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. Shallow Hal
    Could use a little extra comic poundage. The Farrelly brothers' latest sees the team tapping a sweeter, milder vein of humor than their outrageous norm.
  2. Orgazmo
    Massively inventive and spiked with perversely wicked humor.
  3. Mojin: The Lost Legend
    Though the film lacks the spooky, macabre spirit expected of this subterranean subgenre, Mongolian-Chinese helmer Wuershan (“Painted Skin II: The Resurrection”) applies his outlandish visual panache to evoke an underground world of ethnic antiquity refreshingly distinct from traditional Han-Chinese culture.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Casino Royale
    A film of astounding sloppiness, an insult to the Bond name (most likely deliberate) and a dark spot on the resumes of all involved (surely unintentional).
  5. Gold
    As a lone drifter guarding a precious quarry in deadly desert conditions in a faintly futuristic nowhereland, [Efron's] good, as anyone’s who been paying attention should expect. Beyond that, it’s a somewhat arid exercise.
  6. The Longest Yard
    Sandler impressively assumes the Reynolds role here, with strong support by Reynolds himself and a slightly restrained but frequently hilarious Chris Rock.
  7. Alien Trespass
    Good silly fun, Alien Trespass is a dead-on spoof of cheapo '50s sci-fi programmers done with plenty of self-deprecating humor.
  8. One Day
    On a moment-by-moment basis, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess make this long-arc love story viable, sometimes even vital. But the structural conceit proves more reductive than expansive, the big picture too overdetermined to really sweep the viewer away.
  9. Back on the Strip
    Despite wall-to-wall narration by Haddish (at her most raunchy), the movie does a clumsy job of telling a not-very-complicated story. Then again, this lean team effort is Sanders’ directorial debut, and he gets the laughs.
  10. Writer of O
    Hodgepodge of archival, re-enactment and staged fictive elements.
  11. Gerontophilia
    Maybe if the actors had been coached to actually act, it would have come across better, but their painfully stilted delivery is leaden rather than campily artificial.
  12. Hungry Hearts
    It’s as if the director can’t decide what he wants: to chronicle the disintegration of a family, or to take a magnifying glass to a woman whose mania overwhelms all rational thought.
  13. The Secrets We Keep
    This “Death and the Maiden”-like suspense drama is neither fully convincing nor particularly original, its narrative running a course that feels somewhat predictable from the outset. But it’s still strong enough to be effective.
  14. Tolkien
    The film – stately, well-acted, and ultimately unsubstantial – dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration.
  15. The Rider Named Death
    Instead of using its hot-button issues as a present-day hook, sticks with a 19th century mindset which it accompanies with elegant turn-of-the-century decors.
  16. American Gun
    Lacks focus and momentum as it attempts to interweave diverse story strands into a cautionary tapestry.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wonderful World
    Joshua Goldin's directing debut has soulful qualities that have been compressed into a paint-by-numbers production.
  18. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    Sprinkles in charming moments but ultimately doesn't evoke enough wonderment to overcome its tongue-twisting title and completely win over adults along with kids.
  19. The Perfect Host
    Just when the picture seems to be settling into torture porn, it begins pulling a series of clever twists -- although they lose some punch when you realize the script depends on one whopping coincidence.
  20. Step Up
    Fresh cast, a formulaic but engaging storyline, and a smoking soundtrack from rap and hip-hop luminaries.
  21. Dirty Laundry
    Taking control of what would otherwise be a trite and preachy fable about the need for African American families to accept their gay brethren, Devine builds a jolly and touching character from the stock figure of a Georgia mom coming to terms with her disaffected gay son.
  22. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    This low-key and deeply felt indie is unsentimentally blunt while addressing the humiliating debilitations that often define geriatric life. At the same time, however, it scrupulously eschews excessive grimness and shameless heart-tugging, and elicits more than a few laughs in the bargain, while focusing more often on how the title characters deal with last chances and unfinished business.
  23. Penelope
    The whimsical ugly-duckling fable becomes more uneven as it proceeds, straining too hard to manufacture its quirky charms.
  24. Porto
    This narratively slender item is unapologetically a mood piece: a film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.
  25. The Twits
    There’s humor in every detail, much of it skewing to the sordid, if not downright scatological, end of the spectrum, from exploding buttocks to anthropomorphic hairballs.
  26. Admission
    The comedy feels forced as Fey works overtime to insert unnecessary zingers at the tail of every scene. If the cast weren’t so endearing, her actions could easily sour an audience on the whole experience, and Admission digs itself a hole only an ensemble this appealing can escape.
  27. Freud's Last Session
    So many movies are either mindless or completely disinterested with engaging the intellect of their audiences that Freud’s Last Session offers a welcome bit of brain stimulation — but does far less for the soul.
  28. Womb
    Its quietly unsettling storytelling, precision visuals and almost mythical isolated setting all feel Hungarian to the core.
  29. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    The problem for “As It Was” is that this modest turnaround in lifestyle and attitude comes a third of the way into the movie, leaving an hour still to come that will be devoted almost strictly to how well the comeback is going.
  30. 3 Needles
    3 Needles is a great discussion tool for World AIDS Awareness Day that never achieves coherent shape as a three-paneled drama.
  31. Paradise Road
    Though carefully rendered from a historical perspective, this powerful account of female friendship and bonding under the most cruel conditions lacks the narrative focus and dramatic shapeliness to generate emotional excitement.
  32. Particles of Truth
    A believable romantic comedy.
  33. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    As a rich, gum-chewing matron who tools around in her canary-yellow Rolls-Royce, Flanagan is the picture's real scene-stealer.
  34. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    “Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.
  35. King of Thieves
    As the film slackens its pace and shifts awkwardly from caper mode to sober moral deliberations, its one-note characters can’t quite carry it.
  36. Murder at 1600
    What makes the film involving and enjoyable in its first hour is a thick, multilayered plot, a rare sight in mainstream movies nowadays.
  37. Mooz-lum
    Evan Ross impresses with an implosive performance as Tariq Mahdi, a moody young African-American.
  38. Somewhere Slow
    This tonally all-over-the-place drama fails to convince.
  39. Patrick: Evil Awakens
    Rich in gothic trappings and sporting a terrific central performance by Sharni Vinson (“You’re Next”) as a nurse in Patrick’s sinister sights, the pic has some wobbly dialogue and doesn’t deliver full-blown terror, but should satisfy audiences hankering for old-school genre entertainment.
  40. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    “Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Airplane II: The Sequel
    It can’t be said that Airplane II is no better or worse than its predecessor. It is far worse, but might seem funnier had there been no original.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Doom Generation
    A nihilistic comedy about a trio of alienated youngsters, pic is bold not only in its art design, but also in its narrative and tone, a mixture of satire and horror with heavy dosage of steamy sex and macabre violence.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Film has a basic storyline, character elements and dialog for what might have been a superior drama and possibly a great western. But Andrew McLaglen's direction, seems to consist of splicing together cliches, static camera work and Central Casting of the bit parts.
  44. The Scary of Sixty-First
    A brash, gutsy, morbidly funny first feature from actor-filmmaker-podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, it runs on a premise that could have been written as a dare, or a prank.
  45. Jolt
    Once again displaying the kinetic grace, authoritative physicality and heavy-duty footwear that have made her a cult favorite for fans of the “Underworld” franchise, Beckinsale is fun to watch in both the real and fantasy fight sequences that take up much of the briskly paced Jolt.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Invisible Man Returns
    Story and script are workmanlike efforts, with Joe May’s direction holding a steady and suspenseful pace with few dull moments.
  47. The Call of the Wild
    For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.
  48. The FP
    This unabashedly derivative, vaguely post-apocalyptic riff on well-worn '80s-movie tropes plays its boilerplate premise with endearing earnestness, but runs thin in no time.
  49. Don't Worry Darling
    The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.
  50. Martian Child
    Knockout performances by John Cusack and child actor Bobby Coleman help legitimize a whimsical but sententiously moralizing script.
  51. Leap!
    An unabashed wish-fulfilment fantasy that sweetly checks off every conceivable follow-your-heart cliché.
  52. I Feel Pretty
    What sets I Feel Pretty apart is the inspired premise that Renee’s transformation takes place entirely in her head, while those around her are left befuddled by her sudden change of attitude — a concept that begs the question of why our society encourages women to second-guess their self-image in the first place.
  53. Yelling to the Sky
    Strong on texture but taxingly light on narrative.
  54. Morning
    An initially intriguing but ultimately exhausting tale of grieving parents left quite literally dazed and confused in the wake of their young son’s death.
  55. Detective Chinatown 2
    The sequel’s worst enemy is its lead actor Wang Baoqiang, who dials up his bumbling, bragging and vulgar persona Tang Ren to intolerable levels.
  56. Sacrifice
    There’s a virtuosity to Gavras’ filmmaking, which yields some surprising laughs and thrills along the way.
  57. The Mountain Between Us
    Script shortcomings aside, Winslet and Elba make a reasonably good couple.
  58. Blues Brothers 2000
    Dan Aykroyd and director John Landis take a bumpy trip down memory lane in "Blues Brothers 2000," a sluggishly paced, fitfully funny followup to their 1980 musical comedy extravaganza.
  59. The Great Raid
    This overlong march will bore all but the most nobly patriotic.
  60. Rememory
    The final effect is akin to that of a Hallmark card inscribed by Christopher Nolan, and it’s that earnest self-importance of tone that finally makes this light sci-fi effort a bit of a trudge, despite Dinklage’s committed and empathetic performance.
  61. Black Nativity
    Lemmons advances this story with straight-faced conviction, orchestrating narrative and spectacle with a grandiosity that proves easier to admire from a distance than it is to engage with onscreen.
  62. Night at the Museum
    This rambunctious, "Jumanji"-style extravaganza is a gallery of special effects in search of a story; rarely has so much production value yielded so little in terms of audience engagement.
  63. En kærlighedshistorie
    It often resembles John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence," but just as often devolves into a series of bravura acting exercises strung together by an increasingly sketchy narrative theme.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Back Roads
    Although both stars rise above script contrivances, they are somehow never an affecting romantic pair. All of their shared troubles would seem to make a great love story but they never share enough really intimate moments to carry it off.
  65. 17 Again
    Zac Efron's squeaky-clean tweener-bait profile is unlikely to be threatened by 17 Again, an energetic but earthbound comic fantasy that borrows a few moves, if little inspiration, from "Big" and "It's a Wonderful Life."
  66. Adam & Steve
    Gay Gotham farce written, directed and starring veteran actor Craig Chester ("Swoon," "Kiss Me Guido") delivers plenty of well-timed slapstick, a brace of oddball zanies and a couple of show-stopper musical numbers. Material is uneven, but rhythm and pacing keep action moving smartly.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    F/X2
    With all the ingenuity that went into toys and gadgetry in this five-years-removed sequel, it’s a shame no one bothered to hook a brain up to the plot.
    • 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.
  69. Rock Dog
    Rock Dog is cluttered with incompatible subplots that never quite seem to belong in the same film.
  70. First Kid
    The real strength of the Tim Kelleher script is its understanding that despite the two main characters’ considerable positive traits, they are misfits. Each appreciates the other for his qualities, not his station. The writer has effectively created an appealing fantasy and given it human dimension.
  71. The Thing About My Folks
    Good-natured but only memorable as a platform for the amusingly feisty Peter Falk, The Thing About My Folks plies a light approach to the problems grown children face when their parents appear on the verge of divorce.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Frances
    Rare to the memory is a film like Frances which runs 140 minutes and its star is on the screen 85% of the time in one intense scene after another. It’s quite an accomplishment for Jessica Lange and it’s too bad a better film didn’t come of it.
  73. The Last Mercenary
    You could call the film a slightly absurd corruption thriller, an action movie with not enough action, or a by-the-numbers father-son bonding movie. Yet here’s what’s weird about it. The Last Mercenary thinks it’s a comedy, but not because anything in it is actually funny.
  74. Semper Fi
    Though professionally smooth in execution, Semper Fi has the frustrating sum impact of a movie at fundamental conflict with itself.
  75. In the Shadow of the Moon
    The dedicated entertainment junkie now has more options than ever before. So if you’re wondering which logy, derivative, visually pedestrian piece of made-for-Netflix pulp you should avoid at all costs this week, it would be hard to top In the Shadow of the Moon.
  76. Happiness for Beginners
    Well-behaved to a fault, Happiness for Beginners is sweet but a little tentative.
  77. Riff Raff
    Its all-star cast performs admirably, in a film that takes its time to get going, reveals and confronts little once it does, and uses none of its story swerves to build on its dramatic themes, or its one-note humor.
  78. The Proposal
    The Proposal won't catch any bouquets for originality, but in terms of a bended-knee pitch for the affections of women -- including Ryan Reynolds’ boyish charms, a hip granny and even a beyond-adorable puppy -- this romantic comedy pretty much pulls out all the stops.
  79. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    A fine cast can only do so much with the script’s pileup of generational conflict and long-winded introspection, resulting in a willfully out-of-step picture.
  80. The Argument
    The Argument is amusing for a while, and some of the ensemble — Maggie Q and Coleman in particular — manage to access something both human and humorous in what might have seemed harsh in another actor’s hands. But silly as the filmmakers intend for this to be, there’s something unpleasant about the whole ordeal.
  81. Lords of Chaos
    Åkerlund’s music videos established him as a whiz-bang technician, a skill he only unleashes in two terrifying montages. Lords of Chaos proves that he can also get great performances out of a young cast, especially Kilmer’s otherworldly Dead.
  82. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Slam Dance
    Slam Dance is like junk food. It's brightly packaged, looks good and satisfies the hunger for entertainment, but it isn't terribly nourishing or well-made.
  84. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    Graced with some extra star wattage courtesy of Helen Mirren and Ed Harris, this diminishing-returns sequel sends Nicolas Cage on another quest to strike it rich, get young auds excited about history and solve puzzles that are generally less stimulating than yesterday's Sudoku.
  85. Blue Like Jazz
    Remains as tame in its presentation as its target audience would expect. Students drink beers on occasion, but no one is shown having sex, taking mind-altering substances or using language that would jeopardize a PG-13 rating. On the plus side, the film also abstains from any overt message-mongering.
  86. King Cobra
    King Cobra is all smut and no soul, a tacky, superficially titillating reunion between Franco and “I Am Michael” director Justin Kelly.
  87. Mary Magdalene
    Hushed, deliberate and realised with considerable care and beauty, the resulting film has its heart entirely in the right place; its pulse, unfortunately, is far harder to locate.
  88. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    You won’t feel cheated; at stray moments, you’ll feel the wonder. But for every high point, there’s a moment when the thrill threatens to leak away.
  89. Hard Ball
    There's no cork inside Hardball, but there's more than enough corn. Everything about the movie is geared for maximum uplifting and tear-jerking effect, and seems designed, in the end, to question the old saw that there's no crying in baseball.
  90. The Mummy Returns
    Virtually bursts with visual goodies, and writer-director Stephen Sommers scarcely allows the actors, or the audience, a moment to take a breath during the nonstop action of the final hour.
  91. xXx
    A brawny commercial attraction strategically tapping into the auds for extreme sports, spy pix, thrill rides, popcorn actioners and anyone looking to see Diesel kick butt, blow stuff up and/or take his shirt off.
  92. Kiss Me, Guido
    A bright, snappy culture-clash farce in the mode of "Desperately Seeking Susan" and its ilk, Kiss Me, Guido plays gay and Italian-American stereotypes against one another to good-natured, crowd-pleasing results.
  93. Shark Tale
    With the combination of mobster characters and heavily R&B, hip-hop and disco/soul tune orientation of the soundtrack, pic has a more streetwise feel than most animated fare, which is not to say that it has street smarts.
  94. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    A pedigree cast elevates old-fashioned material and lackluster screenwriting.
  95. To the Arctic
    Alternates between intimate wildlife saga and majestic views of the North Pole, offering strong visual compensations for its meandering structure, syrupy tone and excessive sampling of Paul McCartney's back catalog.
  96. Yogawoman
    Few could dispute the obvious physical and mental benefits derived from the practice of this ancient discipline. One could, however, wish that this endless encomium played less like a PowerPoint sales pitch, illustrated with clip-art imagery, scored with generic music and narrated in mellifluous tones by Annette Bening.
  97. The World Made Straight
    This evenly paced drama holds interest with its uneasy character dynamics, interesting milieu and effective performances, though a story so frequently on the verge of violence ought to build more tension than Burris manages.
  98. Down Low
    Hopelessly shallow Down Low is still light-years ahead of mainstream movies (including last year’s “Bros”) as debuting feature director Rightor Doyle delivers what an entire contingent of queer audiences have been asking for all their lives: namely, a comedy that’s as raunchy and inappropriate as the jokes they make among themselves.
  99. Morgan
    It’s little more than a schlock replay of “Ex Machina.” It toys around with some of the same situations, but it doesn’t know where to take them. Instead of developing its themes, it uses them as grist for an overload of “commercial” action.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hannah Montana: The Movie
    A goofily endearing romp that might even lasso a few new fans.
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