Variety's Scores

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For 17,832 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: 9,164 out of 17832
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17832
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17832
17832 movie reviews
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  1. Faust
    [A] film with a maddeningly opaque narrative and a brutalizing cascade of nonstop verbiage.
  2. Whiz Kids
    Nominally structured around the Intel Science Talent Search, Whiz Kids traces a dual process: the empowerment of economically challenged students who otherwise might not realize their potential, and the empowerment of the nation through the problem-solving efforts of its best and brightest.
  3. Corpo Celeste
    Rohrwacher's picture offers a Dardennes-esque look at a working-class teen's growing pains in a backwater parish in southern Italy. Minor tonal inconsistencies are overcome by this intimate tale's naturalistic thesping and loose lensing style.
  4. V/H/S/Beyond
    Despite its new thematic wrinkle, the five segments here feel familiar in ideas and unmemorable in execution. It’s a middling addition to a variably inspired anthology brand that will no doubt trundle on through more installments yet.
  5. Vengeance
    In Vengeance, B.J. Novak proves a born storyteller with the rare gift of using a film to say something that intoxicates us.
  6. The Housemaid
    The Housemaid is one of those movies you go with. It’s too stylized, too entertainingly extreme, for you to get hung up on whether it all tracks.
  7. Lucky Them
    The film’s truest and most meaningful chemistry is generated by Ellie and Charlie, two individuals who are so fun to hang out with that they justify even the film’s flimsiest narrative setups.
  8. The TV Set
    Results are breezy though toothless, with too much repetition and not enough originality.
  9. Sneakers
    Director Phil Alden Robinson demonstrates an agreeable flair for low-key comedy, changing tones, and the orchestration of complicated logistics until falling into the black holes of gaping plot gaps and an insincere jokiness worthy of Sinatra's Rat Pack.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Roar
    The noble intentions of director-writer-producer Noel Marshall and his actress-wife Tippi Hedren shine through the faults and short-comings of Roar, their 11-year, $17 million project – touted as the most disaster-plagued pic in Hollywood history.
  11. The Dead Girl
    More ambitious than her 2002 debut, "Blue Car," Moncrieff's new film maintains her focus on women, expanding to include a range of ages, circumstances and psychologies. Picture's drama, however, is deliberately fractured into a quintet of stories that vary considerably in their overall impact.
  12. Swan Song
    Kier isn’t panhandling for laughs by playing some tired gay stereotype. There’s a heart-on-his-sleeve sincerity to the performance that’s better than the material merits, for Stephens has written an earnest but anemic script.
  13. Love Jones
    Although it becomes a bit contrived and conventional toward the end, writer-director Theodore Witcher's debut feature shows quite a few good moves, and Larenz Tate and Nia Long make an attractively hot couple at its center.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Maryam
    A lovely, intricate coming-of-age portrait set in a cross-cultural context.
  15. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    This is not "E.T.," nor is it a kid's film nor even necessarily a major mass-audience film, although Spielberg's name, high public anticipation and the child-oriented campaign will make it perform like one.
  16. Journey from Zanskar
    Surprisingly entertaining.
  17. My Brooklyn
    Filled with colorful, articulate neighborhood champions, this absorbing picture eschews militant outrage for a quietly devastating look at social commodification.
  18. Just the Two of Us
    Even as it dabbles in genre tropes, the film presents an all-too-unremarkable reality for many women.
  19. The Dating Game
    The feature is awkwardly compressed in its portrait of heartache and easily overwhelmed by the political portent of its subject.
  20. A Tale of Two Sisters
    It manages to suspend disbelief without over-taxing the viewer's patience, and boasts at least one terrific performance, by actress Yeom Jeong-ah as a scary stepmom.
  21. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    With Ledger onscreen more than might have been expected, the film possesses strong curiosity value bolstered by generally lively action and excellent visual effects.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear
    The Naked Gun 2 1/2 is at least two-and-a-half times less funny than its hilarious 1988 progenitor. But even if the laugh machine isn't operating at top efficiency, it still cranks out a few choice bits of irreverent lunacy.
  23. A Call to Spy
    In a world hungering for depictions of national valor and compassion, the movie’s variations on heroism are a boon.
  24. 6ixtynin9
    The film goes more and more off-kilter, with its jumble of black comedy and bloodshed and its mild-mannered protagonist embroiled in violent crime making it an unsophisticated foray into Coen brothers territory.
  25. Arlington Road
    An intelligent, insidiously plotted Hitchcockian thriller directed in souped-up, modern expressionistic style.
  26. Caught Stealing
    Caught Stealing might feel like a break from the “Pi” director’s intensely subjective character portraits, which range from “The Wrestler” to “The Whale,” but in fact, Aronofsky brings us as close to Hank as he has to any of his characters.
  27. The Salt of Life
    Di Gregorio's dialogue and performers are once again marked by a spontaneity and ease; who else working today treats so-called "middle age" with such jocular honesty?
  28. Drama/Mex
    An unerring compositional eye plus firm control of an inventive structure keep Drama/Mex well within the attention span, even when the script wanders without seeming to know why.
  29. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    Much like a work of art, the film invites a range of reactions, though it’s far easier to process than the daubs, doodles and other weird works that now hang all over the country.
  30. Unexpected
    Swanberg and co-writer Megan Mercier have crafted an incredibly generous film that wears its heart on its sleeve but never feels sappy or even sentimental.
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