Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. The Phantom of the Opera
    Sumptuous pic version, which evokes the original show while working as a movie in its own right, is lit by a radiant, vocally lustrous perf by teenaged Emmy Rossum.
  2. Meet the Fockers
    Te laughs "Fockers" generates are the type you feel embarrassed about almost immediately afterward.
  3. Hotel Rwanda
    The genocide of some one million Rwandan Tutsis by their Hutu neighbors remains a disgraceful and too-little-known episode in recent world history. Alas, Terry George's ineffectual Hotel Rwanda only partly rectifies that problem, taking what ought to have been a complex, powerful inquiry and simplifying it to a story about the resilience of the human spirit.
  4. Imaginary Heroes
    The film sways awkwardly back and forth between prickly humor and pathos, rarely ringing true in either register.
  5. Open My Heart
    Has a perverse fascination, despite some technical clumsiness and stiff thesping.
  6. Beyond the Sea
    It's raffish, flashy, energetic, entertaining and not very deep.
  7. Flight of the Phoenix
    Shows both how far Hollywood's tech departments have advanced in 40 years and how shallow the pool of solid action thesps has become.
  8. The Sea Inside
    A dramatic triumph.
  9. Spanglish
    Short on real drama and incident and long on tedium.
  10. The Aviator
    An enormously entertaining slice of biographical drama, The Aviator flies like one of Howard Hughes' record-setting speed airplanes.
  11. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Snicket's macabre tale of three newly orphaned siblings has been lavishly visualized. But for all its elaborate splendor, production pic lacks the feeling and imagination that have distinguished the best recent kidpics.
  12. Million Dollar Baby
    Staying at the top of his game when most of his contemporaries have long since hung up their gloves, Clint Eastwood delivers another knockout punch with Million Dollar Baby.
  13. Santa Smokes
    A meandering, semi-improvised tale of a terminal Gotham loser who works as Santa when he bombs as an actor.
  14. A Talking Picture
    A film destined to divide Manoel de Oliveira's fans but also to win him new ones, A Talking Picture is his simplest, most linear story in memory.
  15. Dolls
    Despite an excessively meandering final act, the drama's three intertwined stories have a cumulative impact, their affecting sadness matched by meticulously composed visual poetry.
  16. Ocean's Twelve
    This smooth inside job benefits from heightened bonhomie among the players, fab Euro locations and a diminished obligation to stick to the heist genre boilerplate.
  17. A Tale of Two Sisters
    It manages to suspend disbelief without over-taxing the viewer's patience, and boasts at least one terrific performance, by actress Yeom Jeong-ah as a scary stepmom.
  18. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    The effect is often soporific.
  19. Freeze Frame
    Signals a talented newcomer in writer-director John Simpson and boasts a gripping central performance from popular British comedian Lee Evans.
  20. Bandido
    The filmmakers seem split between doing it straight and gleefully ripping up the genre, and never make up their minds.
  21. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Even if the film itself is relatively conventional, its exposure of a squalid city's most benighted neighborhood and its introduction of hope into nearly hopeless lives give it strong human interest value.
  22. Blade: Trinity
    Won't linger in the memory long, but gives pretty good action eye-candy while it's going.
  23. House of Flying Daggers
    The tangled tale of love and disguise is awesome in its action sequences but doesn't touch the heart to the same degree.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    After Midnight
    Ferrario has fun with antique footage and exhibits from the museum, but there's a lack of urgency or sufficient charm to engage.
  25. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Though it never disguises its sympathies for Kasparov and contempt for a powerful corporation's machinations, documentary is finally a speculation on the limits of the human mind and how truth can never be fully known.
  26. Conspiracy of Silence
    Deery lays out a story devoid of subtlety, in which characters are too easily pigeonholed and issues exist only in absolutes.
  27. The Deserted Station
    Compelling underlying oddness may be enough to distinguish Deserted Station from similarly excellent humanistic Iranian fare.
  28. Jesus, You Know
    Visually glorious and sometimes moving, but comes coated with a thick hoarfrost of irony.
  29. I Am David
    An unusually intelligent adventure film scaled for younger viewers, which never leaves adults behind.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Green Butchers
    Will be either a turn-on or turn-off, depending on one's sense of humor.
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