Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. Full Battle Rattle
    A so-so pic on an incendiary subject, Full Battle Rattle follows the training regimen of one battalion during engagement and occupation in one of 13 fake "villages" comprising a massive Iraq simulation somewhere in the Mojave Desert.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waiting for Guffman
    The enterprise comes across like a bunch of talented friends making an elaborate home movie for their own amusement.
  3. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Sara Driver, the director of “Boom for Real” (who was there at the time, as Jim Jarmusch’s early producer and romantic partner), creates an alluring and detailed portrait of how the downtown scene came together, springing up like weeds between the cracks of a broken New York, its poverty-row aesthetic infused with the energy of punk and the vivacity of hip-hop (before it was called that).
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Super 8
    A relatively standard monster movie.
  5. 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heaven Can Wait
    Heaven Can Wait is an outstanding film. Harry Segall's fantasy comedy-drama play, made in 1941 by Columbia as Here Comes Mr Jordan, returns in an updated, slightly more macabre treatment.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    East of Eden
    Powerfully somber dramatics have been captured from the pages of John Steinbeck's East of ed en and put on film by Elia Kazan. It is a tour de force for the director's penchant for hard-hitting forays with life.
  8. The Untamed
    While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.
  9. The Aristocrats
    A raucous insider documentary that invites the viewer to share a secret held exclusively by comics for untold generations.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lake Tahoe
    A lazy exercise in cute minimalist humor, low-budget but visually glossy Mexican film Lake Tahoe is so dry and slight that it threatens to drift right off the screen.
  11. Easy A
    What this high school morality fable really recalls is "Clueless" -- a comedy of very contemporary ill manners drawn from classic literature, an immersion in the young-adult lexicon and a potentially career-making showcase for its lead actress, Emma Stone.
  12. The Eagle Huntress
    Like Disney’s “True-Life Adventures” of yore, it educates while deploying some likely sleight-of-hand, and doesn’t really invite the kind of methodological scrutiny a more verite-style documentary would.
  13. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    There’s a momentum to his story — it has a heist-movie-style checklist, carried out by a team composed of only one — that has its own satisfactions, and set-pieces with real tension, even if they lead to a less-than-novel place.
  14. The Mother
    A portrait of a contempo British family drifting apart because of generational differences, The Mother ends up an uneasy brew of too many competing tastes and themes.
  15. Army of One
    Riveting and timely.
  16. Censored Voices
    Loushy skillfully and briskly excerpts the material, although the film falls somewhere on the line between formal documentary and assemblage.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Guns of Navarone
    It faced the problem of a director-switch in mid-stream. But with a bunch of weighty stars, terrific special effects and several socko situations, producer Carl Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson sired a winner.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flying Down to Rio
    This picture makes its bid via numbers staged by Dave Gould to Vincent Youman melodies. But Rio’s story [from a play by Anne Caldwell, based on an original story by Louis Brock] lets it down. It’s slow and lacks laughs to the point where average business seems its groove.
  19. Memory House
    Memory House is, above all, a fable about identities lost and cultural artifacts in need of recovery that doubles as a thrilling and foreboding ride designed to rattle audiences at home and abroad with equal verve.
  20. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
    It’s not another unhinged Bridget bash — more like a hearts-and-flowers finale.
  21. Priceless
    Co-scripter/helmer Pierre Salvadori serves up an enjoyable riff on genuine romance versus the pay-as-you-go variety, in crowd-pleasing, exportable picture.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killers
    Coon’s screenplay is burdened with affected dialog and contrived plotwork. Virtually nothing of the original Hemingway remains.
  23. Transsiberian
    An engagingly up-to-date melodrama steeped in local color and steered by a treacherous sense of morality.
  24. Armadillo
    If nothing else, Armadillo proves just how well "The Hurt Locker" captured the mixture of boredom, fear, brutality and locker-room machismo that makes up the day-to-day routine of a frontline soldier.
  25. Charlotte Sometimes
    The deft shading he (Byler) elicits from his thesps is of a piece with his dramatics and his understated, artful approach to compositions and movement.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Down and Out in Beverly Hills
    It’s a loving caricature of the nouveau riche (Beverly Hills variety) and although it is more of a comedy of manners than a well-developed story, there are enough yocks and bright moments to make it a thoroughly enjoyable outing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heathers
    Daniel Waters' enormously clever screenplay blazes a trail of originality through the dead wood of the teen-comedy genre.
  28. Brothers Hypnotic
    Lively, funny and at times philosophical, Brothers Hypnotic tackles the challenges of maintaining an independent music career, as well as some knotted generational conflicts, and handles it all with great sensitivity.
  29. Old Stone
    Channeling the style of gritty mainland independent films but without the usual longueurs, the film deftly morphs into a suspense thriller with Dostoevskyan undertones.
  30. Candyman
    The new Candyman references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.
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