Variety's Scores

For 17,847 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:
17847 movie reviews
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Passable kiddy fare that, although it strenuously underscores its message of friendship and loyalty, doesn't revitalize the genre.
  1. The confused script makes this a tough film for audiences to dig into.
  2. Each of the talented thesps has some good moments, but, ultimately, none can rise above the limitations of the material and filmmaking.
  3. Viewers of this Sam Raimi-produced, sub-"Amityville" scarefest are likely to hold the real grudge.
  4. A mildly pleasant, aggressively retro kidpic that should please undemanding moppets without unduly boring their parents.
  5. While not as subversive as its predecessor, it delivers on the promise of a smart and salient sequel with bolder action, bigger stakes, and deeper resonance for all ages.
  6. Darker, grimmer and more stylistically single-minded than its two relatively giddy predecessors, Terminator Salvation boasts the kind of singular vision that distinguished the James Cameron original, the full-throttle kinetics of "Speed" and an old-fashioned regard for human (and humanoid) heroics.
  7. Universal’s attempt to find gold by bringing to new life one of the mustier items in its vaults is pure hokum and scarcely of the first order.
  8. This first feature from “Walking Dead” thesp-turned-writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh (who played the feral captive in “The Woman”) proves an increasingly wobbly mix of comedy, horror and social critique, its heavy-handed indictment of stereotypical religious hypocrisy finally dragging the enterprise into caricature.
  9. The movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them.
  10. Now, the action takes to the sea, where pirates, original songs and a minx-like Jennifer Lopez character make for harmless diversion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Marshall, cast as the new kid in school, is sullen and far too low key through much of the picture. Director Rowdy He§rrington, who poured on the trash in Road House, aims for a grittier feel this time, with dull results.
  11. The film dips into the melodramatic as it inches closer to the end and choices have to be made, but if its players are revealed to be starring in a movie, they are also shown to be movie stars, making relatively mundane miseries well worth watching.
  12. The effects are snazzy, even if they pass by quite quickly, and there's enough going on to keep audiences watching, if not entirely happy. Smith, Theron and Bateman capably handle the main roles, but such is the skimpiness of the scenario that no further characters make any impact.
  13. Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.
  14. A pair of beautifully mismatched lead performances elevate a predictable drama to unexpected resonance in The Favor.
  15. Though the picture is respectful of the heist-film template -- the gathering of the crew, the readying of props, the planned circumvention of all obstacles -- its main imperative consists of placing Kahn in impossible situations and watching him trick or strongarm his way out.
  16. Alain Gsponer’s well-crafted romantic comedy, glides along on the sheer power of rising German star Daniel Bruhl’s boyish charm.
  17. [A] thin but engaging portrait.
  18. All told, in giving parents nothing to object to, director Alexs Stadermann (who got his start making straight-to-video sequels for Disney) has also given them little to get excited about, apart from the idea of sharing Maya with another generation of preschoolers.
  19. Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.
  20. This slick-enough mediocrity will pass the time tolerably for less discriminating genre fans. But it’s a little sad to see Antonio Banderas reduced to a B movie with grade-C material.
  21. Lean, mean and stripped for speed, Highwaymen fires on all cylinders as an edgy and unnerving road-kill thriller.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bloodbrothers is an ambitious, if uneven probe into the disintegration of an Italian-American family [from the novel by Richard Price]. Under Robert Mulligan's forceful direction, sharply-drawn characters clash, scream and argue, but fail to resolve any of their or the film's conflicts.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Despite some horsepower casting, House Calls is overall a silly and uneven comedy about doctors which wants to be as macabre as, say, Hospital, and at the same time as innocuous as a TV sitcom. It manages to be neither.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Voyage is a crescendo of mounting jeopardy, an effervescent adventure in an anything-but-Pacific Ocean.
  22. The film does, at minimum, convince us that most people would want to transform into Keaton if given the opportunity.
  23. Main body of the movie is weighed down by flat, expository dialogue and a lot of pedestrian filming. However, Zeffirelli's shooting of the "Carmen" sequences, which make up a sizable chunk of the film and are far and away the pic's most exhilarating sections, are graceful and fluid.
  24. Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.
  25. Turning one of the darkest moments in modern French history into syrupy historical drama, writer-director Rose Bosch's The Round Up is a polished, pathos-driven re-creation of the Vichy regime's mass imprisonment and disposal of 13,000 Parisian Jews in summer 1942.

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