Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. Enemies of Laughter
    Indie comedy about an unsuccessful playwright who very nearly talks himself out of his last best chance for happiness recalls the early work of Woody Allen. But pic stands on its own merits as witty and well-observed grown-up fare.
  2. Little Nicky
    Sandler turns the joke around on his detractors and manages to lead a devilishly energetic vehicle that contains about as many laughs as his previous features combined.
  3. Last Life in the Universe
    It recovers from an opening that's a little oblique to grow progressively more seductive as the two lost central characters become entwined.
  4. Bright Leaves
    Witty, thoughtful and illuminating.
  5. The Wedding Singer
    Director Frank Coraci and scripter Tim Herlihy work in concert to maintain a quality of farce rooted in human comedy.
  6. Goyangileul butaghae
    Engaging, highly accessible movie that marks a slick feature debut by helmer Jeong Jae-eun.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Song for Martin
    A moving love story with two exquisite central performances.
  8. Irreversible
    A demanding but rewarding emotional odyssey in a challenging visual package.
  9. Jesus' Son
    An intermittently compelling and occasionally hilarious road movie.
  10. The Magdalene Sisters
    Mullan's increased maturity as a director is evident in his skill at manipulating light and dark dramatic tones, and shifting between moods of anger and plaintive melancholy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    As with "Aliens," director James Cameron has again taken a first rate science fiction film and crafted a sequel that's in some ways more impressive - expanding on the original rather than merely remaking it.
  12. Bootmen
    Feel-good quality fare.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Sweet Hereafter
    Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan's most ambitious work to date, The Sweet Hereafter is a rich, complex meditation on the impact of a terrible tragedy on a small town.
  14. Prisoner of Paradise
    An important and smoothly mounted meditation on moral choices within the entertainment biz.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Fish Called Wanda
    Curtis steals the show with her keen sense of comic timing and sneaky little grins and asides.
  16. The Human Stain
    Powered by two eye-catching performances.
  17. Blue Car
    This melancholy, insightfully scripted coming-of-age drama is moving without being manipulative and makes an assured calling card for writer-director Karen Moncrieff.
  18. The Good Thief
    Sure, it's all been done before, but seldom with this degree of vigor and panache.
  19. The Mask of Zorro
    The return of the legendary swordsman is well served by a grandly mounted production in the classical style.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boyz n the Hood
    Ultra socially responsible, sometimes to the point of playing like a laundry list of difficulties faced specifically by the urban black community.
  21. Moulin Rouge!
    A tour de force of artifice, a dazzling pastiche of musical and visual elements at the service of a blatantly artificial story.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The English Patient
    A respectable, intelligent but less than stirring adaptation of an imposingly dense and layered novel.
  23. Taking Lives
    A somber, absorbing thriller that treads familiar psycho serial killer terrain with style. Elegantly made and comparatively restrained in cramming sick and grisly stuff down the audience's throat.
  24. Zelary
    Managing to be at once epic and intimate, Zelary matches a resilient urban woman against a compassionate rural man in the spectacular Moravian countryside during World War II. Results rep a triumph of regional filmmaking, but in the David Lean tradition.
  25. Better Than Sex
    Cheekily diverting, decidedly feel-good, tremendously sexy entertainment.
  26. Catch Me If You Can
    Like a trot around the track for the thoroughbreds involved, and one of the results is that it takes them far too long to get to the finish line.
  27. The Fast and the Furious
    A gritty and gratifying cheap thrill, Rob Cohen's high-octane hot-car meller is a true rarity these days, a really good exploitationer, the sort of thing that would rule at drive-ins if they still existed.
  28. Central Station
    Montenegro carries the film su-perbly with her portrait of gritty strength being worn down to a state of tattered vulnerability, while newcomer de Oliveira, a shoeshine boy who won the role over 1,500 other aspirants, is engagingly natural and happily doesn't beg for viewer sympathy.
  29. Never Again
    A hugely enjoyable romantic comedy that dares to suggest that love can bloom -- and, more important, hormones can rage -- after 50. Smart, sassy and slickly packaged.
    • 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.
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