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. Casa de los babys
    An entirely schematic treatise on maternity and conflicting cultures. A subject perhaps far more suited to documentary treatment, this numbingly earnest effort will be a laborious delivery for IFC.
  2. Starsky & Hutch
    Blessed with sporadic moments of cheeky fun, isn't painful but seldom advances beyond costumes and hairstyling in terms of creativity.
  3. Freeze Frame
    Signals a talented newcomer in writer-director John Simpson and boasts a gripping central performance from popular British comedian Lee Evans.
  4. The World of Kanako
    While there’s something compelling about an antihero whose obsession is poised on the razor’s edge between love and hate, The World of Kanako buries it in grinding, agitated repetition.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    52 Pick-Up
    52 Pick-Up is a thriller without any thrills. Although director John Frankenheimer stuffs as much action as he can into the screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel (previously filmed by Cannon in Israel in 1984 as The Ambassador), he can't hide the ridiculous plot and lifeless characters.
  6. Spirited
    For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much exactly as they’d expect, but that doesn’t mean Spirited can’t still surprise.
  7. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Humor turns every kill into a sick punchline, and while the writers do a fine job of making them funny, like macabre cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote can rebound from unthinkable injuries, the movie’s tone negates a fundamental respect for human life.
  8. Promised Land
    By manipulating their story to advance the cynical notion that you really can't trust anyone, the filmmakers inadvertently beg the question why their own motives should be so above suspicion.
  9. Agora
    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.
  10. Military Wives
    If you’ve seen even one based-on-a-true-story British misfit hobbyists movie, you already know the tune.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Croods
    Although state-of-the-art in its rendering of textures, movement and stereography, The Croods, adopts a relatively primitive approach to storytelling with its Flintstonian construction of stock, ill-fitting narrative elements.
  12. Lion Ark
    Overlong film quickly becomes tedious whenever the camera strays from the lions, who don’t have much personality but prove more compelling than the humans.
  13. The Inbetweeners 2
    The Inbetweeners works by balancing its lascivious nonsense with a disarming sweetness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rio Lobo
    Rio Lobo is the sort of western that John Wayne and producer-director Howard Hawks do in their sleep. But by no stretch of nostalgia does it match such previous Wayne-Hawks epics as Red River or Rio Bravo.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mean Season
    Jordan is at his shrewdly crazed best, anchoring the movie with a felt terror, initially just through his off-screen voice as he manipulates the reporter over the phone and ultimately through his cunning.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kitty Foyle
    Despite its episodic, and at times, vaguely-defined motivation, picture on whole is a poignant and dramatic portraiture of a typical Cinderella girl’s love story. Several good comedy sequences interline the footage, deftly written and directed.
  17. I Heart Huckabees
    Clever but distancing, this existential comedy bounces along on the backs of its tasty cast, witty writing and stylistic verve.
  18. The House Bunny
    A blissfully broad comedy that should catapult Anna Faris into a singular kind of stardom.
  19. Rendition
    By underplaying the melodrama in the presumed hope of seeming subtle when Kelley Sane’s script is so baldly melodramatic, the “Tsotsi” helmer drains the life out of an obviously explosive subject.
  20. Trolls
    It’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.
  21. The Sandlot
    Sweet and sincere, the film is also a remarkably shallow wade, rife with incident and slim on substance.
  22. The Tobacconist
    In the end, what makes The Tobacconist effective despite its limitations is the way it focuses on the experience of a “typical” Austrian — that is, a citizen without political convictions.
  23. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
    In Last Man Standing, Broomfield comes close to answering the questions — of guilt and recrimination — that have hung over these murders for too long.
  24. Perfect Sense
    Mackenzie's second collaboration with Ewan McGregor (following 2003's "Young Adam") tritely tosses together two indifferently conceived characters against a backdrop of global panic that generates no urgency.
  25. Sergio
    Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.
  26. Rob Roy
    This handsome, not unappealing look at a Scottish legend of nearly 300 years ago is too solemn, wooden and dour for its own good, and feels oddly of another era.
  27. Ice Princess
    The most sparkling aspect to Ice Princess is Juliana Cannarozzo, a real-life, nationally ranked skater.
  28. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Where Haupt succeeds is in conveying the passion felt by everyone who works on the Sagrada, from foremen to sculptors.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torn Curtain
    Alfred Hitchcock's direction emphasizes suspense and ironic comedy flair but some good plot ideas are marred by routine dialog, and a too relaxed pace contributes to a dull overlength.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flatliners
    Flatliners is a strikingly original, often brilliantly visualized film from director Joel Schumacher and writer Peter Filardi.
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