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. 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.
  2. Boogie
    Boogie is most assured when focusing on specific Chinese American routines, rituals and mindsets, yet it falters when crafting its larger portrait of Boogie’s predicament. Huang’s script routinely indulges in leaden exposition to get its message, as well as character details and dynamics, across.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Class Act
    Mixing elements of Trading Places with a Three Stooges short, this latest test for rap duo Kid 'n Play scores low on the SAT spectrum but should connect with a narrow range of older children and younger teens, at whom it's clearly aimed.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    A midatlantic mish-mash with some moderately amusing moments but no cohesive style.
  5. How It Ends
    Sweet and personal, How It Ends is hardly an entertaining movie, or one that will go down as one of the defining films of these unpredictably strange times. But you can’t really blame the artists for trying to make some therapeutic sense of it all, with a little help from one another.
  6. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    Somehow, it doesn’t actually seem surprising that Cage would partner with Sono. But the creative choices they make together, from an exploding gumball machine to endangered testicles — well, they must be seen to be believed.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alive
    It doesn’t help that character personalities generally aren’t distinct enough to keep track of who’s who throughout the story, leaving the audience to empathize only generally.
  8. R#J
    Even the most eagle-eyed and engaged viewers might run out of patience with R#J. Thankfully, Williams’ magnificent cast counters the disorder with their confident screen presence and theatrical muscles that stand out within the film’s unique atmosphere.
  9. Keep an Eye Out
    It’s a mildly amusing trifle, but Dupieux has already made several of those. It’s one thing not to challenge your viewers, but another not to challenge yourself — something Dupieux has shown little interest in doing.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sniper
    Sniper is an expertly directed, yet ultimately unsatisfying psychological thriller. Luis Llosa’s first-rate action direction is undermined by underdeveloped characters and pedestrian dialogue.
    • 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.
  12. Dream Lover
    An overly abstract mystery about the difficulty of really knowing another person, "Dream Lover" is too rarefied for a popular thriller and too hokey for an art film. Directorial debut of notable screenwriter Nicholas Kazan displays more of an awareness of film's visual possibilities than a flair for them, and while there are any number of interesting ideas bouncing around here, pic falls between stools both artistically and commercially.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Memphis Belle
    Offering a romanticized view of heroism drawn from the Hollywood war epic, Memphis Belle is unashamedly commercial. Its moral fabric is thinner than that of other David Puttnam productions.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Nikita
    Little Nikita never really materializes as a taut espionage thriller and winds up as an unsatisfying execution of a clever premise - a teen's traumatic discovery that his parents are Soviet spies.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Donovan's Reef
    Donovan's Reef, for a director of John Ford's stature, is a potboiler. Where Ford aficianados will squirm is during that occasional scene that reminds them this effort-less effort is the handiwork of the men who made Stagecoach and The Informer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Arizona Dream
    Impeccably lensed in Alaska, New York and Douglas, Ariz, pic remains stuck in an awkward netherworld between slapstick and pathos.
  17. Shepherds and Butchers
    Dowds’ harrowed, haunted performance as a boy overwhelmed not just by the wolves to which he has been thrown, but the ones he claims have unconsciously emerged within him, gives the film its anxious emotional center.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henry & June
    In its depiction of Depression Paris and sexual candor, Henry & June succeeds. The central performances of Fred Ward, as the cynical, life-loving Miller, and Maria de Medeiros, as the beautiful, insatiable Anais, splendidly fulfill the director’s vision. Pic is less successful in gaining audience sympathy for these hedonists. Also, the character of June (Uma Thurman) is ill-defined.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Last Exit to Brooklyn is a bleak tour of urban hell, a $16 million Stateside-lensed production of Hubert Selby Jr's controversial 1964 novel. But it doesn't hold a scalpel to the lacerating torrential prose that made the book so cringingly urgent.
  20. Kid 90
    In many ways, Frye’s collage only makes sense to its maker, where someone else might have brought enough distance to put all this material in perspective.
  21. Love Potion #9
    Inspired by the 1959 hit song, Dale Launer’s Love Potion No. 9 is a light-hearted one-joke romantic comedy that tries too hard to be cute. Glib humor and emphasis on “feel good” values aim squarely at the dating crowd and twentysomething couples. But lack of real wit and comic vitality, absence of star names and sluggish pace make pic less appealing than it might have been.
  22. Voyagers
    Voyagers is a dutiful thriller about the beast within, but there’s not a lot of surprise to it. Even when the characters let themselves go, the drama remains in lockdown.
  23. Thunder Force
    In general le cinéma de Falcone is not a pretty (or hilarious) thing. Thunder Force is, at best, more a light chuckler than a laugher.
  24. Sound of Violence
    The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.
  25. Son
    Son never quite binds its tricky, episodic story into a persuasive or gripping whole.
  26. Next Door
    The film’s games of genre-shuffling and celebrity self-satire can’t override the essential tedium of its core conflict.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mannequin: On the Move
    The only real movement is offered by Meshach Taylor, a prancing decorator who returns from the original Mannequin for more stereotyped fun.
  28. Every Breath You Take
    The movie carries you along, and it’s got some high-tension moments, but there are one too many coincidental running-into-each-other-in-town close encounters.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Romeo and Juliet
    Rarely will audiences be moved to throat-gulping by the plight of the young couple. For all Hussey’s prettiness and Whiting’s shy charm it is clear that they do not understand one tenth of the meaning of their lines and it is a drawback from which the film cannot recover.
  30. The Good Traitor
    Fascinating backroom politics circa WWII are undermined by banal marital melodrama in Danish director Christina Rosendahl’s The Good Traitor, resulting in a so-so period drama that raises more questions than it answers.
  31. Six Minutes to Midnight
    Six Minutes to Midnight, helmed by Andy Goddard, wants to be a Hitchcockian thriller, but merely manages a familiar pastiche peopled with stock characters that should divert less-discriminating viewers.
  32. The Vault
    The Vault has all the external factors that heist movies require. Yet without quite being dull, somehow it misses the danger, esprit and camaraderie we need for such escapades to achieve liftoff.
  33. The Seventh Day
    The movie is diverting enough when it flirts with clerical politics, and that made me think it might be cool to make an exorcist film that dramatized the true-life ins and outs of the Catholic Church’s relationship to exorcism. There’s a major story there, and it could fuel a heady thriller. But The Seventh Day, having established Father Peter as a new kind of exorcist renegade, soon gets down to business as usual.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Renegades
    Renegades offers some rollercoaster thrills thanks to Jack Sholder's full-throttle direction but ultimately exhausts itself with unrelenting bedlam.
  35. The Tunnel
    Solidly crafted if a bit uninspired, Pål Øie’s thriller is like a horizontal, colder, sootier “Towering Inferno” minus the all-star-cast, though their soap-operatics are intact.
  36. Amundsen: The Greatest Expedition
    "Amundsen” is a visually stately yet naggingly underscripted movie that never quite finds its dramatic center.
  37. Consenting Adults
    Consenting Adults initially seems a little brainier than its brethren but soon gives way to the same cavernous lapses in logic and formula ending, though the cast and clear appeal of the genre could insure a strong opening and modest long-term box office life.
  38. Alien on Stage
    Amusing, but not outrageous, and while I’m glad Kummer’s camera was there to capture it, the movie doesn’t reveal enough about the performers’ backgrounds or personalities.
  39. Women Is Losers
    It’s a rewarding experience to watch Izzo thread a tricky line with ease here, emitting both a child-like innocence and gradual steeliness that slowly yet convincingly sharpens and matures. If only the film could deserve her level of commitment.
  40. Things Heard & Seen
    What lies beneath Things Heard & Seen are clichés.
  41. Percy Vs Goliath
    While well cast and plenty compelling (including feisty turns from Christopher Walken and Christina Ricci), this reductive farmer drama deals in emotions more than explanations as it seeks to convey what it means for a little-guy grower like Percy Schmeiser to go up against Big Agro.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Skin Game
    With Alfred Hitchcock its director, more was expected. The story appears to be run through in a straight style as though closely following John Galsworthy's London stage hit.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Old Man and the Sea
    It captures the dignity and the stubborness of the old man, and it is tender in his final defeat. And yet it isn’t a completely satisfying picture. There are long and arid stretches, when it seems as if producer and director were merely trying to fill time.
  44. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
    In this bright, engaging film, Kerr’s story is faithfully and lovingly preserved, though its tougher, quirkier details are mollified by a layer of palatable movie gloss.
  45. The Unthinkable
    Despite some strikingly accomplished elements, the awkward whole never quite gels, sewn-together parts from “Red Dawn,” “Independence Day,” et al., failing to cohere amid major logic gaps, not to mention lead characters more off-putting than interesting.
  46. Reefa
    Reefa, based on an enraging, heartbreaking real-life event, paints over the colors, creativity and chaos of its true-life tragedy with layer of film-convention formula
  47. Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation
    It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.
  48. Dear Evan Hansen
    Dever is the best thing about this adaptation, which feels slightly less creepy in the lied-about-knowing-your-brother-to-worm-my-way-into-your-heart department, if only because Dever’s so good at balancing Zoe’s strength and vulnerability that the situation doesn’t read as a nearly 30-year-old creep manipulating a minor.
  49. Berlin Alexanderplatz
    Although promising a deep-cut dash of contemporary topicality by reimagining the main character as an undocumented African immigrant, there is the sense that the unimpeachable craft and performances — especially from rivetingly charismatic lead Welket Bungué — ultimately add up to just too slick a package.
  50. Oslo
    Rogers’ stage play is a smart, mature piece of writing, but one that transfers rather clumsily to the small screen, in part because its makers don’t show quite the same confidence in their audience’s intelligence.
  51. Cinderella
    For all the innovative, intelligent decisions made, there are an overwhelming number of frustrating creative choices. The movie’s pacing is inconsistent, especially when it comes to character development, which can feel at once underdeveloped and overstuffed.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hardware
    Hardware veers loonily out of control and becomes a black comic exercise in F/X tour-deforce that’s ceaselessly pushing itself over the top.
  53. Last Letter from Your Lover
    Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible — and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison.
  54. Old
    Old, like most Shyamalan movies, has a catchy hook along with some elegant filmmaking gambits. But instead of developing his premise in an insidious and powerful way, the writer-director just keeps throwing a lot of things at you.
  55. Blue Miracle
    Julio Quintana’s likable family film misses nary a cornball trick in Hollywood’s underdog-drama playbook, and just about pulls it off.
  56. The Ice Road
    Just about every possible peril turns up to thwart their mission en route, making for an increasingly implausible action movie that will entertain most viewers, but also perhaps make them feel a bit played for fools.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    Despite its anachronistic emulation of mid-1960s cynical spy mellers, Scorpio might have been an acceptable action programmer if its narrative were clearer, its dialog less 'cultured' and its visuals more straightforward.
  58. A Taste of Hunger
    The result certainly isn’t fast food, but neither is it fine dining.
  59. Gaia
    Gaia’s resourceful visuals, however, aren’t matched by equivalent nimbleness in the writing; after a time, the storytelling feels more anemic than enigmatic.
  60. 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    The weakest point is its construction, sturdy and compact up to the point when it has to use flashbacks in order to explain the British side of the allegory.
  62. Mr. Jones
    A high-energy performance by Richard Gere and an intensely brooding one from Lena Olin engage attentive viewer interest, but the stars are forced to overcompensate for a rather slow pace and lack of plot.
  63. Caveat
    Mc Carthy serves up a generically foreboding premise and pulls off several efficiently traditional jump scares in this variation on a haunted-house formula, but it’s the shape-shifting mind games of his own narrative that most unnerve the viewer, as seemingly fixed plot points of who is under threat — and when, and why, and so on — keep darting out of sight.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brannigan
    Car chases, booby traps, etc round out the formula plot turns.
  65. Red Rocket
    Everything in Red Rocket happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours.
  66. The Story of My Wife
    Divided into seven quirkily titled chapters which are only useful as a kind of interminable countdown, “Story” falls into every trap of the over-reverential adaptation: individual scenes go on too long, there are far too many of them, and everyone sounds like they’re reading when they speak.
  67. France
    Dumont has studied the media enough to get in a few genuinely effective jabs, though it’s hard to engage with the half of France that concerns itself with her private life since she’s such a cold and inscrutable character.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Tycoon
    Producer Sam Spiegel's contribution is admirable, but Elia Kazan's direction of the Pinter plot seems unfocussed though craftsmanlike. Robert De Niro's performance as the inscrutable boy-wonder of films is mildly intriguing.
  69. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    The result is a well-meaning but somewhat granola, partly engaging yet disorganized documentary, one that searches for an imprecise story and struggles to keep its chief ambitions afloat.
  70. La Dosis
    It’s all more involving than it is frustrating. That’s thanks in large part to the nuanced performances of the leads, whose work ensures that at least the first half of the term “psychological thriller” feels well-realized here.
  71. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    It’s a functional piece of exploitation — an efficient little crime-porn snuff-thriller potboiler. It’s like a fast-food meal that makes you think, “Okay, that wasn’t good for me, but I got what I paid for.” A film like this one is a junk-franchise burger: tasty, processed, and basically fake.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Raising Cain
    In 1976’s Paul Schrader-scripted Obsession (also featuring Lithgow), DePalma proved he could handle honest sentiment without sending it up. Here he tips the balance toward self-satire.
  73. Bullet Train
    Bullet Train feels like it comes from the same brain as “Snatch,” wearing its pop style on its sleeve — a “Kill Bill”-like mix of martial arts, manga and gabby hitman movie influences, minus the vision or wit that implies.
  74. Clockwatchers
    What starts as a bright look at the dim lives of temps in a large company slides into unfortunate digressions and drabness in Clockwatchers.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Beast Within
    There does come a time when Clemens has to get out of his body and get on with being a bigtime monster. Thanks to Thomas R. Burman’s make-up effects, this sequence actually creates chills as the boy’s head bubbles and bursts and his skin pops and stretches.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Narrow Margin
    Spectacular stunt work and Canadian locations punch up the train thriller Narrow Margin, but feature remake is too cool and remote to grab the viewer.
  77. Between Two Worlds
    The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.
  78. Stuntman
    In the end, both documentary and the jump itself feel like ambitious vanity projects that are admirably accomplished, yet feel a little hollow in the raison d’être department.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deep Cover
    Convoluted and mostly unconvincing as a portrait of the drug underworld, Deep Cover [based on a story by Michael Tolkin] still carries some resonance due to its vivid portrait of societal decay and a heavyweight performance by Larry Fishburne.
  80. The Hand of God
    The Hand of God has some good scenes, but it’s the kind of portrait-of-an-artist drama where you watch the insults, the clashes, the assaultive attitude of it all and you think: Is this what it was actually like for the young Sorrentino growing up in Naples? Or does he simply have an aversion to scenes that don’t hit you over the head
  81. The Gateway
    The Gateway moves quickly enough to hold attention, if not to cover up its ill-matched individual elements, let alone meld them into a coherent vision.
  82. The Baby-Sitters Club
    The picture’s problem is that it is small in every way. It’s modestly budgeted, and boasts a simple, unflamboyant story. Its score is bland and nondescript, the performers are scrubbed, and everything is tied up in a neat, white bow.
  83. Limbo
    Limbo is half-priced Sayles. After a promising opening in which numerous interesting aspects of life in modern Alaska are laid out, the potentially fascinating social dynamics are dropped in favor of a thinly realized survival tale that falls flat dramatically and cinematically.
  84. Rose
    Though the storied actress’ personality offers moments of charm and occasional depth, a weak, cliché-riddled script reduces almost everyone to a maximum of two characteristics.
  85. The Wonder
    An evenhanded but ultimately preposterous adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, co-written by the author herself (with an assist from Alice Birch).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eating
    The ladies who lunch - and munch, breakfast, binge, dine, diet, starve and sample - are delicious in Eating, but writer-director Henry Jaglom labors over the stove too long, harming a tasty souffle.
  87. The Braves
    Without any modulation in the brazen, head-on-collision presentation, once the story takes a turn for the sappy, there is really nowhere for any subtlety or subtext to hide.
  88. Don't Worry Darling
    The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.
  89. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    On some level, every “Paranormal Activity” film is about monsters caught on camera, but in this one the demons remain scariest when they’re sight unseen
  90. Silent Night
    Distracted for long stretches with ribbons and bows, “Silent Night” never uncovers its harshest possibilities: It’s sober and well-behaved even when the party falls to pieces.
  91. Earwig
    Earwig teeters on the brink of ennui for most of its taxing two-hour running time, asking us to care about characters the film hasn’t really defined.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goodbye, Mr. Chips
    M-G-M's reproduction of Goodbye, Mr. Chips as a big-budget musical [music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse] with Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark is a sumptuous near-miss that trips on its own overproduction.
  93. Four Hours at the Capitol
    The imagery of destruction and assault is powerful on its own terms; it’s in building the story of the participants’ motives and actions that Four Hours at the Capitol falters, making what could have been a definitive document into a deeply flawed one.
  94. Madame X
    Madame X, on the joy scale, feels drained. The show is a concert that plays, at times, like a lecture — or maybe the world’s most extended Oscar/Grammy star-makes-a-statement speech. But I don’t say that because I begrudge Madonna’s message. It’s just that she didn’t use to be so deadly serious and, at times, almost punitive about it.
  95. Mother/Android
    Tomlin’s screenplay deserves credit for mixing things up, introducing new characters and narrative turnabouts. But nothing is again as bluntly compelling as the early going, and despite hardworking principal performances, these characters and their movie lack the emotional depth to pull off an earnestly teary, draggy finale.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Made in America
    Made in America has the distinction of being better than the last movie involving a sperm bank, Frozen Assets, though at times the humor - overplayed to nearly shrill levels - seems to come from the same test tube.
  97. Speer Goes to Hollywood
    A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants.
  98. Love and a .45
    What holds the film back, however, in addition to its less than compelling schema and central relationship, is its utter lack of visual style. At a time when most pictures feature form almost at the expense of content, this one has an utterly undesigned look that’s virtually distinctive in its blandness.
  99. Dead & Beautiful
    A middling horror-thriller and social satire that opens with an intriguing premise but never probes its cashed-up characters deeply enough to create gripping drama from the heightened hedonism or existential crises they experience after acquiring new powers.
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