Variety's Scores

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For 17,805 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 17805
  2. Mixed: 7,020 out of 17805
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17805
17805 movie reviews
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  1. Nothing But the Truth
    Competently constructed and nicely acted by Kate Beckinsale and Vera Farmiga.
  2. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
    Longtime fans of Walker's warm, sepulchral baritone, startlingly evocative songwriting and lushly imaginative instrumentation will rejoice at this revealing documentary.
  3. Gran Torino
    Highlighted by the star's vastly entertaining performance, this funny, broad but ultimately serious-minded drama about an old-timer driven to put things right in his deteriorating neighborhood looks to be a big audience-pleaser.
  4. Che
    If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he's portrayed here.
  5. Timecrimes
    Timecrimes welds a B-movie plotline to precision-engineered writing and a down-to-earth style; add an engagingly sloppy, nonplussed hero, who remains unfazed by the time-bending scrape in which he finds himself, and the result is memorably offbeat.
  6. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    This botched remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" seriously dishonors the seriously fine 1951 sci-fi landmark on which it's based.
  7. Nothing Like the Holidays
    So "The Family Stone" becomes "The Family Rodriguez," and to their credit, the able performers wring as much mileage as they can from such familiar material.
  8. Adam Resurrected
    Largely set in two of the least appetizing locations imaginable, a concentration camp and an insane asylum, this is a rigorously made film that does almost nothing to invite the viewer into its world.
  9. Dark Streets
    As a dancing chanteuse, Bijou Phillips gives it her all, which isn't enough, and a wooden Mann doesn't help, although Izabella Miko brings a modicum of unaffected charm to her role as the Other Woman.
  10. Where God Left His Shoes
    Piles the pathos high as if to see how many hard-luck cliches its pugilist hero can fend off without succumbing to schmaltz. Given John Leguizamo's knockout perf, sentimentality never dares raise its head, and the improbably stacked deck from which his character is dealt gives the pic's would-be "neo-realist" premise a peculiar edge.
  11. The Reader
    Stephen Daldry's film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact.
  12. Wendy and Lucy
    "Old Joy" helmer Kelly Reichardt plays to her strengths in Wendy and Lucy, a modest yet deeply felt road movie about an idealistic young drifter, her faithful canine and the wide-open spaces of the Pacific Northwest.
  13. Hunger
    Picture represents a powerful, pertinent but not entirely perfect debut for British visual-artist-turned-feature-helmer Steve McQueen, who demonstrates a painterly touch with composition and real cinematic flair, but who stumbles in film's last furlough with trite symbolism.
  14. Cadillac Records
    Most of the details are right-on in Cadillac Records, though the director's efforts to sell it sometimes steers the film into mawkish or hokey territory.
  15. Local Color
    Alas, even the soft-hearted may find this formulaic yarn of a young man's apprenticeship to a cantankerous artist too rosy-hued and treacly.
  16. Nobel Son
    Uneven but enjoyably titillating black comedy should elate Rickman fans while pleasing aficionados of extra-flakey caper flicks.
  17. Punisher: War Zone
    Along with torrents of gore, Punisher: War Zone has moments that are deliriously funny, because the violence is so awful and so casual.
  18. Frost/Nixon
    Frank Langella's meticulous performance will generate the sort of attention that will attract serious filmgoers.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Black Balloon
    Collette acts as an anchor for the ensemble, but the young leads credibly hold their own onscreen.
  20. Let Them Chirp Awhile
    That Blitstein pulls off this tiredly self-reflexive conceit with relative panache is due in no small part to the scruffy grace of leads Justin Rice ("Mutual Appreciation") and indie fixture Brendon Sexton III.
  21. Four Christmases
    Oddly misanthropic, occasionally amusing but thoroughly cheerless holiday attraction that is in no way a family film.
  22. Milk
    Brolin's work is superlatively expressive of the inchoate impulses roiling inside his sorry character. But good as most of the cast is, the show belongs squarely to Penn.
  23. Transporter 3
    Boasts a measure of the retro machismo, style and attitude some 007 fans have found lacking in "Quantum of Solace." But it also has a pointless storyline, incoherent editing and a polyglot cast that renders some of the dialogue utterly incomprehensible.
  24. Twilight
    A disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise.
  25. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    Though an admirable attempt to allow the characters to tell their own story in their own voices, docu may be a bit too freely associative, as it becomes difficult at times to identify individual characters... Picture's second half, which proceeds in a more linear fashion, is resolutely gripping.
  26. Bolt
    Bears some telltale signs of Pixar's trademark smarts, but still looks like a mutt compared to the younger company's customary purebreds.
  27. Lake City
    Moore and Hill's script plunges Spacek in a mawkish stew of banality and improbability composed of bits and pieces of earlier roles.
  28. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    How many thrillers could put the outcome in the title and still provide as many white-knuckle moments as Harvard Beats Yale 29-29?
  29. Australia
    Deliberately anachronistic in its heightened style of romance, villainy and destiny, the epic lays an Aussie accent on colorful motifs drawn from Hollywood Westerns, war films, love stories and socially conscious dramas. Some of it plays, some doesn't, and it is long.
  30. Quantum of Solace
    Stripped of "Royale's" humor, elegance and reinvented old-school stylishness, Quantum has little left except its plot, which is rudimentary and slightly barmy, in the line of the Roger Moore pics of the '70s and '80s.
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