Variety's Scores

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For 17,837 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: 9,166 out of 17837
  2. Mixed: 7,034 out of 17837
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17837
17837 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Manhattan Project
    A warm, comedy-laced doomsday story. Using clever one-liners and many humorous situations, Brickman manages successfully to sugarcoat the story’s serious message.
  2. Drawing Restraint 9
    A tapestry of sensuous, striking and sometimes disturbing imagery, Drawing Restraint 9 marks the latest cinematic visit to the wacky world of experimental artist Matthew Barney.
  3. The Hater
    Unlike “Corpus Christi,” which was loosely based on factual events, The Hater parts ways with plausibility early on — and yet, it’s relevant enough to prey on our anxieties.
  4. The Hero
    Haley and Basch have mistaken what the AARP calls “movies for grownups” for a kind of mushy feel-good pablum, throwing together a handful of familiar clichés in the hope that Elliott’s charm will carry the day.
  5. Funny Face
    Oddly, Funny Face feels more like a promising but overreaching debut than any of his earlier films, particularly at the level of its slender script, heavy as it is on banal, minimalist dialogue that doesn’t fuel the flickering chemistry between leads Cosmo Jarvis (“Lady Macbeth”) and appealing newcomer Dela Meskienyar as best it could.
  6. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
    It has its amusing (and enlightening) moments, but in many ways it’s just dancing around the meat of the matter.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vanishing Point
    The action is almost entirely made up of one man driving a car at maximum speed from Denver to, hopefully, San Francisco, against various odds, from the police who try to intercept him, to the oddball individuals he meets along the way.
  8. Night and the City
    Lively performances, pungent New York City atmosphere and an abundance of dramatic incident keep this story of an irrepressible lowlife hustler ripping along.
  9. Unpregnant
    It’s as comforting as a prescription drug commercial, which could send some parents into a conniption. But Unpregnant advocates loudest for allowing young women the space to make their own choices — and that they have friends, longtime or newfound, willing to help when they stumble.
  10. This One's for the Ladies
    The whole affair is vastly entertaining — and far from indecent or intimidating.
  11. Iluminados por el fuego
    A watchable if none-too-penetrating analysis of the traumatizing effects of a war largely forgotten.
  12. Conviction
    Although fiercely committed performances by Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell provide director Tony Goldwyn's film with a core of emotional integrity, a less heavy-handed, more informative approach would have served them and the audience better.
  13. Madrid, 1987
    A perceptive, ultra-wordy stab at catching the zeitgeist at a time of change in Spain, David Trueba's two-hander nonetheless feels like a working-out of social and personal themes that hasn't quite achieved the full leap from page to film.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hammett
    Over polished by too many script rewrites, perhaps emasculated by massive footage scraps and belated re-shoots, project emerges a rather suffocating film taking place in a rickety Chinatown.
    • Variety
  15. Petite Solange
    Ropert’s understanding of how children furtively watch the adults around them, soaking up the friction, is well-observed and the best thing in this otherwise insipid film that perversely discards any shred of naturalism for an outdated and phony ingenuousness. Even the performances are airless, and consequently there’s no emotional investment in a family whose rapport is so clunkily established.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Slap Shot
    Like the character played by Paul Newman in Slap Shot, director George Roy Hill is ambivalent on the subject of violence in professional ice hockey. Half the time Hill invites the audience to get off on the mayhem, the other half of the time he decries it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Idolmaker
    Though it's marred by an overly melodramatic and dubious finale, The Idolmaker is an unusally compelling film about the music business in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It shows how teen idols were created, promoted, and discarded by entrepreneurs cynically manipulating the adolescent audience. Ray Sharkey is superb in the title role.
  18. Song Sung Blue
    Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.
  19. Dreams
    At times, the dramatic tension is so strong, “Dreams” could almost be a thriller.
  20. Before You Know It
    A diverting yet awkward mix of farcical elements and earnest feeliness. The two never quite gel, and it’s hard to care about the nice characters who somewhat improbably put up with wildly insufferable ones. There’s some invention and good humor here, yet the whole feels inorganic.
  21. The Kids Grow Up
    Obsession, compulsion and fear are all part of The Kids Grow Up, which is occasionally a less-than-pleasant reminder of the goofy way we can act even while we think we're being sane.
  22. Brick Lane
    Monica Ali's elegant and critically trumpeted debut novel, Brick Lane, about the travails, conflicting emotions and quiet liberation of a Muslim woman in London, is a far lesser thing in its bigscreen transformation.
  23. Köln 75
    You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy Köln 75, but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.
  24. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    The film picks up more general interest once it moves past the early nobility of the outfit as a band of brothers into the things that cripple the least greatest of groups ... Robertson [is] an articulate and ingratiating tour guide through all this glorious and eventually tortured history.
  25. 10 Years
    Oddly, 10 years barely qualifies as a comedy; in fact, the one interesting thing about it is the dire melancholy at its core.
  26. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The new movie, for all its inevitable Breathless Technological Advances, doesn’t feel as visually unprecedented as the last one did. If anything, though, it’s a better film — bolder and tighter, with a more dramatically focused story — and it certainly has its share of amazements.
  27. Mail Order Wife
    This black comedy on the making of a documentary about mail-order wives finally breaks down under the weight of its twists and turns, but mostly maintains a creepy fascination with its scuzzy characters.
  28. Willard
    Strictly for the birds.
  29. The Faculty
    Results may not be Nobel Prize material, but they're zesty and cogent.
  30. The Count of Monte Cristo
    A lavishly mounted and appealingly old-fashioned swashbuckler with nary a trace of wink-wink irony or revisionist embellishment.
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