't keep them from wanting to visit Ireland immediately).
  26. How to Train Your Dragon
    A thrilling drama interspersed with amusing comedic elements (rather than the other way around).
  27. Waking Sleeping Beauty
    The documentary has but one revelatory insight -- that "The Lion King" can be read as an allegory of the territorial peeing match between big cats Michael Eisner, Roy Disney and, least flatteringly, Katzenberg.
  28. Blue Beard
    This offbeat but compelling take on the tale, arguably the first serial-killer yarn, emphasizes sisterly bonds but still gets to the original story's heart of mysterious darkness with impressive results.
  29. Dancing Across Borders
    Dancing Across Borders, Anne Bass' uneven docu debut, traces the fortunes of Cambodian ballet dancer Sokvannara "Sy" Sar from the time Bass first discovered him performing traditional temple dances at Angkor Wat to his conquests on the world stage.
  30. Godspeed
    A little less chatter and a little more splatter might have improved Godspeed, an initially intriguing but finally overwrought tale of murder, retribution and quasi-religious fanaticism set in the land of the midnight sun.
  31. Lbs.
    The intimately personal chronicle is more impressive for Famiglietti's disarming self-exposure than for any fully formed cinematic style or consistency of tone, but the modest production has a genuine, warm spirit.
  32. Repo Men
    This ultra-gory speculative noir is, at its infrequent best, certifiably nuts; the rest of the time, it's one numbingly brutal slog.
  33. The Bounty Hunter
    This dire battle-of-the-exes action-comedy severely tests audience goodwill by running an indulgent 110 minutes, crammed as it is with half-baked thriller subplots and aimless supporting characters, as if to distract from the central duo's nonstop bickering.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    It's a spry, fluffy comedy.
  35. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    More of an action-light whodunit than a real thriller, and more of a CliffsNotes version than a deeply disturbing portrait of what's wrong with contempo Sweden.
  36. Greenberg
    As a study of stasis and of people conscious of not living the lives they had imagined for themselves, the picture offers a bracing undertow of seriousness beneath the deceptively casual, dramatically offhand surface.
  37. IMAX: Hubble 3D
    This educational eye-popper should prove an excellent draw for science lovers of all ages.
  38. The Runaways
    A conventionally enjoyable making-and-breaking-of-the-band saga.
  39. The Killing Jar
    A spectacularly boring chamber thriller.
  40. Vincere
    It's a thrilling, at times brilliant piece of staging that never forgets the emotional pull of either the tragic personal tale or the ramifications of history.
  41. Shutterbug
    Though the low-budget picture is not without interest, its uneven thesping, sound quality and special effects might prove more welcome on the fest fringe.
  42. Mid-August Lunch
    A surefire pleaser for crowds of a certain age.
  43. The Exploding Girl
    Both comely leads offer engaging presences, and there’s some pretty imagery, shot adequately on HD, but it’s all so slight and featherweight one viewer sneezing could blow it all offscreen.
  44. She's Out of My League
    This appealingly cast movie seesaws from unlikely thoughtfulness to imbecilic vulgarity.
  45. Green Zone
    Once Damon's one-man truth squad goes off the reservation and starts behaving too much like Jason Bourne for comfort, the film begins not only spilling more blood but also leaking crucial credibility.
  46. Mother
    Key casting is aces, led by a deglammed Kim, forcefully low-key as the mother who seems capable of anything to protect her son.
  47. Our Family Wedding
    This broad ethnic farce serves up a full-on culture collision, but -- thanks to a handful of diverting performers -- stops just short of becoming a train wreck.
  48. Remember Me
    The modestly scaled film delivers some moving and affecting moments amid a preponderance of scenes of frequently annoying people behaving badly.
  49. Delta
    A beautifully atmospheric vessel that will seem infinitely deep to some and chafingly dry to others.
  50. Severe Clear
    Scotti's amateur camerawork proves strangely compelling.
  51. The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights
    While the black-white-and-red-clad duo's mystique survives intact, there's some backstage insight.
  52. Children of Invention
    Urgent, artful and even austerely poetic.
  53. Ghost Town
    At a leisurely 172 minutes, the pic takes on the desultory rhythms of rural stagnation, its rigorous compositions imparting aesthetic weight and meditative scope to everything in its purview.
  54. Stolen
    A technically polished thriller marred by textbook filmmaking that grows increasingly dull as the plot wears on.
  55. Alice in Wonderland
    For all its clever design, beguiling creatures and witty actors, the picture feels far more conventional than it should; it's a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney.
  56. Brooklyn's Finest
    It’s more like "Hamlet" -- the ending, at least, with enough blood and corpses to fill a housing project. The only thing missing is a point, which Fuqua circles for two hours without landing.
  57. The Secret of Kells
    With its jewel-bright colors and intricate use of lines, the result is absolutely luscious to behold.
  58. Cop Out
    There's precious little of that tension to be found between co-leads Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, but more than enough between director Kevin Smith and the shoddy script he's elected to take on, and neither seems willing to budge.
  59. The Crazies
    Delivers the essential suspense goods with overall skill and a modicum of intelligence.
  60. Defendor
    Harrelson shines, particularly in framing scenes with Sandra Oh as a tactful court psychiatrist.
  61. The Yellow Handkerchief
    A thoughtful, niche-oriented portrait of four off-the-beaten-path characters trying to find their way.
  62. Easier with Practice
    Amusingly predicated on the romantic possibilities of phone sex, Easier With Practice pushes past its titillating premise to become a quietly provocative love story about emotionally stunted manhood and the risks some guys will take to connect.
  63. Formosa Betrayed
    A decent political thriller set in Taiwan with the requisite Western-market-friendly lead and a determinedly pro-independence message embedded in a formulaic but diverting tale of intrigue and oppression.
  64. Prodigal Sons
    Sad, compelling documentary leaves a few key questions frustratingly unanswered, but the raw materials here are sufficiently bracing.
  65. Shutter Island
    Even when it's clear Scorsese has decided to employ fakery and allow it to be obvious, it's done with elegance and beauty.
  66. Happy Tears
    A contradictory creature, both insightful and dumb, sometimes innovative and sometimes just plain inept. Dreamy, funny but also weirdly disjointed, it’s as if the very film itself were stoned, just like its two pot-smoking sister protags.
  67. The Good Guy
    Lacking much of a satirical bite, the pic's quasi-celebration of crude laddishness becomes oppressive.
  68. Blood Done Sign My Name
    Comes off as a painfully old-fashioned, flatly directed exercise in passionless historical reenactment.
  69. The Ghost Writer
    What the picture most needed was a complete cinematic rethink and, yes, even some action to move it along.
  70. Phyllis and Harold
    Evocatively fleshed out with surprisingly iconic homemovies, passionate love letters and well-chosen pop tunes, Kleine's homegrown Jewish "Madame Bovary" escapes the navel-gazing boundaries of the personal-diary docu by the sheer force of its evocation of bygone sensuality.
  71. Lourdes
    Either a subtly subversive black comedy, a deeply spiritual portrait of physical rebirth or a whole lot of nothing in a self-consciously arty package, Lourdes isn't about to reveal its true colors anytime soon.
  72. The Wolfman
    The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast.
  73. Valentine's Day
    As gooey and lacking in protein as a chocolate holiday bonbon, Valentine's Day plays like a feature-length commercial produced by the Friends of the Valentine Promotional Society.
  74. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    Action movies of this scale often start off strong and wind down to forgettable finales, but "Percy Jackson" is the opposite, overcoming a clunky setup to deliver nearly all its thrills in the last half-hour.
  75. My Name Is Khan
    Riotously overstuffed and enormously enjoyable drama.
  76. Videocracy
    Rather than presenting a well-argued expose of the disturbing symbiosis that exists between Italo politics and TV, with Prime Minister Berlusconi being only the most obvious connection, the scribe-helmer gets sidetracked by marginal characters while keeping bare facts to a minimum.
  77. October Country
    A feel-bad film through and through. Chronicling a year in the life of a low-income Mohawk Valley family beset by external hardships and shockingly bad decision-making, the docu straddles the line between unflinching intimacy and invasive exploitation.
  78. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
    For some, the documentary will represent the endorsement of a self-hater spouting traitorous ideas; for others, it celebrates the courage of a reviled, truth-telling martyr to the cause of academic freedom.
  79. 3 Idiots
    3 Idiots takes a while to lay out its game plan but pays off emotionally in its second half.
  80. Tano da morire
    Humor is inconsistent, and the film suffers from lack of shape and fluidity, playing more like a series of disjointed sketches. But there are more than enough high points to compensate.
  81. From Paris with Love
    To his credit, Travolta hams it up with the kind of laissez-faire irony that might have made the film a tongue-in-cheek pleasure, had his attitude extended to the filmmakers.
  82. Dear John
    Ultimately, the story feels as if it's killing time before throwing the next hurdle at the couple.
  83. District 13: Ultimatum
    The fight sequences (choreographed by Raffaelli) are especially creative, with the combatants using any available object, including a priceless Van Gogh painting, to get the job done.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shinjuku Incident
    Though hyped as a rare straight dramatic outing by Chan, the picture still has him displaying his action skills, if less sensationally than usual.
  85. Frozen
    Don't be surprised if the movie's most wince-inducing moments come not from the "disturbing images" (as the MPAA describes the sight of a leg bone sticking six inches out of one character's ski pants) but rather of the bad acting and worse dialogue.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terribly Happy
    Entertaining and full of surprising twists, this highly cinematic tale of a Copenhagen policeman working punishment duty in the provinces plays with genre in a manner that can be compared with the Coen brothers or David Lynch.
  87. Eyes Wide Open
    Quietly devastating picture reps a natural draw for gay, Jewish-interest and upscale audiences.
  88. Ajami
    Time shifts may overcomplicate the narrative for some, but the pay-off packs a major punch.
  89. Edge of Darkness
    Campbell's topnotch production team yields predictably polished results, but the director's decision to revisit the late Troy Kennedy Martin's teleplay, finally, feels lacking.
  90. When in Rome
    Predictable but pleasant comedic fantasy.
  91. For My Father
    Israeli helmer Dror Sahavi's well-meaning but simplistic terrorist melodrama, gingerly counterbalancing religious fanatics on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, utilizes a lyrical "Romeo and Juliet"-type encounter between a reluctant suicide bomber and a Jewish escapee from Orthodox closed-mindedness to plead mutual tolerance.
  92. Off and Running
    What at first looks like a heartwarming portrait of a highly blended modern family turns into a no less engrossing illustration of that situation's possible pitfalls in Off and Running.
  93. North Face
    An often grippingly staged mountain movie that's good but not great.
  94. Falling Awake
    Underacted, overheated and uses a pair of purloined, high-end sneakers as a 400-pound allegory for getting your priorities straight.
  95. Legion
    Even when the blood-and-thunder hokiness of the over-the-top plot tilts perilously close to absurdity, the admirably straight-faced performances by well-cast lead players provide just enough counterbalance to sustain audience curiosity and sympathy.
  96. Extraordinary Measures
    Doesn't reach far beyond its smallscreen genotype as a disease-of-the-week telepic, despite the star power of Brendan Fraser as the desperate dad and Harrison Ford as an eccentric, ornery researcher.
  97. The Girl on the Train
    From this polarizing lie, Techine fashions a brilliantly complex, intimate multi-strander, held together but somewhat skewed by the central perf of Emilie Dequenne ("Rosetta"), whose radiant physicality threatens to eclipse even Catherine Deneuve.
  98. Creation
    Isn't about science vs. faith so much as that well-worn dramatic hook, the loss of a child.
  99. To Save a Life
    Just as representations of human sexuality on film are often unpleasantly twisted by the grotesqueries of the porn industry, so, too, are filmic representations of religious conversion homogenized by the faith-based entertainment industry. Case in point: Debutante director Brian Baugh's To Save a Life.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tooth Fairy
    Scores a goal for kids and adults alike.
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