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. Sherlock Holmes
    Ritchie has never worked on a scale anything approaching this before and, while some of the directorial affectations are distracting, he keeps the action humming.
  2. Youth in Revolt
    Cera and his gifted comic co-stars elevate the mediocre source material into a semi-iconic coming-of-age story.
  3. The Blind Side
    Uplifting and entertaining feel-good, fact-based sports drama.
  4. Broken Embraces
    A restless, rangy and frankly enjoyable genre-juggler that combines melodrama, comedy and more noir-hued darkness than ever before, the picture is held together by the extraordinary force of Almodovar’s cinematic personality.
  5. The Young Victoria
    Well-groomed, upscale, three-hankie entertainment for the “Masterpiece Theater” crowd.
  6. My Name Is Khan
    Riotously overstuffed and enormously enjoyable drama.
  7. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    A frenetic but undeniably funny follow-up that offers twice the number of singing-and-dancing rodents in another seamless blend of CGI and live-action elements.
  8. Moon
    Despite its handsome look and good thesping workout for Sam Rockwell, the story stretches a bit thin over feature length.
  9. Surrogates
    Mostow's smart speculative suspenser imagines a time when people can live through ideal versions of themselves while they sit wired up at home.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Beaches of Agnès
    Oddball mix that may strike some as overly whimsical but should delight the filmmaker's many fans.
  11. 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.
  12. (500) Days of Summer
    Boy gets girl and boy loses girl in convoluted, sometimes cloying but ultimately winning fashion in 500 Days of Summer.
  13. Zombieland
    Benefiting from the very different but very appealing comedy styles of Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg even when the script's wit runs thin, this should be catnip to jaded genre fans.
  14. The Invention of Lying
    While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy that, like last year's underappreciated "Ghost Town," casts Ricky Gervais as a mild-mannered schlub who manages, in spite of himself, to make the world a better place.
  15. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Carried by Kristen Stewart's compellingly dark performance, but also by helmer Chris Weitz's robust visuals.
  16. The Damned United
    Telling with a light, surefooted touch a legendary tale from British soccer history, The Damned United reps the latest collaboration in factual fiction between chameleon thesp Michael Sheen, screenwriter Peter Morgan and producer Andy Harries ("Frost/Nixon," "The Queen").
  17. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    Eye-popping and mouth-watering in one, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs spins a 30-page children's book into a 90-minute all-you-can-laugh buffet.
  18. Me and Orson Welles
    There are moments, especially when Welles is alternating between acting as Brutus and directing everyone else, that it’s possible to forget you’re watching an actor and really believe you’re beholding Orson Welles at work.
  19. A Perfect Getaway
    A big-reveal thriller with surprises that really do surprise -- and are worth waiting for through an audaciously long buildup -- A Perfect Getaway finds writer-director David Twohy in popcorn form with a muscularity not seen since 2000's "Pitch Black."
  20. Adventureland
    A rather ordinary account of youthful summer misadventures that goes down easily thanks to a sparky cast, more than 40 pop tunes that anchor the action in the late '80s and characters who get high both on and off their jobs at a tacky amusement park.
  21. No End in Sight
    With an accountant's eye for precision and a political scientist's grasp of the machinations that move national policy, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight itemizes the errors, misjudgments and follies that have defined the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq.
  22. The Time Traveler's Wife
    May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.
  23. Slumdog Millionaire
    Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, Slumdog Millionaire is a blast.
  24. Let the Right One In
    Calling to mind the work of Anne Rice and Stephen King, atmospheric adaptation of Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist's bestseller is well directed by his countryman Tomas Alfredson ("Four Shades of Brown") and should click with cult and arthouse auds.
  25. Crash
    The tense drama eventually becomes off-putting when it becomes clear almost every scene hinges on an unpleasant or ugly racial interaction.
  26. Food, Inc.
    A civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry.
  27. Cold Souls
    An amusing slice of existential whimsy with an Eastern European bent, Cold Souls posits a world in which humans can have their souls extracted and implanted in each others’ bodies.
  28. Synecdoche, New York
    A wildly ambitious and gravely serious contemplation of life, love, art, human decay and death, the film bears Kaufman’s scripting fingerprints in its structural trickery and multiplane storytelling.
  29. Terminator Salvation
    Darker, grimmer and more stylistically single-minded than its two relatively giddy predecessors, Terminator Salvation boasts the kind of singular vision that distinguished the James Cameron original, the full-throttle kinetics of "Speed" and an old-fashioned regard for human (and humanoid) heroics.
  30. Waiting for Armageddon
    The documentary's open-endedness offers something for everyone.
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