Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Bruce!!!
    The film moves along lackadaisically, without any knack for establishing scenarios, or setting up punchlines, that might lead to laughs — which, in turn, often makes it play like an enervating drama. Bruce!!!! makes a lot of verbal noise, but it says nothing worth remembering.
  2. The Crow
    This reinvention’s contrastingly elegant yet dislocated revenge-slash-love story is no slam dunk. But neither is it an unwatchable dud.
  3. Seventh Son
    Given the fine past work of its many parents, there was clearly potential here, but as delivered, Seventh Son amounts to nothing short of a creative miscarriage.
  4. A Day Without a Mexican
    Darkly amusing idea delivers an early salvo that fades as the film swings across a range of styles and tones director Sergio Arau gamely tries to corral. Even at its half-realized level, pic will anger some as it amuses others.
  5. The Cave
    Refreshing strokes of science-fact in the early sections give way to action strictly from the Ridley Scott-James Cameron playbook, but without a powerful helmer behind the camera or a memorable cast in front.
  6. Alex Cross
    The cross-dressing "Madea" star seems out of his depth playing the hard-boiled detective made famous by Morgan Freeman in "Along Came a Spider" and "Kiss the Girls." Even action helmer Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious," "XXX") seems to be off his game here.
  7. The Final Destination
    With an array of gory mayhem only marginally enhanced by 3-D and a plot as developed as a text message, The Final Destination may finally sound the death knell for New Line's near-immortal horror franchise.
  8. America Latina
    America Latina may frequently look and sound terrific, but a Ferrari spinning its wheels is spinning its wheels just the same.
  9. Playing It Cool
    Even in a self-absorbed role, Evans, who also exec produces, manages to be eminently likable, though the narration he’s asked to spew isn’t half as smart as the filmmakers think it is. Monaghan is luminous, and indeed, the actors shake every last bit of believability out of the thin gruel that’s given them.
  10. Punisher: War Zone
    Along with torrents of gore, Punisher: War Zone has moments that are deliriously funny, because the violence is so awful and so casual.
  11. Half Brothers
    It’s a slick film that’s forgettable at best, annoyingly broad and unfunny at worst.
  12. Off the Lip
    Rich in its love of surfing but curiously short on such footage, well-meaning directorial debut by producer Robert Mickelson is boosted by winning performances, but ultimately about as memorable as a day of 3-4 foot swells.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vampire's Kiss
    Cage's over-the-top performance generates little sympathy for the character, so it's tough to be interested in him as his personality disorder worsens.
  14. My Way
    Picture operates on the notion that indiscriminate action in service of a formulaic script will keep audiences clutching their armrests, but the results fail to grip.
  15. CBGB
    Transforms the glory days of Hilly Kristal’s Bowery punk/No Wave club into exactly the sort of moldy sitcom one might expect from writer-director Randall Miller.
  16. Badland
    A strenuously solemn film that wants to create some kind of American pastoral tragedy out of the nation's current angst with the war.
  17. The Spirit
    Plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air.
  18. The Outsider
    Dull, flavorless, and fundamentally incurious, “The Outsider” is a clueless misfire, the cinematic equivalent of a study-abroad student showing off the kanji forearm tattoo whose meaning he never bothered to learn.
  19. Feeling Minnesota
    Meant to be an offbeat, darkly comic tale of a triangle of losers desperately clinging to their versions of the American dream, pic comes across as a charmless high-concept indie.
  20. Saw VI
    A film so frighteningly familiar it could well be called "Saw It Already."
  21. Bulletproof
    The criminal activity onscreen in “Bulletproof” is penny ante compared with the felonious slaughter of story, character and logic exacted by the pic’s filmmakers.
  22. Phil
    Phil is a trifle, and there’s no harm in that, but it’s an unconvincing trifle. The words “coy” and “whimsical” scarcely do justice to its coy whimsicality.
  23. Over Her Dead Body
    Even the weakest "Desperate Housewives" episode packs more heat than this tepid romantic comedy-fantasy, whose basic plot gimmick has been done as far back as "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."
  24. The Babymakers
    Yet another attempt to mix raunchy excess and romantic-comedy sweetness in an anything-goes raucous farce, The Babymakers offers a few big laughs between ho-hum stretches of frenetic vamping.
  25. Live at the Foxes Den
    The pacing is tortured. Plot doesn’t so much twist as rupture and spill forth, and character arcs, as if part of a case being built by a cut-rate lawyer, frequently skip discovery and are forgotten before summation.
  26. The Hangover Part III
    Ditching the hangovers, the backward structure, the fleshed-out characters and any sense of debauchery or fun, this installment instead just thrusts its long-suffering protagonists into a rote chase narrative, periodically pausing to trot out fan favorites for a curtain call.
  27. The Pacifier
    If auds swallow this odoriferous exercise in calculated career repositioning, they'll swallow anything.
  28. Love in the Time of Money
    This kind of episodic chain of interlocking encounters has become a formulaic favorite in American indie cinema, and Mattei's take on the genre is narrow and schematic.
  29. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Robinson's script is alive to the material's literary roots, although there is a sense that the brakes have been applied so as not to push into territory perceived as too esoteric for American teenagers.
  30. Gods and Generals
    Gods and Generals is American history transformed into a museum movie, consistently making the flawed human characters at the heart of the Civil War into flawless figures Olympian in their statuesque remoteness.
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