Variety's Scores

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For 17,840 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: 9,167 out of 17840
  2. Mixed: 7,035 out of 17840
  3. Negative: 1,638 out of 17840
17840 movie reviews
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    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Tracey Fragments
    Page is generally commanding as the self-pitying teenager, but there are several moments when, let down by the text, the young thesp obviously does not believe what she is saying.
  2. The Big Uneasy
    Well-intended and informative, but also unfocused, unwieldy and a little smug, picture pales in comparison to the really first-rate films on the subject ("When the Levees Broke," "Trouble the Water").
  3. When Animals Dream
    When Animals Dream lacks peasants bearing flaming torches to hunt down Frankenstein’s monster outside the terrorized village. But it also lacks the depth to avoid seeming just as corny, albeit in a dressed-up, self-consciously important way.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Stepford Wives
    Bryan Forbes’ filmization of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives is a quietly freaky suspense-horror story.
  5. Strays
    Strays balances human expectations and lost-in-translation animal experiences for a smart, suitably raunchy adventure that should resonate even if you don’t have a furry friend waiting at home for you afterward.
  6. Puccini for Beginners
    While it tips its hat to screwball comedy, Puccini for Beginners owes more to contemporary sitcom. It also has way more in common with "Sex and the City" than "The L Word." None of that is entirely a bad thing in a film that never really soars but has enough breezy humor.
  7. Get Smart
    Helmer Peter Segal's formulaic takeoff is neither fish nor fowl, not quite faithful to the show, but not quite bringing it into the 21st century either.
  8. Firebrand
    Firebrand is clever to reframe Catherine as an important figure in England’s change. It just goes too far.
  9. Dear Mr. Watterson
    It is, in short, everything you’d expect from a crowd-sourced documentary, designed to celebrate its subject, while mostly just validating the aesthetic taste of its backers.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Deathtrap
    Despite its intermittently amusing dialog, however, Deathtrap comes across as a minor entertainment, cleverness of which cannot conceal its essential artificiality when blown up on the big screen.
  11. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    Making music, making fun of themselves and making as much political hay as possible, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young set out to alleviate the public allergy to Iraq War films with CSNY Deja Vu, a doc that seems quite likely to effect a cure.
  12. Nutcrackers
    What the movie needs isn’t a shaggy Christmas pageant, but the kind of catharsis one might expect when four of its characters lost their mom and the fifth ought to be mourning his sister.
  13. The Château
    Modest but engaging.
  14. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause
    Nancy Savoca's workmanlike record of a La Mama stage performance taped last December finds the comic spinning some not-especially-interesting anecdotes about her bewildered actions that day, before turning toward more incisive political commentary.
  15. Return to Me
    A simplistic, highly contrived romantic comedy about the mysterious workings of fate.
  16. Chuen jik sat sau
    High-octane plunge into pop gangster psychology.
  17. From Hell
    Surprisingly conventional Olde London Towne gaslight mystery, gussied up with some doctored visuals, and an eccentric performance by Johnny Depp.
  18. Let's Get Frank
    A fascinating portrait of an era, as well as of a unique public servant.
  19. The Bread, My Sweet
    Lightweight but likable.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Johnny Dangerously
    Stapleton is also well-cast in her cliched role, as are Peter Boyle as the good mobster Dundee and Joe Piscopo as the bad Vermin. Deliberately overworking the Cagney mannerisms, Michael Keaton is initially good, too, in the title role, as is Griffin Dunne as Johnny’s D.A. brother. Unfortunately, the material given all of them just gets worse and worse.
  21. The Etruscan Smile
    Brian Cox rages robustly and arrestingly against the dying of the light in The Etruscan Smile, an unabashedly formulaic yet undeniably affecting coming-to-terms drama that may cause as much discomfort as delight for those who recognize bits and pieces of their own fathers (or themselves) in the cantankerous character Cox portrays so persuasively.
  22. Whole New Thing
    "Thing" suffers the familiar curse of Canadian seriocomedy -- just nice enough in content and stylistically like a telepic.
  23. The First Purge
    The First Purge is a slipshod B-movie comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.”
  24. Blue Chips
    More numbing than exciting.
    • Variety
  25. Fierce People
    Whenever Sutherland comes on scene, any inadequacies in the film's depiction of the well-to-do become irrelevant.
  26. Cymbeline
    Having learned a thing or two from Baz Luhrmann, Almereyda substitutes guns for daggers and picks his locations carefully, creating a rich, sultry-looking environment within which to stage the drama.
  27. Barrage
    After a taut, flinty opening that sees Huppert and Chammah sparring to quietly heart-ripping effect, the air trickles out of this sensitive but cliché-laced drama
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Night of the Living Dead
    The story faithfully follows the original except for the bonehead decision to replace the ending with a ‘meaningful’ twist that reeks of pretentiousness.
  29. The Misfortunates
    Calling the Strobbe clan a working-class family would imply that some of its members worked (or had class), but none of the lowlife protags do in the visually robust and often hilarious Flemish tragicomedy The Misfortunates.
  30. Fairhaven
    While there's something undeniably fascinating about the way Fairhaven repeatedly avoids predictable payoffs for portentous dramatic setups, narrative momentum is conspicuous by its absence.
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