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
  1. Suffers in ways typical to such adaptations -- what was fresh and flavorful in anecdotal description becomes more familiar and sitcom broad in literal depiction.
  2. Rigorous but creepy drama.
  3. Some viewers may feel as though, instead of watching a feature, they're paging through a book of rough sketches by a deranged Disney alumnus.
  4. Like a really, really high-tech version of a high school class trip to the planetarium.
  5. Engrossing but psychologically shallow tale.
  6. Intelligent, involving and intricately plotted thriller.
  7. Rouses excitement mostly from stuntwork and thesp agility rather than CGI excess.
  8. Although occasionally both overwritten and overly symbolic, tale carries a satisfying emotional charge.
  9. A seductively structured and superbly acted suspenser that breathtakingly piles swindle upon scam without giving away the game until the very end.
  10. Speak a great deal, but they don't have much to say. A dull ensembler.
  11. Every stab at comedy in this mirthless slog is botched.
  12. Light, thoroughly entertaining comedy;
  13. Above all a rousing entertainment.
  14. Playful and sporty, with just a small twist of the knife, The Cat's Meow is good, uncomplicated fun.
  15. So absurdly contrived that it begs to be taken as comedy.
  16. Bright, glossy, grandly scaled and dramatically stolid, 79-year-old writer-director Jerzy Kawalerowicz's longtime dream project mixes earnest religiosity with the depraved cruelty of Nero's Rome in the classic De Mille tradition.
  17. Charlie Kaufman's clever screenplay bears many traces of the same brand of originality and eccentric imagination that graced his work on "Being John Malkovich," although even at an hour-and-a-half the conceit is stretched almost too thin for audience sustenance.
  18. A resoundingly old-fashioned and well crafted study of evil infecting an American family, Frailty moves from strength to strength on its deceptive narrative course.
  19. Rousing, family-friendly item has a big, epic look and state-of-the-art visual effects, which help to make pic -- a high-profile example of the mainstreaming of Christian entertainment.
  20. Captures the excitement of lightning in a bottle.
  21. Obvious and exploitative even by low-bar youthpic standards.
  22. A comedy that starts the date in a frisky mood but sours before it's time to kiss goodnight.
  23. Despite early-on guffaws, pic suffers from the same problem that has plagued nearly all of the similarly adapted “Saturday Night Live” films: It fails to sustain its initial burst of comic inspiration over the course of its feature-length running time.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thoughtful and mostly very watchable picture, with its emphasis on how war dehumanizes the individual soldier.
  24. 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.
  25. A massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.
  26. Judd now is top-billed, but her performance is so resolutely humorless and businesslike that Freeman's gruffly affectionate warmth becomes doubly valuable, though not nearly enough to lend this generic project any special character.
  27. Middleton's polished writing and amusing observations about the anxieties most people encounter when definitively farewelling their youth help compensate for her standard-issue direction.
  28. A genially amusing ensemble farce that doesn't quite achieve enough momentum for liftoff.
  29. Elegantly constructed, deceptively complex documentary.

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