Variety's Scores

For 17,791 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:
17791 movie reviews
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A rousing celebration of the family-run small business, this Ice Cube-topped ensemble comedy, without offering anything especially new or exciting, provides a springboard for high-voltage comic exchanges that double as wisecrack-coated lessons in community relations.
  1. Depressingly thin and exhaustingly contrived. Only masochistic moviegoers need apply.
  2. Looks set to unsettle as many conservative auds as it will delight nihilistic film buffs.
  3. It's hard to walk away unaffected from this heartfelt, well-researched, feature-length documentary.
  4. A chiller resolutely without chills, in which even the pool water always seems heated. And inasmuch as the pic never owns up to its own trashiness, it's not even enjoyable camp.
  5. De Niro's reunion with helmer Michael Caton-Jones doesn't stoke the same fire as their previous pere-fils drama, "This Boy's Life," partly because De Niro's latest portrayal of a troubled cop feels so familiar.
  6. At its best, Garbus' account quietly depicts a set of wasted lives, and a closing image of Allen's plywood casket carted away by a bulldozer is emblematic of the tragedy.
  7. The film offers a frequently obscure but (for fans) always watchable look at history, memory and -- in the most rarefied sense -- love.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tries to combine romantic comedy, soap-opera parody and murder mystery, but the disparate elements never gel, and the film, about homicide at a daytime television serial, bounces around with no clue of how to reconcile or intertwine its genre conventions.
  8. A knockout documentary with a renegade personality ideally suited to its anarchic subject matter.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Billy Wilder's direction captures the feel of morbid expectancy that always comes out in the curious that flock to scenes of tragedy.
  9. Never quite realizes its potential to evoke the real horror of the Internet -- Yet, Malone has given the film a distinctive atmosphere and occasional flashes of his perverse sense of humor.
  10. Watching *Corpus Callosum and marveling at its sprightliness, its joyous, imaginative air, its effortless attenuation to all that is wonderful and horrible and comical about modern technology, makes you want to jump up and shout for joy, too.
  11. With Undisputed, writer-director Walter Hill is back in contention as one of Hollywood's last defenders of the muscular, no-nonsense genre movie.
  12. What you end up with are a bunch of kids acting not like kids, but how adults who've lost all sense of what it was like to be a kid think kids behave.
  13. Little more than a mall movie designed to kill time.
  14. Attempts to delve beneath the surface of Hollywood's rampant narcissism and fascination with technology, but ultimately feels like just one more in the long line of films this year about the business of making movies.
  15. This immaculately made first feature from noted musicvid and commercials director Mark Romanek provides Robin Williams with one of his creepiest, atypical roles, and the comic star responds with an unusually restrained performance that is, in the end, quite moving.
  16. Pleasantly watchable.
  17. Intense but inscrutable tale involving a woman's gradual remembrance of a long-suppressed trauma.
  18. LaBute has had middling success at best, having come up with a passably engaging time-jumping romantic melodrama that at least grapples seriously with one of the novel's most potent themes.
  19. The proper mix is never found. Ill-conceived and expensive project that winds up looking like a bunch of talented thesps slumming it.
  20. A charming relationships comedy about food, gourmet cooking and emotionally chilling out. Anchored by a career-best performance from German thesp Martina Gedeck.
  21. All the trappings of an energetic, extreme-sports adventure, but ends up more of a creaky "Pretty Woman" retread, with the emphasis on self-empowering schmaltz and with the big-wave surfing that gives pic its title seemingly an afterthought.
  22. An unexpected departure off the map, flinging together elements of Alpine musical, ghoulish Jan Svankmajer-style claymation and a family portrait so hokey it makes the Brady Bunch look hip.
  23. Clearly inspired by, though not in the same dramatic league as, "Schindler's List," pic is marred by uneven perfs and lacks the intensity.
  24. Elusive and elliptical as it is, this is one of the most accessible films in Oliveira's recent repetoire.
  25. Modest but engaging.
  26. A repetitious, borderline-silly vanity project.
  27. An enjoyable absurdist comedy.

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