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. Big Fan
    It's a small, peculiar film, one unlikely to appeal much to women, non-sports fans and mainstreamers, but its uncomfortable comic insights should win it a loyal following.
  2. Wolke Neun
    Overall tone lies somewhere between Mike Leigh and Ken Loach in performances and look, with a modest tech package.
  3. Play the Game
    The comedy's broad perfs, predictable story beats and pro but characterless packaging have a smallscreen feel.
  4. Halloween II (2009)
    Repellent not only in content but in visual style, writer-director Rob Zombie’s hatchet job on the series he revived so artfully two years ago plays like a violent act of euthanasia upon the huge, brain-dead body of work inspired by the 30-year-old “Halloween.”
  5. Taking Woodstock
    The picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen.
  6. Inglourious Basterds
    A violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich.
  7. World's Greatest Dad
    The picture wobbles a bit before emerging a successful low-key satire of literary fraud and morbid personality cults.
  8. Post Grad
    As fiction characters go, Ryden seems as dull as they come, making it hard to muster much sympathy for her plight.
  9. Shorts
    More zippy, diverting fun from Robert Rodriguez's family filmmaking factory.
  10. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    An explosive performance by Johanna Wokalek gives some relief to an otherwise long and humdrum series of characters.
  11. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    A classic about the Irish "troubles." Despite the unavoidably convoluted facts of the real-life story, pic boasts plausibly written, solidly acted characters and a conflict that pushes the viewer's righteous-indignation buttons.
  12. Five Minutes of Heaven
    Powerhouse performances by Liam Neeson and James Nesbit make this an intense, ultimately moving tale.
  13. The Marc Pease Experience
    The finished product appears particularly stale, with an unfunny script that squanders its game cast, including a valiantly emotive Jason Schwartzman in the title role.
  14. X Games 3D: The Movie
    A relatively unimaginative take on the proceedings, coupled with occasionally bizarre stereoscopic work and awkward narration, causes the picture to bail out more often than it soars.
  15. My One and Only
    The ensemble collectively displays crisp comic timing throughout.
  16. Passing Strange
    This first-rate multicamera transcript of a terrific show should delight musical fans (and many who think they aren't) as a niche broadcast item.
  17. Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
    Spinning a wry, tall-tale version of his autobiography, the septuagenarian audaciously plays himself at every age and every stage of his improbably picaresque adventures.
  18. Casi divas
    Gloriously flamboyant comedic extravaganza, fuses soap opera and "American Idol"-type competition, following four wildly different women vying for the star role in a feature filmization of a popular telenovela.
  19. Still Walking
    Its modest surface belies the depths of a lovely seriocomedy that concisely lays bare all kinds of uncomfortable dynamics in seemingly casual, low-key fashion.
  20. The Headless Woman
    A simpler and more taut, if slightly less interesting version of the oblique but mesmerizing studies of family life in fetid, hothouse atmospheres the Argentine helmer offered up in "La cienaga" and "The Holy Girl."
  21. District 9
    Though compelling throughout, District 9 never becomes outright terrifying, largely because Blomkamp is less interested in exploiting his aliens for cheap scares than in holding up a mirror to our own bloodthirsty, xenophobic species.
  22. Ponyo
    Though targeted at tots, Ponyo may appeal most to jaded adults thirsty for wondrous beauty and unpackaged innocence
  23. The Time Traveler's Wife
    May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.
  24. Bandslam
    High school musicals have their scrappiest number in Bandslam, an awkward, earnest, almost irresistible indie.
  25. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
    The movie simply doesn't deliver -- living hard, selling hard and, before it's over, finally dying hard.
  26. Earth Days
    A moving, elegiac, deeply contemplative work that leaves the viewer not with a save-the-world checklist, but rather a spirit of hopeful reflection.
  27. Grace
    In the showdown between mother and mother-in-law, the proceedings are peppered with spasm of violence that are alternately sick-funny and downright chilling, but don't cancel out the intelligence, or at least drollery, with which so much of the film is put together.
  28. It Might Get Loud
    Musically and visually sumptuous.
  29. Spread
    With "Shampoo" and "American Gigolo" now distant memories, the time evidently seemed ripe for another Hollywood stud movie. Despite Ashton Kutcher’s believability as an older woman’s kept boy, Spread isn’t a patch on those previous films.
  30. Taxidermia
    Taxidermia sets a benchmark for body horror in the cinema.
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