Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Swing Vote
    Picture's comic smarts and affecting daddy-daughter drama provide a sturdy platform for its heartfelt advocacy of informed voting and responsible citizenship.
  2. Choke
    Palahniuk's antic absurdism is duly present, but the hurtling pace and barely-underlying nihilism that transferred to screen so vividly in "Fight Club" aren't much in evidence here.
  3. Lisa Frankenstein
    Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.
  4. Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.
  5. Novo
    A bizarre combo of upscale French erotica studded with good-humored kinky sex scenes.
  6. Wish
    Wish self-consciously packs 85 years of animated magic into a portable Disney fable. Does that make it a summation or a pastiche? A movie marbled with pop history or overstuffed with Easter eggs? One that launches the next Disney century or is stuck in the last one? Maybe all of the above.
  7. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    This tediously metatextual exercise conjures few inspired jolts of its own.
  8. The Protagonists
    Newcomer Luca Guadagnino deserves credit for his choice of an unconventional model, by Italian standards, for his English-language debut feature, but it's a model in which approach and material are at odds. [22 Nov 1999, p.87]
    • Variety
    • 47 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Coming to America
    Coming to America starts on a bathroom joke, quickly followed by a gag about private parts, then wanders in search of something equally original for Eddie Murphy to do for another couple of hours. It's a true test for loyal fans.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    1492: Conquest of Paradise
    All Ridley Scott's vaunted visuals can't transform 1492 from a lumbering, one-dimensional historical fresco into the complex, ambiguous character study that it strives to be.
  11. Asphalt City
    The flamboyantly heavy, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-it-ends drama of Black Flies isn’t much fun to sit through, but I think that’s ultimately because the movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake.
  12. Cargo
    Its provocative subject matter, though seriously treated, qualifies it as a dark-horse candidate for latenight cable.
  13. All In: The Poker Movie
    Loaded with history, interviews, hole-cam drama and some rather grand digressions, Douglas Tirola's picture seems a bit late for the poker craze, and at any rate will be preaching largely to the converted.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prison
    Starring as the prison in this rough penal pic with its special effects-laden horror story is the 87-year-old Wyoming State Penitentiary, which has attracted tourists rather than cons since 1981. The structure takes on all the menace of the house in Amityville Horror or hotel in The Shining.
  15. Return of the Living Dead III
    A pedestrian and gruesome, but never really scary, story of how the undead zombies interact with the living.
  16. Peaceful
    The film is too emotionally blunt not to wring tears (or at least a solid lump in the throat) where required, though they don’t always feel artfully earned. Either way, at over two hours, it’s a long trudge toward an inevitable end.
  17. Where the Truth Lies
    Atom Egoyan's most mainstream and genre-oriented picture in his 20-year career applies a thick noir lacquer to a jumbled, time-jumping tale of a young female journalist prying the facts out of the aging entertainers and their cronies.
  18. The Shipping News
    Seems to be playing the author's music, but like a string quartet that plays a half-beat off.
  19. Sordid Lives
    When Sordid Lives does what it does best -- showing Southern gals in the full flight of rabid self-denial -- it's as screamingly funny as this subgenre can get.
  20. The Legend of Bagger Vance
    A lightweight, modestly engaging yarn sporting reductive mystical and philosophical elements that are both valid and borderline silly.
  21. The Last Shot
    Contains most of the elements of a "Get Shorty"-type romp without the character depth and wit.
  22. Who Killed Bambi?
    Delivers only annoyance and impatience.
  23. I Am David
    An unusually intelligent adventure film scaled for younger viewers, which never leaves adults behind.
  24. Luther
    Proceeds like a stultifying history pageant rather than a movie with a pulse of its own.
  25. Shall We Dance
    An unabashedly old-fashioned entertainment loaded with traditional dancing and music.
  26. Halloween (2007)
    Leaves nothing to the imagination: Michael Myers is always right there in plain sight, committing mayhem sans suspenseful buildup or mystique.
  27. Midway
    The film’s drama is B-movie basic. But the destructive colliding metal-on-metal inferno of what war is makes Midway a picture worth seeing.
    • 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.
  29. Reno 911!: Miami
    All of which goes to demonstrate that while it's easy enough to slap a colon on a lowbrow cable TV show, additional punctuation by itself isn't sufficient to actually transform it into a movie.
  30. The Lost City
    A handsomely produced, deeply passionate, but seriously flawed historical epic whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie.
  31. I Saw the Light
    Despite a thoroughly committed, impressive performance from Tom Hiddleston as Williams (and an even better one from Elizabeth Olsen as his first wife, Audrey), the film tackles the life of one of the 20th century’s most seminal musicians with all the passion of a stenographer, making for a dull, unfocused slog through what should have been an effortlessly cinematic story.
  32. Parked
    This engaging character study functions best as a two-hander: The male leads build a wholly believable, offbeat co-dependency, while their interactions with others tend toward the more generic.
  33. Senior Year
    If Alex Hardcastle’s effortfully high-spirited Netflix feature isn’t exactly good, it’s still good enough to provide reasonable throwaway fun, thanks much less to the material than to a cast that elevates it when they can.
  34. The Hitman's Bodyguard
    A delightfully ridiculous screwball action comedy.
  35. Mob Land
    Maggio has cobbled together a modestly diverting, effectively atmospheric but blatantly derivative crime drama sprinkled with a few joltingly nasty plot twists.
  36. The Wild
    Uninspired character animation and obnoxious banter aside, The Wild is ultimately done in by the persistent stench of been-there-seen-that.
  37. Poltergeist
    Less a steadily escalating thriller than a guided tour through a county-fair-style haunted house, Poltergeist offers some quality jump scares, and Kenan has a knack for staging solid individual setpieces. But he proves weirdly incapable of modulation or mood setting here.
  38. Primal Fear
    The major jolt is saved for the very end but, like much else in the film, it is overexplained and underlined when more simplicity and quiet would have provided the revelation with the power of a depth charge.
  39. The Day After Tomorrow
    A disarmingly pulpy, eye-popping disaster movie during its first half, and an increasingly dull survival melodrama during its second.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blood In, Blood Out
    Producer-director Taylor Hackford clearly wants this to be a major cinematic exploration of the Latino experience, from its ponderous near-three-hour length to its more-than-occasional sermonizing. Unfortunately, disjointed storytelling and uneven performances undermine those aspirations.
  41. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    Luis Guzmán and Edgar Garcia give the project much more than it ever gives them, sustaining audience interest and generating mild amusement more or less through sheer force of will as they amble through a threadbare plot.
  42. Hercules
    It’s a grandly staged, solidly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure movie that does something no other Hercules movie has quite done before: it cuts the mythical son of Zeus down to human size (or as human as you can get while still being played by Dwayne Johnson).
  43. The Trip
    The cataclysmic changes in attitude and lifestyles the characters pass through at irregular intervals from 1973 to 1984... seem to consist wholly of changes in hairstyle that look as wildly stereotyped and inauthentic as the gestures and lines that accompany them.
  44. Full Grown Men
    A strong cast, beautiful production values and generally pleasant execution can't disguise the fact both laughs and surprises are on the thin side here, despite the abundant care and affection lavished on the central characters by first-time writer-director David Munro.
  45. Tano da morire
    Humor is inconsistent, and the film suffers from lack of shape and fluidity, playing more like a series of disjointed sketches. But there are more than enough high points to compensate.
  46. Pandemic
    This is a solid if not quite memorable entry in the ever-expanding canon of survivalist undead cinema.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rambo: First Blood Part II
    The charade on the screen, which is not pulled off, is to accept that the underdog Rambo character, albeit with the help of an attractive machine-gun wielding Vietnamese girl (Julia Nickson), can waste hordes of Vietcong and Red Army contingents enroute to hauling POWs to a Thai air base in a smoking Russian chopper with only a facial scar (from a branding iron-knifepoint) marring his tough figure.
  48. Nine Months
    An exceedingly safe and conventional Chris Columbus comedy.
  49. The Sunlit Night
    Here, Wnendt suppresses his naturally provocative streak to deliver an aggressively cute existential comedy instead.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Spirits
    High Spirits is a piece of supernatural Irish whimsy with a few appealing dark underpinnings, but it still rises and falls constantly on the basis of its moment-to-moment inspirations.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oscar
    Oscar is an intermittently amusing throwback to gangster comedies of the 1930s. While dominated by star Sylvester Stallone and heavy doses of production and costume design, pic is most distinguished by sterling turns by superb character actors.
  52. R#J
    Even the most eagle-eyed and engaged viewers might run out of patience with R#J. Thankfully, Williams’ magnificent cast counters the disorder with their confident screen presence and theatrical muscles that stand out within the film’s unique atmosphere.
  53. Bird Box Barcelona
    Though slick and more expansive in some ways, with bigger action sequences, it proves an overlong, uninvolving entry, in which any attempted fresh wrinkles to this fantasy universe offer scant viewer reward.
  54. Glitter & Doom
    Frenetic, repetitious and simplistic, it relies heavily on the stylized spectacle of the song numbers and lyrics to bolster the disappointing drama.
  55. The Legend of Zorro
    Bigger, louder and considerably less charming than its predecessor…Still, there are enough crowd-pleasing moments amid the frenetic action.
  56. Max
    It’s too bad the film doesn’t provide a better sense of what makes the Belgian Malinois so uniquely suited to the battlefield, or find a way to pay more than lip service to the deep bonds developed between military men and animals.
  57. Irresistible
    Irresistible scores points yet feels behind the curve. You wish it were a bold satirical bulletin, or maybe just Stewart’s pricelessly amusing version of a Christopher Guest movie. Instead, the film is a lot like a politician: It makes a big show of leading the viewer, but without rocking the boat.
  58. 27 Dresses
    Frothy, funny and formulaic, 27 Dresses is a pleasantly predictable romantic comedy that sees Katherine Heigl following “Knocked Up” with smooth moves at the wheel of her first starring vehicle.
  59. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances.
  60. Mouth to Mouth
    Emerges an uneven, occasionally vivid, ultimately unsatisfactory treatment of themes that should've packed more punch.
  61. Sink or Swim
    The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Predator
    A slightly above-average actioner that tries to compensate for tissue-thin-plot with ever-more-grisly death sequences and impressive special effects.
  63. Masterminds
    It’s this improv-ready ensemble’s wit and Galifianakis’ own gift for physical humor that account for most of the laugh-out-loud moments, heightened by silly flourishes so eccentric...they could only be found in a Jared Hess movie.
  64. Shock and Awe
    The shock feels less than shocking and the awe less than awesome in Rob Reiner’s righteously motivated but clunkily executed exposé of media manipulation in the run-up to the Iraq War.
  65. The Time Traveler's Wife
    May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.
  66. Thunder and the House of Magic
    It’s a thin premise that cues much cheery knockabout comedy, with ample scope for impressively whooshy 3D tracking shots.
  67. Project Almanac
    Evaluated on the concept’s own terms, the script clearly could have used another do-over or two before Israelite and his cast took the plunge.
  68. Blade
    Though slick and diverting in some aspects, increasingly silly pic has trouble meshing disparate elements --- horror, superhero fantasy, straight-up action --- into a workable whole.
  69. Fists of Legend
    Bloated but energetic, entertaining but interminable, tortured but strangely satisfying, Fists of Legend spends two-and-a-half hours unraveling the knotty saga of three middle-aged fighters, their shared dark past and their rocky road to redemption.
  70. Fort McCoy
    Connor and co-director Michael Worth allow Fort McCoy to proceed at an unhurried pace, giving Stoltz ample opportunity to subtly convey undercurrents of guilt and anger percolating beneath his character’s affable exterior.
  71. Robot Overlords
    Even with such generic scripting, however, there’s a genial, palpably enthusiastic chemistry between the four young, capable stars that gives their hijinks a bit of bounce.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Supervixens
    Russ Meyer’s Supervixens is an overlong and overly violent skin pic whose interest lies in its pretentions to be more than a skin film.
  73. Corner Office
    Like head-in-the-clouds Orson, Back’s debut feature imagines more for itself than others can see, though only the latter has earned a shot at another job.
  74. Daylight
    Daylight is a lower-echelon disaster thriller, in which the best character is knocked off early on and the leading man runs out of ideas with a third of the picture still to go. Noisy, technically proficient actioner about a group of people trapped in the Holland Tunnel after an explosion gets off a few decent blasts, but is just too limited in scope, imagination and excitement to burst out as a major B.O. winner domestically.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mephisto Waltz
    Main fault is a tired script with more than a full quota of arch, laughable dialog, spouted with relish by performers struggling to keep their heads above water.
  76. Pathaan
    Pathaan has a stop-and-go rhythm, and a strung-together structure, that grows wearying. (Two-and-a-half hours of frenetic derivative pulp is a lot of pulp.)
  77. Practical Magic
    Part comedy, part family drama, part romance, part special-effects mystery-adventure, and not entirely satisfying on any of these levels, this hodgepodge suffers from the conflicting sensibilities of its three credited scripters: Robin Swicord, who has done good work before, Akiva Goldsman, who has not, and Adam Brooks.
  78. 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.
  79. The Prince and Me
    Totally cliched and nearly two hours long, pic takes forever to get to hopelessly obvious places.
  80. Man on Fire
    One of the more absorbing and palatable entries in the rather disreputable "Death Wish"-style self-appointed vigilante sub-genre.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flickering Lights
    Jensen helms with assurance and maturity, with rapid but unhectic pacing, plenty of dark humor and deft action sequences that turn cliches from U.S. action-comedies into something very Danish.
  82. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    An hour and a half would’ve been a perfectly fine run-time, whereas at two hours and change, “Sonic 2” wears out its welcome well before it turns into yet another phone-it-in franchise entry.
  83. Silver City
    As both political satire and noirish murder mystery, this Newmarket pickup may be too meandering and unemphatic for wide consumption.
  84. What Happened to Monday
    Wirkola’s film is set apart by its almost heroic lack of self-awareness: Not only does it not realize how dumb it is, there’s a real sense that it thinks it’s smart. In fact it’s a whirlygig of inanely convoluted plotting, deeply dubious philosophy and shots of Noomi Rapace sliding glasses across tables to herself. You should probably watch it.
  85. The Ardennes
    The climax quickens the film’s pulse but doesn’t exactly grow organically from what’s proceeded it.
  86. Herbie Fully Loaded
    A pleasingly retro recycling of "The Love Bug."
  87. The Nun II
    In some respects an improvement on its predecessor, in others not, this is finally one more good-enough if unmemorable entry sure to extend the series’ life in lucrative fashion.
  88. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    While uneven in places, The Great Gilly Hopkins works because it boasts an actress tough enough for the title role.
  89. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The director, Adam Wingard (who made “Godzilla vs. Kong”), knows how to choreograph a beastie battle so that it does maximum damage in a way that appeals to your inner toy-smashing seven-year-old.
  90. The Game of Their Lives
    Picturesque pic, however, lacks even a penalty kick's worth of tension and is paradoxically inert for a movie about guys running up and down the pitch for the glory of the U.S.
  91. Maniac
    This merciless work of anti-entertainment is arguably admirable for being as disturbingly disgusting as it wants to be.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The General's Daughter
    The cinematic equivalent of a disposable airplane read, a hokey, kinky military thriller that's twisty and compelling enough to hook viewers in the mood for a trashy good time.
  93. Open Windows
    A fiendishly inventive thriller built around an audacious if unsustainable gimmick, Open Windows elevates Hitchcockian suspense to jittery new levels of mayhem and paranoia.
  94. A Boy Called Po
    Noble intentions alone do not a great movie make, as evidenced by Po, whose heart is in the right place but whose drama is woefully lacking in momentum.
  95. Common Ground
    This broadness of info only means the Tickells remain surface-level on most topics. Their Common Ground only teases but doesn’t dig deep enough into the intersection of racism and capitalism that brought us to today.
  96. Heaven Is for Real
    Those willing to engage may be pleasantly surprised by some of its understated virtues.
  97. The Giver
    The Giver reaches the screen in a version that captures the essence of Lowry’s affecting allegory but little of its mythic pull.
  98. Wyatt Earp
    If you're going to ask an audience to sit through a three-hour, nine-minute rendition of an oft-told story, it would help to have a strong point of view on your material and an urgent reason to relate it. Such is not the case with Wyatt Earp, a handsome, grandiose gentleman's Western that tries to tell evenhandedly more about the famous Tombstone lawman than has ever before been put onscreen.
  99. Monogamy
    A painfully dull plunge into the suffocating self-absorption that seems to be killing modern romance.
  100. Alice
    The power of the film — and of Palmer’s phenomenal performance — is watching Alice grow into her voice.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »