Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Summer of Sam
    Summer of Sam is never less than absorbing but feels just a bit like yesterday's news, both narratively and cinematically.
  2. Wild Wild West
    As impressive as the industrial-style special effects may be, they're both too much and not enough for this mild mild West.
  3. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    Bigger, Longer & Uncut will make it harder still to dismiss, or kill, this cultural mini-phenom — not least because the feature is a more clever diversion than anyone had any right to expect.
  4. The Dinner Game
    Abetted by an excellent cast, vet writer Weber weaves a simple premise into comedy gold.
  5. Big Daddy
    While the loyal male-teen aud core will not be disappointed with the spate of gags just for them, story contains solid date-movie material.
  6. Tarzan
    Swings, even if it doesn't always soar.
  7. An Ideal Husband
    Shines like a freshly minted coin in Oliver Parker's adaptation.
  8. Run Lola Run
    A highly accomplished, compact feature, which, while it may be light on depth, is rich in humor, rhythm, energy and inventiveness.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The General's Daughter
    The cinematic equivalent of a disposable airplane read, a hokey, kinky military thriller that's twisty and compelling enough to hook viewers in the mood for a trashy good time.
  10. The Red Violin
    Fails on a number of counts, mostly because the individual stories aren't very gripping.
  11. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    Script just doesn’t have it in terms of fresh narrative developments or individual gags.
  12. Buena Vista Social Club
    Wenders lets the music and the sprightly people who make it speak for themselves, although the director's ongoing fascination with the urban environment is in top form as the camera serenely cruises the streets of Havana, often at a velvety dusk.
  13. Limbo
    Limbo is half-priced Sayles. After a promising opening in which numerous interesting aspects of life in modern Alaska are laid out, the potentially fascinating social dynamics are dropped in favor of a thinly realized survival tale that falls flat dramatically and cinematically.
  14. The Thirteenth Floor
    Comes too late, far surpassed by similar and more visually stunning devices in "The Matrix," and even by the mind-bending realities of "eXistenZ."
  15. Notting Hill
    Has buckets to spare of that rarest screen commodity — genuine, engaging charm.
    • Variety
  16. Southie
    Bottom-drawer plot of a South Boston bad boy returning to tie up loose ends reads like every other "Mean Streets" knockoff in the past decade, with no scene, development or performance standing out from undifferentiated din.
  17. The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    Boasting sublime imagery, but no characters to ground his reverie, the new pic heavily relies on an opaque narrative and elliptical editing.
  18. Eternity and a Day
    Eternity and a Day finds Angelopoulos refining his themes and style. Just as other great filmmakers have in the past explored similar themes time and again, so Angelopoulos has evolved and come up with one of his most lucid and emotional journeys thus far.
  19. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
    Phantom is easily consumable eye candy, but it contains no nutrients for the heart or mind.
  20. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    Whimsical, intermittently enjoyable but decidedly unmagical.
  21. Tea with Mussolini
    Some fine individual perfs by the tony cast, plus fine period detail and costumes, make the time pass fairly agreeably, but Tea With Mussolini suffers from a fatal lack of focus and emotional center, reducing potentially involving material to a succession of individual scenes.
  22. The Mummy
    Universal’s attempt to find gold by bringing to new life one of the mustier items in its vaults is pure hokum and scarcely of the first order.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pusher
    The subject has been done before, but Refn avoids the cliches, both in the story itself and its telling.
  24. Idle Hands
    Perhaps thinking he had a farce to play with, Flender encourages tons of mugging; by overplaying what should be underplayed, helmer and cast deliver a fatal stab to the intended comedy-horror.
  25. The Winslow Boy
    Very English, very period and very polite.
  26. Entrapment
    Preposterous whimsy that sort of gets by thanks to lustrous settings, slick production values and, especially, its ultra-attractive stars.
  27. Pushing Tin
    Unfortunately, story's tension climaxes a half-hour before the film is over, and thereafter dissipates much of the charge and good will generated up to that point.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Lost & Found
    Tumbles off the sick-but-sweet balance beam.
  29. eXistenZ
    This is unquestionably Cronenberg Lite, but there is plenty of fun to be had from the absurdities and convoluted plotting, and a solid cast lends stature to the far-fetched fantasies.
  30. Election
    Brandishes the sort of intelligent wit and bracing nastiness that will make it more appealing to discerning adults than to teens who just want to have fun.
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