Variety's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,148 out of 17807
  2. Mixed: 7,022 out of 17807
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17807
17807 movie reviews
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  1. Remember Me
    The modestly scaled film delivers some moving and affecting moments amid a preponderance of scenes of frequently annoying people behaving badly.
  2. Delta
    A beautifully atmospheric vessel that will seem infinitely deep to some and chafingly dry to others.
  3. Severe Clear
    Scotti's amateur camerawork proves strangely compelling.
  4. The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights
    While the black-white-and-red-clad duo's mystique survives intact, there's some backstage insight.
  5. Children of Invention
    Urgent, artful and even austerely poetic.
  6. Ghost Town
    At a leisurely 172 minutes, the pic takes on the desultory rhythms of rural stagnation, its rigorous compositions imparting aesthetic weight and meditative scope to everything in its purview.
  7. Stolen
    A technically polished thriller marred by textbook filmmaking that grows increasingly dull as the plot wears on.
  8. Alice in Wonderland
    For all its clever design, beguiling creatures and witty actors, the picture feels far more conventional than it should; it's a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney.
  9. Brooklyn's Finest
    It’s more like "Hamlet" -- the ending, at least, with enough blood and corpses to fill a housing project. The only thing missing is a point, which Fuqua circles for two hours without landing.
  10. The Secret of Kells
    With its jewel-bright colors and intricate use of lines, the result is absolutely luscious to behold.
  11. Cop Out
    There's precious little of that tension to be found between co-leads Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, but more than enough between director Kevin Smith and the shoddy script he's elected to take on, and neither seems willing to budge.
  12. The Crazies
    Delivers the essential suspense goods with overall skill and a modicum of intelligence.
  13. Defendor
    Harrelson shines, particularly in framing scenes with Sandra Oh as a tactful court psychiatrist.
  14. The Yellow Handkerchief
    A thoughtful, niche-oriented portrait of four off-the-beaten-path characters trying to find their way.
  15. Easier with Practice
    Amusingly predicated on the romantic possibilities of phone sex, Easier With Practice pushes past its titillating premise to become a quietly provocative love story about emotionally stunted manhood and the risks some guys will take to connect.
  16. Formosa Betrayed
    A decent political thriller set in Taiwan with the requisite Western-market-friendly lead and a determinedly pro-independence message embedded in a formulaic but diverting tale of intrigue and oppression.
  17. Prodigal Sons
    Sad, compelling documentary leaves a few key questions frustratingly unanswered, but the raw materials here are sufficiently bracing.
  18. Shutter Island
    Even when it's clear Scorsese has decided to employ fakery and allow it to be obvious, it's done with elegance and beauty.
  19. Happy Tears
    A contradictory creature, both insightful and dumb, sometimes innovative and sometimes just plain inept. Dreamy, funny but also weirdly disjointed, it’s as if the very film itself were stoned, just like its two pot-smoking sister protags.
  20. The Good Guy
    Lacking much of a satirical bite, the pic's quasi-celebration of crude laddishness becomes oppressive.
  21. Blood Done Sign My Name
    Comes off as a painfully old-fashioned, flatly directed exercise in passionless historical reenactment.
  22. The Ghost Writer
    What the picture most needed was a complete cinematic rethink and, yes, even some action to move it along.
  23. Phyllis and Harold
    Evocatively fleshed out with surprisingly iconic homemovies, passionate love letters and well-chosen pop tunes, Kleine's homegrown Jewish "Madame Bovary" escapes the navel-gazing boundaries of the personal-diary docu by the sheer force of its evocation of bygone sensuality.
  24. Lourdes
    Either a subtly subversive black comedy, a deeply spiritual portrait of physical rebirth or a whole lot of nothing in a self-consciously arty package, Lourdes isn't about to reveal its true colors anytime soon.
  25. The Wolfman
    The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast.
  26. Valentine's Day
    As gooey and lacking in protein as a chocolate holiday bonbon, Valentine's Day plays like a feature-length commercial produced by the Friends of the Valentine Promotional Society.
  27. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    Action movies of this scale often start off strong and wind down to forgettable finales, but "Percy Jackson" is the opposite, overcoming a clunky setup to deliver nearly all its thrills in the last half-hour.
  28. My Name Is Khan
    Riotously overstuffed and enormously enjoyable drama.
  29. Videocracy
    Rather than presenting a well-argued expose of the disturbing symbiosis that exists between Italo politics and TV, with Prime Minister Berlusconi being only the most obvious connection, the scribe-helmer gets sidetracked by marginal characters while keeping bare facts to a minimum.
  30. October Country
    A feel-bad film through and through. Chronicling a year in the life of a low-income Mohawk Valley family beset by external hardships and shockingly bad decision-making, the docu straddles the line between unflinching intimacy and invasive exploitation.
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