Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. New York
    As the industry reshapes itself, this drama by helmer Kabir Khan -- with its bold, righteous, anti-Bush administration bent -- could cut out a new constituency for a genre usually devoted to purely escapist entertainment.
  2. Wolke Neun
    Overall tone lies somewhere between Mike Leigh and Ken Loach in performances and look, with a modest tech package.
  3. Chelsea on the Rocks
    A skittery, rambling but often absorbing portrait.
  4. Do Knot Disturb
    Vet helmer David Dhawan's big-budget sitcom is a major, slumdogging step in the right direction, with nosebleed-inducing production values, infectious musical sequences and some astoundingly beautiful actors.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. After.Life
    The potent imagery never meshes with narrative logic in Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's first feature, promising more than it can deliver.
  8. No One Knows About Persian Cats
    Strings an improvised tale around Tehran's underground indie-rock scene. Good-looking, shot-on-the-fly fifth feature by Bahman Ghobadi ("Half Moon," "Turtles Can Fly," "A Time for Drunken Horses"), which blends exciting musical performances with an undernourished narrative.
  9. A Shine of Rainbows
    Irresistibly good-natured even when it's cheesy.
  10. Iron Man 2
    Isn't as much fun as its predecessor, but by the time the smoke clears, it'll do.
  11. Just Wright
    Painting by numbers often gets a bad rap: While it takes little originality to fill in the romantic-comedy blanks, even a simple, competent job can sometimes feel like a breath of fresh air.
  12. The Infidel
    The Infidel takes some all-too-predictable detours into moralizing and sentimentality, but remains consistently sharp as long as it sticks to its acerbic tone and saucy comic sensibility.
  13. The Trotsky
    Both cartoonish and cerebral, and studded with in-jokes referencing multicultural life in "la belle ville" and classic cinema, the colorful pic stretches its premise a bit thin over nearly two hours.
  14. Touching Home
    Despite the tale's real-life basis and a solid Ed Harris as their fictive equivalents' alcoholic dad, Touching Home emerges as a formulaic triumph-over-odds tale with too little distinguishing detail.
  15. The Adjustment Bureau
    Its fun first hour soon gives way to a leaden, expository approach that unwisely favors emotional stakes over speculative-fiction smarts.
  16. Reel Injun
    The tone of Reel Injun is respectfully serious, though well short of angry, while focusing on how the stereotypical depictions of marauding redskins affected the self-images of Native Americans.
  17. Charlie St. Cloud
    Religious overtones, however, could make this the rare mainstream feature that connects with the faith-based entertainment market.
  18. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    With Michael Cera in the title role, twentysomethings and under will swiftly embrace this original romancer.
  19. About Baghdad
    The writer discovers a people physically and psychologically worn down by decades of dictatorship, sanctions, war and occupation.
  20. The Army of Crime
    Guediguian's lengthy period yarn features a wide array of characters filmed with his habitual simpatico eye, but loses the dramatic thread in too many plots, too little action and not enough originality.
  21. Alpha and Omega
    Not without charm and bearing easy appeal to very young viewers.
  22. Devil
    Devil is nothing very special or original, but it gets the job done briskly and economically.
  23. Life as We Know It
    It's a predictable date-night diversion.
  24. The Company Men
    The pain feels cushioned and secondhand, the characters are not terribly sympathetic or interesting other than for their misfortune, and the film shows little interest in analyzing the situation other than to point fingers at greedy CEOs.
  25. TRON: Legacy
    While 21st-century effects and a cutting-edge dance score make this a stunning virtual ride, the underlying concept feels as far-fetched as ever.
  26. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    Western audiences familiar with "Blood Simple" will get a kick out of the reinventions.
  27. The Freebie
    From a performance p.o.v., Aselton and Shepard hold the screen well and are most watchable, and Aselton does a fluid directing job within the limited challenge she set for herself production-wise.
  28. Freakonomics
    This frisky adaptation of the Steven Levitt-Stephen Dubner bestseller on human behavior by the numbers adds up to a revelatory trip into complex, innovative ideas and altered perspectives on how people think.
  29. Unstoppable
    Given the linear, one-track nature of the plot, Scott and Bomback prove surprisingly effective at delivering a well-rounded experience, going out of their way to fill in the personalities of their two leads.
  30. Leaving
    Tightly wound and crafted, with robust performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and recurrent Spanish Don Juan Sergi Lopez, the picture offers a rough, no-frills take on a story as old as France itself.
  31. Red Dawn
    Despite the considerable impediment of a premise arguably even sillier than that of the original "Red Dawn," helmer Dan Bradley's long-delayed remake of John Milius' 1984 kids-vs.-Commies adventure delivers enough thrilling action sequences and rock-'em, sock-'em fantasy-fulfillment to amp its B.O. potential.
  32. Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story
    Charting the presence of prominent Jewish major leaguers in every decade, their relationship to the world of big-time ball and the careers of such greats as Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, helmer Peter Miller's historical docu strikes out a stadium-load of assumptions.
  33. From Prada to Nada
    Based loosely and playfully on Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," From Prada to Nada is a predictable but pleasant comedy.
  34. Satan Hates You
    Barreling into the intersection of horror, comedy and religious sanctimony, Satan Hates You is a clever collision of flamboyant gore and social commentary that never goes too far with anything save mordant wit.
  35. I'm Dangerous with Love
    As a character study and revelation of a possible answer to addiction, the docu rocks. But Negroponte's low-res video camera, trivializes the film's already crude approximations of psychedelic experiences and its recordings of shamanistic rituals.
  36. No Strings Attached
    As it is, No Strings Attached is content to be sweet rather than edgy, to make you go "awww" instead of "hmmm."
  37. Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    A subversive and strange little film noir.
  38. Prom
    An adorable cast ought to provide some appeal for tweens and tykes, though interest should gradually dwindle the closer one gets to actual prom-going age.
  39. Johnny Mad Dog
    There's no doubt Johnny Mad Dog means to leave the viewer with a visceral impression of its terrors, on that it largely succeeds. Whether that accomplishment deserves praise is more of an open question.
  40. Scream 4
    The picture delivers enough of the expected goods, if seldom with the wit or panache of the series' best.
  41. The Dictator
    Typically, political correctness couldn't be farther from the filmmakers' mind, and yet, what the picture most sorely lacks is the sort of humanist appeal Chaplin delivered at the close of "The Great Dictator."
  42. Friends with Kids
    Unfolds in a glib, familiar sitcom universe (think "Seinfeld" crossed with "Friends" sans ethnic flavor but with plenty of Judd Apatow-style crass patter about sex and body parts).
  43. Cold Weather
    Picture represents considerable progress for Katz, a founding member of the mumblecore movement.
  44. Friends with Benefits
    The raunchy premise here is just a smokescreen for the sort of squarely moralistic, altar-bound comedy of which even Jane Austen would approve.
  45. The Lincoln Lawyer
    It's easy enough to just soak up star Matthew McConaughey's good-ol'-boy appeal and overlook the film's stilted dialogue, bizarre directorial indulgences, excessive running time and boilerplate "Law and Order"-style narrative.
  46. Green Lantern
    An attempt to infuse an earnest piece of comicbook lore with an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek sensibility yields decidedly mixed results in Green Lantern.
  47. The Hunger Games
    A watchable enough picture that feels content to realize someone else's vision rather than claim it as its own. Any real sense of risk has been carefully ironed out: The PG-13 rating that ensures the film's suitability for its target audience also blunts the impact of the teen-on-teen bloodshed.
  48. Take Me Home Tonight
    A pleasant-enough all-in-one-night comedy, featuring a protagonist facing the classic "Graduate"-like existential dilemma of post-college paralysis.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mars Needs Moms
    A modestly enjoyable performance-capture creation bearing the unmistakable imprint of producer Robert Zemeckis.
  50. Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    In the lead, Gordon has the wide-eyed appeal of a young Matthew Broderick: He looks nothing like Kinney's crudely rendered cartoon character.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Monte Carlo
    A frothy, innocuous smorgasbord of girlhood wish fulfillment that scores a direct hit with its target demo.
  52. War Horse
    This beautifully composed picture brings a robust physicality to tried-and-true source material, but falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands.
  53. Footloose
    Paramount's Footloose reboot never quite cuts loose enough to distinguish itself from the original.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    A fun though rarely funny family adventure whose lively special effects compensate somewhat for actors who largely sleepwalk through their roles.
  55. Paranormal Activity 3
    Much like its predecessors, Paranormal Activity 3 is a slow-building, stealthily creepy supernatural thriller that takes a teasingly indirect approach to generating suspense and escalating dread.
  56. Piranha 3DD
    Ups the self-parody so much that it's practically a Wayans Brothers spoof, albeit with fewer jokes.
  57. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    This vulgar romp is a generally harmless, heartwarming affair, a cinematic Christmas cookie almost sweet and flaky enough to cover the fact that it's laced with hash, cocaine and assorted bodily fluids, blood included.
  58. The Future
    For all the superficial hilarity of July's approach, a much sadder streak runs deep through the entire film, reinforced by Jon Brion's score (more tones than melody). Still, it's curious that this is the feeling she chooses to leave us with in the end.
  59. On the Road
    Evocatively lensed, skillfully made and duly attentive to the mercurial qualities of its daunting source material, Walter Salles' picture pulses with youthful energy but feels overly calculated in its bid for spontaneity, attesting to the difficulty and perhaps futility of trying to reproduce Kerouac's literary lightning onscreen.
  60. The Skin I Live In
    Much as he did with Ruth Rendell's "Live Flesh," Almodovar has taken an ice-cold psychological thriller, penned by a novelist of far less humanistic temperament, and performed some stylistic surgery of his own, adding broad comic relief, overripe melodrama, outrageous asides and zesty girl-power uplift.
  61. Twixt
    This disarmingly cheeky, intermittently gorgeous trifle would create the perfect bookend to a career begun almost 50 years ago.
  62. Kill the Irishman
    Jonathan Hensleigh's film won't displace "Goodfellas" in anyone's hierarchy of wise-guy movies.
  63. Everything Must Go
    While the film is neither entertaining nor profound, Ferrell makes it watchable at least.
  64. 50/50
    Will Reiser's semiautobiographical script initially prescribes too artificial a story treatment for its characters but is rescued by a genial, low-key vibe that builds in sensitivity and emotion up through the final reels.
  65. Mooz-lum
    Evan Ross impresses with an implosive performance as Tariq Mahdi, a moody young African-American.
  66. Lovers of Hate
    The movie is witty only on occasion. But it lingers in the mind, thanks largely to its trio of actors -- especially Alex Karpovsky.
  67. Old Cats
    Less cohesive and accessible than "The Maid" (which the Chilean duo co-scripted and Silva helmed solo), picture nonetheless contains unforgettable scenes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny English Reborn
    More a resuscitation than a rebirth, Johnny English Reborn finds British comedian Rowan Atkinson reviving his spoof spy character with this enjoyable if somewhat wheezy reprise.
  69. The Vow
    The Vow represents that most welcome kind of Valentine's Day offering, focusing on the feelings that bring couples closer.
  70. Lockout
    Tackles a nifty futuristic premise with bargain-basement efficiency and a deadpan, devil-may-care attitude. It's an initially invigorating tactic that proves slapdash and unsatisfying over the long haul, reducing a potentially rich sci-fier to the level of a halfway decent time-killer
  71. One Day
    On a moment-by-moment basis, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess make this long-arc love story viable, sometimes even vital. But the structural conceit proves more reductive than expansive, the big picture too overdetermined to really sweep the viewer away.
  72. Public Speaking
    Intermittently amusing and surely interesting, "Lebowitz" falls victim to the classic faux pas of overstaying its welcome.
  73. Contraband
    This solid if disposable genre exercise maintains a hard-driving line of action and a commitment to one-damned-thing-after-another storytelling that carries it past any number of narrative speedbumps and preposterous detours.
  74. American: The Bill Hicks Story
    A hagiographic portrait of the standup comic and social satirist who never quite reached beyond cult status in the U.S., American: The Bill Hicks Story might have impressed more of the unconverted had it included more performance footage of its subject.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gift to Stalin
    Script weaknesses overwhelm ethnographic interest, historical tragedy and some solid performances in period drama "The Gift to Stalin."
  76. Wrath of the Titans
    It's a mess too, but it's far more defensible as a lazy Sunday lark for those who have just recently outgrown action figures.
  77. Exporting Raymond
    Mildly amusing.
  78. Chimpanzee
    Visually stunning, almost impossibly intimate results. Unfortunately, this footage is welded to a creakily executed story and narrated by a schticky, frequently bellowing Tim Allen.
  79. L'amour fou
    Shy on the celebrity-gawking (and celebrity input) that marks many fashion documentaries, and neither gossipy nor an objective appreciation of his impact and legacy, picture is a successful portrait on its own terms, save one: It's unlikely to excite much theatrical interest.
  80. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    The immaculately crafted documentary doesn't reveal much about Adria the man, other than that he insists on quiet in his kitchen.
  81. Dirty Girl
    For those not hip to its smug "out is in" mentality, Dirty Girl's redeeming feature is its cast. Temple is vixen enough to carry the part, but manages to project a real wit burning beneath the layers of makeup and dumb-blonde shtick her character affects around others.
  82. Seven Days in Utopia
    Provides little more than a pleasantly passable Christian sports parable delivered as a sort of Texan golfer's version of "The Karate Kid."
  83. Poltergeist
    Less a steadily escalating thriller than a guided tour through a county-fair-style haunted house, Poltergeist offers some quality jump scares, and Kenan has a knack for staging solid individual setpieces. But he proves weirdly incapable of modulation or mood setting here.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Helmer Kirk Jones does a solid job negotiating the material and managing the few tonal shifts when an occasional dark moment emerges.
  85. Safe Haven
    Safe Haven offers an unsurprising but not unsatisfying tour through recognizable Sparkville terrain.
  86. Oz the Great and Powerful
    This elaborate exercise in visual Baum-bast nonetheless gets some mileage out of its game performances, luscious production design and the unfettered enthusiasm director Sam Raimi brings to a thin, simplistic origin story.
  87. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    Jackson and his team seem compelled to flesh out the world of their earlier trilogy in scenes that would be better left to extended-edition DVDs (or omitted entirely), all but failing to set up a compelling reason for fans to return for the second installment.
  88. R
    More pathetic than sympathetic, the young protags are not romanticized or made heroic. While this suits the style of the picture, which never conforms to the melodramatic conventions and stock characters of the prison genre, it also works against audience identification.
  89. Jig
    Although there is some insightful observational work, and the dancing itself is aces, pic feels overcrowded with characters.
  90. Oblivion
    A moderately clever dystopian mindbender with a gratifying human pulse, despite some questionable narrative developments along the way.
  91. R.I.P.D.
    Thank heavens — or at least the “Department of Eternal Affairs” — for Jeff Bridges, whose hilariously free-associative performance as a 19th-century frontier marshal-turned-21st-century undead lawman is like an adrenaline shot to the heart of R.I.P.D.
  92. J. Edgar
    Any movie in which the longtime FBI honcho features as the central character must supply some insight into what made him tick, or suffer from the reality that the Bureau's exploits were far more interesting than the bureaucrat who ran it -- a dilemma J. Edgar never rises above.
  93. The Ward
    Fans excited to see John Carpenter back in bigscreen action after nine years' absence will find limited cause for joy in The Ward, a horror opus that briskly -- maybe too briskly -- charts ghostly doings at a nuthouse.
  94. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    Helmer John Luessenhop ("Takers") and a small army of scripters go back to the bloody roots of the long-running franchise to concoct a better-than-average horror-thriller that relies more on potent suspense than graphic savagery or stereoscopic tricks.
  95. The Interrupters
    James captures candid counseling sessions and heated tussles with equal dynamism, but never quite earns his 164-minute running time.
  96. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The narrative’s time-travel element allows for plenty of fluffy, fleet-footed action.
  97. Fire in Babylon
    This triumph-of-the-underdogs tale is enjoyable in the retelling, despite its repetitious hammering of the message.
  98. Epic
    A reasonably entertaining, adeptly crafted kidpic whose biggest crime is its near pathological reliance on overfamiliar tropes and trappings.
  99. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    With its re-enactments of that fateful day, Extremely Loud plays a bit too much like one of those perfectly lit, heart-tugging segments TV networks air during the Olympics. It hardly matters that Horn manages to give such a naturalistic, unmannered performance as the young Oskar when everything around him has been so deliberately orchestrated to provoke a specific reaction.
  100. Griff the Invisible
    The Melody-Griff evolution is the sweetest part of "Griff the Invisible," and has a certain charm. But anyone looking for a superhero movie is going to be disappointed.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »