Variety's Scores

For 17,794 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 2.4 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:
17794 movie reviews
  1. Uncertain whether to go for straight suspense or gross-out effects, genre in-joking or schlock cinema-of-parodic-excess, Eli Roth's backwoods horror opus Cabin Fever seldom sticks with any one tactic.
  2. The film's unhurried pace will target it for discerning audiences only, but its wry humor and coolly amused observation of contemporary Japan should score with smart urbanites.
  3. Evokes the mythic feel of Sergio Leone Westerns. Despite a convoluted plot that begs for cleaner lines, the wild shoot-outs, cartoonish violence and charismatic cast should lure action fans to theaters.
  4. Universally embraceable subject matter, coupled with helmer's sterling rep as benevolent booster of humanistic pioneers.
  5. Has the built-in curiosity value of watching real people evolve on camera -- a fascination increased by subjects' original, variably sustained commitment to countercultural ideals.
  6. The most affable and endearing of the recent wave of films about Indian immigrants assimilating in the West.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jeanne Moreau turns in a neat bit as a moll and Dary as the inarticulate aging Romeo friend is memorable.
  7. Audience patience undergoes a far more brutal butchering than anything onscreen in Delphine Gleize's wildly over-reaching feature debut, Carnage.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Commits the first cardinal sin of cinematic horror -- it's boring and doesn't have a single scary moment.
  8. Writer-editor-director Paul F. Ryan makes the mistake of focusing on an ungainly and, finally, unplayable verbal match between two high schoolers.
  9. A colorful, lurid and ultimately so-what look at obnoxious personalities careening down their own road to ruin.
  10. Offers a largely satisfying mix of broad slapstick, seriocomic sentimentality and mostly amusing satirical thrusts at easy targets.
  11. Its soul rests in Skarsgard's performance, a powerful mixture of buttoned-down anger and personal disappointment that combines the filmmaker's self-questioning with the real-life character's conflict.
  12. This underground scene makes other "extreme sports" look as harmless as tiddlywinks.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Good action caper.
  13. Marvelously involving family saga.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Film explores the abuses rampant in woman's prisons and the powerlessness of the inmates, while telling the uplifting story of one inmate, Frances (LisaRae).
  14. A nicely contempo mood, engaging characters energized by solid perfs from a good-looking, high-profile young cast, and genuinely witty scripting are let down only by over-length and some generally turgid tunes.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Substantially better than its predecessor, even while staying strictly within the genre's well-defined boundaries.
  15. A delightfully unpredictable sleeper that proves new Argentine cinema really exists, Suddenly, by 26-year-old Diego Lerman, starts scary, moves through deadpan comic and comes out with a whimsical tenderness for its characters.
  16. Director David Zucker, a master of whacked-out visual comedy during his “Airplane!” era, drops the ball here.
  17. It's too arty to cut it as a violent action pic and too gore-spattered to appeal to the arthouse crowd.
  18. At times plays as if it were aimed at children, but more often simply seems to be aiming blind at whatever genre cliche the five credited writers fix upon in any given scene.
  19. The trio is so individually and collectively charismatic that the film eventually neglects fully fleshed-out narrative in favor of sublime characterization.
  20. It's a pungent study of fads, trends and the way everything once genuine ends up being homogenized and exploited beyond recognition by corporate America -- a fine companion piece to Stacy Peralta's "Dogtown and Z-Boys," but with a more raw, punkish aesthetic.
  21. Though shot from the Palestinian P.O.V., the Dutch/Palestinian Film Foundation co-production is remarkably balanced, offering a convinced message of hope for the future.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Film is done in the grand manner of silent-day spectacles with sweep and breadth of action, swordplay and hand-to-hand battles between Norman and Saxon barons.
  22. An utterly fascinating, beautifully crafted exploration of the world of drag kings -- women who dress, perform and/or live as men.
  23. Although Erica Beeney's script beat out more than 7,000 entries, the screen version dulls her potentially distinctive voice with deadly doses of sentimentality.
  24. Plays like an overextended variety-show sketch.

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