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. Two Night Stand
    Two Night Stand’s strength lies in the doubts and the ambivalence it expresses about the way we love now.
  2. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt substantial audiences, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in fact a moderately entertaining film, not deficient in old-fashioned costume drama when it pleases, nor in the power of being clever where it chooses, but awkward and unsatisfying.
  3. Surrogates
    Mostow's smart speculative suspenser imagines a time when people can live through ideal versions of themselves while they sit wired up at home.
  4. South of the Border
    The documentary offers little genuine information and no investigative research, adopting a style even more polemical than Stone's earlier docus on Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Running Man
    Format works only on a pure action level, with some exciting, but overly repetitious, roller-coaster style sequences of runners hurtling into the game through tunnels on futuristic sleds. Schwarzenegger sadistically dispatches the baddies, enunciating typical wisecrack remarks (many repeated from his previous films), but it’s all too easy, despite the casting of such powerful presences as Jim Brown and former wrestlers Jesse Ventura and Prof. Toru Tanaka.
  6. Murder at Yellowstone City
    Director Richard Gray’s well-crafted and handsomely mounted indie is as much a solidly constructed mystery as it is it a conventionally satisfying oater, with much to recommend to fans of either genre who rarely get to sample such a mix.
  7. Hold Your Breath
    The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments.
  8. Cut Sleeve Boys
    No amount of Botox or false eyelashes can rejuvenate helmer Ray Yeung's Cut Sleeve Boys, which recycles way too many gay cliches.
  9. Fanboys
    End result feels like an uneven cross between an amateur "Project Greenlight" pic and such recent comedies as "Superbad" and "Pineapple Express," in which indie directors brought a certain edge to material that might once have felt more at home under the National Lampoon label.
  10. The Rhythm Section
    This isn’t an easy role, but Lively aces it.
  11. The Burning Plain
    Many of the weaknesses and few of the strengths of Guillermo Arriaga as a scripter are evident in his directing debut, The Burning Plain.
  12. England Is Mine
    England Is Mine is fussy and prudish — about erotic longing, and about the rock ‘n’ roll that gives form to it.
  13. Goodnight Mommy
    Watts, a veteran of the genre despite never quite being a scream queen, is delightfully disturbing in a role that requires her to mask her character’s true nature as well as her face.
  14. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead
    A horror comedy much closer to the actor-riffing drollery of Edgar Wright and Christopher Guest than "Scary Movie"-style splatstick, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead is one sly slice of the ridiculous.
  15. Hits
    The effort of sussing out this satire’s attitude seems silly for the fact that its jokes just aren’t funny enough.
  16. Boarding School
    Boarding School includes an odd mix of narrative elements within a classically Grimm child-endangerment scenario that would work best played as a modern fairy tale. Yet Yakin chooses to pace the film more slowly as a serious drama, which keeps the suspense from building real momentum and exacerbates the script’s implausibilities.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She-Devil
    The casting is a real coup, with Barr going her everywoman TV persona one better by breaking the big screen heroine mold, and Streep blowing away any notion that she can’t be funny.
  18. The Age of Disclosure
    These people all look and sound so important that the message that blankets every moment of The Age of Disclosure is: They’re official. And what they have to say is official.
  19. Snatched
    The movie’s mother-daughter jokes are like firecrackers with damp fuses.
  20. The Hottest State
    Patchy lead perfs and mannered helming subtract value from pic's tangible plus points (solid supporting turns, pleasant score).
  21. HellBent
    A straight-ahead slasher pic with the big difference of an all-gay male character cast, Hellbent is fun -- if minor horror fun -- ably handled by first-time feature helmer Paul Etheredge-Ouzts.
  22. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    Affectionate spoof merits appreciation as a not-so-dumb salute to another era's ultra-dumb genre conventions.
  23. Meet the Browns
    Often plays more like "Tyler Perry's Greatest Hits" as it recycles various elements from the writer-director's earlier works.
  24. Just Looking
    It goes down as easy as a cherry Coke.
  25. Novocaine
    A Steve Martin vehicle that's not prankish or weird enough by half.
  26. My Kingdom
    An intriguing spin on the British crime genre that's more a series of strong performances than a fully worked-out character drama.
  27. Full Frontal
    Arid, self-consciously arty and emotionally uninvolving.
  28. El leyton
    Despite its crude, willfully naive style, this comedy of transgression, judgment and revenge becomes steadily more appealing as it progresses.
  29. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    This exceedingly long-winded but classy drama could appeal to the same strain of infrequent, regional moviegoers looking for righteous entertainment that flocked to "The Passion of the Christ."
  30. EuroTrip
    Promising young cast flounders amid comic material that's staler than week-old bread.
  31. Lila & Eve
    Although Davis’ performance is so good here, it’s tough to know where the real world ends and the vendetta fantasy begins.
  32. Paint
    In its dry deliberate way, Paint skewers something all too real: a certain kind of toxic self-deluding male myopia.
  33. Kicking & Screaming
    An immensely likable, funny comedy that finds a novel approach to that familiar combo of kids and sports.
  34. Hesher
    The problem with the script by Susser and David Michod, working from a story by Brian Charles Frank, is that Hesher's uncouth behavior is so aggressively pushed to single-minded, crudely exploitative effect.
  35. Madea's Family Reunion
    Tyler Perry offers another blithely unbalanced mix of low comedy, sudsy sentiment and spiritual uplift in Madea's Family Reunion.
  36. Lansky
    Keitel . . . infuses his performance here with more than enough lion-in-winter gravitas to dominate every moment he is on screen, and quite a few when he isn’t, which in turn is sufficient to propel Lansky through stretches when the passing of time is felt, and the budgetary limitations are obvious.
  37. Descent
    Pic's message is the one thing that's made clear: A victim can sink lower than her predator. Whether receiving that message justifies the cost of watching Descent is another question.
  38. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    The good news for “Ghostbusters” fans is that “Afterlife” does nothing to tarnish what has come before.
  39. Outside the Wire
    Apart from his programming, there’s little that sets Leo apart from your average action hero. And that, of course, is the problem with nearly all of these Netflix movies in the end: They approximate, but seldom surpass, what they’re meant to replace.
  40. Smokin' Aces
    Smokin' Aces blows some cool smoke rings until it makes the very un-cool mistake of overstaying its welcome.
  41. Down and Derby
    A modestly amusing family-friendly comedy about a miniature car race that brings out the worst in overzealous fathers who compete with each other through their children.
  42. Rashevski's Tango
    Picture touchingly conveys the everyday closeness of the Rashevskis, who are wont to tango their troubles away, but spiritual upheavals and tonal shifts feel artificial and strained.
  43. Mean Machine
    OK entertainment but nothing more.
  44. Indecent Proposal
    This is one of those high-concept pictures with a big windup and weak delivery.
  45. Planet Earth: Dreams
    Mendel's visuals consistently fall short of the strange oneiric quality of Foreman's strategically normal-seeming dialogue, with its subtly irregular pauses and repetitions, its austere ellipses and enigmatic insistences.
  46. Outlaw
    Both the pic's power and its problems stem from Love deliberately taking no moral position nor offering any solutions; he gives his audience what it wants at a gut level and doesn't wimp out at the end.
  47. Waiting for Lightning
    A slickly produced, unabashedly celebratory picture about professional skateboarder Danny Way.
  48. The Rooftop
    Like a school pageant with a Broadway-sized budget, this noisy production is a pileup of extravagant dance numbers, candy-colored sets and vintage props that, sans the requisite heart or hip factor, soon overstays its welcome.
  49. Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo
    As a narrative, “Evangelion 3.0″ may make you feel your brain is turning into goat cheese. As a showcase for pure visual ingenuity and splendor, though, it rocks.
  50. Secret in Their Eyes
    Roberts brings an acrid sense of bitterness and sorrow to this exceedingly sharp-witted sleuth, registering the cruel passage of time and the toll of unspeakable tragedy in every careworn feature and vocal quaver.... it’s a skillful and humane turn from an actress whose darkly penetrating gaze comes closest to fulfilling the mystery of the title.
  51. Preggoland
    An amusing, extravagantly implausible farce that nonetheless makes a pointed argument about the perceived marginalization of childless women in modern society.
  52. Prescription Thugs
    Engaging and enraging but also, alas, consistently superficial.
  53. Sky on Fire
    There’s really nothing new here. Still, it’s hard to deny the sporadically satisfying nostalgic appeal of this dash down memory lane.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cocoon: The Return
    Not altogether charmless, Cocoon: The Return still is far less enjoyable a senior folks' fantasy than Cocoon. An overdose of bathos weighs down the sprightliness of the characters, resulting in a more maudlin than magic effort.
  55. Sleeping Dogs
    Sleeping Dogs, starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it keeps you watching.
  56. Red Joan
    Tweedy, dreary, and unconvincing. ... It’s dismaying that so little drama is wrung out of the tale, and that what we get too often feels like a cliché-riddled romantic pulp.
  57. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    Engagingly intriguing throughout most of its slightly overlong running time, and perhaps the strangely mesmerizing mood Lynch has orchestrated for the entire "Twin Peaks" undertaking should not be underestimated at this juncture. But the feeling persists that, to a considerable degree, Lynch is marking time with this project, creating new riffs and variations on themes he had already largely worked out.
  58. Angel Has Fallen
    The plot — which is to say, the plot against the president — is, once again, a violently overwrought confection of “topical” comic-strip ludicrousness; that’s the DNA of the “Fallen” series. Yet when you’re watching a big-budget B-movie, there’s good preposterous and there’s bad preposterous.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lonely Guy
    Martin’s trademark wacky humor is fitfully in evidence, but seems much more repressed than usual in order to fit into the relatively realistic world of single working people.
  60. The Mother
    The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stella
    The semitragic Stella Dallas shows her years in this hopelessly dated and ill-advised remake.
  62. Country Strong
    That rare ensemble piece in which all four principals are not only compellingly drawn but handled with an astute sense of dramatic balance.
  63. Seance
    Seance proves a disappointingly boilerplate retro slasher that’s pedestrian on every level from concept to execution.
  64. Rampage
    Peyton delivers a unified-looking whole, in which the visual effects integrate well with stage and location work.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Outsiders
    Francis Coppola has made a well acted and crafted but highly conventional film out of S.E. Hinton's popular youth novel, The Outsiders.
  66. The Expendables
    A nearly incoherent all-stars-on-deck actioner that plays like "Grown Ups" on nitro or a brutish, blue-collar "Ocean's Eleven."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Adventures in Babysitting
    Chris Columbus weighs in adequately in his directorial debut, thanks to a fresh, solid lead performance from Elisabeth Shue. Yet the film can never rise above the leaden script.
  68. The Warrior's Way
    A visually inspired multi-genre amalgamation, a borderline-surreal folly that suggests a martial-arts action-adventure co-directed by Sergio Leone and Federico Fellini.
  69. No Turning Back
    Competently made but unconvincing melodrama.
  70. S.W.A.T.
    Coming in the wake of the physically astonishing "Bad Boys 2," S.W.A.T. seems square.
  71. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    This is the kind of movie that was doomed on the page, both by an inherently problematic premise and ill-conceived character motivations.
  72. The Raspberry Reich
    This ostensible spoof of "radical chic" is, like his previous works, at once amusingly outrageous and slightly dull.
  73. The Kid
    Director Jon Turteltaub's insistence upon hammering every point home with giant closeups and relentless musical underlining makes this insufferably cloying and sickly sweet.
  74. Slow Jam King
    Rambling road-trip comedy Slow Jam King offers agreeable shenanigans as three mismatched characters find themselves stuck together on a long drive from New York City to Nashville.
  75. Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead
    With Cross jump-starting others on a liquid road to health, this glorified infomercial could saturate latenight TV after its April 1 bow.
  76. Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland
    With an obvious nod to "Trainspotting," Joonas Neuvonen's junkie documentary Reindeerspotting combines the greasy immediacy of that Danny Boyle parable, the naked candor of Larry Clark's "Tulsa" and the laconic poetry of William S. Burroughs' "Junkie."
  77. She's Funny That Way
    An enthusiastic but low-fizz romantic farce that gets by principally on the charms of a cast speckled with gifted funnymen (and, more particularly, funnywomen).
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Return of the Living Dead II
    Billed as a comedy/horror flick, Return of the Living Dead Part II is neither scary nor funny and adds salt in the wound with an obnoxious soundtrack of grating rock music.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paternity
    There are several funny bits in Paternity a harmless enough romantic comedy that strangely has its strongest laughs in its least important scenes.
  80. About Alex
    Neither the script’s up-to-the-minute signifiers nor its cheekily self-aware humor can entirely dispel a formulaic feel.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Foul Play
    Foul Play revives a relatively dormant film genre - the crime-suspense-romantic comedy in which low-key leading players get involved with themselves while also caught up in monumental intrigue. The name missing from the credits is Alfred Hitchcock. Writer Colin Higgins makes a good directorial bow.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bedroom Window
    Curtis Hanson’s screenplay [from the novel The Witnesses by Anne Holden] involves several ingenious plot twists. Huppert carries the first half of the film, replaced by McGovern in importance in the final reels and both actresses are alluring and mysterious in keeping the piece suspenseful. Unfortunately, a lot of coincidences and just plain stupid actions by Guttenberg are relied upon to keep the pot boiling.
  83. Uncertainty
    Half formulaic and half simply unimaginative.
  84. Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
    At 76 minutes, the film is nearly twice as long as even the band's most dedicated admirers might need, with weariness setting in around the 40-minute mark.
  85. Shoot on Sight
    A disappointingly stilted melodrama masquerading as a political thriller.
  86. Johnny Mad Dog
    There's no doubt Johnny Mad Dog means to leave the viewer with a visceral impression of its terrors, on that it largely succeeds. Whether that accomplishment deserves praise is more of an open question.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Above the Law
    With a couple dozen stunt persons and an earthy, warm and supportive partner (Pam Grier), Seagal kicks, kills and crushes with his skillful hands one handful after another of street hoods who try and thwart his mission.
  88. The Dogwalker
    Though central dynamic is a familiar one -- old coot and young lost soul thrown together -- perfs, understated script and well-judged direction avoid too-obvious sentimentality or melodrama. Nonetheless, overall story arc is fairly predictable, and deliberate pacing sometimes risks dullness.
  89. Chasing Mavericks
    The outstanding big-wave footage proves more credible than the overfamiliar dramatics in Chasing Mavericks.
  90. Rules of Engagement
    A broad and obvious approach to ambiguous material that's virtually all plot mechanics with little nuance or characterization.
  91. The Scorpion King
    Rouses excitement mostly from stuntwork and thesp agility rather than CGI excess.
  92. Bootmen
    Feel-good quality fare.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bangkok Dangerous
    Enjoyable in an undemanding way, and with a few interesting flourishes.
  94. Levity
    Despite an effectively low-key performance by Billy Bob Thornton in the leading role, pic is no more spiritually insightful or illuminating than Sunday School instructional story, and a lot less dramatically coherent.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Necessary Roughness
    Essentially, this is a football version of the equally contrived and only slightly less hokey baseball comedy Major League.
  96. Queenpins
    Gaudet and Pullapilly argue, cheekily and convincingly, that the real crooks are the unseen conglomerates who’ve created a society that devalues products and their consumers.
  97. Insidious: The Red Door
    For a first-time director, Patrick Wilson doesn’t do a bad job, but he’s working with tropes that have already been worked to death. It’s time to close this carnival of souls down.
  98. All Cheerleaders Die
    It’s a fond, briskly diverting homage, but not a truly inspired one.
  99. Legends of the Fall
    While emotionally intense, it's neither hurried nor charged with false drama. It's also one of the most handsome of recent films, with sterling work by cameraman John Toll and production designer Lilly Kilvert.
  100. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    Neatly balancing brightly sentimental comedy with slightly edgier funny business, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone pulls off the impressive trick of generating laughs on a consistent basis while spinning a clever scenario about rival magicians waging a Las Vegas turf war with a wide multi-demographic appeal.
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