Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Philadelphia Experiment
    The philadelphia Experiment had a lot of script problems in its development that haven't been solved yet, but final result is an adequate sci-fi yarn.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Places in the Heart
    Flawlessly crafted, Benton creates a full tapestry of life in Waxahachie, Texas circa 1935, but filmgoers may find his understated naturalistic approach lacking in dramatic punch.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Guns II
    Although it's more ambitious than most sequels, Young Guns II exhausts its most inspired moment during the opening credits and fades into a copy of its 1988 predecessor - a slick, glossy MTV-style western.
  4. The Oath
    Here’s a project that had the nerve to address these tensions in a megaplex environment, only to squander them on a standoff it pretends could be so glibly resolved.
  5. Serial Mom
    Fun, almost endearing in its cheeky irreverence, but also rather mild and scattershot in its satiric marksmanship, Serial Mom provokes chuckles and the occasional raised eyebrow rather than guffaws and gross-outs.
  6. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shampoo
    All the excellent creative components do not add up to a whole. There are, however, strong elements in the film. Warden’s performance is outstanding. He makes the most of a script and direction which gives his character much more dimension than the prototype cuckold.
  8. The Front Runner
    Hugh Jackman proves an inspired candidate to embody Hart, downplaying his brawny movie-star persona, while still conveying the twinkle-eyed sex appeal that was not only Hart’s undoing, but one of the qualities that would have made the photogenic and well-spoken senator from Colorado a logical choice to follow the country’s first movie-star president.
  9. The Laws of Thermodynamics
    The final result is a curiosity, sure, but a cute, quick-witted one, with much (maybe too much) on its mind.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lonely Guy
    Martin’s trademark wacky humor is fitfully in evidence, but seems much more repressed than usual in order to fit into the relatively realistic world of single working people.
  11. Nelly
    Émond obviously has deep feeling for Arcan, and “Nelly” is a sincere and respectful attempt to do at least partial, fragmentary justice to a troubled woman able to self-create any persona except a happy one, but it can’t put her back together again.
  12. The Last Suit
    [A] touching, albeit occasionally heavy-handed, drama.
  13. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    Structured as a straightforward life story followed by an extended coda looking in detail at the features Cohen is restoring, The Great Buster can’t hold a candle to the 1987 three-part series “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow” but will make do as a decent DVD extra.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rope
    Hitchcock could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed in Rope. Theme is of a thrill murder, done for no reason but to satisfy a sadistical urge and intellectual vanity.
  15. Freaks
    The only problem is that it’s easier to be impressed by the ingenuity of the staging and the architecture of the screenplay than it is to stay invested in the characters.
  16. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    While always attractive, the look conveys a level of non-spontaneous construction that often takes away from the potency of hard, brutal reality.
  17. Caniba
    How illuminating or challenging Caniba proves for viewers will depend on their amenability to Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s amoral stance and literally up-in-your-face technique. Those who aren’t provoked by its ambiguous psychological inquiry, however, may wish for a bigger human picture from this relentlessly close-up exercise.
  18. Nigerian Prince
    Okoro has bent over backwards not to make the poverty-row version of a glib crime thriller, but he shouldn’t have bent so far.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Road to China
    High Road to China is a lot of old-fashioned fun, revived for Tom Selleck after his TV schedule kept him from taking the Harrison Ford role in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ford clearly got the better deal because China just isn't as tense and exciting.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Critters 2
    Film perfectly weaves together the gruesome behaviour of these bloodthirsty creatures and the comic asides that keep things gliding along.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Exorcist III
    Since The Exorcist was one of the most frightening films ever and Exorcist II one of the goofiest, chances favored The Exorcist III to fall somewhere in between, though not nearly far enough up the scale to rival the original.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
    Jensen Daggett is a standout as the troubled young girl on whom Jason is fixated. V.C. Dupree has vibrant energy in his boxing scenes, Sharlene Martin has a fine time with the bitch role, and Martin Cummins is funny as a video freak who compulsively films the proceedings.
  23. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Directing her first studio feature, Cathy Yan keeps it all hurtling along with impeccable ferocity. Her action scenes have a deftly detonating visual spaciousness, capped by crowd-pleasing moments.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Return of the Living Dead
    Director Dan O’Bannon deserves considerable credit for creating a terrifically funny first half-hour of exposition, something in which he is greatly aided by the goofball performance of James Karen as a medical supply know-it-all.
  25. Happy Death Day 2U
    Happy Death Day 2U is more complicated than the first “Happy Death Day,” but in this case more complicated means less fun.
  26. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
    Manages the difficult feat of being genuinely scary and sharply self-satirical all at once.
  27. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
    Had Arakawa widened the portrait just a bit to include other voices — whether artistic collaborators or the young audiences still just discovering his work — the film would easily have demonstrated how his legacy will live forever. Then again, it’s assumed that anyone watching “Never-Ending Man” knows that already.
  28. The Mule
    There’s nothing inherently wrong with presenting bigoted people onscreen, since heaven knows they exist in real life, but the trouble with The Mule is that it invites audiences to laugh along with Earl’s ignorance.
  29. Vice
    The movie, though it pretends to reveal how power works, is ultimately content to remain on the outside, sticking its finger in the eye of power.
  30. A Dog's Way Home
    For every shameless trick the filmmakers employ to pluck our heartstrings, resonant chords are struck elsewhere, teaching audiences about family, the power of unconditional love, and the ripple effects of compassion.
  31. Possum
    If this wrap-up proves less than fully satisfying, Possum still casts an impressive spell.
  32. Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders
    Were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, in some rollicking sex-positive way, an intrinsic part of the feminist revolution? Or did they represent one step forward and one high kick back? You could make the case either way, but the film pushes the clean and forceful — if highly ironic — argument that the Cheerleaders were nothing more or less than empowered entertainers who seized control of their sexuality and, in doing so, advanced the liberation of women.
  33. The Quake
    There’s nothing terribly profound or innovative about what The Quake achieves. But like “The Wave” before it, it’s just intelligent and serious enough to give you your escapist cake — deluxe popcorn perils in all their big-screen glory — without making you eat the familiar guilt of empty-calorie overload.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nickelodeon
    Peter Bogdanovich's film is an okay comedy-drama about the early days of motion pictures. Story begins with a group of barnstorming filmmakers in the pre-feature film era, later segues to the adolescence of the industry.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Biloxi Blues
    Biloxi Blues is an agreeable but hardly inspired film version of Neil Simon's second installment of his autobiographical trilogy, which bowed during the 1984-85 season. Even with high-powered talents Mike Nichols and Matthew Broderick aboard, World War II barracks comedy provokes just mild laughs and smiles rather than the guffaws Simon's work often elicits in the theater.
  36. Cam
    Reflective of its subject, the movie is content to exist on the stimulating surface, teasing us with the promise of something deeper while skirting around its delivery.
  37. The Jungle Book
    A full-throttled, technically superb adventure — with more bite than most Disney live-action fare — that offers some winning moments but, ultimately, isn’t as involving as it needs to be.
  38. The Sun Is Also a Star
    Sure, Sagan’s scientific method dominates the universe. But here on earth, this crowd-pleaser convinces us to spend one day savoring an American Dream.
  39. Superintelligence
    Some of the funny business is very funny indeed, and the movie overall is more enjoyable than not. Which, again, makes it perfect for streaming.
  40. Backtrace
    Throughout most of the movie’s running time, Modine is tasked with the majority of the heavy lifting, and he handles the burden admirably.
  41. Perfect Strangers (Perfectos Desconocidos)
    Released in Mexico late last year, Caro’s seriocomic adaptation alternates between a tense, well-acted chamber drama and an at times overly didactic parable, but its focus on our newfound willingness to collect all of our darkest secrets behind such an easily pierced veil – do we realize how precarious that tightrope we’re walking is? On some level, are we secretly hoping we might fall? – provides for plenty of squeamish entertainment.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oh, God! You Devil
    The story didn’t need to get this involved and it winds up constantly trying to pull the picture apart, working against the comedy.
  43. Troop Zero
    Neither reinvents the wheel nor even attempts to redesign it all that much, but at least it gets where it wants to go, thanks in no small part to the work of Allison Janney, Viola Davis, and young actor Mckenna Grace.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Final Countdown
    As a documentary on the USS Nimitz, The Final Countdown is wonderful. As entertainment, however, it has the feeling of a telepic that strayed onto the big screen. The magnificent production values provided by setting the film on the world's largest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier can't transcend the predictable cleverness of a plot that will seem overly familiar to viewers raised on Twilight Zone reruns.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pretty Baby
    The film is handsome, the players nearly all effective, but the story highlights are confined within a narrow range of ho-hum dramatization.
  46. All These Small Moments
    Though this sweet, subtle, and sentimental work is a smidge too simplistic in narrative design, it wins over any resistance with its quiet refinement and heartrending insight.
  47. Men in Black: International
    The connection between Tessa Thompson and Hemsworth is what saves the day, not anything their characters do onscreen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paradise Alley
    It’s an upbeat, funny, nostalgic film populated by colorful characters, memorable more for their individual moments than for their parts in the larger story.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Streak
    While falling short of its comedy promise (except when Richard Pryor is on the screen), Silver Streak is an okay adventure comedy starring Gene Wilder on the lam from crooked art thieves aboard a trans-continental train.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mo' Better Blues
    Personal rather than social issues come to the fore in Mo' Better Blues, a Spike Lee personality piece dressed in jazz trappings that puffs itself up like Bird but doesn't really fly. More focused on the sexual dilemmas of its main character than on musical themes, pic might well be subtitled He's Gotta Have It.
  51. Buffalo Boys
    All in all, this Eastern western is a jovial genre cocktail, but it’ll be more interesting to see if its director can bring greater nuance to whatever his next project turns out to be.
  52. Nowhere
    A vibrantly colorful, wildly nihilistic and lovingly perverse poem to America's beautiful, libidinous and doomed youth. Though not his best, Araki's sixth feature is without a doubt his most accessible, sensual and superficially entertaining movie to date.
  53. The Living End
    As a portrait of late-millennial nihilism, The Living End rejects the sympathetic bent of every afflicted-by-AIDS portrayal before or since.
  54. Ask Dr. Ruth
    The irony at the core of the Dr. Ruth persona is that the maverick who made the bedroom public is herself incredibly private, and while she encourages women to get intimate with their bodies, she’s not in touch with her own emotions. Still, she is vocal about respecting boundaries, and White acquiesces, trusting that the facts of Westheimer’s life say plenty about her peppy workaholism.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bat*21
    Glover turns in a solid job but, as with Hackman, he remains one-dimensional.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard to Kill
    It ain’t pretty, but it gets the action fans off.
  57. The Unicorn
    Lead players Lauren Lapkus and co-scripter Nick Rutherford are amply engaging and sympathetic, even when the behavior of their characters is cringe-worthy embarrassing. No, never mind: Make that especially when those characters are humiliating themselves for our enjoyment.
  58. The Maestro
    By consigning its most interesting character to a supporting role, this amiable slice of fictionalized history loses a good deal of its heft. Nonetheless, solid direction and a charming Berkeley turn help it stave off insubstantiality.
  59. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Competently mounted yet plodding, it’s manifestly a labor of love that becomes a bit of a labor to watch.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kelly's Heroes
    Nearly satirical in its overall effect, plot caroms between cliche dogface antics, detailed and gratuitous violence, caper melodramatics, and outrageous anachronism.
  61. The Tomorrow Man
    If the ultimate effect is a little more slight than one might’ve hoped, Jones and his appealing cast nonetheless sustain a low-key charm even after the enigmatic initial promise burns off like morning fog.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Out for Justice
    Director John Flynn does a fair job of keeping the minimal storyline crawling along well enough to justify all the mayhem. Too bad the climactic confrontation doesn’t justify the build-up. Stuntwork, however, is first rate, and Seagal remains a convincing action figure.
  63. A Dog's Journey
    One wishes the film were a bit more inventive with its dog’s-eye view: the odd ground-level action shot aside, there isn’t much to cinematically suggest how animals see the world differently.
  64. The Highwaymen
    Commands attention less as historical counterpoint than as a sturdy showcase for the neatly balanced lead performances of Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson.
  65. Otherhood
    While the filmmakers have crafted compelling characters and conundrums, they unfortunately fail to give them better connective tissue and a satisfying third act.
  66. Big Time Adolescence
    Big Time Adolescence isn’t bad, but it’s a trifle.
  67. The Death of Dick Long
    The distinguishing quality of its jokey, can-you-believe-this? tone is that the two millennial hayseeds at its center are so richly incompetent that they seem to be inventing a new low place on the totem pole of backwoods idiocy.
  68. Honey Boy
    Ask yourself: Just how curious are you to understand the source of Shia LaBeouf’s insecurities and rage? If this is a subject of high importance to you, then you’re in luck, because Honey Boy offers a sincere window into the actor’s soul: a vulnerable, honest (or at least honest-seeming) act of therapy through screenwriting
  69. Official Secrets
    The crux of Gun’s struggle is that she risked everything to tell the truth, and the war happened anyway. Ultimately, her personal story was neither uplifting, nor tragic, which means the film surrounding her doesn’t hurtle toward a satisfying arc.
  70. Little Monsters
    The paradox of "Little Monsters" is that it’s so guileless in its story and execution, it could have been made for kids, except for the disembowelings. Still, Nyong’o not only survives the film with her dignity intact, the audience might exit admiring her more.
  71. The Lodge
    There are too many explanations dangled here, to ends somewhat frustratingly contradictory rather than usefully ambiguous.
  72. Share
    Share is fragmented and disorienting, though one suspects that confusion is perhaps Bianco’s point.
  73. The Sound of Silence
    The Sound of Silence is a deeply silly movie that takes itself incredibly seriously, and believe it or not, that’s its great pleasure.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    History of the World: Part I
    The one interlude which really brings down the house has Brooks working as a waiter at the Last Supper and asking the assembled group. ‘Are you all together or is it separate checks?’..As the old ad line said, there’s something here to offend everybody, particularly the devout of all persuasions and homosexuals.
  75. I Am Mother
    Mostly I Am Mother is exactly what it seems: a good-looking allegory that postures like it’s wrestling with more ideas than it actually is.
  76. The King of Staten Island
    If there were any lingering doubts that Pete Davidson has what it takes to be a terrific actor, this movie should dispel them. In “The King of Staten Island,” he holds the screen with his blinkered, scurrilous, and oddly innocent I did-what? personality, and for the first time he makes the sociopathic goofball he’s playing a fully dimensional presence.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Driver
    Director Walter Hill and stunt coordinator Everett Creach have engineered a number of car chases and they are fabulous, if you like car chases.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Winning
    Overly-long, it nevertheless carries sock appeal in suspenseful racing sequences and its principals in a realistically-developed marital romance score strongly.
  79. Monster Hunter
    Very little of Monster Hunter makes sense, but it’s visually interesting at least and not un-fun to stream at home with a friend, asking questions and cracking jokes along the way.
  80. God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunija
    God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya positions itself as a feminist cry against a patriarchal Macedonia in the grips of bullying machismo and hidebound religion, yet the genial rushed ending undercuts its gender-equality thrust by presenting Petrunya’s emotional savior as a mustachioed guy in uniform.
  81. Light of My Life
    Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.
  82. The Operative
    A proficient but unsurprising espionage thriller from Israeli writer-director Yuval Adler that offers another well-fitted showcase for Diane Kruger’s stern resolve as a performer.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Catch-22
    Low, cheap comedy mingles nervously with slick, high-fashion technical polish in a slow-boiling stew of specious philosophy and superficial characterization.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Tin Drum
    Adheres to the book more than enough not to disappoint avid readers of the bestseller.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paternity
    There are several funny bits in Paternity a harmless enough romantic comedy that strangely has its strongest laughs in its least important scenes.
  86. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    Space Jam: A New Legacy is chaotic, rainbow sprinkle-colored nonsense that, unlike the original, manages to hold together as a movie.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Airport 1975
    Jack Smight’s direction has the refreshing pace of a filmmaker who knows his plot can crash unless he hurries.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Parallax View
    The Parallax View is a partially-successful attempt to take a serious subject - a nationwide network of political guns for hire - and make it commercially palatable to the popcorn trade - via chases, fights, and lots of exterior production elements.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cowboys
    The story [from a novel by William Dale Jennings] is long and episodic, and its gentle treatment makes the length something of a hindrance to maximum enjoyment.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fist of Fury
    Lee has a good deal of aggressive boyish charm. However, pic is archaically simple-minded in its storyline and marginally professional in its production. Lo Wei’s direction is a juvenile match for his own screenplay.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Way of the Dragon
    Dragon is noteworthy more for the martial arts action than for narrative, which is all its fans probably want anyway.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big Jake
    Big Jake is an extremely slick and commercial John Wayne starrer, this time as a long-gone husband out to rescue a grandson from kidnapper Richard Boone.
  93. Duke
    The film sustains more than enough dramatic tension from scene to scene to keep a viewer intrigued, despite the sporadic fuzziness of motivation and plot specifics.
  94. Run This Town
    Run This Town offers some sharp observations about the struggle to provide anything like watchdog journalism in an age of diminished budgets and readership.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Opening Night
    Gena Rowlands turns in another virtuoso performance as the troubled actress. Cassavetes’ highly personal work will please his coterie of enthusiasts, but for general audiences it will be viewed as shrill, puzzling, depressing and overlong.
  96. Ramen Shop
    Bringing two of Singapore and Japan’s most popular dishes (bak kut teh and ramen) together in a film about cultural and culinary fusion, Singaporean auteur Eric Khoo’s “Ramen Teh” is cinematically more comfort food than haute cuisine.
  97. Super Deluxe
    Movies as diverse as “Short Cuts,” “Weekend at Bernie’s,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Magnolia” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” are among the source material that inspire wink-wink allusions and tonal disruptions throughout Super Deluxe, an overextended and wildly uneven Tamil-language extravaganza that manages to impress largely because it’s such a shoot-the-works, go-for-broke mess.
  98. American Relapse
    The aesthetic devices used by the directors to embellish their material — including educational and archival videos, split-screens, slow-motion, time-lapse footage, and lingering close-ups of needles and money — are a bit too self-consciously stylish for their own good. Nonetheless, their film captures the recurring nightmare of substance abuse.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paint Your Wagon
    What the $17 million-plus film (from the 1951 Lerner-Loewe Broadway musical) lacks in a skimpy story line it makes up in the music and expert choreography. There are no obvious ‘musical numbers’. All the songs, save one or two, work neatly, quietly and well into the script. The actors used their own voices, which are pleasant enough and add to the note of authenticity.
  100. Stuck
    “Oftentimes these connections are neglected or rejected,” sings Lloyd early on to complete the couplet, “but every now and then the universe succeeds.” So, in its sincere and refreshingly scrappy way, does Stuck.
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