Variety's Scores

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For 17,805 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: 9,148 out of 17805
  2. Mixed: 7,020 out of 17805
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17805
17805 movie reviews
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  1. 47 Ronin
    As impressive as these visual elements prove to be, the film struggles to grab and maintain audiences’ interest, whether or not they know the underlying legend by heart.
  2. Motherland
    Lacks focus, stumbling from one emotionally fraught stopping place to another but arousing less and less curiosity along the way.
  3. Lord of the Dance in 3D
    Numbingly repetitive in its routines, and seeming to take a bow from the moment it begins, Lord of the Dance 3D makes crystal-clear the sometimes muddied distinctions between a live performance and the filmed alternative.
  4. Curling
    The emotional life of a Canuck bowling-alley handyman slowly turns to slush in Curling, the latest slice of arthouse misery from Quebecois director Denis Cote.
  5. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    While the film rarely provokes any strenuous eye-rolling, it also can't drum up even the slightest interest in the fate of its characters, let alone suspense.
  6. John Carter
    Stanton has been given the resources to create an expansive, expensive world, but lacks the instincts to direct live-action, a limitation that shows most in the performances. Bare of chest and fair of feature, Kitsch doesn't exhibit enough charisma to carry a project of this scale.
  7. Sympathy for Delicious
    This offbeat effort proves more admirable for its ambition than anything else, as the uneasy mix of satire, allegory, grittiness and redemption never quite jells.
  8. Here Comes the Boom
    Hands of stone meet heads of air in Here Comes the Boom, a sports story so daffy it may as well star Kevin James.
  9. Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead
    With Cross jump-starting others on a liquid road to health, this glorified infomercial could saturate latenight TV after its April 1 bow.
  10. Mirror Mirror
    Poised between revisionist fairy tale and smirking sendup, this gaudy, over-frosted cream puff of a movie half-heartedly positions its famous heroine as a dagger-wielding proto-feminist, yet ultimately suffers the same fatal flaw as Julia Roberts' evil queen: It doesn't really care about anything except how pretty it looks.
  11. The Understudy
    Marin Ireland makes a winning lead, but the script by helmers David Conolly and Hannah Davis ran out of gas in 2008, which is when the film was made.
  12. A Little Help
    This tale of a Long Island dental hygienist dealing with various family crises is likable enough, but never really distinctive in character delineation, tone, atmosphere or plotting.
  13. Phillip the Fossil
    The edge achieved by director-editor-producer-scribe Garth Donovan is jeopardized by overreaching for topical relevance.
  14. Square Grouper
    Think of it as the cinematic equivalent of a buzz-kill.
  15. An Invisible Sign
    A tone of fanciful absurdity is maintained throughout.
  16. Go for It!
    Serves up a bland recycling of cliches and archetypes from just about every youth-skewing, dance-centric picture to hit the megaplexes since "Flashdance."
  17. Hesher
    The problem with the script by Susser and David Michod, working from a story by Brian Charles Frank, is that Hesher's uncouth behavior is so aggressively pushed to single-minded, crudely exploitative effect.
  18. The High Cost of Living
    Although there are moments when lead thesps Zach Braff ("Scrubs", "Garden State") and Isabelle Blais just about pull off the implausible conceit, the picture still suffers from major problems of tone as well as stilted camerawork and editing.
  19. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    Mawkish, clunky and unenlightening about female suffering in this or any generation.
  20. The Ledge
    There's a great deal of on-the-nose talk here about faith, rationality, sin and so forth. But Chapman's sincerity is undercut by the crudely melodramatic explanations of why his principals believe as they do.
  21. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    Unfortunately, the unconvincing fictional storyline Rosenbaum weaves around this solid musical base hits every meller cliche in the "self-destructive rock star" playbook.
  22. The Robber
    With no emotional or stylistic hooks, there's not much compelling viewers to engage with what's happening onscreen.
  23. Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
    An unremarkable documentary about Harper Lee and her single literary masterwork, Hey, Boo features what the French call a "structuring absence," that of Lee herself.
  24. American Reunion
    While it's poignant seeing the whole gang again, the tired gross-out antics and limp romantic reprisals keep this hapless if heartfelt effort from qualifying as a decent comedy, let alone a generational classic.
  25. We Go Way Back
    Ultimately too underdeveloped and slight to have much impact, though the helmer's impressionistic uses of image and sound are appealing.
  26. Day of the Falcon
    Helmer/co-scripter Jean-Jacques Annaud's rep for spectacle over screenplay is again borne out in this overblown yet oddly anemic epic of warring Arabian tribes during the nascent oil boom.
  27. Upside Down
    A dystopic sci-fi romance about inverted planets that will have audiences wondering which way is up, but not really caring much or for very long.
  28. Think Like a Man
    While the result deserves some credit for finding a creative way to bring the book to life, the overlapping storylines simply aren't compelling enough, despite the best efforts of a game and attractive cast.
  29. The Big Uneasy
    Well-intended and informative, but also unfocused, unwieldy and a little smug, picture pales in comparison to the really first-rate films on the subject ("When the Levees Broke," "Trouble the Water").
  30. Gone
    A low-pulse thriller that evaporates from memory with the last credit.
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