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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  1. Alien 3
    A muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it.
  2. Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
    A very entertaining recap that grows more disturbing as it wades into the dysfunctional behavior that doomed the show.
  3. The Railway Man
    There’s something decidedly old-fashioned — and also dull as ditchwater — about Jonathan Teplitzky’s retelling of events.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pocahontas
    The Disney artists have created a vivid palette for the picture.
  5. Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno
    Another gorgeous three-hour study of young, attractively housed hearts in often turbulent motion, Mektoub is a frequently seductive sensory epic of equivalent ambition, yet despite its woozily pleasurable set pieces, the fraught emotions binding them are less urgent, and the perspective of its protagonist far less immediate.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Follow That Bird
    Simple premise has the slightly goofy yellow, eight-foot fowl Big Bird taken away from Sesame Street by the officious Miss Finch so he can grow up among his own kind, a bird family named the Dodos, in Oceanview, Ill.
  7. Pretty Problems
    The result is a fresh mix of social satire and relationship dissection with a saving dollop of heart.
  8. Sing
    While there are no profound life lessons to be found in these subplots, Jennings and his cast manage to deliver a steady supply of laughs, while respecting one of Illumination’s core principles: It’s OK to be silly.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Deja Vu
    Cinema's natural felicities for time and action have seldom felt as beautifully dovetailed.
  10. Lizzie
    It’s a simple story made to rouse modern hearts, and the performances and cinematography are so good, the film nearly pulls off the trick.
  11. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    Two's company, three's a crowd and eight is definitely way more than enough in writer-director Daniele Thompson's mismanaged comic ensembler, Change of Plans. Less a crowdpleaser and more a headscratcher than her previous hit, "Avenue Montaigne."
  12. Loudmouth
    The film, at two hours, still feels padded out with recent history. I would have liked, instead, to see some other dimension of Sharpton — who he is away from the protest marches. “Loudmouth” feels highly controlled, almost overly focused on Sharpton’s political identity at the expense of everything else.
  13. Cocaine Cowboys
    A rogues gallery of flamboyant gangsters paint an anecdote-rich portrait of the drug trade, while a steady stream of cops, coroners and crime reporters furnish social commentary.
  14. The Mask
    This showcase for the talents of Jim Carrey is adroitly directed, viscerally and visually dynamic and just plain fun.
  15. The Playroom
    Although Dyer's sophomore feature clearly intends to capture the magical otherness of a child's p.o.v., nothing in her strangely aloof mise-en-scene or her late sister Gretchen's script yields anything more than a group of well-thesped, believable suburban kids upset by their parents' behavior.
  16. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    The technical side isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, and there’s only limited interest in watching White navigate the icon’s first serious bout of depression. That is, unless one understands just how much that record represents to the next generations of musicians and why.
  17. Fight or Flight
    Ultimately, it’s extremely doubtful that any of this would work nearly as well as it does without Hartnett at the center of the storm, anchoring the bloody chaos and generating rooting interest with a performance defined by propulsive physicality, industrial-strength enthusiasm and an indefatigable willingness, even eagerness, to repeatedly make himself the butt of the joke.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Creepshow
    George Romero, collaborating with writer Stephen King, again proves his adeptness at combining thrills with tongue-in-cheek humor.
  19. Heartbreaker
    Combining the glamour of "To Catch a Thief" with the ruckus of a Ben Stiller movie, TV vet Pascal Chaumeil's French Riviera-set intrigue stars Romain Duris.
  20. The Lovebirds
    Bits and pieces of the movie are funny.
  21. Mr. Holland's Opus
    An idealized tribute to a charismatic teacher who has devoted his entire life to music appreciation, Mr. Holland’s Opus has the same old-fashioned texture as Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Older audiences will be moved by the story, but the crucial variable is to what extent younger viewers will embrace this schmaltzy, Capraesque saga that’s not only set mainly in the past but also feels as if it were made back when.
  22. On the Basis of Sex
    An RBG biopic shouldn’t be about sizzle and showpersonship, but hard work and determination in the face of rampant, seemingly unremitting sexism, and in that respect, Leder’s film gets its priorities right.
  23. Beyond the Gates
    This fun if unmemorable occult thriller sports — all too faithfully at times — both the typical pleasures and shortcomings of the movies it pays homage to.
  24. Bitter Melon
    The complex tonal, textural and thematic mix here doesn’t always work, but it’s always interesting and often invigorating.
  25. Run All Night
    Even when he’s dealing with this boilerplate material, Collet-Serra brings an understated intensity and a subtle emotional pull to every scene, aided immeasurably by actors who invest their roles, big and small, with just the right degree of conviction.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Black Cauldron
    By any hard measure, the $25 million animated Cauldron is not very original. The characters, though cute and cuddly and sweet and mean and ugly and simply awful, don't really have much to do that would remain of interest to any but the youngest minds.
  27. Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    Whatever audiences might have wanted to know about sculptor-filmmaker Matthew Barney but were too embarrassed to ask is revealed in accessible documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Finian's Rainbow
    Overall, the $4 million film has an ethereal quality: it’s a blend of real elements, such as love, greed, compassion, prejudice, and other aspects of human nature both noble and otherwise; yet it’s also infused with mystical elements of magic, leprechauns, pixies and wishes that come true.
  29. We Own the Night
    Adequately acted and flecked with the required quota of action to satisfy genre fans, pic recalls numerous good police dramas of the 1970s, but mostly in superficial ways that bring nothing new to the table.
  30. I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
    Since the documentary will likely find its home in the educational market, a more balanced approach might have made it more insightful and educational.
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