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. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    Two's company, three's a crowd and eight is definitely way more than enough in writer-director Daniele Thompson's mismanaged comic ensembler, Change of Plans. Less a crowdpleaser and more a headscratcher than her previous hit, "Avenue Montaigne."
  2. Daniel and Ana
    The screenplay leaves it to the audience to map the psychological terrain, which will frustrate some but thrill others who prefer oblique storytelling.
  3. The Milk of Sorrow
    At first, the picture seems a slow-moving, particularly well-framed ethnographic study of life in the big city in Peru; it only gradually becomes clear that Llosa's second feature perfectly aligns form and content.
  4. Make-Out with Violence
    Directed by the pseudonymous Deagol Brothers, the film invests in spacey horror tropes one moment, plunges into absurdist adolescent angst the next and begs questions every step of the way, but just about holds together with its strong compositional sense, killer atmospheric lighting and wall-to-wall music track.
  5. Louis
    This cinematic anomaly falls flat as a stand-alone.
  6. Baghdad Texas
    David H. Hickey's Lone Star comedy never really develops, stalling this culture-clash clambake at the merely likable stage.
  7. Piranha 3-D
    The 32-year-old carnivorous fish franchise has lost none of its bite, serving up a fresh batch of spring-break revelers for the fearsome creatures to attack.
  8. Lottery Ticket
    The script is never nearly as clever as the premise ought to allow, and the madcap fun is far too frequently derailed by tonal inconsistencies.
  9. Mao's Last Dancer
    The story lights up when world-class performer Chi Cao leaps about as the adult Li, but is marred by lumpy melodrama when the music stops.
  10. The Switch
    An unfunny, manipulative romance about two unlikable people and their prop of a son, the pic mangles the premise of its source material ("Baster," a 1996 short story by Pulitzer-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides) in ways that ought to baffle viewers of all sociopolitical stripes.
  11. The Tillman Story
    A riveting account of how a soldier's death in Afghanistan was spun into a web of public lies.
  12. The Army of Crime
    Guediguian's lengthy period yarn features a wide array of characters filmed with his habitual simpatico eye, but loses the dramatic thread in too many plots, too little action and not enough originality.
  13. A Film Unfinished
    It stands as a unique film-within-a-film, of significance for the historical value of the raw images, the memories they spur and internal evidence of how the Nazis staged scenes long assumed to be real.
  14. Vampires Suck
    The lame mediocrity of Vampires Suck undeniably reps an advance for writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. By just about any other standard, however, this instantly forgettable trifle is fairly close to worthless.
  15. Eat Pray Love
    Director Ryan Murphy's superficial take on Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful memoir is an exotic junk-food buffet that offers few lasting pleasures or surprises, let alone epiphanies.
  16. The Expendables
    A nearly incoherent all-stars-on-deck actioner that plays like "Grown Ups" on nitro or a brutish, blue-collar "Ocean's Eleven."
  17. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    With Michael Cera in the title role, twentysomethings and under will swiftly embrace this original romancer.
  18. Peepli Live
    Debuting writer-director Anusha Rizvi manages to wrest a lively feature out of a gravely serious issue, capturing the desperation of India's village farmers, as well as the nation's shift from agriculture to industrialization, without losing sight of the entertainment principle.
  19. Tales from Earthsea
    This dull and humorless production won't reap the same critical support as the work of Miyazaki Senior.
  20. Salt of This Sea
    That the taste of Annemarie Jacir's feature debut should be bitter is completely understandable given the untenable Palestinian situation, but the heavy-handed, excessively didactic script plays like a primer for people only vaguely aware of the issues while overly confirmed in their righteousness.
  21. They Came to Play
    A delightful, well-crafted documentary.
  22. La Soga (The Butcher's Son)
    Made mainly by Yanks and New York-based Dominicans, the vibrant film bursts with local color and trades in very specific aspects of criminality, island-style.
  23. The People I've Slept With
    A little too well behaved at times, but zips along nicely when its raunchier elements kick in.
  24. Step Up 3-D
    This vapid street-dance soap opera boasts the series' flashiest moves and klutziest script yet, like a brilliant acrobat with a speech impediment; it's also one of the few 3D releases since "Avatar" to make compelling use of the format.
  25. The Other Guys
    The laughs ultimately take a backseat to a convoluted white-collar crime story.
  26. Cairo Time
    The fourth feature from Canadian writer-helmer Ruba Nadda ("Sabah") has a slightly breathless, old-fashioned feel, calling to mind the cliched fiction found in the type of ladies' magazine the heroine edits.
  27. Flipped
    A well-intentioned family pic about first love that's overly concerned with period details and life lessons, rather than the genuinely sweet characters at its center.
  28. Middle Men
    "Boogie Nights" meets "Goodfellas" in Middle Men, a relentlessly sleazy but undeniably intriguing tour of the bottom-feeding netherworld where porn and organized crime do their mutual bump-and-grind.
  29. The Disappearance of Alice Creed
    Crisp handling, some clever twists and a welcome streak of dry humor hold attention throughout
  30. The Wildest Dream
    A solid, gorgeous-looking documentary marred only slightly by a tendency to bury the lead -- namely, its subject, George Mallory.
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