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. Ride the Eagle
    The movie’s seriocomic consideration of how messy familial, sexual and professional relationships can be should have a well-nigh universal resonance.
  2. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    Mira Nair’s latest immigrant saga saddles itself with a laborious narrative structure and half-baked thriller elements in a misguided attempt to open up what should be an intimate, introspective story.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Psycho II
    Psycho II is an impressive, 23-years-after followup to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 suspense classic. Director Richard Franklin deftly keeps the suspense and tension on high while dolling out dozens of shock-of-recognitions shots drawn from the audience’s familiarity with Psycho.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Brubaker
    Even with a sharp cast topped by the star power of Robert Redford, it’s hard to imagine a broad audience wanting to share the two hours of agony in this one, all the way to a downbeat ending with Redford the loser in his righteous battle.
  5. Assassination Nation
    Levinson’s battling more villains than any script can take on, and by the end, his sharp jabs bleed into a gory finale that settles for cathartic cheers.
  6. Volcano
    A furiously paced popcorn picture whose outrageous implausibility is somewhat amusing, Volcano delivers enough spectacular action to get it off to a hot B.O. start, although like the lava in the picture, it may not flow quite as far as anticipated.
  7. The Pirates of Somalia
    The movie’s much too flashy, allowing its cheeky attitude to overpower the otherwise humanist message (somehow, absurd situations feel less so when the narrator is constantly pointing out how outrageous everything seems to be), while the acting is all over the place.
  8. David Brent: Life on the Road
    A late third-act turn into sentimental territory, in which the original show’s misanthropy is sugared up, may feel artificial to viewers drawn to the series’ persistent despairing streak; still, it makes a certain sense given that the film would otherwise entirely lack an emotional arc.
  9. Wander
    The film’s hyperbolic style and convoluted storytelling tend to exhaust patience rather than build intrigue, making for a muddle whose too-many twists and turns ultimately seem meaningless as well as implausible.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Plaza Suite
    Each of the femme stars is given much screen time and the result not only is excellent spotlighting of their own talents, but also an adroit restraint on Matthau’s presence.
  11. To Rome with Love
    This pleasantly diverting, none-too-strenuous arthouse excursion feels like a throwback to Allen's short-story anthologies, with the added pleasure of seeing a game cast play along.
  12. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
    Hosking has a vision, and more often that not, it works.
  13. Pledge
    This third feature for director Daniel Robbins is no delicate flower of cinematic art, but a lean and mean shocker that tells its tale of collegiate hazing run amuck with brute efficiency.
  14. Humboldt County
    Its low-key charms are considerable enough to engage venturesome ticketbuyers.
  15. V/H/S
    The segments vary in quality and the whole overstays its welcome at nearly two hours.
  16. And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen...
    A good-looking but slim confection that's short on the multi-characterisation and sense of entwined destinies that mark the great Lelouch sagas.
  17. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    The lack of a plausible leading lady is enough to sink what is otherwise an eye-catching, although heavily '90s-style, telling of one of history's most frequently filmed stories.
  18. Deep Blue Sea
    Powered by exceptional displays of physical filmmaking, Deep Blue Sea is pulled back to shore by the usual suspects -- weak plotting and weaker dialogue.
  19. Cézanne et Moi
    The cinematic equivalent of calendar art.
  20. Snow Cake
    Boosted by a delish performance from Carrie-Anne Moss as a local vamp who helps unthaw the Englishman, but holed beneath the waterline by a gratingly miscast Sigourney Weaver as the persnickety autistic.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Green Butchers
    Will be either a turn-on or turn-off, depending on one's sense of humor.
  22. Imagine That
    An undemandingly pleasant, mildly amusing fantasy.
  23. Puncture
    Though conceptually intriguing, the mix of downward drug spiral with uphill struggle for good never really coalesces.
  24. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Rather than channeling James Thurber’s satirical tone, Stiller plays it mostly earnest, spinning what feels like a feature-length “Just Do It” ad.
  25. Marie's Story
    A quarter-century ago, such an assured, emotionally satisfying French offering as this could have done significant business in the States, the way films like “Jean de Florette” once did.
  26. A Street Cat Named Bob
    Unpretentiously touching on the page, this material feels stretched a bit thin on film, with televisual production values and a samey song score doing little to enrich matters: Still, it’s sweetly hopeful .
  27. Charlie Bartlett
    Rollicking story of a rich kid whose wildly successful bid for popularity has him playing drug-distributing shrink to an entire high school boasts pitch-perfect faceoffs between upstart Anton Yelchin and alcoholic principal Robert Downey Jr. that could fuel a chemistry lab.
  28. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    The off-the-wall comedy of Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow leaves a mark on the script, but it would require a talent of Peter Sellers' magnitude to conquer this material, and he's not around.
  29. The Hunting Party
    Alternately glib, superficial and amusing, pic vainly attempts to absorb some degree of Serbian irony into a story that's unavoidably lessened by its privileged American vantage point.
  30. Bee Season
    The film is ice cold, never finding a way to invite the viewer into the story, and Richard Gere doesn't convince as a Jewish biblical scholar.
  31. Mood Indigo
    The film frequently privileges art direction over emotion, and a constant sense of wonder based on visuals alone proves impossible to sustain over the lengthy 130-minute runtime.
  32. Life
    Life’s a thrill when it’s smart, but it’s even more exciting when the characters are dumb — which is ultimately a paradox the film wears proudly, to the possible extinction of the human race.
  33. Son
    Son never quite binds its tricky, episodic story into a persuasive or gripping whole.
  34. Oslo
    Rogers’ stage play is a smart, mature piece of writing, but one that transfers rather clumsily to the small screen, in part because its makers don’t show quite the same confidence in their audience’s intelligence.
  35. Another Simple Favor
    The Simple Favor films fill a niche, one that they helped create: the knowing synthetic thriller rooted in the angst of contempo motherhood. But this one both diverts and drags on.
  36. One Missed Call
    Combines scares and chuckles with good production values.
  37. Keeper
    The mood is low-key and naturalistic, yet a streak of trippy weirdness keeps intruding. And here’s the thing: The weird parts don’t add up. That’s likely by design, but that doesn’t make it good.
  38. Thor: The Dark World
    This robust, impersonal visual-effects showpiece proves buoyant and unpretentious enough to offset its stew of otherwise derivative fantasy/action elements.
  39. Beast
    If you can get past the idea that the two-ton lion threatening Idris Elba and his family in the movie is a singularly frightening combination of ones and zeros, not killer instinct and claws, then Beast is a blast.
  40. The Riot Club
    Scherfig approaches the milieu with shrewd anthropological wit, amplifying Wade’s research with her own keen outsider insights — this on top of an expert grasp of tension and tone as the club’s initial allure turns to anxiety and disgust.
  41. Stuart Saves His Family
    This feeble comedy isn't the worst pic ever to be spun off from a "Saturday Night Live" sketch --"It's Pat!" maintains a firm grip on that dubious distinction -- but it is woefully lacking in the humor and charm needed to attract mainstream audiences.
  42. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    That this highly derivative horror series bottoms out by over-investing in the Warrens — its most reliable creation, the only one that’s undeniably its own — is a sure sign that it is well past its utility.
  43. Lonesome Jim
    There's a slightness to the mildly eccentric material here that leaves the whole enterprise in danger of fluttering away.
  44. The Last Stand
    [The Director] is especially good at integrating his New Mexico locations into the action, from a key combat scene on a bridge to a car chase that unfolds, with limited visibility, in a cornfield...Kim's handling of his first English-speaking cast isn't quite as assured, although everyone more or less gets by
  45. Thanks for Sharing
    Collectively, Thanks for Sharing boasts more than enough personalities to keep things interesting, but it lacks the casual spontaneity to make these characters’ journeys anything other than predictable.
  46. To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You
    The trouble with “P.S. I Still Love You” is that nearly all the reasons that Lara Jean makes such a refreshingly different romantic lead are contained in the earlier film, and here, she’s reduced to a version of the passive Disney princess, trying to decide between two dudes who both think she’s swell.
  47. The Substance of Fire
    But what presumably was powerful in Jon Robin Baitz's play has been diluted in opening it up for the screen.
  48. Best Sellers
    Its portrait of an easy-target industry goes soft just when it needs a little added spine, while the film’s abrupt tonal transitions from jaunty comedy to cross-generational weepie occasionally come at the expense of the characters’ own credibility. But it’s the overarching niceness of “Best Sellers” that sees it through.
  49. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
    The Legend of Ron Jeremy is, at a brisk 75 minutes, long enough to get the job done.
  50. Angela's Ashes
    Artfully evokes the physical realities of Irish poverty, but mostly misses the humor, lyricism and emotional charge of Frank McCourt's magical and magnificent memoir
  51. Dead Alive
    Technically, this is Jackson's best to date, with state of the art creature and gore effects by Richard Taylor and prosthetics design by Bob McCarron. There's any amount of dismemberment, disembowelling, beheading, and the like, all of it handled with bloody conviction.
  52. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    Goes beyond simple Bush-bashing to paint a horrifying portrait of organized U.S. imperialist expansion and public deception stretching back to the early Reagan era.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Tales from the Darkside is significantly gorier than its namesake TV series, and has better production values.
    • Variety
  54. Spiderhead
    Kosinski is a gifted director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. He is not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. The execution is tone deaf.
  55. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.
  56. Pandora's Promise
    Some parts of the film are drily academic, but much of it is quite beautiful and artfully put together by the director.
  57. Joe Bell
    A movie like this would be a good start, if this were 1980. A decade and a half after “Brokeback Mountain,” however, it feels like a huge step backward.
  58. The Voyeurs
    Writer-director Michael Mohan’s film plays like rehashed leftovers cooked up for young viewers who’ve never seen any of its superior inspirations.
  59. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    George Lucas has reached deep into the trove of his self-generated mythological world to produce a grand entertainment that offers a satisfying balance among the series' epic, narrative, technological and emotional qualities.
  60. Kung Fu Panda 4
    Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.
  61. Cashback
    Slickly charming, genteelly erotic and directed with supreme polish, Cashback is a conventional romantic comedy that plays unconventional games with time and memory.
  62. Battle in Seattle
    Picture's ambition, cogency and decent performances make up for its uneven aspects. Woody Harrelson has some especially good moments as a cop.
  63. I Am Woman
    The film doesn’t contextualize Reddy within the musical personalities of her era (beyond saying she sure wasn’t cock-rockers Deep Purple, another Wald client), so newbies may well come away with no idea why she had a unique niche in the ’70s entertainment landscape.
  64. Entrapment
    Preposterous whimsy that sort of gets by thanks to lustrous settings, slick production values and, especially, its ultra-attractive stars.
  65. Ya lyublyu tebya
    Clumsily drawn, poorly acted love triangle.
  66. Jersey Boys
    As handsome as his compositions are, Eastwood’s filmmaking simply doesn’t have the snap or the feel for rhythm that the script’s rapid-fire theatrical patter requires, and the relative dearth of prominent musical performances turns what could have been a dancing-in-the-aisles romp into a bit of a slog.
  67. SiREN
    Siren is lively if occasionally rough around the edges, packing a satisfying amount of action and a couple of amusingly nasty surprises into its short running time.
  68. Kinetta
    Lanthimos’ point seems to be that everyone has their own private weaknesses, but after a Lynchian first act in this strange world, he avoids any mainstream dramatic or satiric elements.
  69. Sheep in the Box
    Kore-eda’s attitude toward what he’s showing us is so lackluster and noncommittal that it’s hard to know how to react to any of it.
  70. Effie Gray
    This admirable, watercolor-delicate tale of individual feminist emancipation never quite blooms into living color, hampered by spotty casting and Richard Laxton’s overly deliberate direction.
  71. Memoirs of a Geisha
    From a filmmaking point of view, this is a work that the old Hollywood moguls themselves would have been proud to present.
  72. Battle for Terra
    As original and convincing a feature as the better Japanese animes of recent years --"Tekkonkinkreet" comes to mind, along with the slightly older "Metropolis."
  73. Shuang long hui
    Ticket buyers get two Jackie Chans for the price of one in Twin Dragons, but the pic itself is no great bargain.
  74. Hidalgo
    Tells an old-fashioned boys' adventure yarn in an equally old-fashioned way.
  75. Batman Forever
    Yet while Schumacher has largely accomplished the goal of delivering a cinematic comic book, he's also left the movie hollow at its core -- a distinction that may not trouble Saturday-night audiences but that nonetheless dulls the film's impact beyond its sheer and unrelenting visual grandeur.
  76. Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen
    Once Mulholland has established that both men hark back to a bygone, Teddy Roosevelt-fostered image of laconic masculinity, his peculiar vantage point generates little insight into the psychology and accomplishments of either man, as “The True Gen” abandons biographical logic in favor of a catalogue of arbitrary differences and similarities.
  77. 12-12-12
    An impressive yet drama-less concoction that can’t totally disguise its slightly stale aftertaste.
  78. Going Away
    Garcia, co-scenarist Jacques Fieschi and the excellent cast (including a welcome Dominique Sanda as Baptiste’s regal mother) bring a sense of depth and shared history to even those figures we meet just briefly.
  79. Juggernaut
    Even if the ending falls something short of memorable, Juggernaut still holds attention as a strong, well-acted effort that effectively walks the line between dysfunctional family drama and revenge thriller.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    F.I.S.T.
    In its superb telling of how a humble but idealistic young man escalates to the corrupt heights of unbridled power, F.I.S.T. is to the labor movement in the United States what All the King's Men was to an era in American politics.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fritz the Cat
    Excellent animation and montage shore up a plot which has a few howls, several chuckles and many smiles.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alice in Wonderland
    On the screen it is vividly realized in all its fantastic angles. The humor is genuine and the treatment satisfying on its literary side. But an hour and a quarter of it is overpoweringly sedative. [26 Dec 1933, p.10]
    • Variety
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Evil of Frankenstein
    In this one Peter Cushing plays the baron with his usual seriousness, avoiding tongue-in-the-cheek, and he is the main prop in the proceedings.
  84. The Brady Bunch Movie
    Part homage, part spoof, the deft balancing act is a clever adaptation -- albeit culled from less than pedigreed source material.
  85. All Is Bright
    This engaging if somewhat underwhelming tale of unlikely redemption builds a funny-sad web of intersecting interactions around its strong central perfs.
  86. Pontypool
    A zombie flick sans bite.
  87. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    It may please the faithful, but it’s not quite epic enough to give less devoted viewers the same thrill they once felt from the live-action movies.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trespass
    Throw together The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Rio Bravo, bring in the Ice crew, inject a noxious dose of racial hatred and stir in some sharp action direction and you've got Trespass.
  89. Art School Confidential
    Despite a soulful leading performance from Max Minghella, pic feels insubstantial, echoing without equaling both the coolly ironic edge and heart of "Ghost World" and the incisive art-world outsider portrait of the director's docu feature, "Crumb."
  90. Ricki and the Flash
    This is a shaggy, easily distractible film that consistently defies expectations to both charming and baffling effect.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Life Stinks
    Mel Brooks' Life Stinks is a fitfully funny vaudeville caricature about life on Skid Row. Premise of a rich man who chooses to live among the poor for a spell feels sorely undeveloped, and suffers from the usual gross effects and exaggerations.
  92. So I Married an Axe Murderer
    So I Married an Axe Murderer may have to dodge some angry Scotsmen but otherwise should click with those looking for slightly upscale humor that’s not averse to a few well-placed cheap shots. It’s a delightful and unexpected surprise.
  93. Save the Date
    The film features a lead performance by Lizzy Caplan, who might be mistaken here for a graduate of the Zooey Deschanel School of Dramatic Arts.
  94. Sparkle
    Sparkle deals in such well-worn rise-and-fall music-bio tropes that it's hard to blame it for simply coasting on narrative shorthand at times. But the lackadaisical storytelling can inch toward outright laziness.
  95. The Devil's Rejects
    If you can stomach the violence -- and despite the R rating, that's a big if -- it's hard to deny that Zombie has made exactly the movie he set out to make, guaranteed to satiate his considerable fan base and sicken just about everyone else.
  96. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    Even at its low ebb, the movie effuses an infectious, mischief-making joy.
  97. 10 Items or Less
    Interplay between a jaunty Freeman as an unemployed movie star and the magnetic Paz Vega as a no-nonsense grocery store checker gives pic humanity and lift.
  98. Hands of Stone
    Gets the job done, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re watching a routinely conceived, rather generic boxing flick. It’s utterly competent, yet it makes Duran’s story seem a little so-what?
  99. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    All of this is reasonably interesting, but not as dramatic as it ought to be.
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