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. Bingo Hell
    It works hard stylistically to provide a good time. But that would have been a better bet had at least as much effort been put into a screenplay whose ideas, both comic and macabre, remain undernourished.
  2. Minamata
    Depp plays it surly throughout, dominating those around him, but Minami has a strong screen presence as well (despite struggling somewhat with the dialogue in her first English-language role). As Aileen, she needs only to look at Gene, and he will yield to her demands. The two characters read as equals here, despite their polar-opposite personalities, and that unusual chemistry fuels the dangerous reporting ahead of them.
  3. Bra Boys
    Opening with a bright history lesson about poor suburb Maroubra and its place in Sydney beach culture, the docu then fails to adequately answer any charges as members and sympathetic locals line up to praise the outfit for rescuing troubled youth.
  4. Hobo with a Shotgun
    One must grudgingly admire director Jason Eisener's willingness to go over the top and beyond, and the film certainly delivers what it promises.
  5. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    This scattershot documentary — an undiluted advertisement for this temple of high-end consumerism — jumps skittishly from subject to subject, disjointed and repetitive for all but dyed-in-the-wool fashionistas.
  6. Love and Other Drugs
    A jagged little pill that, in the end, goes down too smoothly.
  7. London to Brighton
    Does what it does well but too often seems a pointless exercise in British miserabilism crossed with a nasty gangster yarn.
  8. Without the King
    With Swaziland providing this mother lode of material, helmer Michael Skolnik extracts only the most pedestrian of films.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Playing by Heart
    A stellar cast and articulate script notwithstanding, pic fails to connect emotionally with its audience, which perhaps says more about the difficulty of making empathetic attachments than writer-director Willard Carroll intended.
  10. Take the Lead
    Well-intentioned, feel-good urban tale.
  11. Young Goethe in Love
    As its English-language title indicates, Philipp Stoelzl's yarn is clearly modeled on "Shakespeare in Love." But though it lacks that film's delirious wordplay, this German cousin is well plotted and impressively mounted.
  12. Clandestine Childhood
    Designed to highlight the uneasy coexistence between everyday childhood experiences and the intense pressures of living with parents secretly fighting the junta, the picture has strong moments, but is bogged down by a script that regurgitates standard-issue ideas without finding anything interesting to say.
  13. Zoom
    Morelli and tyro scribe Matt Hansen unpack this Charlie Kaufman-lite premise with more cleverness than wit, struggling particularly to find the right racy tone for various erotic interludes — but the part-toon pic’s neatly collapsing structure and pop-art flourishes ensure it’s never dull.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Babes in Toyland
    Walt Disney's first live-action musical, a lavish translation to the screen of Victor Herbert's operetta, Babes in Toyland, is an expensive gift, brightly-wrapped and intricately packaged. But some of the more mature patrons may be distressed to discover that quaint, charming Toyland has been transformed into a rather gaudy and mechanical Fantasyland. What actually emerges is Babes in Disneyland.
  15. David
    Faith, “David” has in spades; soul, not so much.
  16. Party Girl
    This trifle about a dizzy downtown New York scenester who gets a grip on her life is energized by several attractive characters and enough youthful pep to put it over as an upbeat diversion for teens and twentysomethings, though it has no more substance than bubblegum music.
  17. Sukiyaki Western Django
    Basic joke wears off after five minutes, and many bystanders will start to head out of town. But genre/Asian buffs prepared to ride shotgun for two hours will be rewarded with some classy action sequences and densely accoutred widescreen lensing.
  18. Club Zero
    What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.
  19. When You're Strange
    The Lizard King is a bummer in When You're Strange, Tom DiCillo's disastrously inane documentary ode to reptilian rocker Jim Morrison and his mellower bandmates in the Doors.
  20. The Girl Is in Trouble
    A textbook noir premise gets an overamped and undercompelling treatment in The Girl Is in Trouble.
  21. A Perfect Pairing
    A Perfect Pairing may lack a unique complexity and leave some sediment behind, but its finish is pleasing nonetheless.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocky V
    When the underdog always wins he's not much of an underdog anymore, and the narrative cartwheels Sylvester Stallone has turned over the years to put Rocky in that position have peeled away the novelty.
  23. Bride & Prejudice
    Austen nuts may rend their frocks, and Bollywood buffs may split their cholis, but there's an immensely likable, almost goofily playful charm to Bride & Prejudice that finally wins the day.
  24. Little Pink House
    If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.
  25. 'R Xmas
    Despite some hazy plot points, the tough, compelling drama comes together quite satisfyingly, standing alongside 1996's "The Funeral" as perhaps the most controlled and cohesive of Ferrara's uneven work of recent years.
  26. Forsaken
    Refreshingly and unabashedly sincere in its embrace of Western conventions and archetypes, this pleasingly retrograde sagebrush saga should play exceptionally well with currently under-served genre fans.
  27. Bitch
    Acted and executed with brute conviction, if not much delicacy, by its writer-director-star, with an excellent foil in Jason Ritter’s boorish, baffled husband, the film feels overstretched in its latter half — with its central metaphor revealing only so many facets before the shock factor begins to pall.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Someone to Watch Over Me
    Someone to Watch Over Me is a stylish and romantic police thriller which manages, through the sleek direction of Ridley Scott and persuasive ensemble performances, to triumph over several hard-to-swallow plot developments.
  29. Wildcat
    It’s emotionally exhausting, but audiences come away with a sense of her legacy, as well as an appreciation for the adversity she faced (and, to a lesser degree, a sense of the criticism that has been leveled against her).
  30. Star Trek: Generations
    It may not "boldly go where no one has gone before," but Star Trek Generations has enough verve, imagination and familiarity to satisfy three decades' worth of Trekkers raised on several incarnations of the television skein. [14 Nov. 1994, p.47]
    • Variety
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