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. Stung
    In a movie that should have gone for funnier or scarier (ideally both), there’s way too much eventual emphasis on the leads’ uninspired evolving romance.
  2. Second Act
    Even though Second Act shouldn’t work, it does (sort of). It’s got flow, a certain knowing ticky-tackiness about its own contrivances. You know you’re watching a connect-the-dots comedy, but the dots sparkle. And Lopez gives her first star performance in a while. Age has enriched her talent; she brings curlicues of experience to every scene.
  3. Fun Mom Dinner
    A film that, for all its tinniness of craft and carelessness of storytelling, gets by on sheer force of personality.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tora! Tora! Tora!
    Both overall director Richard Fleischer and his Japanese counterparts do a dull job, and the monotonously low-key tone of scene after scene almost suggests that each was filmed without a sense of ultimate slotting in the finished form.
  5. A Previous Engagement
    Stevenson casts her usual magic in this frankly adult, determinedly lighthearted comedy of romantic errors.
  6. El cantante
    A virtual template of every imaginable cliche of the musical biopic, picture suffers from a lack of narrative and character focus
  7. They/Them
    It’s so committed to affirmational messages about queer identity not being a choice, a condition or a legitimate motive to get axed by a deranged serial killer that the movie all but forgets to be scary — although enlisting Kevin Bacon as too-genial-to-be-trusted camp overseer Owen Whistler nearly makes it work.
  8. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
    Indie effort evidences more energy than wit, and spends too much time on set-up before a slam-bang pay-off.
  9. Yes Man
    Genial but slim, picture is certainly a light-hearted alternative to weighty year-end awards bait, but the conceit isn't realized fully enough.
  10. U.N. Me
    Covering a lot of ground in colorful, pacey fashion, the documentary is nonetheless somewhat compromised itself by co-director Ami Horowitz's insistence on playing the Michael Moore/Morgan Spurlock role of onscreen provocateur.
    • 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Beneath the Planet of the Apes
    This sequel to the 1968 smash, Planet of the Apes, is hokey and slapdash. The story [by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams] and Ted Post’s direction fall far short of the original.
  13. The Burning Sea
    The movie has every right to be fiction, but the heart of its drama lies in its patina of plausibility.
  14. Smilla's Sense of Snow
    An exceedingly sleek and handsome thriller, this ambitious European co-production, like the novel on which it's quite faithfully based, starts intriguingly but fails to stay the distance.
  15. Killing Bono
    Taking liberties with journalist Neil McCormick's memoir to create narrative tension, screenwriters Simon Maxwell and prolific scribe team Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais ("The Commitments") overstuff the story with subplots and trite character arcs.
  16. Rust
    It’s a handsome and watchable indie art Western, set in 1882, that turns into a sentimental cross-generational buddy film. Yet I can’t say that the movie, in the end, is especially good. It’s got a bare-bones plot, it lopes along more than it takes wing, and for no good reason it’s two hours and 19 minutes long.
  17. Judgment Night
    This is an exceedingly well directed, cleverly filmed and edited, tension-filled affair. It is also a wholly preposterous, muddled, paranoid's view of the inner-city nightmare where the slightest misstep is sure to have a fateful result.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Chorus Line
    Chorus often seems static and confined, rarely venturing beyond the immediate. Attenborough merely films the stage show as best he could.
  19. Destination Wedding
    Destination Wedding barely holds together as a coherent film. It’s too callous for coos, too chipper to examine the dark corners of the soul. Yet it works as a valentine to old-fashioned star power — two modern legends, older if no wiser, daring the audience to somehow love them for all their faults, and on that level, somehow succeeding.
  20. The Dukes
    With Davi and Chazz Palminteri fronting a first-rate ensemble cast, and a tasty soundtrack of golden oldies, this unpretentious indie dramedy has much to recommend.
  21. Black Water: Abyss
    Given its tight dark spaces, opaque water and lunging menace, this movie has plenty of natural nightmare material that it deftly turns toward more atmospheric than rote jump-scare uses.
  22. The Heartbreak Kid
    Uproarious romp, grounded in believable if gleefully implausible human behavior, is a model of comic timing.
  23. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Unfortunately knows no tone between schmaltzy/gooey and slapstick/gross-out. Pic is as far from the original pic and its autobiographical memoir source as it can be while retaining the same title.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bobby G. Can't Swim
    Gutsy, unconventional, bursting with raw urban energy, this surprisingly suspenseful drama portrays New York Hell's Kitchen residents whose lives are governed by the immutable circumstances of their tawdry existence.
  25. Greenfingers
    This shameless knockoff marches lock-stepped through moves that were already looking as tired as the Macarena.
  26. Blue Streak
    A dull afterthought and a sorry vehicle for the comic expression of Martin Lawrence.
  27. Chasing Liberty
    Inoffensive adolescent escapism laced with surprising amounts of genuine charm.
  28. Pumpkin
    Begins as though the filmmakers imagine that they're making a daringly anti-p.c. serio-comedy, but long before it's over, the picture is wearing its bleeding liberal heart all over its sleeve.
  29. Firedancer
    Film struggles to balance its past-present memory drama and a rather standard take on an American immigrant family. Although accented by fine cinematic flourishes, pic is harmed by an abrupt conclusion and technical glitches.
  30. Ghostlight
    Neither fish nor fowl, slick yet strangely rudderless Ghostlight sounds interesting in description but lacks fascination in actual viewing.
  31. Flavors
    Likeable, credible actors, snappy dialogue and a determinedly upbeat tone should work well on cable and score with Indian diaspora auds. But pic lacks density and spontaneity necessary to lift it out of its carefully posed and plotted set-ups and onto a bigscreen.
  32. Life of the Party
    This is a heartier celebration of McCarthy’s talents, a mash note to a comic who can also play flirtatious, empathetic, and human. She’s believable, even if the scenes setting-off her performance aren’t.
  33. Lonely Planet
    While many of the picture’s finer details are in desperate need of ironing out, the wrinkles within these two characters’ lives are compelling enough.
  34. My Mexican Shivah
    Culture shock often proves the stuff of comedy, but the sight of a silver-studded, sombrero-topped mariachi band breaking into a rousing rendition of "Hava Nagila" transports diversity into the realm of the surreal.
  35. 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.
  36. The Devil and Father Amorth
    It is often an oddly compelling tabloid foray, since it winds up shedding a crucial ray of light on the mad moment we’re in now. Whether or not you believe in the Devil, the film helps to color in how our culture got possessed.
  37. Samaritan
    Samaritan is basic enough that it often plays like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. But the movie builds to a very good twist, and Stallone, in his way, brings a vibe to it, complete with an ’80s kiss-off line (“Have a blast!”) delivered in a growl so deliberate it practically etches itself into the scenery.
  38. She's the Man
    As insistent as its heroine to get its point across, She's the Man gathers up enough energy and likeable goodwill that it almost skirts past some extremely strained passages in which Bynes plays out being a boy.
  39. Flipped
    A well-intentioned family pic about first love that's overly concerned with period details and life lessons, rather than the genuinely sweet characters at its center.
  40. Mad City
    In actuality, however, what unfolds onscreen is a simplistic and obvious expose about the manipulative power of the news media that by now is so familiar that its cynical perspective is not likely to upset or provoke anyone.
  41. Tracers
    While Lautner is to be admired for his physical commitment to the role, the below-the-line team lighting, shooting and choreographing his moves deserves equal credit. The film wouldn’t have worked without such a versatile team, which otherwise operates without a trace.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The 'Burbs
    Director Joe Dante funnels his decidedly cracked view of suburban life through dark humour in The ‘Burbs. Hanks does a fine impersonation of a regular guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Dern adds another memorable psychotic to his resume.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Krull
    Professionalism of director Peter Yates, the large array of production and technical talents and, particularly, the mainly British actors keep things from becoming genuinely dull or laughable.
  44. Olympia
    Olympia for all its fondness, is just too cursory a portrait of a complex woman: depth presented as a series of glinting surfaces.
  45. Pain & Gain
    Bay can be a master of exuberant chaos, but here the violence mostly lands with a sickening thud, which is fitting, one supposes, but also ultimately numbing.
  46. The Little Rascals
    Those who grew up watching The Little Rascals may well be intrigued by the idea of introducing their kids to this full-color, bigscreen version. Still, the challenge of stretching those mildly diverting shorts to feature length remains formidable, and one has to wonder whether an audience exists beyond nostalgic parents and their young children.
  47. Straw Dogs
    Though competently crafted, Rod Lurie's wholly unnecessary 2011 remake is a film with few notions of its own, and representative of its time only in the commercial sense that home-invasion thrillers are now more prevalent at the multiplex.
  48. 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.
  49. Odd Thomas
    Sommers attempts to glue it all together with a raffish all-in-fun tone (despite some gory moments and unpleasant conceits), but the pic is neither witty nor macabre enough to pull off Koontz’s balance of elements in cinematic terms.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Joe Versus the Volcano
    An overproduced, disappointing shaggy dog comedy.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Darlings
    In his feature debut, director Ronald F. Maxwell isn’t perfect. But he gets several fine scenes from his performers, especially when O’Neal deals with her love interest, when NcNichol deals with her love interest, and best of all, when O’Neal and McNichol finally level with each other.
  52. A Night in Old Mexico
    Scripter Wittliff and Spanish helmer Emilio Aragon (“Paper Birds”) hit the sweet spot between galloping and sauntering while unfolding the movie’s plot, an interlocking chain of coincidences, encounters and colorful supporting characters that often recalls the twisty storylines of Elmore Leonard.
  53. Coldwater
    Suitable for teens — lies somewhere between indignant expose and unusually tasteful exploitation picture, with shower scenes and sweaty young delinquents aplenty.
  54. Crazy in Alabama
    The opposition of the two dramas winds up in gratifyingly moral and philosophical territory.
  55. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb, sometimes tedious, sometimes fun civilization-vs.-aliens showdown.
  56. The Singing Detective
    Potter's genius for wrapping black humor, poignancy and fantasy in utterly original story concepts lends this "Detective" an immediate fascination that doesn't begin wearing off for some time.
  57. Bully
    By turns turgid, embarrassing and plain off-putting.
  58. Club Dread
    A stunningly unfunny farce that makes the worst of a stale concept.
  59. The Bone Collector
    Entertaining but never fully engrossing.
  60. Mona Lisa Smile
    An appealing female cast gives the hollowly formulaic Mona Lisa Smile more dignity than it perhaps deserves, yet it's Julia Roberts in an ill-suited starring role that represents one of the film's chief shortcomings.
  61. God's Sandbox
    The serious subject of forced female circumcision becomes the stuff of predictable melodrama in God's Sandbox.
  62. The Boy
    So little happens in The Boy, and so little suspense is effectively built around its central figure, that by the time things finally do heat up the movie has flatlined too completely for us to care.
  63. American Assassin
    O’Brien could grow into the role. He has an earnest, high voice — perhaps the reason he’s barely allowed to speak — and shines in the rare scenes where he gets to show personality, as do Keaton and Kitsch when they put down their guns.... It’d be more fun to watch the three actors swap war stories over beers than batter each other — especially when their worst enemy is the script’s coma-inducing machismo.
  64. Evita
    Director Alan Parker has done a dazzling job creating screen images to accompany the wall-to-wall music, resulting in a musical fresco that is much closer to a sophisticated filmed opera than to any conventional tuner.
  65. Evening
    Individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability.
  66. Takers
    A respectable but watered-down heist movie that, given the Los Angeles setting, either owes a debt to director Michael Mann or suggests an unusually violent and action-packed episode of "Entourage."
  67. Gigi & Nate
    What happens once the film vilifies the animal rights contingent, however, is an example of how movies can protect their heroes and create their scapegoats (pardon the expression) to the detriment of dramatic complexity.
  68. Close Your Eyes
    An enjoyable throwback to the occult psychological horror-thrillers of the late 1970s. While it flirts often with campy excess, the film remains compelling thanks to its chilly mood, stylish visuals and polished production values.
  69. Factory Girl
    The wild, unhinged life of Andy Warhol's favorite "superstar," Edie Sedgwick, is refashioned in Factory Girl as a tame biopic with little feel for the 1960s New York Underground.
  70. The Son
    I watching The Son play out, this family’s tragedy becomes our own, and Zeller’s warning becomes impossible to ignore.
  71. Pretty Persuasion
    An exercise in bad taste that takes itself just seriously enough to be offensive.
  72. Locked
    Locked is not without limited charms, but it ultimately fails to bridge the gap between putting audiences in the car with Eddie, and actually wanting to make them go for the ride.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dragonball: Evolution
    A popular Japanese manga series gets a pleasing if paint-by-numbers live-action makeover in Dragonball Evolution, which half-heartedly tries to keep the faith for its pubescent male fanbase.
  74. Happythankyoumoreplease
    With the exception of Akerman's Annie, the characters are uniformly annoying, their stories insubstantial and the tone one of smug contentment.
  75. White on Rice
    Its amusingly off-kilter humor underserved by pedestrian packaging, Dave Boyle's sophomore feature, White on Rice, is the kind of comedy that hinges on a protagonist near-imbecilic in all matters social, physical and especially romantic.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    There are a good many laughs on this simple premise and the script’s exploitation of them. The only time the film falters badly is in its choice of a gimmick to get the boy-who-turns-into-a-dog turned back, for good and all, into a boy.
  77. Whatever Works
    This far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.
  78. End of the Spear
    Although overly earnest and often stilted, the film should find great favor principally among religious auds.
  79. Hoodwinked!
    Little Red Riding Hood gets a cheeky CGI makeover in Hoodwinked!, a fast-paced, fitfully clever 3-D-animated feature that will entertain tykes.
  80. Extraordinary Measures
    Doesn't reach far beyond its smallscreen genotype as a disease-of-the-week telepic, despite the star power of Brendan Fraser as the desperate dad and Harrison Ford as an eccentric, ornery researcher.
  81. Girl in Progress
    Never finds its own groove, alternating between high-school dramedy and overworked-single-mom narratives without ever really becoming a mother-and-daughter story until the closing scenes.
  82. Uncharted
    Uncharted is a lively but thinly scripted and overlong mad-dash caper movie, propelled by actors you wish, after a while, had more interesting things to say and do.
  83. The Girl from Monday
    Unconvincingly attempts to update the futurist dystopian traditions of Orwell, Huxley and William Gibson.
  84. The Chamber
    An intelligently proficient movie that works more effectively as a family drama than a legal thriller.
  85. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    “Paws of Fury” is an efficient yet underimagined animated fable that barely musters the flavor of a cliché Western comedy.
  86. Into the Blue
    Not a thriller so much as an extremely violent swimsuit calendar, the lushly lensed but dramatically waterlogged Into the Blue is too infatuated with its scantily clad stars to make sense of all the drug dealers, boat looters and bloodthirsty sharks trying to hunt them down.
  87. The Weight of Water
    Despite recurrent narrative and dramatic problems, each of Bigelow's pics provides a visual treat, and this film is no exception.
  88. The Three Marias
    Fresh and offbeat tale of vendetta.
  89. King of the Jungle
    Story's spurts of violence are designed to tear Seymour's world apart , but Rosenfeld's scripting and directing choices tend to lessen impact of a potentially gut-wrenching urban tale.
  90. The Sum of All Fears
    Director Phil Alden Robinson -- has done just about everything he can do to build a sleek, involving and -- for a few minutes -- terrifying movie that can get viewers past the young Ryan factor.
  91. How to Deal
    A bland romance that suffers from choppy development, dramatic overload and dearth of personality.
  92. Love Object
    While the premise has possibilities for some creepy, pulpy fun, writer-director Robert Parigi brings too little style or humor, instead going a more obvious, overwrought route.
  93. Proof of Life
    A disappointingly routine thriller that prefers to lean on tired Hollywood conventions rather than to explore fresh dramatic and stylistic territory.
  94. Delhi-6
    Admirably ambitious but ultimately frustrating musical dramedy.
  95. The People I've Slept With
    A little too well behaved at times, but zips along nicely when its raunchier elements kick in.
  96. Berlin 36
    The picture sports a strong lead cast but is diminished by TV-style helming and production qualities.
  97. Jack and Diane
    If Benicio del Toro designed Hallmark cards, or if "Lady and the Tramp" were lesbians, they'd have a lot in common with Jack & Diane, a well-constructed, well-intentioned but too deliberate attempt to provoke the unprovokable.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fire and Ice
    Ralph Bakshi's newest animation feature is interesting for two special reasons: (1) the production represents a clear design on Bakshi's part to capture a wider and younger audience and (2) the animation marks the film debut of America's leading exponent of heroic fantasy art, Frank Frazetta, who coproduced.
  99. The Good Son
    The bizarre prospect of Macaulay Culkin as a latter-day "bad seed" should prompt enough curiosity to generate initial box office visits, but this peculiar thriller doesn't deliver enough jolts to leave the audience screaming.
  100. The Pope's Exorcist
    The Pope’s Exorcist still exerts a lurid B-movie pull, in part because Australian genre stylist Avery demonstrates some command of fire-and-brimstone theatrics, but mostly thanks to Russell Crowe: As the film’s version of Father Amorth by way of Damien Karras, the slumming Oscar champ props up proceedings with just the right balance of gruff, paternalistic credibility and wry, self-mocking irony.
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