Variety's Scores

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For 17,839 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 17839
  2. Mixed: 7,035 out of 17839
  3. Negative: 1,638 out of 17839
17839 movie reviews
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  1. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    At its core is a most affecting portrait of two people who love each other, but may no longer be able to live as one, and it is mostly a pleasure to spend two, or three, or five hours in their company.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Field of Dreams
    In spite of a script hobbled with cloying aphorisms and shameless sentimentality, Field of Dreams sustains a dreamy mood in which the idea of baseball is distilled to its purest essence.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ragtime
    The page-turning joys of E.L. Doctorow's bestselling Ragtime, which dizzily and entertainingly charted a kaleidoscopic vision of a turn-of-century America in the midst of intense social change, have been realized almost completely in Milos Forman's superbly crafted screen adaptation.
  4. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    Western audiences familiar with "Blood Simple" will get a kick out of the reinventions.
  5. Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    For most of its running time, Fordson wanders far from the gridiron to offer overall impressions of a close-knit community of Arab-Americans who, in the wake of 9/11, often have found themselves targeted and stereotyped as militant Islamists or worse.
  6. The Hole
    Cool it may be, but scary (or even mildly shudder-inducing) it ain’t, even in 3-D.
  7. Mr. Six
    Scored to a beautiful, introspection-oriented saxophone score, Mr. Six surprises by attempting to delve behind Feng’s sometime-inscrutable facade, rather than pushing its leading man toward action.
  8. Lace Crater
    First-time director Harrison Atkins never quite finds his own distinct voice. He dabbles in horror and deadpan comedy, experiments in discordant jags on the soundtrack, and suggests a more fluid boundary between the living and the dead, but the film remains stubbornly hazy and obscure in its intentions.
  9. Dicks: The Musical
    "Dicks” is an unapologetically puerile, hard-R novelty that’s just lo-fi enough to maintain its underground cred.
  10. Flicka
    It's not really either an animal or a kids' film but rather a young adult drama that rings emotionally true.
  11. Vamps
    Heckerling always manages to get her finger firmly on the pulse of the contemporary moment, and while her club-hopping heroines may be undead, they serve as adorable metaphors for what the filmmaker sees as a zombified moment in cultural history.
  12. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Dracula legend is a bloody visual feast. Both the most extravagant screen telling of the oft-filmed story and the one most faithful to its literary source, this rendition sets grand romantic goals for itself that aren't fulfilled emotionally, and it is gory without being at all scary.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Romulus, My Father
    Warmly felt but haltingly told meller Romulus, My Father holds the attention with fine perfs and exquisite lensing, but never really grips the imagination.
  14. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    It's hard to dislike a movie this light-hearted, but there's something terribly ephemeral about it as well; it's a film of complete weightlessness.
  15. Flesh and Blood
    If, in the final analysis, this is an experiment that doesn’t quite gel, it’s still one that will be worth the risk taken for adventurous viewers.
  16. And Their Children After Them
    Where the the writing is wan, the filmmaking compensates with emphatic braggadocio. Augustin Barbaroux’s cinematography is all humidly saturated tones and rolling, kinetic movement.
  17. The Intouchables
    Though never known for their subtlety, French co-helmers/scripters Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache have never delivered a film as offensive as "Untouchable," which flings about the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.
  18. Life Partners
    The movie belongs to thesps Jacobs and Meester. Jacobs fully inhabits her less-than-completely-sympathetic role with warmth and just the right touch of unconscious entitlement, while Meester luminously expands the film’s affective core.
  19. Thor
    Thor delivers the goods so long as butt is being kicked and family conflict is playing out in celestial dimensions, but is less thrilling during the Norse warrior god's rather brief banishment on Earth.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Permanent Midnight
    Stiller’s attempted image makeover, though admirable, doesn’t make it. His perform-ance is strictly from the clenched-teeth, “Look at me, I’m acting!” school.
  21. Me and You
    Ultimately, such a stir-crazy two-hander can only be as interesting as its actors.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trick or Treat
    Like a relatively dark street on Halloween night, Trick or Treat is ripe for howls and hoots, but only manages to deliver a choice handful of them when the festivities are just about over.
  23. The Wandering Earth
    Director Frant Gwo’s adaptation of the 2000 novella by Liu Cixin is no genre classic, but its furious pace, spectacular visuals, and fanciful plot deliver decent escapist entertainment.
  24. Roommates
    By turns tenderly observed, improbably dark and perkily sitcom-esque, it’s certainly erratic, and uncertainly much else.
  25. Body of Lies
    A mostly formulaic approach that becomes more disappointing as the yarn unwinds.
  26. The Wedding Guest
    What’s lacking is personality from the human characters, which is a serious failing, considering how the film shifts into character mode as Apte slowly emerges as an equal to Patel, while both remain too guarded for audiences to fully appreciate as people.
  27. Towelhead
    Towelhead is transgressive without being effectively subversive, gutsy to no particular end. It simply lacks style, which counts for so much in this sort of thing.
  28. Antlers
    What makes suggestion-driven Antlers so disturbing isn’t the movie’s tension- and dread-building mechanics so much as the way the filmmaker burrows into the minds of his two main characters.
  29. The Notebook
    Unfortunately, the glowering, non-pro Gyemant twins, who seem to have only one facial expression (and oddly anachronistic haircuts), continually break the spell woven by the other performers.
  30. Teeth
    A game, disarming lead performance from Jess Weixler, who won a jury acting prize at Sundance, goes some way toward making palatable this mish-mash, whose provocative nature could carve out a certain commercial niche.
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