Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb, sometimes tedious, sometimes fun civilization-vs.-aliens showdown.
  2. The Marvels
    The director, Nia DaCosta (who made the intriguing remake of “Candyman”), stages the action efficiently, but she doesn’t center the narrative; the film is a series of goals in search of a higher mission.
  3. Four Kids and It
    “Careful what you wish for” may have been the essential moral takeaway from the source books, but that wasn’t to discourage wishing for anything at all: In all respects, this serviceable but anodyne programmer could dream a bit bigger.
  4. The Mindfulness Movement
    An earnest, over-stuffed infomercial for the potential and benefits of practicing mindfulness.
  5. LA Originals
    They’re also among the most visible contemporary Chicano artists Los Angeles has to offer, and better a self-serving documentary than none at all.
  6. The Main Event
    Even though the feature reflects WWE’s core values built on family, teamwork and inspirational aspirations, and contains healthy messages about proving one’s mettle using wit and wisdom, The Main Event sags far too frequently.
  7. 1BR
    With its aspects of human captivity, brainwashing, collective insanity and ersatz utopianism, Marmor could have taken his story in myriad tonal directions. But instead of a wild ride, his film emerges a competent one that holds the attention, yet also feels like a missed chance at something truly memorable from a promisingly offbeat premise.
  8. Capone
    Handsomely shot and small of scale, Capone ambles along without catching fire. That’s because the movie, at heart, is shaped as a pedestal for Hardy’s prankish mumbly Method showboating.
  9. Stardust
    The movie gives us only a small taste of it, but it’s enough to whet your appetite: for a Bowie biopic that captures this cracked actor in all his funhouse-mirror rock ‘n’ roll glory.
  10. The Wrong Missy
    The Wrong Missy is a harmless dumb-meets-smart-mouth comedy that doesn’t necessarily feed your appetite for more Netflix throwaways. But it does make you want to see Lauren Lapkus’s next act.
  11. 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!!!”
  12. Robert the Bruce
    McGowan knows how to invest ire with intelligence, and he has mastered the art of making riding a horse look like a form of strutting. When he’s onscreen, the film vibrates. When you’re watching MacFadyen’s Robert, it swells with nobility and deflates at the same time.
  13. Blood Quantum
    Despite sufficient gore, there’s more style than bite to this undead opus, which does not excel at scares or action set-pieces.
  14. Tesnota (Closeness)
    Closeness is a tough-minded, rigorously composed, quite brilliantly acted story of the challenges of everyday religious prejudice and ethnic divides in the bleak heart of Russia’s North Caucasus, and in many ways Balagov’s uncompromising but stylized social realism rewards as much as it punishes.
  15. Come Play
    Even though the kid is the hero we should clearly be rooting for, the filmmaker conjures equal amounts of empathy and compassion for the monster. That serves to add complexity to the characterizations, but balancing both sides muddles the poignancy of the climax.
  16. Chemical Hearts
    For all its serious-faced surface grit, Chemical Hearts never quite rings true.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Human Factor
    Graham Greene's low-keyed, highly absorbing 1978 novel of an aging English double agent finding himself trapped into defecting to Moscow and leaving his family behind may have seemed like ideal material for Otto Preminger's style of dispassionate ambiguity, but helmer doesn't seem up to the occasion, bringing little atmosphere or feeling to the delicate ticks of the story.
  19. Sweetness in the Belly
    There’s a floridly sentimental heart fluttering beneath its tastefully solemn surface, but at times, you can’t help wishing the film would give in to its more expressive impulses.
  20. Body Cam
    Intriguing, though not exactly visionary; it’s more twisted puzzle than horror ride. Not that there aren’t jumpy moments, and tense interludes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    California Split
    The film is technically and physically handsome, all the more so for being mostly location work, but lacks a cohesive and reinforced sense of story direction.
  22. Unhinged
    The carnage is the point here, not any of the reasoning behind it, and Borte and Crowe bring it to a suitably frothing, furious head: Some movies just want to watch the world burn, preferably on a very big screen.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a disappointing mixture. A period story about a small northwest mountain village where stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie run the bordello, the production suffers from overlength; also a serious effort at moody photography which backfires into pretentiousness; plus a diffused comedy-drama plot line which is repeatedly shoved aside in favor of bawdiness.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Faces
    Faces is a long, long (at least an hour too long) look at a 36-hour splitup in the 14-year marriage of a middle-class couple. At least John Cassavetes, who also wrote the screenplay, describes them as middle-class.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Klute
    Produced handsomely in New York, but directed tediously by Alan J. Pakula, the film is a suspenser without much suspense. Donald Sutherland shares above-title billing in a line-throwing, third-banana trifle of a part.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Million Dollar Mermaid
    This is a gaudy, conventional biopic based on the career of Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman, appropriately tagged ‘Million Dollar Mermaid’.
  27. Days of the Bagnold Summer
    Even if the general ultra-clean cartoonishness of it all is deliberate, the film’s whisper-thin premise and sitcom-like characters are the cinema equivalent of Sweethearts candy: rather too sugared, and immediately forgotten.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Singing Nun
    The Singing Nun, patently designed to cash in on the story of the Belgian nun Soeur Sourire and her song 'Dominique', carries an expectancy not always realized. Fictionized approach to the truelife character - necessitated by agreement with Catholic church authorities not to make pictures autobiographical - resultantly loses in the transition, and while there are engaging musical interludes what emerges is slight and frequently slow-moving.
  29. Exit Plan
    Exit Plan has been retitled from “Suicide Tourist” for its U.S. release, and while the original monicker was certainly punchier, the new one perhaps better captures the gist of a movie that’s ultimately a little too polite and vague to make much of its intriguing premise.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bellboy
    From an artistic standpoint, The Bellboy is minor-league screen comedy, the victim of its energetic star's limited craftsmanship.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Patsy
    The Patsy's slim story line has it ups and downs, sometimes being hilarious, frequently unfunny.
  32. Fatal Affair
    Ultimately, this movie isn’t “Us,” or any other shrewd riff on contemporary culture. You won’t make a fatal — or even near-fatal — error if you stream it. Sometimes a second-rate thriller is just a second-rate thriller.
  33. Ava
    There’s a stranger, spikier, more unnerving film to be pulled from the sleek genre carapace of Ava, a film less interested in what makes a contract killer tick than in the superhuman Swiss-watch regularity of her ticking in the first place.
  34. Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash
    Despite its probably modest budget, “Street Survivors” is actually first-class as convincingly harrowing aeronautical disaster movies go, if you’re a follower of the genre that has Peter Weir’s 1993 “Fearless” to live up to.
  35. Summerland
    Summerland is very pretty, and bursts with affection for its gently befuddled characters, but for all its eager charms, streaming like colored pennants from every turret, it’s a castle in the air.
  36. Never Too Late
    While Never Too Late goes for a few too many old-folk chuckles, it also aims to probe the serious.
  37. A Girl Missing
    The intriguing ambiguity suffusing Kôji Fukada’s “Harmonium” returns to a certain degree in A Girl Missing, but this time the writer-director neglects to reinforce onscreen relationships, resulting in a disappointing and unmoving drama.
  38. Lost Girls & Love Hotels
    William Olsson’s film works as an atmospheric mood piece and sometime erotic drama. It’s less successful as a character study.
  39. Project Power
    Project Power has propulsion, little detonations of visual magic, the resonant setting of a still desperate New Orleans, and a better cast than a movie like this one tends to have. Yet watching it, you may find yourself aware of how patched together the whole thing is.
  40. Work It
    Few of the lessons and triumphs of Work It will surprise, and some of the missed opportunities disappoint.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Arabesque
    Arabesque packs the names of Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren and a foreign intrigue theme, but doesn't always progress on a true entertainment course. Fault lies in a shadowy plotline and confusing characters, particularly in the miscasting of Peck in a cute role.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flying Down to Rio
    This picture makes its bid via numbers staged by Dave Gould to Vincent Youman melodies. But Rio’s story [from a play by Anne Caldwell, based on an original story by Louis Brock] lets it down. It’s slow and lacks laughs to the point where average business seems its groove.
  43. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    An hour and a half would’ve been a perfectly fine run-time, whereas at two hours and change, “Sonic 2” wears out its welcome well before it turns into yet another phone-it-in franchise entry.
  44. Greenland
    In its relatively small-scale, often rather plodding B-movie way, it wants to do for apocalypse thrillers what “Contagion” did for outbreak movies. And there are moments when it does.
  45. Something to Talk About
    Unfortunately, the diverse elements introduced here don’t coalesce into a comfortable package, with much of the background action proving notably listless and unconvincing.
  46. Endless
    Scott Speer’s direction and the script (by Andre Case and Oneil Sharma) assures there are no baddies here. Although it shamelessly nods to the popcorn classic “Ghost,” it doesn’t rely on a culturally vexing villain to score points. This is one of the movie’s charms — and truths.
  47. Nadia, Butterfly
    It’s not Nadia’s fault — or Savard’s — that she’s a bore. That’s just the way this oddly incurious movie, which assumes too much of its audience, has made her out to be. In the water, Nadia may be a powerful butterfly, but on land, she’s more of a moth.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Parents
    There is not enough weight or complexity to the material to justify the serious approach, and while the potential for considerable black comedy exists, Balaban only scratches the surface. The laughs never come.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Raggedy Man
    This is standard stuff and hardly worth Spacek’s talents.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Silent Running
    Silent Running depends on the excellent special effects of debuting director Douglas Trumbull and his team and on the appreciation of a literate but broadly entertaining script. Those being the highlights, they are virtually wiped out by the crucial miscasting of Bruce Dern. Production lacks dramatic credibility and teeters on the edge of the ludicrous.
  51. Death of Me
    Bousman’s film pulls off some effectively nasty jolts and jabs: its feverish, whispery, eventually shrieking island-of-lost-souls claustrophobia may be rooted in cliché, but cliché takes root for a reason.
  52. Epicentro
    It’s a fascinating moment for cultural stock-taking. Yet despite the filmmaker’s evident fondness for the people and nation, this impressionistic feature feels frustratingly obtuse, unfocused and unstructured.
  53. Eternal Beauty
    With an assist from Sally Hawkins’ valiantly committed lead performance, the result occasionally summons the genuinely disoriented perspective of an unstable protagonist, but more often, it’s the filmmaking that seems to spiral out of control.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    Minnelli could have timed many of the scenes so that laughs would not have stepped on dialog tag lines. Also he permits the wedding rehearsal sequence to play too long, lessening the comedic effect.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Butterfield 8
    Alterations made on John O'Hara's 1935 novel by the scenarists (among other things, they have updated it from the Prohibition era, spectacularized the ending and refined some of the dialog) have given Butterfield 8 the form and pace it needs, but the story itself remains a weak one, the behavior and motivations of its characters no more tangible than in the original work.
  56. Ammonite
    Ultimately more symbolic than satisfying, the project leaves one grateful that two stars of this caliber would take on such a story, while wishing their efforts had left us with a more resonant artifact.
  57. The Mole Agent
    Alberdi’s comic-caper approach soon fizzles. Like Sergio, the film is hunting for drama, something to merit the 007 guitar and upright bass riffs of Vincent van Warmerdam’s score.
  58. Sportin' Life
    There’s at least something honest about the messiness and occasional superficiality of the documentary, as a ragged, unsynchronized collection of events and ideas — whether personal, trivial or globally resonant — that have passed through Ferrara’s eyes and his mind in the last year.
  59. Hubie Halloween
    Director Steve Brill (another regular Sandler ally) keeps a lot of colorful balls in the air, even if the pacing is lumpier than you’d like in an enterprise this sketchy: Set pieces and one-off visual gags are simply stuffed in wherever they fit, like the cinematic equivalent of Hubie’s over-decorated Halloween front yard.
  60. Friendsgiving
    This vagueness of purpose wouldn’t matter much if the film were genuinely, raucously funny, but comedian-turned-filmmaker Paone’s best gags are the kind to raise a smile rather than a laugh.
  61. New Order
    Essentially picking up where “The Joker” left off, this ultra-provocative case of speculative fiction promises a view of what change might look like, only to succumb to a deep sense of cynicism as the scope of the film becomes unmanageable.
  62. Final Account
    Clocking in at a swift 90 minutes, Final Account is like a teenager-friendly approach to “Shoah,” designed as an introduction to issues of responsibility, guilt and the banality of man’s inhumanity to man.
  63. Akilla's Escape
    Williams’ effortless, near-otherworldly presence gives Akilla’s Escape all the grace and mystique it requires; the film strains a little too hard for its own.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Windmill
    All principal players are well cast, but the production fizzles in its final half-hour because the story premise gets clobbered by clumsy and ineffective resolution and execution.
  65. Fear of a Black Hat
    Good musical numbers serve as welcome punctuation to a film that grows increasingly tedious.
  66. Mr. Nanny
    Cross Uncle Buck with Home Alone, stir in the Hulkster, and you've got Mr. Nanny, a gonzo comedy-actioner that should entertain the under-12 and couch-potato sets.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ball of Fire
    A simple gag is hardly enough on which to string 110 minutes of film. And that's all - one funny situation - that Samuel Goldwyn's director and writers have to support Ball of Fire. It's sufficient, however, to provide quite a few chuckles.
  68. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    His vision is big, but the execution clunky and crowded with detail, such that it all plays like a regional-theater production of “The Wiz” staged within the walls of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.” Talbert is positively unabashed about Jingle Jangle’s too-muchness, as if trying to make up for a century of underrepresentation by stuffing everything he can into two hours’ worth of Christmas pageantry.
  69. Honest Thief
    It’s a serviceably energized and routine action crime movie, with a few slammin’ fistfights and gun battles, and it proves once again that Liam Neeson is an actor who will take a paycheck gig without treating it like one.
  70. Chick Fight
    Instead of the cleavage, hair-pulling and Jerry Springer antics it teases, Chick Fight serves up a blandly formulaic and scrupulously inoffensive tale of female empowerment.
  71. Siempre, Luis
    Siempre, Luis winds up sidelining the bulk of Luis’ life to focus disproportionately on a recent achievement: his part, alongside that of his son, in bringing “Hamilton” to a Puerto Rican audience. The perky but lopsided result isn’t particularly revelatory on either front, and so relentlessly glowing that it’s hard not to feel some of Luis’ political expertise at play.
  72. Fatman
    This, in other words, is not your father’s grungy one-joke yuletide action comedy. It’s “The Santa Clause” meets “Magnum Claus,” and it’s pitched to the Gibson faithful with the idea that they’ll follow him anywhere (which they probably will).
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Marnie
    Marnie is the character study of a thief and a liar, but what makes her tick remains clouded even after a climax reckoned to be shocking but somewhat missing its point.
  74. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Wild Mountain Thyme is the kind of film you want to love, just as you want these two characters to fall in love, and it’s simultaneously exasperating and original that they don’t go about their courtship in the usual fashion.
  75. Hillbilly Elegy
    As long as Close is acting up an award-worthy storm (her performance is actually quite meticulous), Hillbilly Elegy is never less than alive. Adams does some showpiece acting of her own, but as skillful as her performance is, she never gets us to look at Bev with pity and terror.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rabid
    Rabid, as the dictionary explains means both ‘affected with rabies’ and ‘extremely violent’. Using both definitions, Rabid, is so accurately titled that this one word tells all. Here is an extremely violent, sometimes nauseating, picture about a young woman affected with rabies, running around Montreal infecting others.
  77. Radium Girls
    Scrupulously sincere in its approach and well-meaning to a fault in intention, the film aims for inspirational true story, but is sadly uninspired, and its relationship to real history is obscured by the schematic way it is fictionalized.
  78. My Psychedelic Love Story
    When you watch a documentary, some talking heads are more arresting than others, and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, seated before Morris’ camera, seems like a supporting player who’s been elevated to the lead.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Empire of the Ants
    Periodic moments of good special effects are separated by reels of dramatic banality as players flounder in flimsy dialog and under sluggish direction.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Supervixens
    Russ Meyer’s Supervixens is an overlong and overly violent skin pic whose interest lies in its pretentions to be more than a skin film.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killer Elite
    The Killer Elite is an okay Sam Peckinpah actioner starring James Caan and Robert Duvall as two modern mercenaries who wind up stalking each other in a boringly complex double-cross plot [from the novel by Robert Rostand].
  82. Embattled
    At several points in Georgian director Nick Sarkisov’s roaring, blood-and-guts film, it’s hard not to wish it would take things down a notch: A hokey, old-fashioned father-son meller clothed in a younger man’s bling-encrusted robes, it increasingly sacrifices emotional credibility for the violent, amped-up bravado of MMA itself.
  83. Modern Persuasion
    Alex Appel and Jonathan Lisecki’s film is both too innocuous and too flatly imagined to stir much feeling either way. What it does have going for it is Alicia Witt, a likable, spirited star too little used by Hollywood of late.
  84. Boss Level
    By the end of Boss Level, you may feel a lot like Pulver. Putting “Groundhog Day” on action steroids, the film has a patina of cleverness that’s pleasing enough, but you’ve seen it before. And you’ll see it again.
  85. Reminiscence
    Reminiscence plays like a perfectly calibrated two-hour mirage of things we’ve seen before.
  86. Just Cause
    The flip-flops, coincidences, surprising disclosures, far-fetched happenings, TV-style chases and illogically protracted confrontations come flying virtually all at once, obliterating the plausible character work and making the film feel like a hundred others.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Playing by Heart
    A stellar cast and articulate script notwithstanding, pic fails to connect emotionally with its audience, which perhaps says more about the difficulty of making empathetic attachments than writer-director Willard Carroll intended.
  88. 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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hannie Caulder
    Welch, with genteel modesty, makes the character for many rather ingratiating though others undoubtedly will find her plain ludicrous.
  90. Palmer
    Stevens (who has expert instincts in his documentary work) falls short of making this scenario entirely convincing. Take out a few “gritty” details that account for the film’s R rating, and Palmer is formulaic enough to pass for a faith-based movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Godspell
    Original production’s appealing aspects have remained intact – a strong Stephen Schwartz score and an infectious joie de vivre conveyed by an energetic, no-name cast. So also, unfortunately, have its flaws – a relentlessly simplistic approach to the New Testament interpreted in overbearing children’s theatre-style mugging.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Escape Artist
    Treatment frequently pushes past the careful to the precious, and the quiet, odd tale never becomes more than mildly intriguing.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mistress
    Pic, co-produced by Robert De Niro’s Tribeca outfit, looks to fade fast. The Player it’s not.
  94. The Human Factor
    Moreh offers no analysis — an especially unfortunate stance given explosive feelings and wildly variable interpretations of events. Finally, the film pushes the deeply disquieting assumption that the United States knows what’s best for those troublesome people in the Middle East, whose tantrums kiboshed all the hard work and emotional investment put in by the sainted Americans.
  95. The Program
    The Program starts in a fourth-down situation by being a sports movie with virtually no one for whom the audience can root — a major drawback, no matter how hackneyed those “Rocky”-ized finishes have become. Instead, Ward and co-writer Aaron Latham seek to indict big-time college football through a collection of cliches (money-doling boosters, steroid abuse, academic negligence , shady recruiting practices) and still want us to care about whether these players and coaches win the big game.
  96. Stand!
    Earnest and plainly felt, this grafting of a cross-cultural romance onto the story of a critical turning point in Canadian workers’ rights doesn’t want for incident and emotional commitment, but Robert Adetuyi’s film does fall a little short on showmanship.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dogfight
    The bringing together of a soldier headed for Vietnam and a future hippie on the night before President Kennedy’s assassination represents a frightfully schematic screenwriting device. But Savoca underplays the character development to such an extent that the film has a muted, very modest impact.
  98. Hocus Pocus
    With Bette Midler and her onscreen sisters shamelessly hamming things up, it looks as if those involved in making this inoffensive flight of fantasy had more fun than anyone over 12 will have watching it. Still, the blend of witchcraft and comedy should divert kids without driving the patience of their parents to the boiling point, leaving a chance to conjure up a little box office magic among that contingent before the pot tips over.
  99. True Mothers
    Adapting Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel of the same name helps impose more of a narrative framework than is typically found in Kawase’s oeuvre, although the film’s mix of genres — from marital drama to teen romance to social commentary — don’t gel.
  100. A Writer's Odyssey
    “Odyssey” is packed with stunning sights including a 50-ft., four-armed CGI villain but is let down by a script that fails to fashion promising story elements into a consistently compelling whole.
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