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. 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain
    Only small children with limited attention spans will be impressed by the lackluster kung-foolishness in 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain.
  2. Willy's Wonderland
    Willy’s Wonderland has the garish stop-and-go rhythm of an ’80s slasher film, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a gorefest to relax into with a can of Punch (or something stronger).
  3. Cherry
    There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.
  4. Rails & Ties
    Reserved, careful and largely predictable in the way it plays out its wrenching emotional crises.
  5. Treasure
    A film with heart but no real teeth, the commendable sensitivity of which turns too easily toward the sentimental.
  6. Klimt
    Billed as a phantasmagoria rather than a biopic, Klimt falls into the philosophical conundrum it attempts to resurrect -- whether portrait and allegory can coexist. Notwithstanding moments of great beauty, in this case the answer is clearly "no."
  7. Way Off Broadway
    Both extremely familiar and, despite frequent references to Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles, cinematically and dramatically dull.
  8. Music from the Big House
    The performances are fun, if musically only adequate -- there are no evident virtuosi languishing within Angola's walls -- and Chiarelli's attempts to frame matters philosophically fall a little flat.
  9. Colossus
    Hendrickson shot “Colossus” from a partial script, leaving room for improvisation, and the movie’s loose, shapeless feel and scenes that go on far too long are the telltale signs of a filmmaker who fell so in love with his own material that he couldn’t bring himself to kill his darlings.
  10. Perfect Sisters
    Stan Brooks’ first directorial feature provides scant psychological depth, drawing its characters and staging their incidents in crude fashion, despite superficial production gloss.
  11. The Girl and Death
    The film’s emotional center rings coldly hollow, its star-crossed lovers coming off more like projected figures than flesh-and-blood players.
  12. Salt and Fire
    This most defiantly rule-resistant of filmmakers certainly hasn’t lost his capacity to surprise. Salt and Fire’s punchline, however, only enhances the sense of a shaggy-dog tale dashed off on the back of a postcard — it’s the scenery on the other side that holds our attention.
  13. Wolf Warrior 2
    More apolitical moviegoers are likely to simply enjoy the runaway train of action set pieces that Wu propels with his flimsy but serviceable plot, and dismiss all the jingoist chest-thumping as roughly akin to John Rambo’s stated desire to refight the Vietnam War — and, dammit, win this time! — in “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”
  14. The Bay of Silence
    The film’s pained, ugly revelations finally carry more weight than any amateur detective work leading up to them: a #MeToo reckoning hidden within a glinting, noir-esque hall of mirrors.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Raven
    A good horror flicker. Just vaguely 'suggested' by the Edgar Allen Poe classic, the adaptation wanders not a little, but the basic romance is wisely kept to the fore, and Bela Lugosi, as the psycopathic medico to whom Irene Ware is indebted for her life contributes the shocker aspects forcibly.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Egg and I
    Shortcoming is in an evenness of treatment – partially in the writing but more importantly in Erskine’s direction – that fails to suck the drama out of the situations presented in the book.
  17. Homestead
    The lead characters are well-cast across the board, with Chase and McDonough especially effective as complex, unpredictable characters whose sporadic conflicts go a long way toward developing a rooting interest in both men.
  18. Wild Horses
    Tonally dissonant and narratively disjointed, Wild Horses plays like a patchwork quilt of scenes excerpted from a much longer movie, or maybe even a miniseries.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    K-9
    There are a few amazing moments (the dog’s rescue of Belushi in a bar). In between lingers lots of standard action-pic fare, plenty of toothless jokes and some down-right mangy dialog.
  20. Frontier(s)
    Can a movie be an adrenalin-fueled, blood-gushing thrill ride and still be as boring as dirt? Apparently. The French answer to "Hostel" and "Saw" -- Frontier(s) is a 100-minute hemorrhage that doesn't bring anything to the operating table of torture-porn but more gore, cruelty and misery.
  21. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    It's a very academic movie about academics that belongs in academia, not movie theaters.
  22. Miracles from Heaven
    In a welcome gender reversal from the father-son dynamic of “Heaven Is for Real,” Garner and Rogers deliver fully committed performances that credibly convey the physical and mental anguish endured by sick children and their caregivers.
  23. School for Scoundrels
    Picture seemed certain to either fly high on outrageous humor or crash under the weight of tastelessness. Instead, the movie just sits there and never comes alive.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    More American Graffiti
    While dazzling to the eye, the flirtation with split-screen, anamorphic, 16mm and 1:85 screen sizes does not justify itself in terms of the film’s content. What Norton and producer Howard Kazanjian are attempting, and what a variety of technicians pull off flawlessly, is daring, but ultimately pointless.
  25. Boys Life 3
    A typical grab bag of works of varying depth, all of them breezy and entertaining.
  26. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Beyond the participants' friends and co-workers, it's hard to imagine an audience for this professionally packaged exercise in navel gazing.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kate & Leopold
    A time-travel romantic comedy whose best elements -- Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman -- overcome distracting plot holes, loose threads and assorted contrivances to make for a mostly charming and diverting tale.
  28. A Slipping-Down Life
    A curiously bland drama that fails to fulfill the promise of its early scenes.
  29. I Am I
    This potentially intriguing concept is given disappointingly bland, flat treatment in the Kickstarter-funded project, in which Towne brings professionalism but little personality to both her on- and offcamera roles.
  30. 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.
  31. Mapplethorpe
    To rob Mapplethorpe of his controversy is to strip the movie of its dramatic conflict. By doing so, the script (co-written with Mikko Alanne) reduces to a rather banal biopic, reenacting how a scrappy outsider achieved unconventional success.
  32. Oz the Great and Powerful
    This elaborate exercise in visual Baum-bast nonetheless gets some mileage out of its game performances, luscious production design and the unfettered enthusiasm director Sam Raimi brings to a thin, simplistic origin story.
  33. Joyful Noise
    A routinely plotted competition drama in which Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton (playing her first bigscreen lead in 20 years) vie for control of a small-town Georgia church chorus.
  34. Rush Hour 3
    The latest picture to feature one of the movies’ oddest crime-fighting tandems nevertheless stays true to the franchise formula of East-West fusion action, broad cultural comedy and international intrigue, this time largely in Paris.
  35. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    Seth MacFarlane has delivered a flaccid all-star farce that’s handsomely dressed up with nowhere to go for most of its padded two-hour running time.
  36. Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    Too underground in feel.
  37. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    A partly smart, mostly dumb addition to the teen horror sweepstakes -- smart in how it neatly catches the petty, hurtful, sexy and druggy aspects of high school life, dumb in how it makes absolutely no sense once its resolution is known.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Three Men and a Cradle
    Coline Serreau's comedy about three hardened bachelors saddled with a newborn baby, produced on a modest budget and without bankable talent, is warm, hilarious and well-made. Serreau's direction is bright and confident, avoiding the saccharine pitfalls of the material.
  39. Bushwick
    Even if the low-budget execution is uneven at times, there’s enough snap to the filmmaking, and enough raw power in the premise, to make for solid B-movie excitement.
  40. How to Deter a Robber
    With low stakes and even lower energy, writer-director Maria Bissell’s feature debut isn’t sure if it’s a thriller with amusing elements or a comedy of criminal absurdity. What it winds up being, therefore, is neither, stuck in a dull middle ground that will please no one.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Warlock
    Warlock is an attempt to concoct a pic from a pinch of occult chiller, a dash of fantasy thriller and a splash of 'stalk 'n' slash'. But what could have been a heady brew falls short, despite some gusto thesping from Richard E. Grant and Lori Singer.
  42. The Love Punch
    A creaky heist-caper comedy that hopes to get by on sunny amiability.
  43. Last Man Standing
    Bruce Willis’ one-note performance and the monotonous plotting doom this New Line venture, despite the director’s typically virile staging of the numerous gun battles.
  44. Unicorn Store
    There’s a serious mismatch between the personality of Samantha McIntyre’s script (which seems to be written as a kooky, do-it-yourself comedy, à la “Being John Malkovich” or “Napoleon Dynamite”) and Larson’s directing style, which feels entirely incompatible with whimsy.
  45. Chaos Theory
    The lead performers, the brighter fillips in Daniel Taplitz’s screenplay and Marcos Siega’s (“Pretty Persuasion”) assured direction make this a pleasing item overall.
  46. The Closer You Get
    Another tale of out-of-it working-class men cooking up a harebrained scheme to improve their lot in life.
  47. The Code
    Gallic gangster actioner fuses many disparate generic and stylistic conventions, but, although script by co-star Samy Naceri's brother was purportedly pared down from several hundred pages, it still bears the weight of its pretensions.
  48. Brokedown Palace
    It's close to a no-win situation dramatically, culturally and politically, and Kaplan deals with it plausibly enough by concentrating on the performances and the interior conflicts they reveal.
  49. The Ninth Gate
    This is really a shaggy devil story whose giddy, ironic tone may throw viewers expecting a scary movie.
  50. Love & Sex
    Valerie Breiman’s exceedingly slick feature is one of those cutesy items in which the characters talk about nothing but relationships and themselves.
  51. Pearl Harbor
    Just compare their superficiality to the complex characters in "From Here to Eternity" and what's missing here becomes terribly clear.
  52. The Marksman
    The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate.
  53. The Jacket
    A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.
  54. Skills Like This
    Likable but lightweight slacker comedy.
  55. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    It is all aggressively stylized, abusively fast-paced and ear-bleedingly loud, relying so heavily on CGI that nothing — not one thing — seems to correspond to the real world.
  56. The Miracle Season
    Even if you see through the benign (manipulative) strategies of The Miracle Season, which isn’t hard to do, resistance is futile. You will surrender. You’ll feel the tear on your cheek, the lump in your throat, the reverent huggy glory of it all.
  57. Drive Angry 3D
    Despite amply funded f/x, including some spectacular muscle-car stunts, the movie motors to the grindhouse with squealing tires and guitars, gratuitous nudity and gore, and a scantily clad greasy-spoon waitress endearingly played by Amber Heard.
  58. Slap Her... She's French
    Scripters Robert Lee King and Lamar Damon leave no national cliche or double entendre unturned in this good-looking but relentlessly lowbrow outing which plays like "Clueless Does South Fork" with a side order of garlic.
  59. Carbon Nation
    Well intended but inert.
  60. Incident In a Ghostland
    It all seems slick, intense, and unpleasant in the same hollow way “Martyrs” did, because all the cruelty is so meaningless.
  61. A Sacrifice
    The result is a movie that ultimately falls short on both suspense and ideas, though it remains watchable enough.
  62. Then Came You
    Since the filmmakers’ hearts are clearly in the right place, it’s a shame its parts couldn’t knit together a bit more seamlessly. The narrative’s lifeblood is the sweet friendship that develops between Calvin and Skye — and the actors’ magnetic chemistry keeps that alive.
  63. In My Country
    An unquestionably sincere but dramatically stillborn outing by veteran John Boorman.
  64. The Union
    The trouble with The Union is that neither the film nor its characters have much in the way of personality, to the point it’s not even clear how they feel about one another.
  65. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Carried by Kristen Stewart's compellingly dark performance, but also by helmer Chris Weitz's robust visuals.
  66. City of Lies
    The truth is out there, but when pot and kettle go to battle, Hollywood best be careful using the term City of Lies to describe anything other than itself.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Brain Donors
    The title Brain Donors sounds like a horror film and for those expecting a comedy, it is.
  68. The Legend of Tarzan
    As a brand, Burroughs’ hero has always been schlocky, and no amount of psychological depth or physical perfection can render him otherwise if the filmmakers can’t swing a convincing interaction between Tarzan and his animal allies. That dynamic — along with his full-throated yodel — has always been Tarzan’s trademark, but in this relatively lifeless incarnation, it simply doesn’t register.
  69. Rapture-Palooza
    More irrelevant than irreverent, the unworthy script from “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’s” Chris Matheson might play to apocalyptically stoned college kids, but offers nothing in the way of broader social satire, suggesting the waste of a perfectly good Reckoning — not to mention the talents of a cast far funnier than the doom-and-gloom results suggest.
  70. The Fabulous Four
    Despite the caliber of its cast, “The Fabulous Four” never shakes the feeling that its on-screen talent is being severely misused.
  71. Stomp the Yard
    The dancing is more dynamic than the plotting in Stomp the Yard, an energetic if formulaic underdog tale about warring black fraternities specializing in an intensely competitive style of step dancing.
  72. Stalin's Wife
    Results are solid, if stylistically unspectacular.
  73. Kidnap
    The implication is that Berry’s character, Karla Dyson, isn’t like other parents, and yet, what makes Kidnap so compelling is that she behaves exactly the way you think you might under the same circumstances.
  74. Henry Poole Is Here
    Picture's tendency to lecture on the power of faith and religion and on the demerits of science seems to assume an almost childlike audience that needs to be spoon-fed Pablum.
  75. Fidel
    Worth seeing for its wealth of archival footage hitherto little-seen outside Communist bloc nations, Fidel nonetheless errs badly by slapping a quasi-objective journalistic tenor onto content so flattering and uncritical it might pass for an old "This Is Your Life" episode.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vatel
    Vatel, a no-expense-spared costumer, is further proof that all the money and technical expertise in the world are no substitutes for a good screenplay and creative direction.
  77. Sympathy for Delicious
    This offbeat effort proves more admirable for its ambition than anything else, as the uneasy mix of satire, allegory, grittiness and redemption never quite jells.
  78. Dear Dictator
    Pleasant enough to watch, even innocuous, Dear Dictator is something that gets worse the more you think about it.
  79. Holidate
    Briskly directed by John Whitesell, written by Tiffany Paulsen, Holidate won’t change your mind about the tread-worn challenges of romantic comedies, but its leads leverage their charms nicely.
  80. Hellboy: The Crooked Man
    Everything that unfolds in The Crooked Man does so with exceptional dullness, including various psychic visions experienced by the characters, which feel more obligatory than inspired.
  81. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Pacific Rim Uprising delivers plentiful CG mayhem.... What it lacks, though, is both del Toro’s trademark Lovecraftian imagery (all slick tentacles and dank subterranean locales) and the sense of thunderous heft that the Mexican auteur bestowed upon his titans.
  82. Heart of Stone
    What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.
  83. Murder Mystery 2
    Sandler and Aniston mesh; they made you believe in Nick and Audrey’s cantankerous marriage, and in the love percolating just beneath the fighting. If what Nora Ephron devised was a clever Xerox of the rom-com, “Murder Mystery 2” is a Xerox of the Xerox, powered by a whodunit plot that’s a cheesy light parody of itself played just straight enough to work.
  84. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
    Those looking for much in the way of real insight will find this amiable enterprise doesn’t stray very far from a general, standard-stoner-yuks tenor of “OMG I was SO HIGH!!!”
  85. Hooking Up
    In spite of its tweaks to gender roles, the duo’s sexcapades and Snow’s spirited performance, Hooking Up doesn’t offer much by way of surprise, which doesn’t mean that as the odd, amiable couple head toward their personal reckonings, you won’t find yourself rooting for them. Separately and together.
  86. The Brothers Grimsby
    Baron Cohen’s unflinching ability to play dumb is still good for a few chuckles, making some of the film’s funniest moments out of its most innocent quips.
  87. Peter and Vandy
    An aggravating romance that runs only 78 minutes but ends not a moment too soon.
  88. Hyena Road
    This is the kind of movie where a major development in a character’s personal life instantly telegraphs his ultimate fate in the trenches.
  89. Nowhere
    A vibrantly colorful, wildly nihilistic and lovingly perverse poem to America's beautiful, libidinous and doomed youth. Though not his best, Araki's sixth feature is without a doubt his most accessible, sensual and superficially entertaining movie to date.
  90. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Any message about the need for open-mindedness in life and love, however, is muddled by a slapdash plot that ultimately cares less about taking a stand in favor of progressive values than it does in superficially employing such feel-good ideas for unimaginative, hyperactive adolescent slapstick.
  91. Zombeavers
    Zombeavers is not a total wash, and seen at night, under the right combination of low expectations and controlled substances, it may even seem better than it really is.
  92. 12 Mighty Orphans
    It’s all engineered to pay off in familiar ways, though the movie isn’t quite as predictable as you might think.
  93. Brightburn
    A watchable but super-silly mix of superheroics and evil-child horror that mashes together singularly uninspired ideas from both.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Innocent Blood
    Teens and genre fans should eat up John Landis' latest mix of horror and camp comedy. They will 'ooh' at the various gross-out scenes and nifty special effects, 'aah' at the film's sensuality and Anne Parillaud's easy nudity, and savor the numerous in-jokes and horror references, from cameos by other goremeister directors to clips from various late-show staples.
  95. Two Weeks
    Picture veers unsteadily between melodrama and light comedy, with no confidence in either.
  96. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Despite the preposterous, kissing-your-sister premise of A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy, a very likable cast and some terrific sketch-style comedy should please (if not deeply satisfy the lustful yearnings of) audiences lured by the film's title.
  97. Churchill
    Churchill is a small, watchable, rather prosaic backroom docudrama.
  98. The Belko Experiment
    As a self-aware guilty pleasure, The Belko Experiment may not quite seize greatness, but it does give it a playful squeeze.
  99. Pain Hustlers
    Pain Hustlers takes an off-putting mock-documentary approach to this tragedy, focusing on a handful of sleazebag salespeople who bent the rules to incentivize doctors to prescribe Lonafin (the film’s fictional Subsys substitute) first for treating cancer pain, and later for conditions as mild as migraines.
  100. Hostage
    What sends this initially tense thriller over the precipice is a plot scheme that never knows when enough is enough.
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