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. Posse
    Despite all its agreeable revisionism and breezy bonhomie, Posse has the feel of a mish-mash of elements all thrown into a big pot and stirred. Lacking dramatic grounding and structuring, even the pertinent revelations that will be most surprising and interesting to modern audiences carry more intellectual than emotional resonance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
    The latest product of the prolific Wayans family, Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood is much like its marquee-buster of a title: full of very obvious spoofery, and funnier in concept than in execution.
  3. Dirty Work
    Highly reminiscent of Kingpin in its willingness to try anything for a laugh, Dirty Work is a shameless and sporadically hilarious comedy about two thirtysomething underachievers who start a revenge for hire business.
  4. Belly
    The film is never boring -- there's no question that filmmaker Hype Williams has the fancy moves -- but the rhythmic, stylistic repetition becomes tedious, and serves to keep the audience removed from the story.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Magic Christian
    A spotty, uneven satire (from the novel by Terry Southern) with a number of good yocks, but insufficient sustained wit or related action.
  6. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    Everything Everywhere is ultimately too much of a good thing, a novel idea driven to the point of exhaustion.
  7. Blacklight
    If you approach it with sufficiently lowered expectations, and have fond memories of the ’70s paranoid dramas that obviously inspired director and co-writer Mark Williams, this might be your house-brand jam.
  8. Peter von Kant
    Everything in Fassbinder’s rightly canonized movie is fake, except the emotions. In Ozon’s loving, diverting but inessential homage, everything is real except the bitter, glycerine tears.
  9. The In Between
    The movie is at its best during the flashback scenes detailing their genuinely tender romance. It fares less well when they are separated and inhabit different realms.
  10. New York Ninja
    The on-screen actors’ raw hamming is nicely complemented by the voice performers’ relatively deadpan contributions, which only render the dialogue and situations even more absurd.
  11. Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick, in its quick verbal exchanges, its naked sexuality, its general air of busting taboos as if they were oversize balloons, is recognizably a Lena Dunham movie. But it’s the first one of her projects in which the parts don’t quite add up, because it seems as if what we’re watching hasn’t been so much created as contrived.
  12. Emily the Criminal
    Despite the fact that the camera rarely backs away from studying Plaza’s wary eyes and tense mouth in close-up, this character piece feels as distanced from its taciturn subject as if it was merely monitoring her on security camera.
  13. Resurrection
    It winds up several stops north of bonkers, in a finale that shoots for transgressive, psycho-biological role-reversal, but plays like 1994’s Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Junior” given a torture-porn makeover.
  14. Babysitter
    The film is based on screenwriter Catherine Léger’s play, and perhaps the herky-jerk structure works on stage. On screen, however, it just feels undisciplined, as its Quentin Dupieux-style visual drollery never quite gels with its more obvious, broadly smutty farce.
  15. I’ll Be Your Mirror
    You come to Blood for its aura of spiritual sustenance, only to leave it feeling curiously alienated and undernourished.
  16. Summering
    Nostalgia may be the strongest emotion engendered by this breeze-blown dandelion seed of a film, which nods to the bittersweet complexities of growing up and confronting adulthood, but never gets as far as fully dramatizing them.
  17. The Weekend Away
    Ultimately there are a few twists too many, pushing the story into a realm of excess contrivance. There’s not enough time or nuance to lend numerous narrative turnabouts plausibility.
  18. Men
    The leaves are so green, the tone is so ominous, and the men are so … Rory Kinnear-y that audiences are all but guaranteed to leave this folk-horror bizart-house offering feeling disturbed, even if no two viewers can agree on what bothered them about it.
  19. Flux Gourmet
    To call “Flux Gourmet” an acquired taste would be an understatement. It’s really more of an elaborate inside joke by Strickland on the peculiar relationship between artists and the institutions that fund, develop and encourage their folly.
  20. Dark Glasses
    While it wouldn’t exactly be accurate to say that Dark Glasses was worth waiting a decade for, a world in which Argento continues working till the bitter end is preferable to one in which we don’t have movies like this at all.
  21. Taurus
    This is about as valiantly unflattering as vanity projects get. The bad news is that the wispily tragic character of “Cole,” his alienated, self-destructive but wildly popular alter ego, hardly seems worth Baker’s extensive efforts.
  22. Nobody's Hero
    Moonlighting as a broad bedroom farce, this heavily plotted but oddly low-energy film winds up too distracted and diluted to score as a vital political satire.
  23. Prey for the Devil
    Rather good actors do indeed keep a straight face, as does the film overall. And Stamm’s jump scares aren’t bad, as they go. He hasn’t made a very suspenseful movie, but he’s avoided both dullness and unintentional laughs.
  24. Father of the Bride
    This remake is loud and exaggerated; it’s more hijinks than heart. (Even the swans that bedeviled Martin have been swapped out for synchronized flamingos.) Audiences looking to shed a tear need not RSVP.
  25. Mother Schmuckers
    The Guits’ provocation is about as amiable as something so abjectly appalling can be, though it’s perhaps a few jaw-dropping shocks (or a few uproarious belly-laughs) short of the cult status it seeks.
  26. Renfield
    Cage’s Dracula, sipping blood out of a martini glass, is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.
  27. Anaïs in Love
    Some might wonder what Anaïs in Love really has to say for itself; the film, perhaps, objects to the idea of young women like its cheerfully confused heroine having to explain themselves at all. Either way, this zephyr-blown dandelion of a movie isn’t going to break a sweat to get its message across.
  28. Love After Love
    Love After Love goes through the motions of classic, rousing melodrama but not the emotions.
  29. Umma
    Oh aces her leading role with customary aplomb, and Stewart makes for a game scene partner, but Shim’s economical-to-a-fault screenplay rarely allows them enough downtime to fully flesh out their characters.
  30. Memory
    In the end, “Memory” isn’t terribly convincing, but it’s at least trying for something more serious than most.
  31. Easter Sunday
    Instead of character and chemistry, the film employs a series of running gags meant to support the star’s likability and not compete with his wisecracks.
  32. Secret Headquarters
    With a solid cast, healthy sense of humor and polished visual effects, the film rises above so many of the sub-cinematic slogs littering the streaming fray. Expecting it to be memorable proves to be a big ask from the filmmakers, despite their hunger for a Marvel-style, Amblin-esque franchise starter. Still, the ease with which we forget its blights might just be the project’s real superpower.
  33. Crush
    What’s jarring in Crush is the absence of some requisite dose of youthful mischief, a sense of stakes and perhaps even a lightly scandalous touch, integral to the spirit of many of the genre staples Cohen and co-writers Kirsten King and Casey Rackham attempt to revive on their own terms.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Children of the Damned
    What weakens this sequel is the fact that, unlike the original, it is burdened with a "message."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Boys' Night Out
    Since the element of story surprise, so vital in humour, is completely absent in the Ira Wallach screenplay, adapted by Marion Hargrove from a story by Arne Sultan and Marvin Worth, the audience is forced to seek comedy rewards in isolated doses – individual gags and situations.
  36. Father Stu
    Father Stu is not your everyday Hollywood religious odyssey — it’s closer to “Diary of a Country Cutup.” It’s a surprisingly sincere movie about religious feeling, but it is also, too often, a dramatically undernourished one.
  37. The Princess
    A smarter script would’ve found ways to work a historical critique (or some “Shrek”-like satire, at least) into its relatively brainless string of set pieces.
  38. Trapped in Paradise
    An agreeable Middle American comedy intent upon reviving oldfashioned virtues, George Gallo's second feature doesn't serve up the big yocks needed to make it a breakout sleeper.
  39. The Takedown
    Leterrier manages a few modestly exciting chase scenes, including one that begins in a laser tag course, continues through a bowling alley and a go-kart track, and ends in a crowded supermarket. And his two leads are agreeably amusing and for the most part engaging throughout the film.
  40. Deadfall
    Watchable only for camp value, Deadfall is at its best when cameo-laden anarchy reigns. As a tribute to film noir, it won't make it to the late late show.
  41. Eiffel
    Bourboulon hatches a second-rate romance, rather than detailing the rich, real-life drama that swirled around Eiffel’s controversial endeavor.
  42. Halftime
    Halftime justly salutes Lopez’s pride in her achievements, but it’s every bit as much a salute to her brand management.
  43. Press Play
    Greg Björkman’s directorial debut has a catchy hook and atmospheric pull — yet the material leaves far too much underdeveloped, unrealized and incohesive to connect with viewers’ heads and hearts.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Summer of '42
    Robert Mulligan's Summer of '42 has a large amount of charm and tenderness; it also has little dramatic economy and much eye-exhausting photography which translates to forced and artificial emphasis on a strungout story.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crimes of the Future
    Cronenberg’s obsession for such matters as bodily mutation and grotesque growths, aberrant medical experiments, massive plagues and futuristic architecture are all here in a convoluted look at a future gone perverse.
  46. They/Them
    It’s so committed to affirmational messages about queer identity not being a choice, a condition or a legitimate motive to get axed by a deranged serial killer that the movie all but forgets to be scary — although enlisting Kevin Bacon as too-genial-to-be-trusted camp overseer Owen Whistler nearly makes it work.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An Autumn Afternoon
    This view of contemporary middle class life in Japan is too leisurely paced, too sentimental in design and its humorous social comments too infrequent.
  48. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.
  49. Enys Men
    Visually and sonically, Enys Men is utterly intoxicating, but a lack of any nourishing interplay between form and content makes it feel like getting drunk on an empty stomach, alone on an island where everything happens at the same time, and nothing really happens at all.
  50. A Magnificent Life
    Magnificent as Pagnol’s achievements may have been, it’s a pity that the decades-spanning account of one of France’s greatest storytellers didn’t make for a better story unto itself.
  51. Funny Pages
    What is doesn’t have, oddly, is any sort of bone-deep reality factor. Almost nothing that happens in Funny Pages is particularly believable.
  52. A Goofy Movie
    Brightly drawn, fast-moving and mercifully short, efficient effort is a male bonding saga that hinges upon the fears of teenage pooch Max that he’ll grow up to be just as goofy as Dad.
  53. Anything's Possible
    It still plays a bit too much like a public service announcement — where characters embody and express trans-accepting talking points — and not enough like the funny, sexy teen rom-coms that clearly inspired it.
  54. The Walk
    The film’s insights about racism come as familiar baby steps.
  55. The Good Neighbor
    Competent performances and a slick veneer make this revamp go down easily enough. Still, one wishes Rick had placed more emphasis on Hitchcockian suspense, rather than trusting the slow-moving tale will hold us via plot and character complexities that really aren’t particularly evident.
  56. Spoiler Alert
    Throughout, Spoiler Alert shows a maturity toward modern relationships, whether straight or queer, that’s refreshing and instructive. Unfortunately, too much of the movie simply doesn’t work.
  57. Fourth of July
    Fourth of July is a trifle, and a facile, easy-to-watch one. But what it’s offering under the surface feels, in part, like a clandestine defense of Louis C.K.’s transgressions. In about 45 minutes, the family swings from being louts to saints. That’s supposed to be a lesson to us all. It’s not a convincing one.
  58. Doula
    Doula ultimately comes across less as an actual comedy and more as a slice of life that’s lighthearted but also low stakes.
  59. Hypochondriac
    The combination of gay protagonists, mental illness exploration, horror tropes, and surreal elements that gesture toward “Donnie Darko” make for an ambitious mix that holds attention, even if the uneven, somewhat muddled results are ultimately more effortful than insightful.
  60. Look Both Ways
    While the filmmakers’ heads and hearts are in the right place with their resonant sentiments on taking risks and embracing fate, their execution of narrative basics proves lackluster.
  61. Asteroid City
    Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.
  62. The Swimmers
    At a bloated 134 minutes . . . your brain may well start to prune, the way fingers do when they spend too much time in water.
  63. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    It’s all quite wispy and anecdotal, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Bill Holderman, the director of these films, and Erin Simms, his co-screenwriter and producer, had squeezed more texture into the anecdotes.
  64. All Man: The International Male Story
    Telling a straightforward tale about this queer-skewing business, “All Man” opens up inquiries on how masculinity has been packaged for the American consumer, straight and gay alike.
  65. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
    Recalling the animated "Superman" shorts of the 1940s, "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" is a baroque, melodramatic tale of good and evil that's a tad too sophisticated for its intended youthful audience. The shrill thriller is a throwback to a bygone time more appealing to adults.
  66. Gigi & Nate
    What happens once the film vilifies the animal rights contingent, however, is an example of how movies can protect their heroes and create their scapegoats (pardon the expression) to the detriment of dramatic complexity.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Three Faces of Eve
    It is frequently an intriguing, provocative motion picture, but director Nunnally Johnson's treatment of the subject matter makes the film neither fish nor foul. Johnson shifts back and forth - striving for comedy at one point and presenting a documentary case history at another.
  68. Hellraiser
    The new Hellraiser works as metaphor, as flesh-annihilating spectacle. Yet it doesn’t work as a story.
  69. Dead for A Dollar
    Hill wants to “do justice” to each of these people, but the result is that Dead for a Dollar doesn’t have a dramatic core. It has actors we like to watch, doing what they do well (like Waltz playing a civilized badass), but it isn’t structured so that any of their fates gets a rise out of us.
  70. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    The results, balancing overfamiliar warm-and-fuzzy growing-up saga and halfhearted horror revenge tale, evaporate quickly from the mind — there’s little cumulative force that might linger. Yet at the same time, Hancock does an admirable job keeping this hour and three-quarters polished and engaging, maintaining consistent viewer interest even if the ultimate reward underwhelms.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Operation Crossbow
    Ambitiously filmed in Europe and boasting production values which may seem to catch the spirit of the monumental effort, what the Carlo Ponti production lacks primarily is a cohesive story line.
  72. Raymond & Ray
    Raymond & Ray is curiously alienating despite the two A-listers in the driver seat, some decent chuckles to spare and a handsome, cinematic finish courtesy of DP Igor Jadue-Lillo.
  73. Peter Pan & Wendy
    Where “Peter Pan” was a phenomenon, this straight-to-streaming version is but a shadow, scampering off and trying to have fun on its own.
  74. Allelujah
    It didactically calls out governmental hypocrisy while exposing corrupt elements and inefficiencies within the precious institution itself. It hedges its bets politically between nostalgic keening for a kinder, fairer Britain of old and advocating for a top-down socialist makeover. It wavers tonally between cozy comedy and head-on polemic.
  75. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.
  76. V/H/S/99
    Here, nothing stands out: The best episodes are merely good enough, and the worst just tiresome.
  77. Knock at the Cabin
    Knock at the Cabin takes a premise audiences think they know and does something unconventional and (alas) frustrating with it. Trouble is, these days, it’s no surprise to be let down by a Shyamalan movie.
  78. Susie Searches
    Clemons’ strong performance provides enough of a center to propel the story to its conclusion.
  79. Wild Bill
    Overall, the filmmakers’ take on the subject is highly esoteric and fails to suggest either why Wild Bill has remained such a famous figure, or the irony in the fact that he has done so.
  80. A Man Called Otto
    The movie is trying so hard to be a crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It’s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than.
  81. Poker Face
    This Australia-shot mix of intrigue, soap opera, thriller and tearjerker never quite gels, despite enough surface gloss and cast expertise to hold attention.
  82. Peaceful
    The film is too emotionally blunt not to wring tears (or at least a solid lump in the throat) where required, though they don’t always feel artfully earned. Either way, at over two hours, it’s a long trudge toward an inevitable end.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    To the Devil a Daughter
    Based on a novel by English author Dennis Wheatley, the picture makes a few too many pretensions to serious exploration of the occult, that hamper the flow.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Day of the Dolphin
    Mike Nichols' film of The Day of the Dolphin is a rare and regrettably uneven combination of ideas and action. George C. Scott stars as a marine scientist whose work with dolphins faces corruption by his own sponsors. The story climax strains belief, but Nichols is one of a handful of directors who can get away with occasional improbability.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The People That Time Forgot
    Special effects add to the suspense as the group encounter all manner of hair-raising beasties and erupting fire in braving the dangers of the cavemen in an attempt to find their quarry.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Watcher in the Woods
    The acting and writing are barely professional but the art direction, especially Alan Hume’s stunning camerawork, gives the pic a gloss.
  87. Inside
    Inside has an intriguing premise and an actor who makes whatever’s thrown at him intriguingly watchable. What it lacks is sufficient sense of who this character is, and a resonant enough narrative to justify being locked up together.
  88. You People
    You People alternates between energetic set-pieces by a nimble roster of comedians and intervals of tedium during which the actors seem lost, unable to jump-start the script’s plentiful thin stretches.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chained Heat
    A silly, almost campy follow-up to producer Billy Fine's women's prison hit, The Concrete Jungle, that manages to pack in enough sex tease and violent action to satisfy undiscriminating action fans.
  90. The Offering
    The Offering does move along at a brisk clip, so it’s at no risk of being boring even as its potential to terrify dissipates. But it ends up illustrating the virtue of “less is more,” particularly when attempting a serious occult horror story
  91. Baby Ruby
    Evocative and appropriately aggravating as Baby Ruby is in its portrayal of mental breakdown following traumatic childbirth, however, its parlaying of this condition into full-blown genre tensions and terrors yields mixed rewards.
  92. Beau Is Afraid
    Three hours doesn’t feel at all reasonable for such an uneven collection of sketches.
  93. Justice
    Justice re-equips the anti-Kavanaugh side by pulling a more streamlined narrative from the blizzard of detail that threatened observers at the time with snow-blindness.
  94. AUM: The Cult at the End of the World
    Braun and Yanagimoto go for comprehensiveness over comprehension, bringing in many more commentators — writers, lawyers, reporters, eyewitnesses — each to peel back one further, fascinating fold in the infinite origami of the Aum story.
  95. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    It’s a thin, practically anemic observational movie for audiences who recognize themselves in Fran’s awkwardness.
  96. We Have a Ghost
    Rarely ha-ha funny and never scary, it’s ultimately more sentimental than anything else — a clunky approach that undermines its strong performances.
  97. Theater Camp
    Mostly, audiences are stuck watching everybody trying to be funny: testing out one-liners, singing off-key, panhandling for laughs. Running jokes trip over their own shoelaces.
  98. Pamela, a love story
    Even as a thoughtful chronicle of the ups and downs of her life, Ryan White’s film plays slightly as a retread that amplifies the public’s love story with redemption arcs — especially for celebrities — more than it offers anything that has not already been revealed to the world.
  99. Devil's Peak
    Despite some good performances and vividly written characters, Devil’s Peak crumbles due to Penn’s inexperienced performance. Otherwise, it’s an entertaining drama with some grandiose ideas about family legacy that make it peculiarly compelling.
  100. Love Again
    An old-school, straight-faced studio romance featuring five new songs from Ms. Dion, writer-director Jim Strouse’s Love Again is all about such healing — to the extent that if it were a book instead of a movie, it would be filed in the self-help section.
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