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. American Assassin
    O’Brien could grow into the role. He has an earnest, high voice — perhaps the reason he’s barely allowed to speak — and shines in the rare scenes where he gets to show personality, as do Keaton and Kitsch when they put down their guns.... It’d be more fun to watch the three actors swap war stories over beers than batter each other — especially when their worst enemy is the script’s coma-inducing machismo.
  2. Evita
    Director Alan Parker has done a dazzling job creating screen images to accompany the wall-to-wall music, resulting in a musical fresco that is much closer to a sophisticated filmed opera than to any conventional tuner.
  3. Evening
    Individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability.
  4. Takers
    A respectable but watered-down heist movie that, given the Los Angeles setting, either owes a debt to director Michael Mann or suggests an unusually violent and action-packed episode of "Entourage."
  5. Gigi & Nate
    What happens once the film vilifies the animal rights contingent, however, is an example of how movies can protect their heroes and create their scapegoats (pardon the expression) to the detriment of dramatic complexity.
  6. Close Your Eyes
    An enjoyable throwback to the occult psychological horror-thrillers of the late 1970s. While it flirts often with campy excess, the film remains compelling thanks to its chilly mood, stylish visuals and polished production values.
  7. Factory Girl
    The wild, unhinged life of Andy Warhol's favorite "superstar," Edie Sedgwick, is refashioned in Factory Girl as a tame biopic with little feel for the 1960s New York Underground.
  8. The Son
    I watching The Son play out, this family’s tragedy becomes our own, and Zeller’s warning becomes impossible to ignore.
  9. Pretty Persuasion
    An exercise in bad taste that takes itself just seriously enough to be offensive.
  10. Locked
    Locked is not without limited charms, but it ultimately fails to bridge the gap between putting audiences in the car with Eddie, and actually wanting to make them go for the ride.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dragonball: Evolution
    A popular Japanese manga series gets a pleasing if paint-by-numbers live-action makeover in Dragonball Evolution, which half-heartedly tries to keep the faith for its pubescent male fanbase.
  12. Happythankyoumoreplease
    With the exception of Akerman's Annie, the characters are uniformly annoying, their stories insubstantial and the tone one of smug contentment.
  13. White on Rice
    Its amusingly off-kilter humor underserved by pedestrian packaging, Dave Boyle's sophomore feature, White on Rice, is the kind of comedy that hinges on a protagonist near-imbecilic in all matters social, physical and especially romantic.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    There are a good many laughs on this simple premise and the script’s exploitation of them. The only time the film falters badly is in its choice of a gimmick to get the boy-who-turns-into-a-dog turned back, for good and all, into a boy.
  15. Whatever Works
    This far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.
  16. End of the Spear
    Although overly earnest and often stilted, the film should find great favor principally among religious auds.
  17. Hoodwinked!
    Little Red Riding Hood gets a cheeky CGI makeover in Hoodwinked!, a fast-paced, fitfully clever 3-D-animated feature that will entertain tykes.
  18. Extraordinary Measures
    Doesn't reach far beyond its smallscreen genotype as a disease-of-the-week telepic, despite the star power of Brendan Fraser as the desperate dad and Harrison Ford as an eccentric, ornery researcher.
  19. Girl in Progress
    Never finds its own groove, alternating between high-school dramedy and overworked-single-mom narratives without ever really becoming a mother-and-daughter story until the closing scenes.
  20. Uncharted
    Uncharted is a lively but thinly scripted and overlong mad-dash caper movie, propelled by actors you wish, after a while, had more interesting things to say and do.
  21. The Girl from Monday
    Unconvincingly attempts to update the futurist dystopian traditions of Orwell, Huxley and William Gibson.
  22. The Chamber
    An intelligently proficient movie that works more effectively as a family drama than a legal thriller.
  23. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    “Paws of Fury” is an efficient yet underimagined animated fable that barely musters the flavor of a cliché Western comedy.
  24. Into the Blue
    Not a thriller so much as an extremely violent swimsuit calendar, the lushly lensed but dramatically waterlogged Into the Blue is too infatuated with its scantily clad stars to make sense of all the drug dealers, boat looters and bloodthirsty sharks trying to hunt them down.
  25. The Weight of Water
    Despite recurrent narrative and dramatic problems, each of Bigelow's pics provides a visual treat, and this film is no exception.
  26. The Three Marias
    Fresh and offbeat tale of vendetta.
  27. King of the Jungle
    Story's spurts of violence are designed to tear Seymour's world apart , but Rosenfeld's scripting and directing choices tend to lessen impact of a potentially gut-wrenching urban tale.
  28. The Sum of All Fears
    Director Phil Alden Robinson -- has done just about everything he can do to build a sleek, involving and -- for a few minutes -- terrifying movie that can get viewers past the young Ryan factor.
  29. How to Deal
    A bland romance that suffers from choppy development, dramatic overload and dearth of personality.
  30. Love Object
    While the premise has possibilities for some creepy, pulpy fun, writer-director Robert Parigi brings too little style or humor, instead going a more obvious, overwrought route.
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