Variety's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    The moments of inspired originality are all too infrequent. There's enough eye candy and marvels on screen, however.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Caravaggio
    Much of the joy of the film is to be found in the way Jarman and his team recreate the look and color of the original paintings.
  3. The Good Girl
    This one comes up short in terms of visual flair. But it delivers amusingly observed characters, consistent laughs underscored by the poignancy of unfulfilled existences and winning performances from a terrific cast captained by Jennifer Aniston.
  4. Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    By turns defiant and apologetic, gleefully raunchy and anxiously defensive.
  5. Full Frontal
    Arid, self-consciously arty and emotionally uninvolving.
  6. One Last Kiss
    Craftily combining elements that speak directly to three different generations, this accomplished ensemble piece is shaping up to be the surprise homegrown hit of the season.
  7. The Master of Disguise
    Vehicle for Dana Carvey as a chameleonic crime-fighting imbecile is noisy, colorful and fart-gag-filled enough to amuse undiscriminating auds under the age of 10.
  8. Signs
    All smoke and mirrors. With his third straight excursion into the supernatural, M. Night Shyamalan has begun revealing the hand that works his spooky tricks so much that the lack of substance is plainly seen.
  9. Gaza Strip
    Takes the viewer deep into the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the powerful immediacy of raw images, some of them very hard to look at.
  10. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    A treat, a delicious blend of perversity, playfulness and deadly passion concealed beneath the tranquil, moneyed surface of the Swiss bougeoisie.
  11. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    Opulently produced, fittingly enough, and quite entertaining as a surface ride through the up, down and somewhat up again life of one of the New Hollywood's most colorful characters.
  12. Lan Yu
    Might spark controversy in mainland China, not only because it deals with a homosexual relationship between a member of the Chinese establishment and a peasant, but also because it touches on events such as the 1989 massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. However, pic is unlikely to raise eyebrows anywhere else.
  13. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    May leave itself open to charges of being little more than a promo feature posing as a documentary, but pic nevertheless is a warts-and-all look at a group of musicians -- and the music biz -- likely to make most record label flacks flinch.
  14. The Country Bears
    Toddlers and pre-teens will be entertained, and parents will be pleasantly surprised, by this more-than-just-bearable musical road movie.
  15. Who Is Cletis Tout?
    A convoluted comic caper that labors to affect a lighthearted, off-the-cuff feel, and winds up being a copy of a copy of a bad Tarantino-Elmore Leonard forgery, with Tim Allen as a glib cinephile hitman.
  16. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    A picture that, even more than the previous two, feels like a bunch of gags tossed together. The laughs are here, to be sure, although even some of the best of them are retreads and the Swinging '60s recycling act is now feeling a bit past its zeitgeist prime.
  17. Happy Times
    Small but delightful tale about a dyed-in-the-wool spieler who develops a soft spot for a blind girl dumped in his care.
  18. K-19: The Widowmaker
    Obediently follows the verities of the submarine movie and its true story origins but without the imagination needed to refresh the genre.
  19. Lansdown
    Recycles familiar ideas, with just enough droll wit to score as a nifty normal-folk-doing-stupid-deadly-things comedy a la "Fargo."
  20. Stuart Little 2
    Slight but lively sequel. Aimed squarely at moppets with piddling attention spans.
  21. Tadpole
    A smart sex comedy that successfully swims upstream to spawn and score.
  22. Eight Legged Freaks
    This update of 1950s drive-in sci-fiers finds the right balance between icky, funny and scary, with sheer energy compensating for a script that could have used more parodic panache.
  23. All About Lily Chou-Chou
    For all its digressions and occasional flat moments, Iwai's movie is a remarkable, acutely involving one, working on an emotional level that can only really be expressed through music -- a strong component in all of Iwai's pics.
  24. My Wife Is an Actress
    A sporadically amusing but ultimately very slight showbiz story about being married to a celebrity. Most of the jokes and situations are predictable, and the film is saddled with irritating supporting characters.
  25. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
    A perfectly respectable kid-friendly family offering.
  26. Reign of Fire
    An uncommonly satisfying mix of medieval fantasy, high-tech military action and "Mad Max"-style misadventure.
  27. Sex and Lucia
    A slickly made, intense and powerfully visual take on time-honored problems such as identity and the body's power over the mind.
  28. Never Again
    A hugely enjoyable romantic comedy that dares to suggest that love can bloom -- and, more important, hormones can rage -- after 50. Smart, sassy and slickly packaged.
  29. Halloween: Resurrection
    More uselessly redundant and shamelessly money-grubbing than most third-rate horror sequels.
  30. Road to Perdition
    Sam Mendes' much-anticipated second effort after his Oscar-winning "American Beauty" finds him working in a very different key while displaying an even more pronounced attentiveness to tone, genre variations and artistic niceties.
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