Variety's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. The Bang Bang Club
    Club's entertainment value suffers at the expense of trying to capture the events as they happened -- an ill-advised endeavor, considering everything.
  2. Dashcam
    The result is at once fun and fatiguing. Scary it’s not, and many viewers will find their patience tested by the character they most hope will be dealt a quick demise being the one we’re principally stuck with.
  3. Spanglish
    Short on real drama and incident and long on tedium.
  4. My Amityville Horror
    This documentary plays like an extended episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” deficient as it is in stylistic zeal, investigative spirit and plain old scares.
  5. Elizabeth Blue
    Empathetic and yet ultimately too draggy to elicit much engagement with its paper-thin story, Elizabeth Blue proves at once well-intentioned and inert.
  6. Bounty Killer
    Cheerfully gory, derivative and silly, Bounty Killer aspires to nothing more or less than trashy fun for genre fans, and this umpteenth “Mad Max”-style dystopian actioner delivers on that modest but admirable score
  7. Lucky Break
    Chained to the floor by a script that isn't particularly funny, direction that goes for realism rather than stylization and an almost complete lack of comic timing.
  8. The Gatekeeper
    Actor-turned-director John Carlos Frey, who also stars, knows how to push the right sentimental buttons in what ultimately amounts to a pedestrian actioner, a cliched compendium of Anglo villains and Mexican martyrs.
  9. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    In its animated work, DreamWorks has repeatedly flip-flopped between the hip and the square. This time out, it's as if the company tried to apply a hip approach to a square subject, with unresolved results.
  10. 50 First Dates
    Schneider hams it up as a paunchy middle-aged Hawaiian stoner in an eyebrow-raising ethnic caricature that more than once calls to mind Mickey Rooney's unfortunate Japanese turn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
  11. Virgin
    The film is never quite as startling or mysterious as it seems to want to be, leaving it in an uncertain cinematic limbo.
  12. Tears of the Sun
    This is one of those pictures that unavoidably becomes part of the zeitgeist due to its coincidental arrival at a precise moment in history when its themes play into current events.
  13. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Offers a lively introduction to the highly articulate political dissident and to his controversial views on 9/11.
  14. It's Only the End of the World
    Here, in cinema’s most unpleasant genre (the dysfunctional family gathering), Dolan has found a way to exasperate and exhaust his audience, but he has also achieved a completely unexpected catharsis at the end of an agonizing hour and a half.
  15. Ju-on: The Grudge
    A haunted-house one-trick pony.
  16. Jungle
    Taut and rattling in setup, before losing its bearings in more ways than one as no end of jungle fever seizes Daniel Radcliffe’s agonized protagonist.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    The Drowning Pool is stylish, improbable, entertaining, superficial, well cast, and totally synthetic. Stuart Rosenberg’s direction is functional and unexciting.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Fine
    So Fine is quite all right. Andrew Bergman, screenwriter on Blazing Saddles and The In-Laws, has come up with a somewhat less zany concoction this time but makes an impressively sharp directorial debut highlighted by some good bedroom farce.
  19. The Counselor
    The script is nearly all dialogue, including several eloquent spoken passages toward the end, but it’s a lousy story, ineptly constructed and rendered far too difficult to follow.
  20. Song One
    Perhaps the cleverest thing about Barker-Froyland’s delicately contrived debut is how uncontrived she manages to make it seem.
  21. The Hawk Is Dying
    Already gasping for breath in its opening scenes, picture takes two bleak, unyielding hours to finally expire.
  22. Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
    Mix "Night of the Living Dead" with Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" movies, then add a hefty dose of "Beavis and Butt-Head"-style silliness, and you have "Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight," a fang-in-cheek horror thriller that likely will please fans and turn off non-devotees.
  23. Joyride
    Joyride needs some deft actors driving it, and it has lucked out: An up-for-anything Olivia Colman and scrappy newcomer Charlie Reid make for an unlikely but appealing buddy duo.
  24. Red Hook Summer
    For those expecting Mookie's mid-career encore to signify a return to Spike Lee's roots, Red Hook Summer instead surprises -- and to some extent delights -- as yet another radically unique entry in the director's iconoclastic oeuvre.
  25. Solomon Kane
    This muscular yet monotonous "Kane" just isn't much fun.
  26. Paris Can Wait
    The trouble with Paris Can Wait — apart from the sheer agony of being trapped with two insufferable characters as they sample gorgeously photographed food and wine that we can’t taste — is the way the movie seems so willing to let its leading lady be defined by her husband’s job.
  27. Jeanne du Barry
    In attempting to reclaim this woman’s reputation, Maïwenn’s film feels unexpectedly tame — it risks turning a would-be scandal into a royal bore.
  28. The Oh in Ohio
    Amusing indie comedy blithely blurs the line between risque and raunchy, often to hilarious effect.
  29. Underwater
    Underwater is a stupefying entertainment in which every claustrophobic space and apocalyptic crash of water registers as a slick visual trigger, yet it’s all built on top of a dramatic void. It’s boredom in Sensurround.
  30. Janice Beard
    Starts out on an exhilarating high but gradually loses steam, Janice Beard 45 WPM tries hard to overcome its inconsistency with relentless whimsy.
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