Variety's Scores

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For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Hank and Asha
    Kakkar and Pastides generate a rooting interest in their characters, with compellingly persuasive performances.
  3. A Monster Calls
    We’ve heard the same lesson countless times before in other movies, and though it’s certainly impressive to see Conor’s anxieties manifest themselves in such a stunning Ent-like being, as monsters go, Bayona’s creation is all bark and no bite.
  4. The Last of Robin Hood
    The script represents a too-tame middle ground, which gives the unfortunate impression that perhaps the filmmakers want us to empathize with this icky romance.
  5. The Love Punch
    A creaky heist-caper comedy that hopes to get by on sunny amiability.
  6. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    Scrumptious as it all is, it hurts to watch chefs so committed to excellence in a movie so content to settle for attractive mediocrity.
  7. Let's Be Cops
    The mix of raucous buffoonery and violent mayhem isn’t exactly seamless, and the laugh-out-loud moments come with conspicuously less frequency during a third act that suggests a rough draft for “Bad Boys 3.”
  8. The Players
    The Players is an odd beast that, like all omnibus films, is only as strong as its weakest link.
  9. Walking with the Enemy
    Made with obvious passion and drive, but also a nagging predilection for Holocaust-drama cliches.
  10. Trust Me
    Mixing comedy, drama, satire and noir, the Marvel actor’s second outing behind the camera plays for the same kind of uncomfortable laughs that his 2008 dramedy “Choke” did, but this one gazes so deeply into Hollywood’s navel that, with the affable Gregg in practically every scene, it ultimately can’t escape the whiff of a vanity project.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paths of Glory
    While the subject is well handled and enacted in a series of outstanding characterizations, it seems dated and makes for grim screen fare.
  12. All Cheerleaders Die
    It’s a fond, briskly diverting homage, but not a truly inspired one.
  13. V/H/S: Viral
    While the scares are in short supply, there’s a surfeit of macabre, tongue-in-cheek creativity to be found here.
  14. Good People
    Both stars are in agreeable if uncharacteristically muted form, doing little to distinguish Genz’s pic from any amount of formula-following filler in the same B-movie ballpark.
  15. Citizen Koch
    Some material in the docu feels repetitive or unnecessary. But the main problem is that “Citizen Koch” simply juggles too many themes and narratives to cohere. The result is largely compelling in the moment, but unsatisfying as a whole.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chances Are
    A potentially charming premise yields only a handful of chuckles.
  17. In the Name of My Daughter
    A mobster movie without whackings, a thriller without suspense and a courtroom drama without resolution, this turgid retelling of an unsolved missing-persons case functions mostly as a portrait of a young woman who loved too passionately and the manipulative creep incapable of reciprocating her affections.
  18. The Odd Way Home
    Its essential contrivance works against the earnest emotions it’s aiming for.
  19. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    Skillfully made first feature by writer-director Katrin Gebbe has some undeniably striking passages and performances, but ultimately spirals toward a gruesome third act that is no less monotonous for supposedly being based on true events.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Weird Science
    Hughes’ true gift is at capturing the naturalistic rhythms and interaction between the boys with a great ear for dialog. Le Brock is just right as the film’s calm but commanding center.
  21. The Client
    The Client is a satisfactory, by-the-numbers child-in-jeopardy thriller that will fill the bill as a very commercial hot weather popcorn picture.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A League of Their Own
    Penny Marshall’s gangly fourth film benefits from a fresh, unusual subject, the joy of baseball being played by women having the time of their lives and a wonderful central performance by Geena Davis. Downside includes contrived plotting, obvious comedy and heart-tugging, some hammy thesping and a general hokiness.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Uncle Buck
    John Hughes unsuccessfully tries to mix a serious generation gap message between the belly laughs in Uncle Buck, a warm-weather John Candy vehicle.
  24. This Is Not a Ball
    Muniz uncovers a raft of intriguing people and stories, with subjects ranging from sports to astrophysics, gender politics, history and developmental psychology, but he never sits still with them long enough to ask any probing questions, and the film never arrives at any real point.
  25. Joy
    Despite another solid performance from Jennifer Lawrence, anchoring Russell’s sincerely felt tribute to the power of a woman’s resolve in a man’s world, it’s hard not to wish Joy were better — that its various winsome parts added up to more than a flyweight product that still feels stuck in the development stage.
  26. 4 Minute Mile
    Engaging performances by the principal players, including Richard Jenkins as a legendary coach beset by personal demons, are almost enough to win the day, but in the end, the cliched narrative is too slight to put the picture over the finish line.
  27. Video Games: The Movie
    Video Games: The Movie is content to celebrate without much insight.
  28. About Alex
    Neither the script’s up-to-the-minute signifiers nor its cheekily self-aware humor can entirely dispel a formulaic feel.
  29. Me and You
    Ultimately, such a stir-crazy two-hander can only be as interesting as its actors.
  30. 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.
  31. Han Gong-ju
    For some time, the pic holds interest while constantly frustrating curiosity with the way it parses out information, but soon after the midway point the game becomes tedious, and attention slackens considerably even as Gong-ju’s ordeal becomes clear.
  32. The Green Prince
    An extraordinarily engrossing tale becomes an extremely uncinematic experience in the hands of Israeli documentarian Nadav Schirman.
  33. The Notebook
    Unfortunately, the glowering, non-pro Gyemant twins, who seem to have only one facial expression (and oddly anachronistic haircuts), continually break the spell woven by the other performers.
  34. A Five Star Life
    Maria Sole Tognazzi’s ultra-sedate romantic comedy A Five Star Life is full of aesthetic sophistication and luxurious ambiance, but its pleasures are all secondhand, and the whole endeavor is too starved of incident to really stick in the memory.
  35. Horns
    This overly devout adaptation of Joe Hill’s sacrilegious text benefits from the helmer’s twisted sensibility, but suffers from a case of overall silliness.
  36. Young Ones
    The sophomore effort from Jake Paltrow (“The Good Night”) gets so bogged down in its primal tale of murder and revenge that the most intriguing elements become little more than futuristic window dressing.
  37. Annabelle
    When it comes to Annabelle’s five or six big stinger moments, Leonetti manages to deliver the jolts, and if audiences are sure to head home complaining about how dumb and predictable it all was, many may also find themselves nursing their significant others’ lightly bruised forearms.
  38. Last Weekend
    Its eventual reach for warm-and-fuzzy emotional catharsis rings hollow among characters that never become more than disagreeably shallow products of unexamined privilege.
  39. Drunktown's Finest
    Unfortunately, Drunktown’s Finest too often suffers from stilted performances and scripting.
  40. My Old Lady
    Its translation from stage to screen looks to have been a bit rocky, and the film never manages to transcend its actors-workshop aura and develop into something deeper.
  41. May in the Summer
    This warmly conceived but largely formulaic picture is by turns sensitive and shrill, culturally perceptive and overly broad in its dysfunctional-family melodramatics.
  42. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
    The film is not without spectacle, but it is strangely without soul. That would’ve made it a disappointment to anyone buying a movie ticket, but perhaps at home, it will make for a more welcome distraction.
  43. Weaving the Past: Journey of Discovery
    The love and dedication that the filmmakers (including Dominguez’s wife and exec producer, Shelley Morrison) have poured into this project are more than evident onscreen; what it needs now is the sort of strong, supple cinematic vision that could tie its disparate strands together.
  44. Saban's Power Rangers
    We’re now so awash in superhero culture that kids no longer need the safe, lame, pandering junior-league version of it. They can just watch “Ant-Man” or the PG-13 “Suicide Squad.” Safe, lame, and pandering have all grown up.
  45. Swim Little Fish Swim
    [A] slight, predictable debut.
  46. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    High-spirited but hobbled by lame dialogue and sheer overkill, Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead marks an instance where too much of a good thing means it just isn’t good anymore.
  47. The Remaining
    La Scala is able to maintain interest and sustain narrative momentum throughout his fantastical narrative, even while he covers overly familiar territory. In this, he gets immeasurable aid from the sincere performances by his game cast.
  48. Men, Women & Children
    This painfully well-meaning but largely unpersuasive bid for cross-generational understanding feels at once of-the-moment and too obvious by half, like a less overblown version of “Crash” for the information superhighway.
  49. Miss Meadows
    An eventual retreat into conventional thriller terrain isn’t managed with much panache or tension, and a limp happily-ever-after sequence underlines the pic’s failure to make very much of the twisted-fairy-tale aspect that is its most distinctive element.
  50. At the Devil's Door
    At the Devil’s Door (which premiered at SXSW last spring under the title “Home”) ends up too tentative and underdeveloped, playing like an attenuated prologue for a bigger film.
  51. The Pyramid
    Correctly ascertaining that auds will be less interested in the outcome than in the obstacles along the way, Levasseur plants and executes the pic’s exclamation-point scares with grinning, squelching gusto.
  52. The Rewrite
    It’s a rare pleasure to see Tomei in a lead role, and she fills out the short cuts in Lawrence’s characterization with wry warmth and a hint of swallowed disappointment.
  53. The Gambler
    A movie of slick, surface-level pleasures that’s unpersuasive at its core.
  54. Cake
    To be sure, Aniston leads with her scowl here, in the sort of performance that often gets called “brave” but is, in fact, more accurately described as a well-executed change of pace.
  55. The Keeping Room
    A potentially gripping story of empowerment through armed resistance is almost totally undermined by studied, self-conscious storytelling.
  56. A Little Chaos
    Too often, helmer Rickman galumphs through what’s meant to be a witty romp, underlining the script’s most obvious, rigged qualities.
  57. Pasolini
    Ferrara finds himself imitating rather than innovating.
  58. Black or White
    The good news is that Kevin Costner does some of the finest, most deeply felt work of his career as a widower lawyer fighting for custody of his biracial granddaughter in Mike Binder’s Black and White. The bad news is that this well-intentioned family drama never quite shakes free from its didactic, movie-of-the-week dramaturgy and a hand-holding approach to race-relations.
  59. Extraterrestrial
    Good-looking and entertaining, if unmemorable.
  60. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    The Scorch Trials offers virtually no character development and only hints of plot advancement, mostly just functioning to move a group of obliquely motivated characters from one place to another without giving much clue where the whole thing is headed.
  61. Alien 3
    A muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it.
  62. 23 Blast
    A fairly predictable yarn that’s lighthearted and well-acted.
  63. The Flash
    The trouble with The Flash is that as the film moves forward, it exudes less of that “Back to the Future” playfulness and more of that mythological but arbitrary blockbuster self-importance.
  64. Aquaman
    Aquaman gets his own adventure, and it’s kind of a shock that it doesn’t suck, but only if you’re willing to sit through two hours of water-logged world-building before the movie finally takes off.
  65. The Finest Hours
    Perhaps the worst one could say about Craig Gillespie’s film is that, rather than their finest hours, the whole cast and crew all put in a solid shift at the office making the movie, producing a perfectly entertaining, sometimes quite well-crafted disaster drama that nonetheless retreats from the memory almost as soon as the credits roll.
  66. 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.
  67. Red Knot
    As Red Knot (very) slowly unwinds, Thirlby conveys an impressive range of emotions through the eloquence of her facial expressions and body language. Like Kartheiser, however, she labors under the burden of playing a role that is more a vague concept than a fully developed character.
  68. Kurmanjan Datka Queen of the Mountains
    The screenplay by Sher-Niyaz, Bakytbek Turdubaev and Kyrgyz culture minister Sultan Raev takes an “important moments” approach to Kurmanjan’s life, requiring the casting of four different actresses. Unfortunately, the result plays like an illustration of her Wikipedia entry rather than providing any psychological insight into her feelings.
  69. The Foxy Merkins
    Olnek and collaborators share a genuinely offbeat sensibility, and The Foxy Merkins would have made a hilarious short. Yet it simply doesn’t come up with enough inventive scenes, let alone overall narrative spine, to sustain itself at feature length.
  70. Southpaw
    The undeniable intensity of Gyllenhaal’s bulked-up, Method-mumbling performance may leave you feeling more pummeled than convinced in this heavy-handed tale of redemption, in which director Antoine Fuqua once more demonstrates his fascination with codes of masculine aggression, extreme violence and not much else.
  71. Wild Card
    As usual, Statham gets a lot of mileage out of his droll, ever-present scowl, but as in “Heat,” the movie’s disparate narrative strands never really come together, and the climactic showdown feels pretty anticlimactic.
  72. Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
    For all these missteps — including the convenient and predictable use of elderly death as a plot device — the leads’ odd-couple chemistry does become steadier and affectionate as their dance lessons continue, and the film manages to close on a quietly touching final note.
  73. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Where Haupt succeeds is in conveying the passion felt by everyone who works on the Sagrada, from foremen to sculptors.
  74. The King's Daughter
    It was on this film that Scodelario met Walker. The couple are now married, which suggests there’s a “happily ever after” to be found somewhere in this froufrou film maudit.
  75. A LEGO Brickumentary
    Most of the jokes are real groaners, though the humor is welcome, while shooting select exteriors with tilt-shift lenses (for a miniature-faking effect that makes real-world buildings look like tiny Lego sets) adds another creative touch to the overall package.
  76. 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.
  77. Difret
    The unwillingness to let nuance communicate lends a flat quality to the drama here; after the initial crimes, suspense situations are simply lopped off prematurely, the action jumping clumsily to their aftermath.
  78. The Great Wall
    Director Zhang Yimou capably gives period fantasy-action The Great Wall the look and feel of a Hollywood blockbuster, but his signature visual dazzle, his gift for depicting delicate relationships and throbbing passions are trampled by dead-serious epic aspirations.
  79. War for the Planet of the Apes
    It’s fitting that the visual effects have advanced so dramatically since 2011, as it allows the series to suggest that its ape protagonists have evolved to an equivalent degree, and yet, “War’s” story is beneath their intelligence.
  80. The Mountain Between Us
    Script shortcomings aside, Winslet and Elba make a reasonably good couple.
  81. Effie Gray
    This admirable, watercolor-delicate tale of individual feminist emancipation never quite blooms into living color, hampered by spotty casting and Richard Laxton’s overly deliberate direction.
  82. 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.
  83. 3 Nights in the Desert
    The characters, situations and dialogue too seldom escape cliche in Gabriel Cowan’s watchable but unmemorable feature.
  84. The Bronze
    Though no one would accuse The Bronze of not being funny, it somehow manages not to be funny often enough.
  85. The End of the Tour
    The two leads’ clashing styles might work if the film were entirely about two superficially similar people’s inability to truly find common ground. But as we’re finally intended to judge their meeting a profound connective one on at least some levels, the chemistry simply feels off.
  86. Concussion
    Effective enough as a cautionary tale about willful ignorance and as a showcase for Will Smith...the film is let down by its confused and cliche-riddled screenplay, which struggles mightily to take a complex story and finesse it to fit story beats it was never meant to hit.
  87. Ghostbusters
    While both funnier and scarier than Ivan Reitman’s 1984 original, this otherwise over-familiar remake from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig doesn’t do nearly enough to innovate on what has come before.
  88. Nasty Baby
    Silva assembles a loosely scripted, raucously nonconformist laffer that looks like it’s going one way, only to arrive somewhere else entirely — a change of heart that’s not at all to the advantage of a film.
  89. Stockholm, Pennsylvania
    From its opening scene, the film feels desaturated and airless, as if the intrusion of energy or color might upset the characters’ delicate task of healing.
  90. Don Verdean
    The expected satire of religious gullibility and charlatanism proves toothless; worse, a cast of very funny people is given very little funny to do.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Poltergeist
    Given the talents, Poltergeist is an annoying film because it could have been so much better.
  92. Diary of a Chambermaid
    The film milks some brisk comedy from its upstairs-downstairs peekaboo, but is too breezy to convince in its depiction of obsessive erotic fixation — making for a “Diary” that oddly feels less exposing as it goes along.
  93. Cut Bank
    Watching an estimable quintet of character actors do their thing is the chief pleasure of Cut Bank.
  94. Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal
    The decision to binge on CGI action setpieces overwhelms the romantic spark of the central characters, played by impossibly beautiful leads Lee Bingbing and Aloys Chen Kun, while the film’s themes of class division, human desire and hypocrisy find darker, more riveting expression only toward the end.
  95. Nightlight
    The relative restraint of keeping any supernatural creatures and most violence just offscreen works well to maintain suspense. It’s too bad Beck and Woods didn’t exercise equal caution in the dialogue department.
  96. Road Hard
    This feature directing debut for Adam Carolla and frequent writing/producing collaborator Kevin Hench is an amiable, nicely assembled semi-autobiographical fiction that will please the former’s fans.
  97. She's Lost Control
    Marquardt never buries her symbolic subtext very deep, what with a woman who freezes her eggs and a man who ensures that his patients feel nothing.
  98. Free State of Jones
    For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.
  99. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Although The Last Jedi meets a relatively high standard for franchise filmmaking, Johnson’s effort is ultimately a disappointment. If anything, it demonstrates just how effective supervising producer Kathleen Kennedy and the forces that oversee this now Disney-owned property are at molding their individual directors’ visions into supporting a unified corporate aesthetic.
  100. 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.”
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