Variety's Scores

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For 17,828 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: 9,160 out of 17828
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17828
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17828
17828 movie reviews
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  1. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
    Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.
  2. The Good Thief
    Sure, it's all been done before, but seldom with this degree of vigor and panache.
  3. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step
    Hentoff presides over a film rich in the sounds and occasional sights of legendary cultural figures, from Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X to Bob Dylan and Coleman Hawkins.
  4. I Was at Home, But
    I Was at Home, But… works as a mood piece in the truest sense of the term: once you stop trying to logically assemble the narrative and submit instead to its clashing, enveloping currents of feeling, they form a persuasive story of their own.
  5. The President
    An allegorical lesson about dictatorships and the cycle of violence they breed, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The President unfortunately offers a simplified and simplistic reduction, akin to an ancient morality tale without the ancients’ brevity – rather than sophistication cloaked in innocence, the pic feels like didacticism submerged in naivete.
  6. Monsters and Men
    Mixing “gritty” handheld camerawork with an almost zen-like kind of restraint, Green’s approach is frustratingly thin on the kind of specifics that make for rich drama, leaving audiences to fill in the gaps.
  7. Gladiator
    John Mathieson's widescreen cinematography is magnificent, and the pacing across 2½ hours is well modulated.
  8. Bluebird
    Edmands maintains too measured a pace as he cycles through the various lives affected, to the extent that one begins to wonder when things will start kick in.
  9. The Divine Order
    Though the film’s feel-good construction undercuts its ability to surprise, Petra Volpe’s cine-history lesson remains a mainstream crowd-pleaser adept at inspiring and amusing in equal measure.
  10. Moon
    Despite its handsome look and good thesping workout for Sam Rockwell, the story stretches a bit thin over feature length.
  11. Last Days in the Desert
    Deliberately paced, sparely imagined and suffused with mystery, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia’s seventh feature is nonetheless quite lucid and accessible in its themes of empathy, compassion and sacrifice, and grounded by a Christ/Satan dual performance by Ewan McGregor that plays vastly better onscreen than it sounds on paper.
  12. Band Aid
    Band Aid has wit and nasty charm to burn in the earlygoing, generating enough goodwill to power it through an uneven final act.
  13. The Captain
    Few and far between are the movies...that actually implicate modern viewers in the evil, which is precisely what makes The Captain such a remarkable film. Not a great one, mind you — the movie starts out with a bang but swiftly falls into a kind of prolonged and distressingly outlandish tedium, and lodges there for the better part of its rather taxing running time — but a brave and uncompromising indictment of human nature, Teutonic or otherwise.
  14. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Segel makes an engaging impression throughout Forgetting Sarah Marshall, gamely making himself the butt of many jokes that involve Peter's non-macho proclivities.
  15. Bottle Rocket
    Full of surprising warmth and charm, unexpected plot turns and droll characters that bounce off each other in refreshing ways.
  16. Home
    Typically sharp work by d.p. Agnes Godard and lead thesp Isabelle Huppert.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Night They Raided Minsky's
    Norman Lear's period peek at a peculiarly American form of entertainment - burlesque - is most successful in its art direction and nostalgic recapturing of New York's lower East Side during its most hoydenish period.
  18. Ick
    This full-frontal assault on the senses is bound to get on some viewers’ nerves, but Kahn has always strived to touch them in one way or another.
  19. American Promise
    American Promise succeeds in touching on a wealth of subjects without overreaching.
  20. Akilla's Escape
    Williams’ effortless, near-otherworldly presence gives Akilla’s Escape all the grace and mystique it requires; the film strains a little too hard for its own.
  21. Dead Man's Wire
    There’s no doubt that Dead Man’s Wire holds you. It’s Van Sant’s most vital piece of work for the big screen in some time. The movie plays, and part of it is that it triggers our anti-institutional anger.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Wild One
    Inspired by an episode when a mob of youths on motorcycles terrorized a Californian town for an entire evening, this feature is long on suspense, brutality and sadism. Marlon Brando contributes another hard-faced 'hero' who never knew love as a boy and is now plainly in need of psychoanalysis.
  23. Concrete Cowboy
    This is one of those rare, reframe-the-conversation films, like “Paris Is Burning,” “12 O’Clock Boys” and “Rize,” that take a very specific subculture and turn it into something universal and uplifting — only this one isn’t a documentary, despite the many real-world details that bring director Ricky Staub’s exceptional father-son drama to life.
  24. Avatar: The Way of Water
    At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in "The Way of Water," remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.
  25. Snow Angels
    Emotionally harrowing and gentle by turns, this well-acted winter's tale is a more narrative-driven experience than Green's more lyrical Sundance entries, "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls."
  26. Summer of Sam
    Summer of Sam is never less than absorbing but feels just a bit like yesterday's news, both narratively and cinematically.
  27. Harmony and Me
    Bristling with wry wit and peopled with a rogue's gallery of disaffected losers.
  28. The New Rijksmuseum
    Hoogendijk has created an artifact that, while not exactly elegant, 400 years hence may prove as vital a window into Amsterdam culture as any of the Dutch masterpieces hanging in the museum itself.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cactus Flower
    Cactus Flower drags, which is probably the worst thing that can be said of a light comedy. It's due to sloppy direction by Gene Saks and the miscasting of Walter Matthau opposite Ingrid Bergman.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lord of the Flies
    The theme of young boys reverting to savagery when marooned on a deserted island has its moments of truth, but this pic rates as a near-miss on many counts.
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