Variety's Scores

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For 17,807 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: 9,148 out of 17807
  2. Mixed: 7,022 out of 17807
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17807
17807 movie reviews
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  1. Coneheads
    A sweet, funny anarchic pastiche that should find broad based popularity. Its sly combination of the outrageous and the mundane is a surprisingly appealing screen entertainment that transcends the one-joke territory it inhabited on television.
  2. Richie Rich
    Decently crafted but oddly charmless.
  3. Blush
    Admirably acted and powered by a loopy internal rhythm, the film nonetheless wears out its welcome long before it’s done inflicting indignities on its heroine, arriving at its main point early and then repeating it again and again.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fort Apache the Bronx
    Driving relentlessly to make points that are almost pointless, Fort Apache The Bronx is a very patchy picture, strong on dialog and acting and exceedingly weak on story.
  5. Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock & Roll
    While the film may feel at times like it was made under the auspices of an Asbury Park tourism board, it’s at least a theoretical tourism board that has a good awareness that a dystopia doesn’t shift back to utopia overnight, or even over a neat 50 years.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brigadoon
    In transferring Brigadoon, a click as a [1947] Broadway musical play, to the screen, Metro has medium success. It's a fairly entertaining tunefilm of mixed appeal.
  7. American Reunion
    While it's poignant seeing the whole gang again, the tired gross-out antics and limp romantic reprisals keep this hapless if heartfelt effort from qualifying as a decent comedy, let alone a generational classic.
  8. Krampus
    Krampus isn’t especially scary, but it generates goodwill nonetheless for treating its home-invasion-for-the-holidays setup with an appreciably straight face.
  9. Desert Dancer
    Desert Dancer traffics in the kind of spirited rebel-youth archetypes who’ve been endemic to dance movies for decades.
  10. The Best Offer
    Aiming for a Hitchcockian take on an eccentric auctioneer (well-handled by Geoffrey Rush) who becomes enamored of an heiress with severe agoraphobia, the pic ends up more in Dan Brown territory, with over-obvious setups and phony insight into the art establishment.
  11. The Sentinel
    A half-hearted exercise in political paranoia, The Sentinel unravels its wrong-man scenario with business-like efficiency and an impressively jittery visual scheme, but falls far short of providing visceral or emotional thrills.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Money Pit
    The Money Pit is simply the pits. There is really very little else to be said about this gruesomely unfunny comedy. Unofficial remake of the 1948 Cary Grant-Myrna Loy starrer Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House begins unpromisingly and slides irrevocably downward from there.
    • Variety
  13. Your Place or Mine
    Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction.
  14. The Gray Man
    What makes The Gray Man exciting — and let’s not beat around the bush: This is the most exciting original action property Netflix has delivered since “Bright” — are the shades the ensemble bring to their characters and the little ways in which the Russos come through where those other films fell short.
  15. New York, I Love You
    The results are, well, formulaic, hobbled by weak dialogue and absent any sense of texture.
  16. Big Sur
    Michael Polish’s Big Sur offers an elegantly muted take on the midlife ennui of Kerouac’s autobiographical 1962 novel.
  17. Apartment 7A
    The movie is largely entertaining, despite being pulled constantly in two directions: as a predecessor to an iconic work and as a distinct beast, with its own gripes against patriarchal norms.
  18. Porno
    Unfortunately, Porno gets more uneven as it goes on, with a somewhat slack midsection and a mix of earnestness, broad comedy, titillation, and moralizing that neither fully gels, nor makes something unpredictably wild out of those clashing elements.
  19. People Like Us
    If they never fully sell the situation, the actors nonetheless deliver strong, emotionally accessible work.
  20. Texas Killing Fields
    Script by former DEA officer Don Ferrarone isn't that bad in itself, but matters aren't helped by the mumbled performances and poor sound, which make it hard to hear what anyone's saying, while sloppy editing wreaks havoc on the story.
  21. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    Feels as schizophrenic as its eponymous heroine.
  22. Jane Got a Gun
    A solidly made and conventionally satisfying Western.
  23. Shoot 'Em Up
    Good taste is the first fatality in this gonzo thrill-seeker, sure to offend mainstream dispositions, yet too stylistically audacious to dismiss outright.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Marked for Death
    This dim-witted revenge yarn is the simplest of showcases for Steven Seagal - an extremely compelling action presence with his brutal martial arts fighting style, imposing size and nasty demeanor.
  25. Broken City
    Competent but juiceless New York melodrama, an unpersuasive marriage of head-slamming action and middling civic intrigue that treats issues like gay rights and public housing as red herrings rather than actual talking points.
  26. The Miracle Club
    The movie’s nothing special, but it’s worth checking out just for the cast.
  27. The Business of Fancydancing
    Stalled character development in the second half of the pic reduces the impact of the whole.
  28. Big Bad Love
    A flawed and overlong but ultimately affecting account of one man's struggle to regain control of his life.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Good Boy!
    Passable kiddy fare that, although it strenuously underscores its message of friendship and loyalty, doesn't revitalize the genre.
  30. The Hidden Half
    The confused script makes this a tough film for audiences to dig into.
  31. The Way of the Gun
    Each of the talented thesps has some good moments, but, ultimately, none can rise above the limitations of the material and filmmaking.
  32. The Grudge
    Viewers of this Sam Raimi-produced, sub-"Amityville" scarefest are likely to hold the real grudge.
  33. Benji: Off the Leash!
    A mildly pleasant, aggressively retro kidpic that should please undemanding moppets without unduly boring their parents.
  34. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    While not as subversive as its predecessor, it delivers on the promise of a smart and salient sequel with bolder action, bigger stakes, and deeper resonance for all ages.
  35. Terminator Salvation
    Darker, grimmer and more stylistically single-minded than its two relatively giddy predecessors, Terminator Salvation boasts the kind of singular vision that distinguished the James Cameron original, the full-throttle kinetics of "Speed" and an old-fashioned regard for human (and humanoid) heroics.
  36. The Mummy
    Universal’s attempt to find gold by bringing to new life one of the mustier items in its vaults is pure hokum and scarcely of the first order.
  37. Darlin'
    This first feature from “Walking Dead” thesp-turned-writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh (who played the feral captive in “The Woman”) proves an increasingly wobbly mix of comedy, horror and social critique, its heavy-handed indictment of stereotypical religious hypocrisy finally dragging the enterprise into caricature.
  38. Bohemian Rhapsody
    The movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them.
  39. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Now, the action takes to the sea, where pirates, original songs and a minx-like Jennifer Lopez character make for harmless diversion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gladiator
    Marshall, cast as the new kid in school, is sullen and far too low key through much of the picture. Director Rowdy He§rrington, who poured on the trash in Road House, aims for a grittier feel this time, with dull results.
  41. Millers in Marriage
    The film dips into the melodramatic as it inches closer to the end and choices have to be made, but if its players are revealed to be starring in a movie, they are also shown to be movie stars, making relatively mundane miseries well worth watching.
  42. Hancock
    The effects are snazzy, even if they pass by quite quickly, and there's enough going on to keep audiences watching, if not entirely happy. Smith, Theron and Bateman capably handle the main roles, but such is the skimpiness of the scenario that no further characters make any impact.
  43. Mary Shelley
    Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.
  44. The Favor
    A pair of beautifully mismatched lead performances elevate a predictable drama to unexpected resonance in The Favor.
  45. Don 2
    Though the picture is respectful of the heist-film template -- the gathering of the crew, the readying of props, the planned circumvention of all obstacles -- its main imperative consists of placing Kahn in impossible situations and watching him trick or strongarm his way out.
  46. Lila Lila
    Alain Gsponer’s well-crafted romantic comedy, glides along on the sheer power of rising German star Daniel Bruhl’s boyish charm.
  47. Burt's Buzz
    [A] thin but engaging portrait.
  48. Maya the Bee Movie
    All told, in giving parents nothing to object to, director Alexs Stadermann (who got his start making straight-to-video sequels for Disney) has also given them little to get excited about, apart from the idea of sharing Maya with another generation of preschoolers.
  49. Cleaner
    Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.
  50. Acts Of Vengeance
    This slick-enough mediocrity will pass the time tolerably for less discriminating genre fans. But it’s a little sad to see Antonio Banderas reduced to a B movie with grade-C material.
  51. Highwaymen
    Lean, mean and stripped for speed, Highwaymen fires on all cylinders as an edgy and unnerving road-kill thriller.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bloodbrothers
    Bloodbrothers is an ambitious, if uneven probe into the disintegration of an Italian-American family [from the novel by Richard Price]. Under Robert Mulligan's forceful direction, sharply-drawn characters clash, scream and argue, but fail to resolve any of their or the film's conflicts.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    House Calls
    Despite some horsepower casting, House Calls is overall a silly and uneven comedy about doctors which wants to be as macabre as, say, Hospital, and at the same time as innocuous as a TV sitcom. It manages to be neither.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
    Voyage is a crescendo of mounting jeopardy, an effervescent adventure in an anything-but-Pacific Ocean.
  55. Mack & Rita
    The film does, at minimum, convince us that most people would want to transform into Keaton if given the opportunity.
  56. Callas Forever
    Main body of the movie is weighed down by flat, expository dialogue and a lot of pedestrian filming. However, Zeffirelli's shooting of the "Carmen" sequences, which make up a sizable chunk of the film and are far and away the pic's most exhilarating sections, are graceful and fluid.
  57. Antichrist
    Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.
  58. La Rafle (The Round Up)
    Turning one of the darkest moments in modern French history into syrupy historical drama, writer-director Rose Bosch's The Round Up is a polished, pathos-driven re-creation of the Vichy regime's mass imprisonment and disposal of 13,000 Parisian Jews in summer 1942.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eyes of Laura Mars
    Eyes of Laura Mars is a very stylish thriller [from a story by John Carpenter] in search of a better ending.
  60. Bullet Train
    Bullet Train feels like it comes from the same brain as “Snatch,” wearing its pop style on its sleeve — a “Kill Bill”-like mix of martial arts, manga and gabby hitman movie influences, minus the vision or wit that implies.
  61. Four Brothers
    With equal measures of rock-the-house vigor and in-your-face attitude, Four Brothers proves usually potent and consistently enjoyable as an old school approach to what might best be described as the urban-Western genre of slam-bang, balls-out action-revenger.
  62. Y2K
    It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.
  63. Sleuth
    The results will be received with a large, loud yawn by all but the most loyal fans of Pinter and hard-working co-stars Michael Caine and Jude Law.
  64. Daniela Forever
    Heady almost to a fault, Daniela Forever is all concept, all the time. Vigalondo’s screenplay is much too schematic and analytical for its own good.
  65. Amsterdam
    The result has all the red flags of a flop, but takes a strong enough anti-establishment stand — and does so with wit and originality — to earn a cult following. There’s too much ambition here to write the movie off, even if Amsterdam, like the history it depicts, winds up taking years to be rediscovered and understood.
  66. Inventing the Abbotts
    An emotionally powerful but extremely old-fashioned coming-of-age saga.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ricochet
    Screenplay [from a story by Fred Dekker and Menno Meyjes] offers unusually good dialog for the smooth-talking Washington and a number of scenes to savor. Pic threatens to become truly absorbing as Lithgow’s brilliant revenge scheme unfolds, but Ricochet soon abandons cleverness in favor of spectacle.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mars Needs Moms
    A modestly enjoyable performance-capture creation bearing the unmistakable imprint of producer Robert Zemeckis.
  69. Django
    The film — while not an especially compelling or well-told biopic unto itself — shines much-needed attention on the plight of the Roma people at the hands of German (and French) officials.
  70. Flannel Pajamas
    Visually, the film is without flair or ambition, conveying no sense of atmosphere or mood. But the performances put it over.
  71. Frankenstein's Army
    Pic’s monotone edges towards monotony by the end of the third act, but as no-budget calling-card features go, Frankenstein’s Army remains a grisly cut above.
  72. Kalifornia
    Though somewhat overplayed and coy about its destination, the film packs a helluva wallop.
  73. Downhill
    The story worked brilliantly before. In Downhill, it works…well enough. The new movie is a teasing trifle with something real on its mind.
  74. The Man Who Copied
    Intermittently amusing.
  75. Harrison's Flowers
    Provides powerful drama thanks to its trenchant core story and harrowing re-creation of the brutal chaos of war.
  76. China: The Panda Adventure
    This wobbly docu-drama ends up being caught in between the impulse to make theatrical a true story and the usual Imax mission of imparting information about the natural world in an entertaining way for families.
  77. Harvard Man
    Wildly uneven yet perversely coherent ode to the lure of sexual and chemical experimentation, the precariousness of sanity and the sheer suggestible power of paranoia.
  78. Bedazzled
    The 2000 version is louder, broader and much, much bigger.
  79. Words and Pictures
    Both the words and the pictures are surprisingly flaccid, largely due to Gerald DiPego’s literate but hopelessly contrived screenplay and direction that lacks Schepisi’s usual snap.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poltergeist II: The Other Side
    This time around, co-scripters Mark Victor and Michael Grais (who wrote the first Poltergeist with Steven Spielberg) have the focus of evil in human form, in the perfectly cast, since deceased, Julian Beck.
  81. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
    Far from the definitive version of the tale, this lavish but overwrought melodrama is in many ways less compelling than even a recent made-for-cable movie and a 1973 miniseries starring Michael Sarrazin that was less faithful to the source material.
  82. Mobile Homes
    This is a dour and deeply unpleasant film that wears its gritty realism as a badge of honor, while failing to recognize the motivations that explain such behavior in reality, which makes him neither an attentive journalist nor a particularly good storyteller (at least not yet).
  83. The Cellar
    Writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s latest lacks the thick atmospherics that might have punched across a sketchy screenplay, which falls short in expanding the premise of his 2004 short “The Ten Steps.”
  84. Adult Life Skills
    For the most part, the film is similarly content to repeat the past, all the way through to its predictable liberating-feel-good wrap-up.
  85. The Catcher Was a Spy
    There’s a curious lack of credibility and urgency in this big-screen adaptation, the kind of respectable near-miss that can happen when worthy talent apply themselves to a project they’re just not ideally suited for.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Vanishing
    Some last-reel thrills and cathartic violence provide commercial oomph to the otherwise tedious thriller The Vanishing. This is one remake that sacrifices much of what made the original work so well.
  87. Little
    Consistently funny if all-around a bit too familiar.
  88. The Whore's Son
    Cool, stylized lensing by onetime Fassbinder d.p. Jurgen Jurges lifts The Whore's Son above simple meller status, but uneven character development mars this otherwise commendable feature debut by Michael Sturminger.
  89. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2
    Doubling down on the first chapter’s intermittent triumphs but also on its grievous structural issues, it is an exercise in contradictions: incident-packed yet oddly sedate; replete with characters new and returning, yet largely lacking in compelling characterization; and, running to over three hours, simply too long a film to be so jarringly abrupt.
  90. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    A costumer that's well named for being pleasant and conventional but little more.
  91. Tristan and Isolde
    This understated period drama may lack sufficient star power and emotional wallop to score breakthrough success with mainstream auds during its domestic theatrical run, but pic could find a warmer response in the same international markets where "Kingdom of Heaven" redeemed itself last year.
  92. V/H/S/2
    This one is shorter and has fewer segments, but also earns a much higher batting average. In fact, there’s nary a dud among the four main tales (not including the titled bookends), which each whip elements of terror, macabre humor and the fantastical into a giddy frenzy.
  93. The Wannabe
    Since Thomas’ character is incapable of change or variation, and the film’s only engaging supporting players occupy a small fraction of the running time, it falls squarely upon Arquette to carry the film.
  94. Spirit Untamed
    Very little of Spirit Untamed lives up to what the studio is selling.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Texasville
    Peter Bogdanovich's sequel to The Last Picture Show is long on folksy humor and short on plot. In adapting Larry McMurtry's 1987 follow-up novel (predecessor was penned in 1965, filmed in 1971), Bogdanovich uses an impending county centennial celebration as the weak spine for this slice of small-town Texas life.
  96. The Last Shaman
    At once superficial and overblown, this documentary also often feels downright phony.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Made in America
    Made in America has the distinction of being better than the last movie involving a sperm bank, Frozen Assets, though at times the humor - overplayed to nearly shrill levels - seems to come from the same test tube.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lord of the Flies
    Director Harry Hook’s literal, unimaginative visual approach makes the tale seem mundane and tedious.
  99. Insidious: The Last Key
    Despite the indomitable Shaye’s best efforts, however, new director Adam Robitel is rarely successful in shaking the cobwebs off this increasingly creaky franchise: The Last Key is wildly uneven, confused and confusing, and it appears to leave the “Insidious” saga written into a corner yet again.
  100. Formula 17
    While it has about as much depth and nuance as the bubblegum Sino-pop tunes that pepper its soundtrack, Formula 17 is a fresh, sweet-natured affair with an attractive young cast that should play to the gay-teen niche.
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