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. The Visit
    Shyamalan has long been criticized for serving up borderline (or downright) silly premises with a straight face and overtly pretentious atmosphere, but he basically abandons that approach here in favor of a looser, more playful dynamic between his fresh-faced leads.
  2. Nim's Island
    A picturesque adventure-comedy that quickly capsizes under the weight of its obnoxious slapstick, pedestrian dialogue and general unwillingness to rise above stock ideas and situations.
  3. Megalopolis
    To call this garish, idea-bloated monstrosity a mere “fable” is to grossly undersell the project’s expansive insights into art, life and legacy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mr. Majestyk
    Mr Majestyk makes a first-reel pretense of dealing with the thorny subject of migrant Chicano farm laborers, but social relevance is soon clobbered by the usual Charles Bronson heroics, here mechanically navigated by director Richard Fleischer.
  5. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    Scrumptious as it all is, it hurts to watch chefs so committed to excellence in a movie so content to settle for attractive mediocrity.
  6. Darshan: The Embrace
    Docu's pace will be a little too meditative for many, but the rigorous, sinewy lensing will have Hypnotic power on those so inclined.
  7. Aquaman
    Aquaman gets his own adventure, and it’s kind of a shock that it doesn’t suck, but only if you’re willing to sit through two hours of water-logged world-building before the movie finally takes off.
  8. Arkansas
    Not everything here works, including some lead casting. But this daylight noir should please viewers willing to roll along with a crime meller more interested in character quirks than action thrills.
  9. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    Another superficial film about music from Scott Hicks ("Shine"), picture runs a distant second to the superior new film on John Adams and Peter Sellars, "Wonders Are Many," which really captures how a composer works.
  10. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    Not surprisingly, the pic struggles at times to flesh out even its relatively brief 90-odd-minute duration, but it delivers some genuine if generally low-brow laughs along the way.
  11. Violent Night
    The movie has no comic-book hook; it’s a trash-compactor genre buffet that smashes together a dozen things you’ve seen before. But that’s the hook. Violent Night is amusing in a few spots, wearying in more than a few others, but to complain about it in the way that I’m doing is to come off as churlish. It’s a movie that feeds the beast.
  12. Irina Palm
    Astonishingly, pic reaped hearty guffaws at Berlinale press show, suggesting this might play best in Europe, but Anglophone auds are more likely to give Palm the thumbs down.
  13. Love Actually
    A roundly entertaining romantic comedy, Love Actually is still nearly as cloying as it is funny…its cheeky wit, impossibly attractive cast and sure-handed professionalism are beguiling.
  14. The Command
    Vinterberg’s Kursk occasionally lands an emotive blow but only in its more fictionalized stretches, while it pulls its punches with the thorniest and most provocative elements of the real story, an instinct that unduly submerges much of the real horror and lasting consequence of this tragically, enragingly, heartbreakingly bungled incident.
  15. The Gambler
    A movie of slick, surface-level pleasures that’s unpersuasive at its core.
  16. Brooklyn Lobster
    Character's multiple mid-life crises could make this genuinely engaging drama especially appealing to older viewers.
  17. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    The results, balancing overfamiliar warm-and-fuzzy growing-up saga and halfhearted horror revenge tale, evaporate quickly from the mind — there’s little cumulative force that might linger. Yet at the same time, Hancock does an admirable job keeping this hour and three-quarters polished and engaging, maintaining consistent viewer interest even if the ultimate reward underwhelms.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bustin' Loose
    Bustin’ Loose is obviously a personal project for Pryor, who produced and wrote the story, which has admirable ambitions but is also the film’s greatest weakness. Still, Pryor is an infectious comedian and a master of body language, keeping the picture on the move with sheer energy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Four Seasons
    Tale is populated strictly with Ordinary People, but Alda’s script doesn’t begin to scratch the surface to discover what makes them tick and is particularly stingy in giving Carol Burnett and Rita Moreno anything to work with.
  20. 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.
  21. Clementine
    It’s too early to state for sure, but restraint appears to be one of Gallagher’s gifts — the kind that rewards moviegoing patience. With this first feature, Gallagher spins a yarn, also peeling a story of attraction and power, identity and coming-of-agency. Only this Clementine is no toss off.
  22. The Flash
    The trouble with The Flash is that as the film moves forward, it exudes less of that “Back to the Future” playfulness and more of that mythological but arbitrary blockbuster self-importance.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dogwalker
    There's an infectious, spry quality to much of The Dogwalker, an indie that benefits from amusing characters, strong thesping and taut situational humor.
  24. Bulgarian Lovers
    Full of charm, entertaining enough as it unfolds, good looking, but not especially memorable in retrospect.
  25. Great Expectations
    Beautifully made production lacks the emotional depth and dramatic tension needed to command audience attention beyond the level of a talented curiosity.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Acid House
    The Acid House makes "Trainspotting" look like a mild-mannered youth comedy.
  27. 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.
  28. Starsky & Hutch
    Blessed with sporadic moments of cheeky fun, isn't painful but seldom advances beyond costumes and hairstyling in terms of creativity.
  29. Freeze Frame
    Signals a talented newcomer in writer-director John Simpson and boasts a gripping central performance from popular British comedian Lee Evans.
  30. The World of Kanako
    While there’s something compelling about an antihero whose obsession is poised on the razor’s edge between love and hate, The World of Kanako buries it in grinding, agitated repetition.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    52 Pick-Up
    52 Pick-Up is a thriller without any thrills. Although director John Frankenheimer stuffs as much action as he can into the screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel (previously filmed by Cannon in Israel in 1984 as The Ambassador), he can't hide the ridiculous plot and lifeless characters.
  32. Spirited
    For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much exactly as they’d expect, but that doesn’t mean Spirited can’t still surprise.
  33. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Humor turns every kill into a sick punchline, and while the writers do a fine job of making them funny, like macabre cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote can rebound from unthinkable injuries, the movie’s tone negates a fundamental respect for human life.
  34. Promised Land
    By manipulating their story to advance the cynical notion that you really can't trust anyone, the filmmakers inadvertently beg the question why their own motives should be so above suspicion.
  35. Agora
    The mother of all secular humanists fights a losing battle against freshly minted religious zealots in Agora, a visually imposing, high-minded epic that ambitiously puts one of the pivotal moments in Western history onscreen for the first time.
  36. Military Wives
    If you’ve seen even one based-on-a-true-story British misfit hobbyists movie, you already know the tune.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Croods
    Although state-of-the-art in its rendering of textures, movement and stereography, The Croods, adopts a relatively primitive approach to storytelling with its Flintstonian construction of stock, ill-fitting narrative elements.
  38. Lion Ark
    Overlong film quickly becomes tedious whenever the camera strays from the lions, who don’t have much personality but prove more compelling than the humans.
  39. The Inbetweeners 2
    The Inbetweeners works by balancing its lascivious nonsense with a disarming sweetness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rio Lobo
    Rio Lobo is the sort of western that John Wayne and producer-director Howard Hawks do in their sleep. But by no stretch of nostalgia does it match such previous Wayne-Hawks epics as Red River or Rio Bravo.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mean Season
    Jordan is at his shrewdly crazed best, anchoring the movie with a felt terror, initially just through his off-screen voice as he manipulates the reporter over the phone and ultimately through his cunning.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kitty Foyle
    Despite its episodic, and at times, vaguely-defined motivation, picture on whole is a poignant and dramatic portraiture of a typical Cinderella girl’s love story. Several good comedy sequences interline the footage, deftly written and directed.
  43. I Heart Huckabees
    Clever but distancing, this existential comedy bounces along on the backs of its tasty cast, witty writing and stylistic verve.
  44. The House Bunny
    A blissfully broad comedy that should catapult Anna Faris into a singular kind of stardom.
  45. Rendition
    By underplaying the melodrama in the presumed hope of seeming subtle when Kelley Sane’s script is so baldly melodramatic, the “Tsotsi” helmer drains the life out of an obviously explosive subject.
  46. Trolls
    It’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.
  47. The Sandlot
    Sweet and sincere, the film is also a remarkably shallow wade, rife with incident and slim on substance.
  48. The Tobacconist
    In the end, what makes The Tobacconist effective despite its limitations is the way it focuses on the experience of a “typical” Austrian — that is, a citizen without political convictions.
  49. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
    In Last Man Standing, Broomfield comes close to answering the questions — of guilt and recrimination — that have hung over these murders for too long.
  50. Perfect Sense
    Mackenzie's second collaboration with Ewan McGregor (following 2003's "Young Adam") tritely tosses together two indifferently conceived characters against a backdrop of global panic that generates no urgency.
  51. Sergio
    Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.
  52. Rob Roy
    This handsome, not unappealing look at a Scottish legend of nearly 300 years ago is too solemn, wooden and dour for its own good, and feels oddly of another era.
  53. Ice Princess
    The most sparkling aspect to Ice Princess is Juliana Cannarozzo, a real-life, nationally ranked skater.
  54. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Where Haupt succeeds is in conveying the passion felt by everyone who works on the Sagrada, from foremen to sculptors.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torn Curtain
    Alfred Hitchcock's direction emphasizes suspense and ironic comedy flair but some good plot ideas are marred by routine dialog, and a too relaxed pace contributes to a dull overlength.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flatliners
    Flatliners is a strikingly original, often brilliantly visualized film from director Joel Schumacher and writer Peter Filardi.
  57. Bingo Hell
    It works hard stylistically to provide a good time. But that would have been a better bet had at least as much effort been put into a screenplay whose ideas, both comic and macabre, remain undernourished.
  58. Minamata
    Depp plays it surly throughout, dominating those around him, but Minami has a strong screen presence as well (despite struggling somewhat with the dialogue in her first English-language role). As Aileen, she needs only to look at Gene, and he will yield to her demands. The two characters read as equals here, despite their polar-opposite personalities, and that unusual chemistry fuels the dangerous reporting ahead of them.
  59. Bra Boys
    Opening with a bright history lesson about poor suburb Maroubra and its place in Sydney beach culture, the docu then fails to adequately answer any charges as members and sympathetic locals line up to praise the outfit for rescuing troubled youth.
  60. Hobo with a Shotgun
    One must grudgingly admire director Jason Eisener's willingness to go over the top and beyond, and the film certainly delivers what it promises.
  61. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    This scattershot documentary — an undiluted advertisement for this temple of high-end consumerism — jumps skittishly from subject to subject, disjointed and repetitive for all but dyed-in-the-wool fashionistas.
  62. Love and Other Drugs
    A jagged little pill that, in the end, goes down too smoothly.
  63. London to Brighton
    Does what it does well but too often seems a pointless exercise in British miserabilism crossed with a nasty gangster yarn.
  64. Without the King
    With Swaziland providing this mother lode of material, helmer Michael Skolnik extracts only the most pedestrian of films.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Playing by Heart
    A stellar cast and articulate script notwithstanding, pic fails to connect emotionally with its audience, which perhaps says more about the difficulty of making empathetic attachments than writer-director Willard Carroll intended.
  66. Take the Lead
    Well-intentioned, feel-good urban tale.
  67. Young Goethe in Love
    As its English-language title indicates, Philipp Stoelzl's yarn is clearly modeled on "Shakespeare in Love." But though it lacks that film's delirious wordplay, this German cousin is well plotted and impressively mounted.
  68. Clandestine Childhood
    Designed to highlight the uneasy coexistence between everyday childhood experiences and the intense pressures of living with parents secretly fighting the junta, the picture has strong moments, but is bogged down by a script that regurgitates standard-issue ideas without finding anything interesting to say.
  69. Zoom
    Morelli and tyro scribe Matt Hansen unpack this Charlie Kaufman-lite premise with more cleverness than wit, struggling particularly to find the right racy tone for various erotic interludes — but the part-toon pic’s neatly collapsing structure and pop-art flourishes ensure it’s never dull.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Babes in Toyland
    Walt Disney's first live-action musical, a lavish translation to the screen of Victor Herbert's operetta, Babes in Toyland, is an expensive gift, brightly-wrapped and intricately packaged. But some of the more mature patrons may be distressed to discover that quaint, charming Toyland has been transformed into a rather gaudy and mechanical Fantasyland. What actually emerges is Babes in Disneyland.
  71. David
    Faith, “David” has in spades; soul, not so much.
  72. Party Girl
    This trifle about a dizzy downtown New York scenester who gets a grip on her life is energized by several attractive characters and enough youthful pep to put it over as an upbeat diversion for teens and twentysomethings, though it has no more substance than bubblegum music.
  73. Sukiyaki Western Django
    Basic joke wears off after five minutes, and many bystanders will start to head out of town. But genre/Asian buffs prepared to ride shotgun for two hours will be rewarded with some classy action sequences and densely accoutred widescreen lensing.
  74. Club Zero
    What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.
  75. When You're Strange
    The Lizard King is a bummer in When You're Strange, Tom DiCillo's disastrously inane documentary ode to reptilian rocker Jim Morrison and his mellower bandmates in the Doors.
  76. The Girl Is in Trouble
    A textbook noir premise gets an overamped and undercompelling treatment in The Girl Is in Trouble.
  77. A Perfect Pairing
    A Perfect Pairing may lack a unique complexity and leave some sediment behind, but its finish is pleasing nonetheless.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocky V
    When the underdog always wins he's not much of an underdog anymore, and the narrative cartwheels Sylvester Stallone has turned over the years to put Rocky in that position have peeled away the novelty.
  79. Bride & Prejudice
    Austen nuts may rend their frocks, and Bollywood buffs may split their cholis, but there's an immensely likable, almost goofily playful charm to Bride & Prejudice that finally wins the day.
  80. Little Pink House
    If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.
  81. 'R Xmas
    Despite some hazy plot points, the tough, compelling drama comes together quite satisfyingly, standing alongside 1996's "The Funeral" as perhaps the most controlled and cohesive of Ferrara's uneven work of recent years.
  82. Forsaken
    Refreshingly and unabashedly sincere in its embrace of Western conventions and archetypes, this pleasingly retrograde sagebrush saga should play exceptionally well with currently under-served genre fans.
  83. Bitch
    Acted and executed with brute conviction, if not much delicacy, by its writer-director-star, with an excellent foil in Jason Ritter’s boorish, baffled husband, the film feels overstretched in its latter half — with its central metaphor revealing only so many facets before the shock factor begins to pall.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Someone to Watch Over Me
    Someone to Watch Over Me is a stylish and romantic police thriller which manages, through the sleek direction of Ridley Scott and persuasive ensemble performances, to triumph over several hard-to-swallow plot developments.
  85. Wildcat
    It’s emotionally exhausting, but audiences come away with a sense of her legacy, as well as an appreciation for the adversity she faced (and, to a lesser degree, a sense of the criticism that has been leveled against her).
  86. Star Trek: Generations
    It may not "boldly go where no one has gone before," but Star Trek Generations has enough verve, imagination and familiarity to satisfy three decades' worth of Trekkers raised on several incarnations of the television skein. [14 Nov. 1994, p.47]
    • Variety
  87. A Futile and Stupid Gesture
    Wain made a terrible mistake when he decided to turn Kenney’s story into a goof, a sketch, a riff of threadbare mockery, instead of treating it as a relatively straight movie with laughs. If he had done that, it might have been hilarious, though in an acidly downbeat and far-reaching way.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
    As a phenomenon, the hip-hop, breakdancing, sidewalk graffiti and rap music culture lends itself well to a comic book approach and to his credit director Sam Firstenberg doesn’t try to interject too much reality into the picture.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Barefoot in the Park
    A thoroughly entertaining comedy delight about young marriage.
  90. Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable
    A documentary that recaps Hamilton’s life in compelling fashion without adding anything of special novelty or depth (though much of the surfing footage is spectacular), it can feel like you’re seeing a perfectly fine devotional sports biography that doesn’t elevate the saga it’s telling to the next level.
  91. Bunnylovr
    Following Zhu’s peculiar white rabbit is never less than an intriguing experience, but in the end, it feels like a hollow one.
  92. King of the Corner
    Lacks the stylistic attention to psychological distress that might have lent it maximum impact. Instead, the pic is amiable, kinda charming, visually routine, and incisive in individual sequences.
  93. The Conspirator
    This methodical courtroom drama is charged with impassioned performances and an unimpeachable liberal message. But its stodgy emphasis on telling over showing will limit its reach to Civil War buffs and self-selecting older viewers.
  94. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    Plenty entertaining and occasionally very funny, “Ninjago” nonetheless displays symptoms of diminishing returns, and Lego might want to shuffle its pieces a bit before building yet another film with this same model.
  95. Dallas 362
    Has a relaxed poeticism to it; it's a sweetly naive, adolescent Hemingway fantasy with a star-making performance by Shawn Hatosy and good ones from everyone else (including Caan).
  96. American: The Bill Hicks Story
    A hagiographic portrait of the standup comic and social satirist who never quite reached beyond cult status in the U.S., American: The Bill Hicks Story might have impressed more of the unconverted had it included more performance footage of its subject.
  97. The Fundamentals of Caring
    Solid performances and some genuinely sharp humor elevate writer-director Rob Burnett’s second feature.
  98. The First Time
    This teen romance proves perilously short on substance, insight and novelty, unless you count its characters being afflicted with a case of "Juno" mouth.
  99. The Prom
    The movie has a universalist spirit that’s wired into its very form. It turns doing the right thing into a fizzy and elating high-camp showbiz high.
  100. The Lion King
    Favreau’s most important responsibility in overseeing the remake was simply not to mess it up. Which he doesn’t. Then again, nor does he bring the kind of visionary new take to the material that Julie Taymor added when staging the Broadway musical. That makes Favreau’s “The Lion King” an undeniably impressive, but incredibly safe entry to the catalog — one whose greatest accomplishment may not be technical (which is not to diminish the incredible work required to make talking animals look believable), but in perfecting the performances.
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