Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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 2.3 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. Maybe Baby
    A wannabe romantic comedy with miscast leads and a script in desperate need of a good editor.
  2. Dr. Dolittle
    Slim on story and rife with scatological jokes, the film may strike a chord with pre-teens but misses for an older crowd despite some nifty effects and broad humor.
  3. Payback
    Not an embarrassment, but it's not distinguished, either.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dead Pool
    The Dead Pool isn't the best and brightest of the Dirty Harry films, either, but just as invincible. It's possible that Clint Eastwood and crew are just enjoying a bit of self-mockery with this one.
  5. Choose Connor
    Once Choose Connor ventures into the larger political arena, it begins to work against itself.
  6. Off Jackson Avenue
    Though picture is downbeat and defiantly low-budget, its laid-back absurdist tone and no-nonsense pacing make for an audio-visual delight.
  7. The Little Death
    The actors are all game and well paired, but flashes of chemistry and an appreciable level of production finesse (courtesy of d.p. Simon Chapman and composer Michael Yezerski) aren’t enough to bring the requisite charge to this flimsy, pseudo-provocative material.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pete's Dragon
    Pete’s Dragon is an enchanting and humane fable which introduces a most lovable animal star (albeit an animated one).
  9. The Last Movie Star
    Despite a few good moments, this well-intentioned seriocomedy mostly wobbles between crude yocks, lame generation-gap humor and sentimental cliche.
  10. Red Tails
    Apart from the occasional thrill provided by CG-enhanced aerial dogfights, this stuffy history lesson about the groundbreaking African-American fighter pilot division never quite takes off, weighed down by wooden characters and leaden screenwriting.
  11. Burke and Hare
    The film struggles to match the original Ealing's quality benchmark, and its unapologetically old-fashioned sensibility may have trouble connecting with contempo audiences.
  12. Desert Wind
    Far from encouraging "Survivor"-style competitiveness, the desert setting serves as a serene Club Med-type backdrop to the all-male bonding.
  13. Medieval
    Medieval succeeds as a lively, handsome chunk of history (however freely imagined), with nary a dull moment between densely-packed intrigues, chases and battles.
  14. The Comedians of Comedy
    Amiably slapdash docu about The Comedians of Comedy tour mixes on-stage performances, backstage bull sessions and downtime tomfoolery to generally satisfying and frequently hilarious effect.
  15. Mercy
    Its modesty is what makes its very real virtues -- a tart, literate script, an adroit balance of humor and pathos, a memorable onscreen collaboration between star-scribe Scott Caan and his father James -- so cumulatively impressive.
  16. The Broken Tower
    Though clearly besotted with Crane’s poetry, the writer-director-star never achieves full immersion in the man’s life or work; the sense is of people playing a very cerebral game of dress-up.
  17. Agnes and His Brothers
    A Teutonic version of "American Beauty" with added dysfunctionality.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Wake in Providence
    Zesty indie comedy from Rhode Island is a winner, with ethnic humor easily mixing with universal truths about dealing with families.
  19. The Flowers of War
    Scene by scene, The Flowers of War is an erratic and ungainly piece of storytelling, full of melodramatic twists and grotesque visual excesses (a bullet pierces first a stained-glass window and then a girl's neck), which are nonetheless delivered with startling conviction.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Two-Minute Warning
    An off-the-beaten-track story [based on the novel by George La Fountaine] of a football stadium crowd menaced by a sniper, combined with above-average plotting, acting and direction.
  21. Cash Out
    Every line of dialogue that follows from this tired premise is like an echo of one from a better movie.
  22. Flirt
    Slight but sleek, Flirt is still fun.
  23. Ballad of a Small Player
    Ballad of a Small Player looks great, but lacks the fundamental human insight to make it a winner.
  24. Breakthrough
    What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.
  25. Clay Pigeons
    Visual flourishes (handsomely lensed by Eric Edwards on Utah locales standing in for Montana) are polished but derivative, with too many time-lapse sky views, reminiscent of Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho."
  26. Deliver Us from Eva
    Well-cast relationship comedy-drama is played too broadly in the early going, but gradually settles into a more appealing groove as a glossy date-movie.
  27. Foreign Sister
    Unfortunately, Wolman's flat direction accentuates the predictable course of his soft narrative.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Nanny Diaries
    Rarely rises above standard sitcom fare.
  29. Reservation Road
    A dramatic situation that should be wrenching is mostly tedious in Reservation Road.
  30. Picture Perfect
    A well-upholstered but hopelessly contrived romantic comedy, Picture Perfect is too ineffectual to tickle either the funnybone or the heartstrings.
  31. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The key to Seuss' tales, as with all good fables, is not only their cleverness but their surpassing elegance and simplicity, qualities that this busy, over-cluttered contraption of a movie seems entirely uninterested in replicating.
  32. My Spy
    There’s hardly a surprise along the way but Bautista’s gruff charm and winning chemistry with talented young co-star Chloe Coleman (“Big Little Lies”) do just enough to carry a script by “RED” writers Jon and Erich Hoeber that pokes some good fun at action movie tropes but is hampered by too many groan-worthy gags.
  33. Lolita
    The bad news, however, is that after an intriguing opening stretch, and despite Jeremy Irons' potent lead performance, the overlong film becomes repetitive, flat and often dull.
  34. Ali G Indahouse
    An extremely silly, grossly scatological but often amusing picture that plays like Dumb & Dumber meets Spike Lee in London.
  35. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Toy Soldiers
    Toy Soldiers is a very entertaining action film that updates 1981's sleeper hit Taps. Seeing Sean Astin (son of John Astin and Patty Duke) and his pranksters turn into commandos who wipe out the nasty invaders makes for purely escapist, crowd-pleasing pleasure.
  37. Seed of Chucky
    Simply isn't funny or frightening enough to expand its appeal beyond core fan base.
  38. We Are Your Friends
    We Are Your Friends” has its heart in the right place, and it’s shrewd and cuddly enough to get a few likes. But it would be an infinitely better movie if it sustained the sort of trancelike sonic ecstasy that turns fans into fanatics.
  39. Ida Red
    What holds Ida Red together and gives it solidity is the relationships between Wyatt, Jeanie and Darla, which might not be entirely original but they don’t need to be thanks to good ensemble performances, with Hartnett very much at ease and Hublitz making an impression in her biggest role to date.
  40. Ashby
    McNamara’s second directorial feature (following 2003’s Aussie “The Rage in Placid Lake,” another teenage-misfits-make-good comedy) winds up a poorly mixed bowl of mismatched ingredients that is nonetheless tepidly, forgettably digestible.
  41. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    With its re-enactments of that fateful day, Extremely Loud plays a bit too much like one of those perfectly lit, heart-tugging segments TV networks air during the Olympics. It hardly matters that Horn manages to give such a naturalistic, unmannered performance as the young Oskar when everything around him has been so deliberately orchestrated to provoke a specific reaction.
  42. Immortals
    Navigating the film's mounting erotic bloodlust proves tedious, until the show-stopping final battle between gods and Titans in one chamber, Theseus and Hyperion in another, at which point logic melts away completely and the pic's raison d'etre emerges -- namely, to justify staging a fight scene for the ages.
  43. Habermann
    More soap opera than high drama, the film is confused and confusing, and tedious to boot.
  44. Lavender
    The film would be a routine affair if not for its baroque aesthetic gestures and a captivating turn from star Abbie Cornish.
  45. The Players Club
    Ice Cube continues his evolution from hard-core rapper to multihyphenate filmmaker with "The Players Club," a messy but lively B-movie that recalls the more spirited comedic dramas of the '70s blaxploitation era.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tank Girl
    A classic case of kitchen-sink filmmaking, in which the principals have thrown everything into the stew, hoping enough will stick to the audience...What’s missing from the mix is an engaging story to bind together its intriguing bits. And Lori Petty as Tank Girl, aka Rachel Buck, has the spunk but, sadly, not the heart of the post-apocalyptic heroine.
  47. Sweet Girl
    Aided by Steven Price’s enthusiastic score, Mendoza’s vigorous direction keeps things speeding along, and Momoa is such a charismatic presence — whether sensitively interacting with Rachel (skillfully embodied by Merced) or inventively snapping an adversary’s neck — that the proceedings’ lack of realism works to its advantage.
  48. Mirror Mirror
    Poised between revisionist fairy tale and smirking sendup, this gaudy, over-frosted cream puff of a movie half-heartedly positions its famous heroine as a dagger-wielding proto-feminist, yet ultimately suffers the same fatal flaw as Julia Roberts' evil queen: It doesn't really care about anything except how pretty it looks.
  49. El Chicano
    The problem here isn’t the fairly apparent budgetary limits — it’s the limitations of style and imagination.
  50. Food of Love
    Pons has aimed for a performance-driven drama whose virtues are of the small-scale, low-key variety, with the director working within narrow dramatic limits as always but here doing so brilliantly.
  51. Festival in Cannes
    Jaglom's quickest and funniest picture in years and the most accessible.
  52. Breakin' All the Rules
    Manages to amuse as a cleverly concocted hybrid of conventional romantic comedy and mistaken-identity farce.
  53. Beyond the Sea
    It's raffish, flashy, energetic, entertaining and not very deep.
  54. B-52
    Filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky needs nothing more than the cold facts surrounding this awesome weapon to get across a message about the importance of peace.
  55. The Ringer
    Sometimes veering close to being a promotional film for the Special Olympics, pic will be applauded by the disability community and its advocates but quickly ignored by longtime fans of the Farrellys and Knoxville.
  56. Bigbug
    The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future.
  57. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    The magic here feels machine-made and depressingly state-of-the-art.
  58. The Addams Family
    The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beaches
    [An] engaging tearjerker.
  60. Ravenous
    Essentially approaches its subject seriously, but does take stabs both at horror and grotesque comedy, neither with much success.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny English Reborn
    More a resuscitation than a rebirth, Johnny English Reborn finds British comedian Rowan Atkinson reviving his spoof spy character with this enjoyable if somewhat wheezy reprise.
  62. Hunky Dory
    The picture draws only slight entertainment value from the spectacle of youngsters warbling 1970s pop tunes, like a retro version of “High School Musical” with less charm.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Ninth Configuration
    The Ninth Configuration is an often confusing story concerning the effects of a new 'doctor' on an institution for crazed military men which manages to effectively tie itself together in the end. Problem is the William Peter Blatty film takes entirely too long to explain itself.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kafka
    The story ultimately feels too conventional, and the portrait of the artist is too shallow to stand as a compelling or convincing evocation of a complex mind.
  65. Next Day Air
    An altogether bumbling excuse for an action-comedy.
  66. You, Me and Dupree
    A middling third-wheel comedy elevated a couple of notches by the ineffably weird charms of Owen Wilson.
  67. Rebecca
    For about three-quarters of the running time, Rebecca does a respectable job of navigating between respect for the source and establishing its own distinct identity. And then, at precisely the moment where it stands to make a few enlightened improvements . . . this Rolls-Royce of an adaptation veers off the road.
  68. You Should Have Left
    The movie won’t disturb your dreams, but it grabs hold of you and keeps tugging.
  69. The Exorcism
    The darker the movie gets, the less there is at stake, and the more that Crowe seems to be going through the motions of trying to save not his soul but his career.
  70. Tommy Boy
    Chris Farley's first star turn is loaded with fat jokes, excrement gags and other banality, but also offers more goofy charm than most of its recent brethren -- which is to say, not much.
  71. Unlocked
    An anonymously enjoyable espionage thriller that, for purposes of memory, all but self-destructs the second the closing credits begin to roll.
  72. Manderlay
    The subject being race relations, Manderlay is bound to stir considerable debate in intellectual circles, but given the director's abstract style and use of characters to enact an agenda, it's a discussion that will exclude the general public, who will ignore it as they did "Dogville."
  73. Airheads
    Though it’s little more than a one-joke premise, director Michael Lehmann gets maximum mileage from the low-octane script by Rich Wilkes. Wisely, there’s minimal interest accorded the narrative, with emphasis on the off-kilter characters and their social milieu.
  74. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    It’s all quite wispy and anecdotal, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Bill Holderman, the director of these films, and Erin Simms, his co-screenwriter and producer, had squeezed more texture into the anecdotes.
  75. Hackers
    There is a great deal more style than substance here. The special effects experts and the other members of the technical crew do their considerable best to give their various hacking sequences the look of warp-speed sci-fi fantasy.
  76. Mind the Gap
    Warm-hearted but clear-eyed indie effort richly repays audience patience during deliberately paced and provocatively allusive early scenes with a cumulative emotional impact that is immensely satisfying.
  77. Yes Day
    Yes Day strings together a series of just-say-yes set pieces that don’t play out the central premise so much as they turn it into an extended kiddie-action-movie burlesque.
  78. Honey Don't!
    Honey Don’t! is a deliberate throwaway — a knowingly light and funny mock escapist thriller, one that’s just trying to show you a flaky good time.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Beverly Hills Cop II
    Beverly Hills Cop II is a noisy, numbing, unimaginative, heartless remake of the original film...Murphy keeps things entertainingly afloat with his sassiness, raunchy one-liners, take-charge brazenness and innate irreverence.
    • Variety
  80. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    You might say that “Frozen Empire” has to work even harder to invent a reason for itself to exist. Yet it’s a livelier movie than “Afterlife.”
  81. Rosebush Pruning
    Rosebush Pruning makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle. Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty.
  82. Jesus Revolution
    It’s one of the most appealing faith-based big-screen entertainments in a while, polished and persuasive without getting too preachy.
  83. Reminiscence
    Reminiscence plays like a perfectly calibrated two-hour mirage of things we’ve seen before.
  84. The Deal
    Never entirely convincing yet always watchable.
  85. She's Out of My League
    This appealingly cast movie seesaws from unlikely thoughtfulness to imbecilic vulgarity.
  86. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    It takes at least a sliver of human interest to make a noir pastiche more than the sum of its influences, and anything resembling authentic feeling has been neatly airbrushed away from this movie’s synthetic surface.
  87. The Comedy
    For a catalog of aggressively stupid, socially deviant male behavior, Rick Alverson's cheekily titled The Comedy is not without a certain subversive intelligence.
  88. How Do You Know
    This wrong-headed dramedy peddles forced warm-fuzziness and insincere sentiment on the backs of an all-star cast.
  89. King Arthur
    Impressively made and well acted by an exceedingly attractive cast, this dark tale of ceaseless conflict is adult entertainment and will likely disappoint viewers expecting a "Camelot"-like love triangle.
  90. Grumpier Old Men
    Grumpier is a welcome continuation that leaves you wanting for another chapter that's as rich in humanity and fun as the initial companion pieces.
  91. Hostel: Part II
    In this twist-filled sequel, the real shocker is just how smart and satisfying such degradation can be. There's no question "Part II" outgrosses the original "Hostel" in the blood-and-guts department.
  92. The Nun
    Employing just about every trick from the Hammer Horror playbook without wasting time trying to make any sense, it provides a serviceable 96 minutes of standard-issue jump scares and supernatural hokum.
  93. If I Stay
    The overall execution is so pedestrian that it’s possible to feel more moved by the filmmakers’ good intentions than by the actual emotional content onscreen.
  94. Don't Breathe 2
    In the case of Don’t Breathe 2, one reason the movie, for all the operatic (and often absurd) grisliness of its second half, isn’t quite as good as the original is that the original didn’t have a trace of that franchise self-consciousness.
  95. Esther Kahn
    Senselessly long at two-and-three-quarters hours and with a protracted climax that eradicates any goodwill established in the fastidious first couple of reels.
  96. One Night at McCool's
    Feels like a film from several years ago, one of the many made in the wake of "Pulp Fiction" that tried and failed to be as clever as its progenitor.
  97. Secret Window
    The resourceful actor (Depp) invigorates Secret Window with a playful personality and wryly humorous aplomb not front-and-center in the script, making the psycho-suspenser more compelling than it might otherwise have been.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Sands
    The plot shifts as often as the desert in White Sands, an absorbing, tightly coiled thriller not always easy to follow, with a fine cast, no-fat direction by Roger Donaldson, and nasties belonging to the all-purpose CIA-FBI consortium of evil.
  99. Fast & Furious
    A series that's provided a successful, moderately enjoyable ride up to now blows its tires, gasket and transmission on its way to flaming out in Fast & Furious.
  100. Damsel
    What matters most is whether we believe Brown in the role, and the “Stranger Things” star has no trouble embodying the kind of quick-thinking independent mind it takes to survive such an adventure.
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