Variety's Scores

For 17,807 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 2.4 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:
17807 movie reviews
  1. With extended closing credits, Marmaduke clocks in at 88 minutes and feels longer.
  2. Cropsey has all the trappings of a true-crime TV special, but with an undercurrent of cultural exposition that is intelligent, profound and unsettling.
  3. With rare candor and a refreshing lack of piety, first-timers and combat-weary veterans exhibit their camaraderie, euphoria and burnout as the camera documents their struggles with logistics, horror, death and self-doubt.
  4. This mildly amusing, resolutely inoffensive outing lacks serious sexual tension -- which might just make it a viable compromise date pick in limited release.
  5. A horror comedy much closer to the actor-riffing drollery of Edgar Wright and Christopher Guest than "Scary Movie"-style splatstick, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead is one sly slice of the ridiculous.
  6. 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.
  7. Despite its infotainment look, Burzynski ultimately proves convincing.
  8. Mademoiselle Chambon offers a touching, soft-spoken portrait of two adults fighting to contain their carnal passions from spilling over into a full-blown affair.
  9. Turning the volume of his slapstick surreality down from 11 to 10, Gallic auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Amelie") hits the sweet spot with Micmacs.
  10. Bruckheimer's passably enjoyable, antiquity-themed epic should satisfy its young male core demographic well enough, but won't connect with other auds on the level of Bruckheimer's "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.
  11. Steeped in fan-pleasing gore but woefully thin on ideas, originality (beyond new zombie-offing methods) or directorial flair.
  12. Marked by moments of remarkable stillness amid its emotional tumult, the film's classy, perceptive treatment of potentially maudlin material merits wider arthouse attention than it's likely to receive.
  13. The mother of all secular humanists fights a losing battle against freshly minted religious zealots in Agora, a visually imposing, high-minded epic that ambitiously puts one of the pivotal moments in Western history onscreen for the first time.
  14. Part of the action occurs in the desert, which inadvertently proves apt, since the oases of enjoyable moments -- and they do exist -- suffer from being spaced too widely in what's otherwise a long, arid trek.
  15. The reputed swan song for the series and its first entry in 3D, pic contains a respectable number of laughs, but also borrows its storyline from the oft-recycled "It's a Wonderful Life," and if that's all its creators can do, it's best to put Far Far Away far far away.
  16. How much mileage can a comedy get from a single joke? Quite a bit, judging from the guffaws-to-groaners ratio in MacGruber.
  17. An energetic, nicely balanced documentary containing all the necessary elements for sports reportage with the added advantage of meatier issues attached.
  18. Asch's first feature is intelligent, respectable yet curiously muted in tone and impact, never fully catching the viewer up in either its crime saga or its account of individual rebellion within an insular religious community.
  19. Despite the emotive subject matter, picture is often too sluggish dramatically, and never knits together its stock Western characters into a satisfying whole.
  20. The deliriously entertaining and shamelessly derivative Hindi Kites owes more to Hollywood than Bollywood, though director Anurag Basu borrows plenty from both, aiming to give Indian song-and-dance pics the same sort of crossover success "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" did for Asian martial-arts movies.
  21. The perceptively balanced "Dreams" transitions seamlessly from domestic drama to 70-mph heats.
  22. A movie of no small generosity: It offers audiences the pleasures of a screenplay whose every acerbic line is firmly rooted in character, and it hands Michael Douglas one of his best roles in years.
  23. The demoralizing slide of the relationship between Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, from artistic comrades-in-arms during the thrilling creation of the nouvelle vague to name-calling enemies from the early '70s onward, is charted in overly academic and constricted fashion in Two in the Wave.
  24. Impressively made and serious-minded to a fault, this physically imposing picture brings abundant political-historical dimensions to its epic canvas, yet often seems devoted to stifling whatever pleasure audiences may have derived from the popular legend.
  25. Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan's script relentlessly piles on goopy conversation-stoppers like "Do you believe in destiny?" and "I didn't know that true love had an expiration date."
  26. Painting by numbers often gets a bad rap: While it takes little originality to fill in the romantic-comedy blanks, even a simple, competent job can sometimes feel like a breath of fresh air.
  27. Eschewing character arcs and talking heads in favor of a more poetic approach, this lyrical exercise in avant-garde entomology is the work of an intuitive filmmaker with an often hypnotic sense of composition.
  28. Slight, extremely likable picture, a sly variant on recent immigrant movies like "The Visitor" and "Goodbye Solo."
  29. Despite the tale's real-life basis and a solid Ed Harris as their fictive equivalents' alcoholic dad, Touching Home emerges as a formulaic triumph-over-odds tale with too little distinguishing detail.
  30. As in many of Laverty's scripts, problems of overall tone and character development aren't solved by Loach's easygoing direction, though when it works, "Eric" has many incidental pleasures.

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