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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  1. Another End
    Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.
  2. Gridiron Gang
    A crowd-pleasing, uplifting, feel-good and not-so-rare hybrid -- the sports/prison movie -- in which Los Angeles gangbangers are taught the virtues of trading violence on the streets for violence on the field.
  3. Pusher (2012)
    What's missing cast-wise is an appealing personality in the sidekick role, and Webb is no match for Mads Mikkelsen.
  4. Con Air
    Apart from not knowing to quit while it's ahead, Con Air provides quite an exciting flight prior to its crash and burn.
  5. The Machine
    Closer to “Her” in its musing on human/machine connectivity, while also incorporating the dystopian and action-thriller aspects of “Blade Runner” and its ilk, albeit on a much smaller scale, the pic will divide fantasy fans, some of whom will give it props for breaking somewhat from genre formula, while others will be disappointed by the largely budgetary limits of its imagination.
  6. The Lodgers
    David Turpin’s screenplay is adequate but slender, with rather too few complications and a foundational mythology that, when finally revealed, proves pretty skimpy itself. That doesn’t trouble O’Malley. He brings so much gloomy, lustrous visual enchantment to the tale that it feels quite bewitching while you’re watching it.
  7. Boulevard
    This is one of the kindest characters Williams has ever played, which makes his self-imposed turmoil — the consequence of not wanting to hurt anyone, least of all his wife — all the more tragic.
  8. The Lake House
    Never quite sure what it wants to be -- a magical-mysterious love story, a psychodrama, a sprawling family saga, or an uneasy combination of these.
  9. Wind Chill
    This intermittently effective thriller serves as a rickety vehicle for its two perfectly cast leads, working better as a slow-thawing two-hander than as a chilly ghost story.
  10. Last Stop for Paul
    There's no real subterfuge going on, simply an ingenious way of constructing a good film out of virtually nothing.
  11. Deadfall
    A highly satisfying Western-cum-noir in the old tradition, Deadfall is alive in ways that are all too rare among American movies.
  12. The Dark
    In trying to succeed as something both metaphorical and very literal-minded, the movie ends up being neither one nor the other — not psychologically deep enough to succeed as pure drama, and too earnest to offer the usual rewards of a genre film.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clara's Heart
    Buoyed by a beautifully measured star turn by Whoopi Goldberg and a smashing screen debut for young Neil Patrick Harris, Clara's Dream is a powerful, unabashedly sentimental drama.
  14. Trap
    Asking an audience to go with something this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.
  15. Death on the Nile
    It’s a moderately diverting dessert that carries you right along. It never transcends the feeling that you’re seeing a relic injected with life serum, but that, in a way, is part of its minor-league charm.
  16. Bean
    Atkinson, who is in almost every scene, boasts a full-on comic personality that on the cinema screen is a bit daunting at times, and it's an open question as to whether the Carrey crowd will go for this seriously eccentric Brit.
  17. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Saddled with a sentimentally "sincere" subject and lacking the stylistic and humorous cachet of the recent computer-animated smashes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
    Has a certain raw charm but does not quite achieve the needed cohesion and directorial finesse it calls for. (Review of original release)
  19. Beefcake
    As a mix of nonfiction and wafer-thin drama, however, it's a genial mess in which both elements emerge undercooked
  20. Journey to the Shore
    Fans of Kurosawa’s earlier psycho-thrillers may desire more eeriness and visual panache, but those who’ve accepted the helmer’s conscious change of tune and pace should be gently touched.
  21. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    Unfortunately, the piece ends up laid low by a climax that peters out by taking itself too seriously, but the film’s totality is still made worthwhile by its central performances.
  22. Skyfire
    This thrill-packed tale about an angry volcano wreaking havoc on thinly written characters at a luxury island resort plays like a souped-up and much better remake of Irwin Allen’s 1980 turkey “When Time Ran Out.”
  23. Eternals
    Zhao’s sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She’s a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch.
  24. 47 Meters Down
    Director Johannes Roberts’ mostly underwater thriller is a compact and sturdily crafted B-movie that generates enough scares and suspense to qualify as — well, maybe not a pleasant surprise, but a reasonably entertaining one.
  25. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    This is gripping stuff, to be sure, yet the movie, volatile as it is, lacks a full dramatic center and the momentum that would flow out of it.
  26. The Next Three Days
    Paul Haggis' middling fourth feature evinces a sometimes pulse-quickening fascination with procedural details, and climaxes with a good dose of swift, suspenseful filmmaking. But what was briskly diverting in the original has been rather laboriously overworked.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    HouseSitter
    Davis Steve Martin Universal's HouseSitter, a tediously unfunny screwball comedy, is a career misstep for both Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. Hawn is grating as the kind of giggly flake she played two decades ago on "Laugh-In," and Martin is more obnoxious than endearing as the New England architect whose life she invades. This looks like a B.O. dud.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Accidental Tourist
    Slow, sonorous and largely satisfying.
  29. The Weird World of Blowfly
    Hanging out with a 1970s cult figure of raunchy R&B "party records" is less fun than one would expect in The Weird World of Blowfly.
  30. G20
    Action does not come naturally to the “Under the Same Moon” director, though the script poses an even bigger problem in G20, a movie whose short title manages to reflect both its high concept and shockingly low intelligence level.
  31. Maggie
    Though Henry Hobson’s hugely promising debut feature is generating buzz from the casting of a fine, low-key Arnold Schwarzenegger as the anguished father of a semi-zombified teen, it’s Abigail Breslin’s gutsy, nuanced turn as the reluctantly undead title character — at once a heroine to be protected and a mutant threat to be destroyed — that makes the film unique within its grisly canon.
  32. VHYes
    The best thing the film has going for it is editor Avner Shiloah’s scrambled channel-surfing assembly, which seldom sticks with any bit long enough for it to get too stale. Still, VHYes feels overextended even at the 66 slim minutes it takes to reach the final credits.
  33. Bomb the System
    A richly textured drama with an angry poetic edge that gets inside the obsessive subculture of New York graffiti artists, Bomb the System signals the arrival of a talented filmmaker in NYU film graduate Adam Bhala Lough.
  34. London Boulevard
    The result is a superficially handsome crime thriller that doesn't tick, although it's got a pretty, jeweled face, and some clever scripting by William Monahan (scribe of "The Departed"), making his directorial debut here.
  35. Bobbi Jene
    For a film with such a narrow scope, this one oddly refuses to ask some of the basic questions that might have enriched our understanding.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cannery Row
    This long-in-the-works adaptation of John Steinbeck's waterfront tomes [Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday] displays more appreciation for the values inherent in the material than it does ability to breathe life into it.
  37. The Hills Have Eyes
    Besides proving to be a faithful mimic of Craven's filmmaking, Aja pours on the gore. But where Aja's version really leaps beyond Craven's both atmospherically and on the violence scale is in the second hour.
  38. Queen Bees
    A lightweight but likable comedy.
  39. Murder on the Orient Express
    Though he succeeds in creating the most memorable incarnation of Poirot ever seen on-screen (upstaging even Johnny Depp’s competing cameo), the movie is a failure overall, juggling too many characters to keep straight, and botching the last act so badly that those who go in blind may well walk out not having understood its infamous twist ending.
  40. Magnus
    Magnus, it turns out, is the anti-Bobby: a fascinatingly “normalized” prodigy.
  41. DamNation
    The film’s haphazard focus muddies the waters without doing anything to clarify the overall stakes. Fortunately, the continual visual splendors make a rather striking argument of their own.
  42. Black Tea
    The film aims for woozy sensualism but falls way short on the ambient richness and X-factor chemistry required to sell such an essentially confected exercise.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost
    An odd creation - at times nearly smothering in arty somberness, at others veering into good, wacky fun.
  44. Run Rabbit Run
    What it lacks in thematic newness, Run Rabbit Run makes up for in the sophistication of its moment-to-moment scarifying and its performances from Sarah Snook and outstanding newcomer Lily LaTorre.
  45. Eleanor the Great
    Johansson, however, while she does a perfectly efficient job of directing, doesn’t hone the tone of her scenes. She keeps the whole thing earnest and rather neutral in a plot-driven way, with Squibb as her wild card.
  46. [Rec] 2
    A sequel to the Spanish cult hit that offers an explanation for something that was far more effective when left largely unexplained.
  47. Putin's Kiss
    The picture still tells a riveting story about contempo Russia's darkest side.
  48. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is at once too much and yet somehow not enough. On the one hand, it’s exciting to see the always envelope-pushing Lee working without a studio- or distributor-imposed safety net... But while the film never lacks for ambition, it fails to satisfy emotionally or intellectually in the ways Lee intends.
  49. House of Fools
    Has the comically grotesque appeal of a Fellini film and could reach out to auds in specialized release. It lacks the originality and invention to go much beyond that.
  50. Ghost River
    Huppert's mastery aside, this is a European Art Film writ large, complete with classical music, gorgeously filmed landscapes, expository voiceovers, poetic transitions and only a ghost's footprint of a story.
  51. Possession
    LaBute has had middling success at best, having come up with a passably engaging time-jumping romantic melodrama that at least grapples seriously with one of the novel's most potent themes.
  52. Center Stage
    Unfortunately, Center Stage is directed and shot (by Geoffrey Simpson) in a way that doesn't let the audience feel the exhilarating pull of the dance world.
  53. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
    While plot mechanics aren't wildly imaginative, pic nonetheless delivers requisite jolts in an above-average package.
  54. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    A polished genre piece with superior fright elements.
  55. Serendipity
    Will serve as an excellent gauge of any viewer's tolerance level for schmaltzy contrivance and manipulation.
  56. Bring It On
    Succeeds in displaying the physical drive and demands of cheerleading.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Milarepa
    Buddhist legend brings warnings of bad karma in Milarepa, a worthy and engaging period pic from Bhutan.
  58. Loot
    Marder, surely, was looking for a big bonanza at the end of Loot, but suspense and catharsis prove as elusive as two old men's memories.
  59. Charlie's Angels
    The movie is relentless, it’s pulpy and exciting, it’s unabashedly derivative, and at an hour and 58 minutes it’s a little too much of a rousingly of-the-moment feministic but still rather standard-issue thing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goin' South
    Picture starts off promisingly enough with Nicholson as a hapless outlaw who makes it across the border but the posse cheats and comes across after him causing his horse to faint. But it never jells, as Nicholson continues to sputter and chomp, acting more like her grandfather than a handsome roue out to overcome her virginity.
  61. First Date
    More concerned with paying homage to ’90s-era Quentin Tarantino than telling a contemporary coming-of-age tale with believable stakes, co-helmers Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s debut feature First Date saddles a young couple not with a romantic night out, but with a haphazard all-nighter crime-comedy that’s mostly unfunny and free of convincing suspense.
  62. The Amateur
    It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in The Amateur seems…arbitrary.
  63. Greed
    The emperor is naked, Greed wants us to realize, but unless we agree to radically rethink our own wardrobes, does it make any difference?
  64. SuperFly
    Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that’s less sensually stylish than you’d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing.
  65. Gracie
    Modestly engaging but thoroughly predictable.
  66. Windfall
    Blending the oddball sensibility of McDowell and regular co-writer Justin Lader with the nastier genre smarts of “Se7en” scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, this low-key Netflix holds to its intriguing promise for a crisp 90 minutes, though even its climax is muted by design.
  67. Dark Water
    Well-crafted but thoroughly unsuspenseful.
  68. Mars Attacks!
    The picture is lacking in the uproarious humor that might well have ensued from the material, which instead inspires occasional laughs but, much more often, bemused fascination and wonderment at the bizarre imaginations and impressive skill of the filmmakers.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Punchline
    It’s an uneven melodrama where Tom Hanks exhibits flashes of brilliance as a caustically tongued stand-up comic in a strange, undefinable romance with protege Sally Field.
  70. The Fifth Element
    Ultimately a mess of diverse ingredients that sorely could have used a rigorous screening process to eliminate all the chaff.
  71. Anyone But You
    Anyone But You is a rom-com for the age of antipathy. It is, in many ways, as prefab as a lot of the rom-coms of the ’90s and aughts, but there’s something zesty and bracing about how it channels the anti-romanticism of the Tinder-meets-MeToo generation.
  72. Ghost in the Shell
    Spectacularly honoring the spirit and aesthetic of Mamoru Oshii’s beloved animated adaptations without resorting wholly to slavish cosplay, this is smart, hard-lacquered entertainment that may just trump the original films for galloping storytelling momentum and sheer, coruscating visual excitement — even if a measure of their eerie, melancholic spirit hasn’t quite carried over to the immaculate new carapace.
  73. The Man of My Life
    A drama that steadily succumbs to self-conscious artiness, drunk on its own sense of contrived poetry and cloudy existential reflection.
  74. The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek
    With its convincingly antique-looking artifacts and hilarious “re-creations,” the March 1 release should please audiences searching for an intelligent, satiric spin on historical hindsight.
  75. Radiance
    The film’s thematic preoccupation with the power of images — as perceived through any of the senses — is a worthy and thoughtful one. Yet the execution lacks the visual and emotional rigor of Kawase’s most imposing films, instead swaddling viewers in buttery lighting and blunt, earnest platitudes.
  76. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    “Toothless” probably isn’t the first word Magic Mike fans want to associate with Channing Tatum’s aging exotic dancer series, but there’s no denying the female-targeting franchise has dulled its bite over the past decade.
  77. Detachment
    Scripter Lund, himself an ex-teacher, delivers a story that lacks nuance, and mixes badly with Kaye's impatient edits, Dutch angles and extreme close-ups.
  78. Running with Scissors
    Writer-director Ryan Murphy strives mightily to capture the bracing hilarity, pathos and surreal incident of Burroughs' bestselling memoir, but this rudderless adaptation never gets a firm grip on the author's deadpan tone or episodic narrative style.
  79. Central Intelligence
    It delivers — on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. It’s an action-comedy utensil, like “Rush Hour” crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    School Daze
    As a director, Lee fails to strike the right note between realism and fantasy, and the heavy subject matter just falls with a thud. As an actor, however, Lee does a good job creating a sort of black babe in the woods.
  81. Amelia's Children
    A climactic tilt into a fight for survival remains sharply rendered by Abrantes, but it unfolds towards a forecast destination. The film’s evocative edge is gone.
  82. Silent Night
    Distracted for long stretches with ribbons and bows, “Silent Night” never uncovers its harshest possibilities: It’s sober and well-behaved even when the party falls to pieces.
  83. Last Holiday
    Most successful when it is engaging, not uproarious. Glossy amusement is an updated remake of a well-regarded 1950 Brit comedy-drama starring Alec Guinness, improbably retrofitted as a star vehicle for Queen Latifah.
  84. Insidious
    A possession thriller less terrifying than fun.
  85. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.
  86. 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.
  87. Wasteland
    It’s an overlong Northern British heist caper with a wildly uneven tone and a needlessly scrambled narrative, but it suggests a higher intelligence beneath, waiting to flower down the road.
  88. Alone in Berlin
    Tastefully lit and art-directed throughout, with a somberly mellifluous Alexandre Desplat score to ease it along, this fact-based drama finally cushions its harshest emotional blows, though Brendan Gleeson’s deeply sad, stoic dignity in the lead cuts through some of the padding.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Grease 2
    Where this film has a decided edge on its predecessor is in the staging and cutting of the musical sequences. Choreographer and director Patricia Birch has come up with some unusual settings (a bowling alley, a bomb shelter) for some of the scenes, and employs some sharp montage to give most of the songs and dances a fair amount of punch.
  90. Chasing Madoff
    Chasing Madoff is a useful reminder that all is far from well with our financial institutions, which continue to lobby for less regulation rather than more. But the human element of the film is so weirdly distracting it often deflects from its primary target.
  91. The Iron Lady
    Fuzzy-headed biopic, which glosses over the former British prime minister's politics in favor of a glib, breakneck whirl around her career and marriage.
  92. Once in the Life
    A film that ultimately feels stagebound and excessively talky, but which showcases an exceptional performance.
  93. The Princess Diaries
    Exudes a pre-fab quality.
  94. Turkey Bowl
    This ongoing improvisation, along with the completed passes and resulting chest-bumping celebrations or recriminations, serves to define these otherwise "ordinary" ciphers and lend shape and momentum to an otherwise plotless movie.
  95. Madame Bovary
    Measured and absorbing rather than deeply compelling or vital, this latest adaptation of a rarely well-filmed novel makes a strong effort to capture the stiflingly provincial world that Flaubert was able to describe in such precise, painstaking detail on the page.
  96. Get Santa
    Midway through, the plot gets rather bogged down, unfolding on what seems like one of the longest December days for daylight hours ever witnessed in the Northern Hemisphere. However, Broadbent keeps the smiles coming in a wonderfully committed turn as the incarcerated toymaker.
  97. How He Fell in Love
    Mature and moving in its navigation of convoluted, conflicting desires, it’s an indie as assured in its silences as it is in its speeches.
  98. An Ordinary Man
    An incredibly precise actor who understands exactly how to play to the camera, conveying volumes via even the slightest microexpressions, Kingsley navigates the tricky mix of humor, horror, and deep-seated regret that make this man, if not exactly ordinary, then relatable, at least.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sudden Impact
    A brutally hard-hitting policier which casts Clint Eastwood as audiences like to see him, as the toughest guy in town.
  100. Materna
    The film is formally beautiful almost to a fault, giving it a schematic quality that’s at odds with its roiling emotions.
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