Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. The Great Flood
    There’s a lot to look at here, and nary a dull moment. Still, the cumulative impact is less than “great” — hobbled by too many confused, confusing layers in an overstuffed second half.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Breadwinner
    The comedian’s 'Mr. Mom' update offers a few opportunities to chuckle, but the gags mostly fall flat.
  3. The Gallerist
    The intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases.
  4. Outcome
    A generally brittle, distant affair, Outcome largely saps Reeves of his genial, unaffected charisma, leaving him to play the carapace of a man who’s lost any real sense of who he is when not in character.
  5. Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!
    While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.
  6. Tow
    Tow is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.
  7. Touch Me
    In trying to do too much, the filmmakers end up with much less than they could have.
  8. Roommates
    By turns tenderly observed, improbably dark and perkily sitcom-esque, it’s certainly erratic, and uncertainly much else.
  9. Balls Up
    A mostly pretty innocuous affair — give or take some par-for-the-course ethnic stereotyping and at least one close-up involving a prosthetic glans — it’s neither good nor bad to any memorable degree, not as riotous as it could have been but not devoid of low-hanging laughs either.
  10. Deep Water
    Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.
  11. The Unknown
    With all due apologies to any real-world sufferers of supernatural body-switching, who perhaps regard the film’s high-mindedness as a welcome corrective to the condition’s flippantly comedic treatment in pop culture more generally, the real unknown of The Unknown is the reason behind making a body-swap movie feel so wholly disembodied.
  12. Moulin
    It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but one that doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon, given the linearity and literal nature of its approach to human anguish. At over two hours in length, its points are made with clarity before being repeated ad nauseam.
  13. Sheep in the Box
    Kore-eda’s attitude toward what he’s showing us is so lackluster and noncommittal that it’s hard to know how to react to any of it.
  14. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
    In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality.
  15. Orphan
    There’s much horror here, and much beauty, but little meaningful tension between the two.
  16. Ashes
    The film plays out like a tale where too much has been relegated to the margins and left between the cuts, where the performances shine but their emotional foundations have been laid in reverse.
  17. The Wolfman
    The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast.
  18. The Lovely Bones
    Jackson undermines solid work from a good cast with show-offy celestial evocations that severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters.
  19. The Road
    Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front.
  20. It's Complicated
    Cute and clever though the plot may be, everything is played out in the broadest possible terms without an iota of nuance or subtlety.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Spy Next Door
    Chan struggles gamely to charm, but the picture's cartoonish jokes and misfired gags are likely to elicit more eye rolls than laughs.
  22. Leap Year
    Pleasant enough overall, if also somewhat gratingly old-fashioned.
  23. Ninja Assassin
    Seemingly made to capitalize on a dubious CG innovation -- namely, the slicing of bodies in half by whizzing five-pointed stars -- Ninja Assassin has little else to recommend it, not even laughs.
  24. 44 Inch Chest
    On the debit side, and it's a doozy, the picture's narrative trajectory fails to deliver a third act that takes the story anywhere of note except into a silly realm of cut-rate surrealism. Final reel ends not with the expected bang but with an almost inaudible whimper.
  25. Gamer
    The audience gets played in Gamer. This latest eye-scraper from writer-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor is as hopped up as their "Crank" pics, but with dour Gerard Butler as a soldier commandeered by a teenage gamer, it's considerably less interactive.
  26. Planet 51
    There's nothing funny, provocative or involving about what "Shrek" co-writer Joe Stillman and the team from Madrid-based Ilion Animation Studios do with the notion here.
  27. New York, I Love You
    The results are, well, formulaic, hobbled by weak dialogue and absent any sense of texture.
  28. Couples Retreat
    Those involved got to spend weeks at a Bora Bora luxury resort; all we get is this not lousy but unmemorable tropical-vacation comedy.
  29. Cop Out
    There's precious little of that tension to be found between co-leads Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, but more than enough between director Kevin Smith and the shoddy script he's elected to take on, and neither seems willing to budge.
  30. The Fourth Kind
    Even the most gullible auds will be challenged to buy into the picture, billed as "based on the actual case studies" and, in any case, rendered rather boring by writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi ("The Cavern").
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