Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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    • 98 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Passion of Joan of Arc
    Here is a deadly tiresome picture that merely makes an attempt to narrate without sound or dialog an allegedly written recorded trial in the 15th or 16th century of Joan of Arc for witchery, leading to her condemnation and burning at the stake. [10 Apr 1929, p.25]
    • Variety
    • 84 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Valentino's Ghost
    The burning topic of Muslim (mis)representation in U.S. media is not well served by Michael Singh’s amateurish and ill-defined docu Valentino’s Ghost.
  3. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    While Talbot and Fails claim to have walk-and-talked their way all over San Francisco, the script — and especially the dialogue — is the most disappointing element of their first feature.
  4. Sorry to Bother You
    Paradoxically, the more ridiculous Riley’s gonzo social critique gets, the more boring it becomes, to the point that its out-of-control second half starts to feel like some kind of bad trip.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Saturday Night Fever
    The clumsy story lurches forward through predictable travail and treacle, separated by phonograph records (or vice versa).
  6. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.
  7. Linda Linda Linda
    This aimless, lifeless time-killer about four teenage girls prepping for their rock-band gig in a school talent show proves entirely the wrong choice.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Robin and Marian
    Robin and Marian is a disappointing and embarrassing film: disappointing, because Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn, the brilliant Robert Shaw, Richard Harris and a screenplay by James Goldman ought to add up to something even in the face of Richard Lester's flat direction; embarrassing, because the incompatible blend of tongue-in-cheek comedy, adventure and romance gives the Robin Hood-revisited film the grace and energy of a geriatrics' discotheque.
  9. The Lottery
    Advocacy to the point of propaganda.
  10. Everyone Else
    Simply fuzzy filmmaking of the worst sort.
  11. Carnage
    Audience patience undergoes a far more brutal butchering than anything onscreen in Delphine Gleize's wildly over-reaching feature debut, Carnage.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dawn of the Dead
    Dawn pummels the viewer with a series of ever-more-grisly events - decapitations, shootings, knifings, flesh tearings - that make Romero's special effects man, Tom Savini, the real 'star' of the film - the actors are as woodenly uninteresting as the characters they play. Romero's script is banal when not incoherent - those who haven't seen Night of the Living Dead may have some difficulty deciphering exactly what's going on at the outset of Dawn.
  13. Kinyarwanda
    Doubly disappointing considering that it marks the first feature by Rwandan filmmakers to address the country's 1994 Hutu-on-Tutsi genocide, Kinyarwanda awkwardly and fitfully patches together a half-dozen story strands meant to provide a panoramic view of war and reconciliation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Performance
    Co-director Nicolas Roeg’s lensing is tricky, the characters gamey, the dialog dull, performances flat, impact none.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Blood of a Poet
    On the face of it, this film represents six reels of scraped together footage from off the cutting room floor. A more vague or hopeless mess could not have resulted.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Minnie and Moskowitz
    Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel play the title roles in Minnie And Moskowitz, an oppressive and irritating film in which a shrill and numbing hysteria of acting and direction soon kills any empathy for the loneliness of the main characters. John Cassavetes wrote and directed in his now-familiar home-movie improvisational and indulgent style.
  17. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    Her (Wauer) attempt to relieve uncomfortable events with happy stories makes for a disturbing superficiality, and a "make your own Jewish grave" student project is plain offensive. Score is omnipresent and insufferable.
  18. Demonlover
    Sure to turn off general viewers due to its emotional inaccessibility, multitude of narrative problems and preoccupation with a torture Web site.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Breakfast Club
    Does director John Hughes really believe, as he writes here, that 'when you grow up, your heart dies.' It may. But not unless the brain has already started to rot with films like this.
  20. October Country
    A feel-bad film through and through. Chronicling a year in the life of a low-income Mohawk Valley family beset by external hardships and shockingly bad decision-making, the docu straddles the line between unflinching intimacy and invasive exploitation.
  21. The Dirties
    This sloppy, button-pushing black comedy reveals a crew desperately in need of counseling — less in anger management than in the fundamentals of screenwriting, camerawork and structure.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    True to form, John Cassavetes challenges a Hollywood cliche: that technology is so advanced even the worst films usually look good. With ease, he proves that an awful film can look even worse.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    La Femme Nikita
    [Parillaud] remains a totally uninteresting figment of Besson's blinkered movieland imagination, especially when she's in the company of Karyo and Anglade, who provide balance to her overacting.
  24. Bull
    A disappointment ... The story feels lean, and most of the cast, while convincing, don’t leap off the screen the way the ensemble in an Andrea Arnold movie does.
  25. Ride Your Wave
    Sooner or later, Hinako is going to have to learn to face the world on her own, which is where the tension finally arises before this dopey film reaches its sappy conclusion — by showing its heroine, so effortless on water, “learning to ride life’s waves, too.”
  26. Father and Son
    Irritatingly devoid of irony, the film has an unintentional but unmistakable homoerotic subtext.
  27. Bound
    Debuting writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski come off like Coen brothers wannabes with no sense of humor.
  28. Coma
    As difficult as it can be to tell what’s real and what’s not here, it’s even more difficult to care: “Coma” seems to have poured out of Bonello stream-of-consciousness style, and analyzing it is about as rewarding as trying to make sense of the half-remembered dream your friend won’t stop talking about.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriot Games
    Tom Clancy was right the first time. Paramount's Patriot Games is an expensive stiff. Mindless, morally repugnant and ineptly directed to boot, it's a shoddy followup to Par's 1990 hit "The Hunt for Red October."
  30. Synchronic
    Making underwhelming use of its not-bad ... conceit, Benson’s sci-fi-tinged script is not at all ingeniously plotted, insists we care about tritely sketched characters, and is never credible enough to transcend an air of escalating silliness.
  31. Dancer in the Dark
    A 2½-hour demo of auteurist self-importance that's artistically bankrupt on almost every level.
  32. The Annihilation of Fish
    A minnow of a movie. A drear moment in the careers of all concerned.
  33. Bad Posture
    Bad dialogue and bad acting might convince some of the authenticity behind Bad Posture, but there's no getting around the tedious navel-gazing of Malcolm Murray's fiction debut.
  34. Waydowntown
    Third outing for prairie auteur Gary Burns is his most ambitious, and most uneven, effort yet.
  35. I'm Your Woman
    This is the kind of movie where the most dynamic thing in every scene is the art direction, followed by the natty retro costumes (which Jean must have used the cash to buy, since she didn’t have time to pack), and only then comes the people.
  36. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Has the unmistakable look and feel of a micro-budget indie produced for a small circle of friends, many of whom are listed in the credits.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Lost Boys
    The Lost Boys is a horrifically dreadful vampire teensploitation entry that daringly advances the theory that all those missing children pictured on garbage bags and milk cartons are actually the victims of bloodsucking bikers.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tequila Sunrise
    There's not much kick in this cocktail, despite its mix of quality ingredients. Casually glamorous South Bay is the setting for a story of little substance as writer-director Robert Towne attempts a study of friendship and trust but gets lost in a clutter of drug dealings and police operations.
  39. Outside Providence
    A disappointingly rote entry in the '70s teen nostalgia sweepstakes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jacob's Ladder
    Jacob's Ladder means to be a harrowing thriller about a Vietnam vet (Tim Robbins) bedeviled by strange visions, but the $40 million production is dull, unimaginative and pretentious.
  41. U-571
    The submarine goes deep but the story never does in U-571, a good old-fashioned WWII picture that is exciting in only the most superficial way.
  42. The Monkey
    It’s a ham-handed, lurchingly obvious mess, without the glimmer of human interest that even a sensationalist horror film needs.
  43. Eric Larue
    A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    Performances are dull. Whatever sociological, political or dramatic motivations may once have existed in the story have been ruthlessly stripped from the plot, leaving all characters bereft of empathy or sympathy. There’s hardly a pretense toward justifying the carnage
  45. Petite Solange
    Ropert’s understanding of how children furtively watch the adults around them, soaking up the friction, is well-observed and the best thing in this otherwise insipid film that perversely discards any shred of naturalism for an outdated and phony ingenuousness. Even the performances are airless, and consequently there’s no emotional investment in a family whose rapport is so clunkily established.
  46. Willard
    Strictly for the birds.
  47. The Portuguese Nun
    A tedious slog alleviated only by widescreen shots of the Portuguese capital and terrific fado singing.
  48. Two Women
    The best that can be said for Robichaud’s film is that her two leads, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman and Laurence Leboeuf, give committed performances
  49. Freeway
    Freeway is roadkill. The directorial debut of screenwriter Matthew Bright ("Gun Crazy") is a sophomoric and morally repellent mix of fractured fairy tale, juvenile social satire, bloody mayhem and overstated B-movie melodrama.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hot Shots!
    Jim Abrahams tries to tap the zany Airplane! vein with this Top Gun spoof but bats far too low a percentage with the usual rapid-fire assault of numbingly stupid gags.
  51. Laurel Canyon
    The dramatic trajectory is frightfully obvious, the characters tediously one-dimensional, the dialogue banal.
  52. Limonov: The Ballad
    Given all its omissions and elisions, and the sense of coolness-cosplay that permeates this noisy but lifeless film, “Limonov” might not be a total misapprehension of the mercurial, charismatic and infuriating Eduard Limonov, but it is at least a mispronunciation.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    This trashy, gaudy, sound-stage vulgarity about low life among the high life is as funny as a burning orphanage.
  54. Overnight
    There's a stunning rags-to-rags morality tale hidden in this two-hour mess of a movie.
  55. Braid
    Braid does look great. But Mitzi Peirone’s debut feature is so void of any substance beyond the pretentiously pictorial that one suspects her real calling is in music videos or advertising.
  56. The Importance of Being Earnest
    A comedy in the last century and a drama in the new one. At least, that's the dumbfounding impression left by writer-director Oliver Parker's utterly miscalculated film adaptation of Wilde's play.
  57. Good Boys
    A little too imitative of “Superbad” ... Good Boys lacks that film’s wit and heart. It’s a lively, slick package, yet crude and obvious at every turn.
  58. L'iceberg
    A brave but doomed attempt to revive the art of pure physical comedy, the willfully eccentric, practically dialogue-free, Iceberg sets itself a high standard with an opening 15 minutes of the most delicious slapstick, but thereafter only a few moments of gentle surrealism and the occasional poetic image justify the ride, with only 10% of the pic's potential laughs evident above the surface.
  59. Smallfoot
    It’s messy and distressingly unmemorable, which is a shame since there are no shortage of great Looney Tunes-level cartoon gags wasted along the way, including an ingenious rope bridge sequence worthy of golden-age Warner Bros. animation.
  60. Mission: Impossible II
    Even more empty a luxury vehicle than its predecessor, M:I 2 pushes the envelope in terms of just how much flashy packaging an audience will buy when there's absolutely nada inside.
  61. All Is True
    The result is a revisionist fiasco, too dense with Shakespeare allusions for casual moviegoers, and too fast and loose with the facts for those who know a thing or two about the man. In short, All Is True takes the English language’s most gifted dramatist and reduces his sunset years to a sloppy soap opera.
  62. Lakeboat
    So fractured and so awkwardly staged that end result is an uninvolving film that’s dramatically inert and artistically shapeless.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Clash of the Titans
    Clash of the Titans is an unbearable bore that will probably put to sleep the few adults stuck taking the kids to it. Desmond Davis directs with a tired hand, not helped much by the lackadaisical writing.
  64. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.
  65. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    Starts intriguingly but ends up thrashing around as a toothless wonder.
  66. The King
    The story of a veritable devil who comes to test and destroy a family of faith, The King is a noxious film morally and an aggravating one dramatically.
  67. Wheeler
    The term “vanity project” doesn’t come close to adequately describing the hubristic folly that is Wheeler, an excruciatingly dull and self-indulgent faux documentary
  68. I Declare War
    The concept is thought-provoking but the execution is flat-footed.
  69. The Midnight Sky
    Some viewers will surely be moved. To me, though, The Midnight Sky just proves that a movie that reaches for the stars can still come up empty-handed.
  70. Happily
    Aiming for a darkly humorous portrait of marital bliss — and the difficulties of maintaining it — the film comes off as a half-formed “Twilight Zone” joke minus the punchline.
  71. Mother Mary
    “Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.
  72. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    Though this ’80s-set horror-comedy takes an old-school approach to capturing the horrific happenings, the stunts are lackluster and the comedic hijinks are a tiresome bore. With very little interest conjured from the filmmakers to properly develop their characters, there’s little incentive to stay interested.
  73. Session 9
    Little more than an overworked exercise in jostling red herrings, and not particularly fresh herrings at that.
  74. Man on the Moon
    Never comes close to making the case that its subject is worthy of the viewer's interest.
  75. Eden
    While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie that’s not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.
  76. Knives and Skin
    The positive qualities lie in the surrealistic film’s bold cinematography, distinctive use of music, and diversity of cast, though that’s not enough to redeem this tedious viewing experience.
  77. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    If nonchalance were an Olympic sport, Max would be a gold medalist, and watching Somebody Up There Likes Me is about as much fun as being a spectator at that event might sound.
  78. Away We Go
    Emerges as an oddly sour, unappealing road-trip scenario.
  79. The Intouchables
    Though never known for their subtlety, French co-helmers/scripters Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache have never delivered a film as offensive as "Untouchable," which flings about the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.
  80. Filly Brown
    The resulting film is a trite piece of storytelling, with character development and plot points that feel not so much lived in as borrowed from other movies.
  81. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
  82. Lovely, Still
    The surprise twist brutally defies the opening narration and plot logic that preceded it, alienating viewers who willingly suspended disbelief.
  83. Our Friend
    So much of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the picture, until what remains is precisely the kind of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death that inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cujo
    Although well-made, this screen adaptation of Stephen King's Cujo emerges as a dull, uneventful entry in the horror genre. Novel about a mad dog on the rampage occupies a low place in the King canon, which is understandable if the film's stupefying predictability is an accurate reflection of the book.
  85. Bread and Roses
    Its politics and dramatic line are familiar and far from convincing.
  86. The Strange Ones
    There’s a point beyond which it’s difficult to believe anything that happens on screen, and impossible to care what is supposed to be real or not. Unfortunately, the movie continues for a lengthy stretch after that, until it literally trudges into a deep, dark hole.
  87. Hard Luck Love Song
    Instead of persuasive verisimilitude and compelling character development, we get scene after scene of Jesse waiting for something, anything.
  88. A Knight's Tale
    Traditionalists and older viewers in general will scoff, while pop culture addicts will no doubt go with the flow.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ironweed
    Unrelentingly bleak, Ironweed is a film without an audience and no reason for being except its own self-importance. It's an event picture without the event. Whatever joy or redemption William Kennedy offered in his Pulitzer prize-winning novel is nowhere to be found, surprising since he wrote the screenplay.
  90. Cabin Fever
    Uncertain whether to go for straight suspense or gross-out effects, genre in-joking or schlock cinema-of-parodic-excess, Eli Roth's backwoods horror opus Cabin Fever seldom sticks with any one tactic.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Invaders from Mars
    Tobe Hooper's remake of Invaders from Mars is an embarrassing combination of kitsch and boredom.
  92. All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    Will greatly peeve many hardcore fans.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Wall Street
    Watching Oliver Stone's Wall Street is about as wordy and dreary as reading the financial papers accounts of the rise and fall of an Ivan Boesky-type arbitrageur.
  94. War Machine
    Everyone has a different idea of what’s funny, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being amused by War Machine, a colossally miscalculated satire.
  95. CQ
    Roman Coppola's first film has sympathetic aims but is distressingly lacking in flair, style, wit or fun.
  96. Vicious
    The movie devolves into something inexact and thoughtless, without anything distinct to recenter it. It’s hardly a sin for cruelty to be the point, especially in horror. But you have to at least land your punches.
  97. Below
    This hokey thriller reps what one can only hope will be a one-of-a-kind hybrid between a World War II actioner and a ghost story outfitted with innumerable false-alarm shock cuts and shot with enough colored lights and filters to delight Baz Luhrmann.
  98. Ambulance
    Ambulance is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.
  99. Clown in a Cornfield
    You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be.
  100. Casa de los babys
    An entirely schematic treatise on maternity and conflicting cultures. A subject perhaps far more suited to documentary treatment, this numbingly earnest effort will be a laborious delivery for IFC.
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