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 Skyjacker's Tale
    A Skyjacker’s Tale is all in the telling, and Jamie Kastner’s haphazard documentary misses the opportunity to get it right, despite having access to Ali and an impressive assembly of major players from his past.
  2. The Craft: Legacy
    The original “Craft” may be a mess, but it does have a legacy, and this ain’t it.
  3. Orphan: First Kill
    Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.
  4. A Little Help
    This tale of a Long Island dental hygienist dealing with various family crises is likable enough, but never really distinctive in character delineation, tone, atmosphere or plotting.
  5. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Offers a diverting package of surreal, rude stoner and pop culture-based humor that will delight youthful viewers while bewildering stray elders.
  6. Draft Day
    Draft Day affords the simple but uncommon pleasure of watching intelligent characters who are passionate about what they do trying to do the best that they can.
  7. Camp X-Ray
    Camp X-Ray is most commendable for believably depicting the U.S. military from a female’s point of view.
  8. Why Did I Get Married?
    Though fans might miss Perry's genre-exploding daring, the excellent cast injects enough pathos and zing to keep picture percolating.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Downtown 81
    Extraordinary real-life snapshot of hip, arty, clubland Manhattan in the post-punk era.
  10. Stray
    Placing among the upper ranks of films for dog lovers, Stray successfully takes this mission to heart, revealing in the process not only the wholesomeness of humans’ four-legged best friends, but also the soulful voice of an exciting new filmmaker with immense moral queries on her mind.
  11. Eye of the Dolphin
    There's a pleasantly dreamy quality to much of Eye of the Dolphin, and that goes a long way toward enabling audiences to ignore the formulaic plot and enjoy the laid-back charms of this innocuous indie.
  12. Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    Michael Moore In TrumpLand turns out to be a tossed hand grenade that doesn’t fully detonate.
  13. Becky
    Wilson’s nimble half-brat, half-she-devil performance is key to our buying the basic premise, aided by solid supporting cast contributions. James grows less intimidating the more dialogue he’s given in an otherwise trim script by marital duo Ruckus and Lane Skye.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blue Steel
    A taut, relentless thriller that hums with an electric current of outrage. Director and cowriter Kathryn Bigelow makes the most of her hook - the use of a female star (Jamie Lee Curtis) in a tough action pic - by stressing the character's vulnerability in remarkable early scenes.
  15. Profile
    Bekmambetov’s cumulatively hysterical film begins as a study of terror before lurching into something closer to horror.
  16. Boogie
    Boogie is most assured when focusing on specific Chinese American routines, rituals and mindsets, yet it falters when crafting its larger portrait of Boogie’s predicament. Huang’s script routinely indulges in leaden exposition to get its message, as well as character details and dynamics, across.
  17. Music of the Heart
    A gloriously sentimental true-life drama
  18. Gerry
    Defiantly uncommunicative picture.
  19. Freak Show
    Freak Show...doesn’t exhibit an understanding of queer identity that goes much deeper than the sheer sequined fabulosity of Billy’s image.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Family Business
    Director Sidney Lumet has crafted a film with real pathos while writer Vincent Patrick (adapting his own novel) injects enough bawdy humor to create a delightful mixed bag spiced with almost a European sensibility.
  21. Life in a Day 2020
    Life in a Day 2020 is quick to fall back on tidy montage methods — grouped shots of babies being born, skydivers jumping from planes, believers grouped in prayer, mourners in cemeteries — that rather strenuously force a sense of global communion, rather than seeking and stressing life’s more diverse and disorienting juxtapositions.
  22. Cocaine Bear
    Cocaine Bear is less formulaic than a slasher film and more stylishly made. It’s a true oddball, one that mixes yocks and mock desperation and disembodied limbs. So when it’s over you can say, “Well, we definitely saw that.”
    • 54 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    For Your Eyes Only
    For Your Eyes Only bears not the slightest resemblance to the Ian Fleming novel of the same title, but emerges as one of the most thoroughly enjoyable of the 12 Bond pix [to date] despite fact that many of the usual ingredients in the successful 007 formula are missing.
  24. Luckiest Girl Alive
    Because of its unwieldy aspects, primarily those shoe-horned into the climax, its simplistic conclusion draws ire instead of the inspired elation these filmmakers crave.
  25. Observe and Report
    Ronnie is more complex, and much scarier, than the kind of self-deluding boob auds usually encounter in comedies of this sort. With the invaluable aid of Rogen, who's never been better, Hill sustains an impressive degree of tension between seemingly contradictory elements.
  26. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    The film is the portrait of a kind and giving man open to all positive ideas that come his way.
  27. Until the Light Takes Us
    Stylistic overreach and neglect of the uninitiated make Until the Light Takes Us a too-specialized examination of Norway's black-metal movement and the aberrant culture surrounding it.
  28. Wah Do Dem
    Slight but winning and often funny, the scrappy Amerindie Wah Do Dem is a fish-out-of-water comedy driven by Sean "Bones" Sullivan's offbeat performance.
  29. The Freebie
    From a performance p.o.v., Aselton and Shepard hold the screen well and are most watchable, and Aselton does a fluid directing job within the limited challenge she set for herself production-wise.
  30. The Magnificent Seven
    Fuqua is trying for John Ford meets Sergio Leone: a funky classical sweep, with room for delirious shootouts. The trouble is that he mimics the trademarks of those directors without their élan, and the plot that was once catchy is now rote.
  31. The Taste of Money
    A trite and tangled potboiler that, despite its polemical pretensions, is just a glorified Korean domestic drama with classier couture and shapelier champagne flutes.
  32. Good on Paper
    Containing razor-sharp witticisms about feminine intuition, gendered sexual politics and relationships (both platonic and romantic), it excels beyond its self-deprecating title.
  33. Sympathy for the Devil
    The tension that should fire up this joint throughout never quite catches hold, because there are never any tangible stakes. These characters and their crisis remain just a premise, too incompletely worked out to either generate urgent suspense or enter the realm of surreal fantasia as Cage did in a long-ago road nightmare, “Wild at Heart.”
  34. Echo Valley
    When you’re simply looking for something semi-interesting to stream, stories like these don’t necessarily require great actors, but great actors are the reason some of them still reverberate in our memory decades later.
  35. With Friends Like These...
    The perennially insecure world of two-bit character actors is humorously and knowingly explored in With Friends Like These.
  36. Elizabeth Harvest
    The disorienting impact of this early shock, coupled with the zig-zaggy progression of the time-tripping narrative, goes a long way toward distracting from a fairly conventional premise that ultimately asserts itself above all the flash and filigree. Indeed, you could describe the entire movie as an elaborate con job — and intend that appraisal as a compliment.
  37. Small Time
    The narrative becomes more tenuous the deeper it strays into drama.
  38. My Wonderful Wanda
    It’s an engaging, mostly well-acted tale, full of surprising twists, even if some seem a bit too on the nose.
  39. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    The deliberately jittery hand-held lensing enhances the mockery in this mockumentary.
  40. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    We all know where this is headed — Snow’s destined to become Panem’s authoritarian “president” — but there’s still enormous room for surprise and debate, even among readers of Collins’ prequel.
  41. The Little Things
    This sort of clinical detective movie hinges on creating a feeling of revelation, a kind of horror-saturated awe. The Little Things is just a warmed-over set of serial-killer-thriller clichés, like crime-scene photos we’ve seen before. And some of it doesn’t track all that well.
  42. Railway Children
    Effectively piling nostalgia upon nostalgia upon nostalgia into a triple-layered Victorian sponge of particularly English sweetness, this good-natured, resolutely old-fashioned film will likely make any adults who grew up on Jeffries’ original a little misty-eyed.
  43. Bran Nue Dae
    Offering blandly stereotypical characters in a trite road-trip narrative, it's genial but too silly for most grownups, and likely to impress few "High School Musical"-indoctrinated kids.
  44. Bee Movie
    Amiable but no more, Bee Movie puts a hiveful of potent talent at the service of a zig-zigging, back-of-an-envelope story that's short on surprise and originality.
  45. Rock Star
    Feels particularly like old news after the risks of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle were laid out for the previously uninformed in last year's "Almost Famous."
  46. Mrs. Doubtfire
    Director Chris Columbus shrewdly brings together many of the same selling points as in his "Home Alone" movies, mixing broad comedic strokes with heavy-handed messages about the magical power of family.
  47. What We Do Is Secret
    Actor Shane West and writer-director Rodger Grossman have a clear, unwavering perspective on Crash that should entice curiosity seekers and old punks.
  48. Illegal
    A prolonged stay in a Belgian immigration detention center causes more than a few chinks in the armor of a strong-willed Russian femme in Illegal, Olivier Masset-Depasse's fascinating study of perseverance in the face of subhuman treatment.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tomorrow, When the War Began
    Parochial paranoia dovetails with adolescent angst in the glossy sci-fi coming-of-ager Tomorrow When the War Began.
  50. Big Boys Gone Bananas!*
    A David-and Goliath story that delves into corporate scare tactics, legal effrontery, brand protection, media manipulation, online propagandizing and craven behavior.
  51. Closer to God
    The result is ultimately admirable more for what it resists — the usual sci-fi horror exploitation cliches — than for the watchable yet somewhat underwhelming impact of a narrative that feels perhaps a little too reined-in for its own good.
  52. Blame
    Shephard has a lively eye for the neurotic ripples of high-school society, but her most audacious gambit is to dare to place the audience in a grey zone between innocence and judgment regarding a relationship that plays out more sympathetically than it should.
  53. Allure
    A Worthy Companion is a lacerating snapshot of what abuse really does: how it can tear away someone’s identity.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Little Drummer Girl
    A disappointingly flat film adaptation of one of John Le Carre's top novels.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bedtime Story
    Bed time Story will divert the less discriminating, although there are times when even such major league performers as Marlon Brando and David Niven have to strain to sustain the overall meager romantic comedy material.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suddenly, Last Summer
    It has some very effective moments, but on the whole it fails to move.
  57. Giants Being Lonely
    The film asks us to indulge and share the privacy of its characters. That’s its moody, free-floating allure.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
    Good looking production is above average family entertainment, enhanced to great measure by zesty, but never show-off, direction by Robert Butler, in a debut swing to pix from telefilm.
  59. Knox Goes Away
    Knox Goes Away doesn’t traffic in comedy — or exaggerated reality. In addition to being a noir that holds you exactly the way a noir should, it may be one of the best dramas about dementia I’ve ever seen.
  60. Everything's Going to Be Great
    Everything’s Going to Be Great is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it.
  61. Assault on Precinct 13
    In an era when similar genre pics increasingly resemble videogames, musicvideos or glossy commercials, the blunt, brawny simplicity of helmer Jean-Francois Richet's storytelling style seems positively novel.
  62. The Signal
    Exceedingly stylish and ultimately quite silly, The Signal is a sci-fi head trip better appreciated for the journey than the destination.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Because of Winn-Dixie
    Uneven though it is, Because of Winn-Dixie, based on Kate Di Camillo's novel, is tough to dislike.
  64. Penguin Bloom
    Shrewdly, Watts goes for something subtle and soft here — instead of clichéd garishness, her performance hinges on her doleful gaze and melancholic tinge, ultimately helping Penguin Bloom honor its real-life character’s journey with some respect.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    *batteries not included
    Batteries Not Included could have used more imaginative juices to distinguish it from other, more enchanting Spielbergian pics where lovable mechanical things solve earthly human dilemmas. Still, it’s suitable entertainment for kids.
  66. Vacancy
    At the risk of spoiling anything, Vacancy, is one strange movie. It ends so precipitously, one can only assume it's a setup for the sequel (which, given all that happens, seems a mite unlikely).
  67. Terminator: Dark Fate
    "Dark Fate” is a lean, tough, and absorbing sequel that taps back into the enthralling surface of the “Terminator” series’ comic-book kinetics as well as the sinister sweet spot of its grandiose pulp mythology.
  68. Black and Blue
    Black and Blue feels imbalanced and overlong, favoring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.
  69. Copycat
    Ending is on the conventional side, more so than anything else in the picture , but script by Ann Biderman and David Madsen keeps the tart surprises coming throughout most of the picture with only occasional lapses into red herrings and artificial manipulation.
  70. Swim Little Fish Swim
    [A] slight, predictable debut.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Dream Team
    The Dream Team is a hokey comedy that basically reduces mental illness to a grab bag of quirky schtick. Yet with a quartet of gifted comic actors having a field day playing loonies on the loose in Manhattan, much of that schtick is awfully funny.
  72. The Empire
    Despite fun trappings . . . the actual conflict in the film boils down to a series of very simplistic binaries: good and evil, sacred and secular, female and male, one and zero, being and nothingness.
  73. Empire of Light
    In the era when content is king, Sam Mendes still believes in moving pictures. Empire of Light is the proof.
  74. The Sea
    [A] good, middlebrow adaptation — which, despite being scripted by Banville himself, sacrifices much of the novel’s structural intricacy for Masterpiece-style emotional accessibility.
  75. Good Dick
    An annoying example of self-therapy posing as art.
  76. Shock to the System
    Enough action, a tiny pinch of sex and some campy moments from Morgan Fairchild.
  77. A Girl Like Her
    A mix of found-footage thriller, mock-doc realism and public service announcement that rings true almost as often as it rings false.
  78. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.
  79. The Notebook
    A determined and often affecting romance that doesn't speak down to audiences.
  80. Jet Lag
    Stays resolutely grounded thanks to miscasting of Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno as the leads and a script that contrarily breaks every rule of the genre.
  81. People I Know
    Compelling 24-hour odyssey into the life of a world-weary Gotham publicist, driven by a vivid performance from Al Pacino.
  82. The Hunting of the President
    Content is engrossing (if so fast-paced that uninformed viewers might easily get lost), but packaging is sometimes questionable.
  83. Human Traffic
    Well cast, engagingly played and directed with a stylistic pedal to the metal, Human Traffic is a lot of energy adding up to very little.
  84. The Fighting Temptations
    Paper-thin plot serves as a pretext for rousing gospel numbers in The Fighting Temptations, which straddles styles and eras to get everybody's toes tapping.
  85. A Time to Kill
    As originated by Grisham and adapted by Akiva Goldsman, this is a story of elemental emotional and legal issues splashed across a large canvas, and director Joel Schumacher has done a solid job of keeping the many components in focus and balance.
  86. Silent Night
    Silly as it might be, Silent Night gives audiences reason to get excited about the Hong Kong innovator once again, ranking as one of the few bloody Christmas counterprogrammers since “Die Hard” that feels worthy of repeat viewing down the road.
  87. Paranormal Activity 2
    Picture fares like most horror follow-ups, offering more of the same to somewhat diminished effect.
  88. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    The main problem with “Hong Kong Trilogy” is that it over-promises and under-delivers.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    2010
    In Peter Hyams’ hands [working from a novel by Arthur C. Clarke], the HAL mystery is the most satisfying substance of the film and handled the best. Unfortunately, it lies amid a hodge-podge of bits and pieces.
  90. The Dead Don't Die
    The Dead Don’t Die fancies itself a cutting-edge macabre comedy, but the truth is that it’s behind the curve of pop culture. That’s why it’s a disappointing trifle.
  91. Adopt a Highway
    All evidence here suggests that Marshall-Green needs a strong collaborator — or maybe just someone else’s screenplay — the next time he gets behind the camera.
  92. Shorts
    More zippy, diverting fun from Robert Rodriguez's family filmmaking factory.
  93. In Satmar Custody
    Potentially shocking expose is weakened by one-sided reportage that leaves too many questions unanswered.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Red Dawn
    Red Dawn charges off to an exciting start as a war picture and then gets all confused in moralistic handwriting, finally sinking in the sunset. Swayze, Howell and the other youngsters are all good in their parts.
    • Variety
  95. Music Within
    Helmed by Steve Sawalich, this real-life dramedy is anchored by Michael Sheen’s captivating performance as the severely handicapped, profoundly acerbic Art Honeyman.
  96. Creation Stories
    As directed by Nick Moran in obvious imitation of executive producer Danny Boyle’s most hyperbolic style, scripted by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, this apparently loose interpretation of the subject’s memoir becomes a hyperventilating “Behind the Music” caricature, all familiar flash and precious little substance.
  97. Sinister
    The scares are not just intense but unyielding in this compelling horror yarn from "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" director Scott Derrickson.
  98. The Tale of Despereaux
    This graphically well-rendered kidpic is less crass and mouthy than many recent feature-length toons, but also more sluggish and ungainly as it tries to approximate DiCamillo's singularly delicate tone.
  99. Violent Ends
    Writer-director John-Michael Powell maintains a likably low-key interest in the local flavor of his home state, but it’s small potatoes in terms of personality. His self-serious approach proves a terminal match for his crime yarn’s familiar, simplistic plotting.
  100. Alice in Wonderland
    For all its clever design, beguiling creatures and witty actors, the picture feels far more conventional than it should; it's a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney.
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