Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. To End All Wars
    Grim in theme yet seldom effective or convincing in execution.
  2. Massoud, the Afghan
    This educational and moving film is must-viewing for anyone who craves a glimpse of the best qualities of a country that many have coveted but which has never been colonized.
  3. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    It succeeds emotionally in the cause of what seems to be its primary aim, to advance an attitudinal change in Australians not normally sympathetic to the aboriginal cause.
  4. Dead or Alive: Final
    It's a silly but enjoyable farrago from the cult quickie-meister, again set in an amoral universe-on-a-budget.
  5. Russian Ark
    Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.
  6. They
    They ought to be a whole lot scarier than they are in this tepid genre offering from director Robert Harmon, whose debut film "The Hitcher" set a high bar for screen terror in the 1980s. Pic looks like a holiday gobbler.
  7. Extreme Ops
    Action pics rarely come much more blandly generic than Extreme Ops, an instantly forgettable snow-and-stuntwork extravaganza.
  8. Solaris
    Despite its undeniably pure and earnest intent, Solaris is equally undeniably an arid, dull affair that imposes and maintains a huge distance between the viewer and what happens onscreen.
  9. Eight Crazy Nights
    This is a dark, vulgar, brooding turnoff of a movie, minus the steady laugh quotient needed to appease Sandler's core constituency.
  10. Die Another Day
    Sports some tasty scenes, mostly in the first half, but also pushes 007 into CGI-driven, quasi-sci-fi territory that feels like a betrayal of what the franchise has always been about.
  11. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Impresses with the originality of its observation, storytelling techniques and filmmaking style.
  12. The Emperor's Club
    A rather stodgily directed pic by Michael Hoffman which extols the virtues of Greek and Roman thinking in the guise of Kevin Kline's classics teacher.
  13. The Quiet American
    One of Caine's meatiest roles, and he handles it with power, humanity and remarkable emotional fluidity; from the opening moments, an enormous amount comes through his eyes alone.
  14. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Offers a lively introduction to the highly articulate political dissident and to his controversial views on 9/11.
  15. Talk to Her
    An engaging, well-crafted and imaginative meditation on solitude and communication.
  16. Friday After Next
    Surely one of the most frantic, virulent and foul-natured Christmas season pic ever delivered by a Hollywood studio.
  17. Better Housekeeping
    A triumph of indie casting of unknowns, Good Housekeeping is knee-deep in delicious thesping.
  18. Hell House
    Hell House is a slice of contempo life many viewers will find bizarre and disturbing, not necessarily in the precautionary-moral way its subjects intend. Briskly paced docu is well handled in tech departments.
  19. The Way Home
    Utterly unsentimental but profoundly moving,The Way Home" is a tiny gem from South Korea.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    The film works on both a human-interest level -- focusing on the travails of the band members now finally receiving their well-earned due -- and as a slice of Motown's early history.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Interview with the Assassin
    Satisfying picture that like a pot of water on the stove keeps heating up until it explodes.
  22. Half Past Dead
    In recent years, Steven Seagal has been steadily losing any firm standing as even a B-grade actioner icon, and by the genre's most basic standards, he now displays a visible fatigue and lack of interest that proves deadlier than any of his hero's skills.
  23. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Respectably crafted to avoid lurid excess, feature is nonetheless a bit potboilerish in its pileup of sexy, violent, duplicitous circumstances that plague the consciences of latter-day clergymen.
  24. Revolution #9
    Looks with fresh eyes at a new millennium in which, seemingly, the entire world is bought and sold in neatly wrapped packages engineered for mass consumption.
  25. Ararat
    Egoyan's pedantic, lecturing approach makes the film a bit of a slog, although the basic material has an intrinsic interest that makes one at least want to know more about the historical events.
  26. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Darker and more dramatic, this account of Harry's troubled second year at Hogwarts may be a bit overlong and unmodulated in pacing, but it possesses a confidence and intermittent flair that begin to give it a life of its own apart of the literary franchise, something the initial picture never achieved.
  27. Bánk bán
    While it creaks along at times, director Csaba Kael's new film version of a Hungarian opera masterpiece, Ferenc Erkel's Bank Ban, is ultimately an invaluable entry in the opera-on-film library.
  28. Hush!
    Meandering melodrama about gay relationships, friendship, loneliness and the elastic notion of family is considerably overlong and hampered by too many superfluous scenes.
  29. The Rising Place
    An ultra-touchy-feely race-relations, civil-rights drama as imagined by theme-park organizers, with every character painted in broad strokes in a story that eagerly tugs at every available heartstring -- and rings false at every turn.
  30. Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite
    Choppy and fragmented to the point of irritation, pic overuses blackouts between scenes, self-conscious camera movements, narrative ellipses and other jangly techniques.
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