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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    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Running on Empty
    A complex, turbulent tale told with admirable simplicity. Film successfully operates on several levels – as study of the primacy of the family unit, an anguished teen romance, a coming-of-age story and a look at what happened to some political radicals a generation later.
  2. The Vessel
    Cuban-American writer-director Julio Quintana’s feature debut has an understated formal loveliness that helps offset its more heavy-handed allegorical inclinations.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Phantom of the Paradise
    A very good horror comedy-drama about a disfigured musician haunting a rock palace. Brian De Palma's direction and script makes for one of the very rare backstage rock story pix, catching the garishness of the glitter scene in its own time.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Secret Agent
    Secret Agent dallies much on the way but rates as good spy entertainment, suave story telling, and, in one particular case, brilliant characterization.
  5. Been Rich All My Life
    Providing an inspiration for active retirement, the ex-Harlem Renaissance chorus girls profiled in docu Been Rich All My Life are still shaking booty while most of their contemporaries can only shuffle their walkers.
  6. Nocturnal Animals
    Ford is a true moviemaker — a social observer who’s a junkie for sensation and narrative. He has structured Nocturnal Animals beautifully, so that the past feeds into the present, and fiction into reality.
  7. Russian Dolls
    Viewers who thought the protags were superficial and annoying first time around will find little to change their minds here, but original pictures fans will probably embrace the now-scattered group's marginally more mature dilemmas centered on work and romance.
  8. Night Call
    Blanchart proves himself adept at giving all his ensemble various shading, shifting the audience’s allegiances and making his film much more than the usual brutal actioner.
  9. Framing John DeLorean
    An adventurous hybrid. ... It shouldn’t work, but it does.
  10. Bolt
    Bears some telltale signs of Pixar's trademark smarts, but still looks like a mutt compared to the younger company's customary purebreds.
  11. In Search of Mozart
    A beautifully lensed but ploddingly paced tribute.
  12. The Well Digger's Daughter
    The humanist spirit of Gallic novelist-director Marcel Pagnol is alive and well in the old-fashionedly sincere The Well-Digger's Daughter, a competent remake of Pagnol's eponymous 1940 melodrama about a working-class girl impregnated by a young pilot who's sent off to war.
  13. Elevate
    Hoop dreams die hard, and the stories in Elevate are both sobering and thrilling.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bananas
    Allen and Mickey Rose have written some funny stuff, and Allen, both as director and actor, knows what to do with it.
  15. Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache
    Aesthetically, too, Norbu’s film offers steady, muted levels of intoxication, giving constant pleasure while never quite tipping into flamboyance.
  16. T2 Trainspotting
    Where “Trainspotting’s” dive into the void was targeted, bristling with snarky anger at a Conservative system that provided few lifelines, “T2” — despite landing in a Britain once more under divisive Tory rule — is mostly content to let its characters alternately indulge and excoriate themselves.
  17. This Is the End
    This directing debut for co-writers Rogen and Evan Goldberg offsets its slightly smug premise with a clever sense of self-parody and near-cataclysmic levels of vulgarity.
  18. My Old School
    Like any good con-artist documentary, My Old School keeps its audience guessing, delighted to be deceived — although there’s a degree to which relying on animation cheats us of the question on everybody’s mind: How could so many have fallen for Brandon’s ruse?
  19. The Door in the Floor
    A thoughtful, melancholy story of love, loss, pain, betrayal and the lingering after-effects of tragedy, The Door in the Floor is an intelligent, impeccably acted, unsentimental drama.
  20. Sound of My Voice
    Two documentary filmmakers infiltrate a mysterious cult, only to find themselves drawn into the leader's insidious grip, in the taut, compelling low-budget feature Sound of My Voice.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Blood of a Poet
    On the face of it, this film represents six reels of scraped together footage from off the cutting room floor. A more vague or hopeless mess could not have resulted.
  22. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fatal Attraction
    The screws are tightened expertly in this suspenseful meller about a flipped-out femme who makes life hell for the married man who scorns her.
  24. Steel City
    Its honest, unshowy performances and textured depiction of life in a working-class community in a nowhere Southern Illinois town make this modest indie feature an affecting experience.
  25. Mondovino
    Consistently fascinating material provides an uncommonly eloquent, provocative statement against globalization that's sure to stimulate thinking audiences.
  26. Decasia
    Lacking any obvious thematic or emotional arc, compilation pic succeeds as a pure exercise in visual stimulus, its narcotic effect much amplified by Michael Gordon's thunderous, dissonant orchestral score.
  27. Stir of Echoes
    Koepp does a masterful job of grounding his intimations of the supernatural in a totally persuasive down-to-earth context.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Fisher King
    The Fisher King has two actors at the top of their form, and a compelling, well-directed and well-produced story.
  29. An Ideal Husband
    Shines like a freshly minted coin in Oliver Parker's adaptation.
  30. Fahrenheit 9/11
    Pic fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about, so intellectually Moore is largely preaching to the converted in this blatant cinematic 2004 campaign pamphlet.
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