Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. Little Accidents
    Features a standout central performance by newcomer Boyd Holbrook (“The Host”), but suffers from predictable plotting and shallow characterizations that keep the movie from ever transcending the obvious.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Oh, God!
    Oh, God! is a hilarious film which benefits from the brilliant teaming of George Burns, as the Almighty in human form, and John Denver, sensational in his screen debut as a supermarket assistant manager who finds himself a suburban Moses.
  3. DC League of Super-Pets
    The movie, in its conventional and likable way, knocks the stuffing out of superhero fantasy. Its joke is that a mangy crew of animals doing outlandish CGI magic tricks is essentially what a comic-book movie is.
  4. Storks
    In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.
  5. Valkyrie
    Has visual splendor galore, but is a cold work lacking in the requisite tension and suspense.
  6. Douchebag
    Dickler's acting debut is memorably repellent, even if the movie he's in -- a fitfully engaging story about two estranged brothers on a road trip -- often feels forced and unconvincing, even on its modest, intimately scaled terms
  7. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Rather than trying to frighten adults, this entire R-rated exercise feels engineered to emotionally scar any younger audiences who should happen to see it -- much as the original did del Toro back in the day.
  8. Drive-Away Dolls
    Drive-Away Dolls is 84 minutes long, and it’s styled to be an easy-to-watch caper, but it’s most definitely a trifle.
  9. Mosquito State
    Mosquito State gradually allows its mise-en-scène to swamp its human narrative, not that the latter offers us much to care about anyway. As far as we’re concerned, the mosquitoes can have it all.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Date Night
    An uncommonly engaging date movie.
  11. Driving Lessons
    Basically conservative yet titillatingly "eccentric" British laffer could succeed in the "Full Monty" import slot.
  12. The DUFF
    Canny and funny in equal measure, it’s a film that embraces technology — just like it does its protagonist — on its own perfectly imperfect terms.
  13. French Exit
    Yes, French Exit blisters amid the rarefied air of Tom Wolfe or Whit Stillman, but it’s nicely cut with the schadenfreude of “Schitt’s Creek.”
  14. Remarkably Bright Creatures
    Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.
  15. Where's the Party Yaar?
    The most affable and endearing of the recent wave of films about Indian immigrants assimilating in the West.
  16. Sylvia
    Still, there is an estimable integrity to the respect and fidelity with which the film regards its subjects, as well as an honesty in its attempt to illuminate the essences of these difficult people.
  17. Anna and the King
    Her (Foster's) performance is contained in a schmaltzy, ultra-elaborate, overly long production.
  18. Danny Deckchair
    Thanks to amiable lead performances from Miranda Otto and Rhys Ifans, this not very original Aussie comedy about a man making a fresh start in life is a pleasant enough time-waster.
  19. All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    Will greatly peeve many hardcore fans.
  20. Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man
    Confusing lack of historical set-up considerably dims the potential luster of a great true story: Helmer Alberto Negrin relies instead on competently rendered but cliche-ridden melodrama of nasty Nazis and suffering Jews.
  21. Saving Private Perez
    The horrific events in Mexico are proving fertile ground for black comedy, and though Saving Private Perez is certainly not the blackest, it may well be the funniest.
  22. Wagner & Me
    For Fry, the music's complexity, ambiguity, innovation and humanity far surpass Wagner's personal limitations. He may not convince his viewers of the rightness of his conclusions, but he certainly makes a fervent case for the triumph of art over biography.
  23. Towheads
    Works better as a series of well-conceived, impeccably timed and executed physical gags, with light dustings of pathos, than as the story of a woman sacrificing her artistic identity on the altar of motherhood.
  24. Afflicted
    A low-budget horror-thriller that’s resourceful enough to wring a few fresh chills from a slender premise and a less-than-novel formal conceit.
  25. Casa Grande
    The pic is full of nicely observed vignettes that act as signifiers of caste, though at times the script turns overly didactic.
  26. To Life
    Given the complexity of everything the characters went through, it’s a shame to witness their lives reduced to a sequence of TV-movie moments.
  27. Sabrina
    This new "Sabrina" is more fizzle than fizz. Although the revamping of one of Audrey Hepburn's most enchanting vehicles has its share of diverting scenes and dialogue, Sydney Pollack and his writers have uncomfortably tilted this Cinderella story to less than scintillating results.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Arrival
    A straight-faced updating of the 1950s space monster formula, film stars Charlie Sheen as the rogue scientist who battles E.T.s, uncovers government conspiracies and, most impressive of all, suppresses giggles when confronted with some of the silliest alien effects in memory. [03 June 1996, p.50]
    • Variety
  29. A Bride for Rip Van Winkle
    Artfully subverting the spirit of such soulful, diaphanous romances as “Love Letter” and “Hana and Alice” from earlier in his own career, Iwai exposes the desperation and deceit involved in the search for love.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hellraiser
    Hellraiser is a well-paced si-fi cum horror fantasy. Pic is well made, well acted, and the visual effects are generally handled with skill.
  31. Ne Zha
    Ne Zha has something vital to teach the American animation industry — about the glories of letting the dark side rip — but it’s also clear that Chinese animators, working under more restrictions than we have, have absorbed a great many of the breakneck freedoms of American pop culture. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful symbiosis.
  32. Planet of the Humans
    There’s nothing particularly elegant about the way Planet of the Humans arrives at that downbeat thesis. Though well-shot and edited, the material here is simply too sprawling to avoid feeling crammed into one ungainly package even narrator Gibbs admits “might seem overwhelming.”
  33. The Other Tom
    The film’s intimate scenes of mother-son discord are remarkable, played with raw, nerve-pushing testiness by two first-time actors.
  34. Animale
    The filmmaking is at its most successful when it moves away from dialogue-driven sequences and into the more visual, visceral aspects of Nejma’s chosen line of work.
  35. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Cavill and Hammer have each toplined major tentpoles before, so it’s something of a mystery why neither makes much of an impression here, but there’s a curious vacuum at the center of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that almost certainly owes to its casting.
  36. The Brave One
    Foster’s pistol-packing turn as an avenging dark angel nearly sustains director Neil Jordan’s grim vigilante drama through a string of implausibilities and occasionally trite psychological framing devices, with deft support from Terrence Howard as a sympathetic cop.
  37. Wolf Creek
    Essentially a worst-case-scenario white-knuckler executed with terrifically focused skill and realism.
  38. 39 Pounds of Love
    Dani Menkin's documentary tracks his odyssey, which by nature is hard to be cynical about. Still, the feature feels padded even at 70 minutes.
  39. Miss Julie
    The three thesps are impressive, with Chastain and Farrell delivering fevered performances that might have been knockouts on the boards, but in this respectfully flat approach feel a bit overscaled — you can see their virtuoso technique at work.
  40. Minions
    Stronger on concept than story, Brian Lynch’s Minions script emphasizes scale over quantity.
    • 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.
  42. Real Steel
    The uncanny thing about Real Steel is just how gripping the fight scenes are; Sugar Ray Leonard served as a consultant to the motion-capture performers responsible for pantomiming the machines' moves.
  43. 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.
  44. The Fence
    Many things are simple in The Fence, an unusually sharp-cornered and rhetorical work from this typically elliptical and sensuous filmmaker, but the rage swelling beneath its still, mannered surface is not.
  45. Spoken Word
    Spoken Word benefits from an improbably perfect storm of production circumstances: The muscular, balanced script, the brainchild of an unusual alliance between professional poet Joe Ray Sandoval and TV writer William T. Conway, consistently plays to Nunez's strengths.
  46. For No Good Reason
    While the effort is admirable, the result is a bit unwieldy, casting too wide a net to really plumb its subject’s depths, and defanging some of Steadman’s acid wit with an overly busy, hit-and-miss aesthetic approach.
  47. Unknown
    Beyond the occasional plot frissons and juicy supporting turns, it's an emotionally and psychologically threadbare exercise.
  48. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    Filmmakers underline the immediate relevance of their conclusion: In matters of war and peace, who we elect president is crucial.
  49. The Rum Diary
    Temperance of a different sort, a willful abstention from trippy stylistic excess, is what makes this 1960-set Caribbean picaresque easily the most lucid screen adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's work, even if it's still several drafts shy of a fully developed yarn.
  50. Take Me
    From one wild mood swing to the next, it keeps us interested with aplomb, with Mike Makowsky’s script never lingering too long on any one element, the better to keep the pace brisk, and unpredictable.
  51. Ramona and Beezus
    It's not the personal, distinctive portrait of misfit girlhood it could have been.
  52. Frank & Lola
    It’s poised between reality and paranoid daydream, it’s about the dangerous ways that love can go wrong, and it does the thing that noir was invented to do: It sucks you in.
  53. Filth
    Powered by a vigorous, image-shedding lead turn from James McAvoy as a coked-up Edinburgh detective on the fast track to either promotion or self-implosion, this descent into Scotch-marinated madness begins as ugly comedy, segues almost imperceptibly into farcical tragedy, and inevitably — perhaps intentionally — loses control in the process.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    Norman Jewison's sensational futuristic drama about a world of Corporate States stars James Caan in an excellent performance as a famed athlete who fights for his identity and free will.
  55. Breaking and Entering
    Entirely respectable in every way, it nonetheless has a very cool body temperature and thus likely will inspire polite admiration rather than excitement among viewers.
  56. Christmas in the Clouds
    Combo of gorgeously shot Western settings (mostly in snowbound Idaho), memorably mismatched characters, and light-touch social commentary.
  57. Bamboozled
    Occasionally biting but excessively melodramatic.
  58. Stella Days
    Although Martin Sheen often goes full cherub in his depiction of the film's central Catholic priest, the pictue is also a frank assessment of a cleric's crisis of faith and the church's rather ruthless efforts to maintain medieval control in the face of modernization.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Doc Hollywood
    Has no real taste of its own, but, in its mildness and predictability, offers the reassurance of a fast-food or motel chain.
  60. Hereafter
    A beguiling blend of the audacious and the familiar; it dances right on the edge of the ridiculous and at times even crosses over, but is armored against risibility by its deep pockets of emotion, sly humor and matter-of-fact approach to the fantastical.
  61. The Croods: A New Age
    For those who wish they’d just slow it down and tell a decent story, The Croods: A New Age feels like an assault on the cranium, a loud and patently obnoxious 21st-century “Flintstones” with far more sophisticated technology, but nothing new to offer in the script department.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death Becomes Her
    Central problem is that this treat for somewhat specialized tastes must be marketed to the widest possible public due to its clearly big-time budget, and general audiences are very unlikely to warm to this wickedly cold-hearted tale of jealousy, spite and revenge despite the abundance of eye-popping effects.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Minus Man
    The kind of muted, anything-but-obvious psychological thriller Hitchcock would have loved.
  64. CQ
    Roman Coppola's first film has sympathetic aims but is distressingly lacking in flair, style, wit or fun.
  65. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    Marvelously involving family saga.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Men of Honor
    Those in search of positive role models and films detailing little-known aspects of black and military history, or stressing the value of tenacity and hard work, pic has something to offer.
  67. Phone Booth
    Gussied up with a host of filmmaking tricks in an attempt to keep things lively, this intensely acted little exercise just doesn't have enough going for it, with the exception of gradually growing interest in lead Colin Farrell.
  68. 30 Years to Life
    Middleton's polished writing and amusing observations about the anxieties most people encounter when definitively farewelling their youth help compensate for her standard-issue direction.
  69. The Anniversary Party
    Too familiar in its basic trajectory to be fresh or compelling.
  70. The Ladykillers
    The souffle falls a little flat in The Ladykillers, a Coen brothers black comedy in which the humor seems arch and narrative momentum doesn't kick in until the final third.
    • 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.
  72. Troy
    Despite a sensationally attractive cast and an array of well-staged combat scenes presented on a vast scale, Wolfgang Petersen's highly telescoped rendition of the Trojan War lurches ahead in fits and starts for much of its hefty running time, to OK effect.
  73. Phoebe in Wonderland
    Partly produced by Lifetime, the pic attempts to elevate the disease-of-the-week movie into a moral dialectic between conformity and imagination.
  74. Fast X
    Leterrier’s bad with story but reasonably strong on the action front. Characters are constantly jumping in and out of speeding vehicles in these movies, and Leterrier’s job here must have felt somewhat similar, clambering aboard the juggernaut that is the “Fast” franchise in full steam.
  75. Maleficent
    Uncertain of tone, and bearing visible scarring from what one imagines were multiple rewrites, the film fails to probe the psychology of its subject or set up a satisfying alternate history, but it sure is nice to look at for 97 minutes.
  76. The Time We Killed
    The Time We Killed reps avant-garde vet Jennifer Todd Reeves' most ambitious work yet, a dense-packed feature-length black-and-white journey into a beautifully restless mind.
  77. Sequestro: A Story of Kidnapping
    Audiences might feel they've been taken hostage during certain parts of Sequestro (Kidnapping), but Brazilian helmer Jorge W. Atalla's documentary is ultimately electrifying, both in what it reveals and how it reveals it. .
  78. Fanny, Annie & Danny
    The more difficult characters here (all female) and resulting character dynamics are so consistently shrill that the picture feels a bit too one-dimensional and cruel to leave the small-tragedy aftertaste it could have.
  79. Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings
    Exuberantly silly, Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings sends up Filipino horror, romance, gaysploitation and other genre cliches in service of a pro-tolerance message.
  80. The End of Time
    Intermittently interesting but more often pretentious, this sluggish exploration of time as real and conceived concepts rarely does more than regurgitate philosophical platitudes without locating the depth to make them interesting.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Throw Momma from the Train
    A fun and delightfully venal comedy. Very clever and engaging from beginning to end.
  82. 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Touch
    Paul Schrader's first feature since Light Sleeper five years ago boasts a colorful cast and some vivid individual scenes, but unsuccessfully mixes tones while strenuously reaching for offbeat humor.
  84. Claire in Motion
    Those who seek neat narrative resolution to any mystery may leave underwhelmed. Still, the hard-won acceptance of uncertainty that Robinson and Howell allow their protagonist provides its own, more abstract satisfaction.
  85. Bottle Shock
    Wine lovers won't just sip but guzzle a lot of this down, and the same effect that sun-dappled days and sex in California had on "Sideways" operates here.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shag
    As a dance flick, Shag suffers from an unexciting dance-style and so-so choreography but compensates with a fine young cast and likable story.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pretty in Pink
    A rather intelligent (if not terribly original) look at adolescent insecurities.
  88. Boss Level
    By the end of Boss Level, you may feel a lot like Pulver. Putting “Groundhog Day” on action steroids, the film has a patina of cleverness that’s pleasing enough, but you’ve seen it before. And you’ll see it again.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    December Boys
    Occasionally touching but rarely convincing coming-of-ager.
  90. Then She Found Me
    A smart, subtle and seriously funny dramedy bound to find favor with sophisticated auds.
  91. The Pale Blue Eye
    The Pale Blue Eye wants to get into the 19th-century darkness, but it’s suffocatingly somber and static. The film showcases its two investigators in an ostensibly enigmatic dance-of-the-seven-frontier-high-collars way, but for much of the movie we’re a step ahead of them.
  92. Sangre De Mi Sangre
    Ochoa is such a masterful actor that he makes things fairly interesting despite the script, with Hernandez and Espindola well-cast as two young men operating by different moral compasses.
  93. Manglehorn
    Something about working with Pacino forces what could have been a breaks-the-mold character portrait into factory-made territory.
  94. The Misandrists
    Misandrists is a diverting bad-taste frolic for the sufficiently jaded.
  95. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    The arguments between Ramanujan and Hardy form easily the most absorbing aspect of The Man Who Knew Infinity, as their eloquent clash of wills is shown to be not just intellectual but ideological in nature.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghostbusters II
    Ghostbusters II is babyboomer silliness. Kids will find the oozing slime and ghastly, ghostly apparitions to their liking and adults will enjoy the preposterously clever dialog.
  97. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    Kundo: Age of the Rampant delivers a thoroughly entertaining if overlong gallop through the trusty old story of honorable bandits stealing from nasty rich people and distributing the proceeds to downtrodden peasants.
  98. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
    Rather than linger on the project’s shortcomings, which only disappoint relative to the story’s incredible creative potential, it should be said that in partnership with Berla, Malzieu has created a fully realized, wildly imaginative storybook world and populated it with eccentric characters.
  99. Alex of Venice
    The pleasures of well-observed characters and small epiphanies are undeniable, and Alex of Venice, actor Chris Messina’s directing debut, is amply supplied with both, thanks to Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s extraordinary performance: Registering profound shocks with slight ripples rather than big emotions, she quietly commands attention.
  100. The Running Man
    It hangs together and mostly obeys the rules of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet it’s clear that what drew Wright to the project was his infatuation with the sci-fi sociology of a retro-future USA.
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