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. U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
    Salaciously watchable but finally hokey.
  2. Inferno
    There’s a stern, let’s-get-to-work air to the film’s craft and conception that hampers whatever thrill of the chase “Inferno” has to offer. Fundamentally silly the film may be, but it never graduates to spryness.
  3. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Though the sequel features far more footage of the giant beasts, including a spectacular nighttime scene in which one of the bioluminescent creatures ejects phosphorescent spores into the desert sky, the story remains stubbornly focused on relatively uninteresting human concerns.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Road to China
    High Road to China is a lot of old-fashioned fun, revived for Tom Selleck after his TV schedule kept him from taking the Harrison Ford role in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ford clearly got the better deal because China just isn't as tense and exciting.
  5. Mrs. Lowry & Son
    The disappointment of Mrs. Lowry & Son is that it finds neither of its star attractions at the peak of their powers: Both Spall and Redgrave feel stifled and stiff-jointed, hemmed in by a thin, shallow-focus script that betrays its origins as a radio play all too easily.
  6. One of These Days
    The film’s unexpected ending is both effective and unconscionable, factually accurate and virtually impossible to accept, in part because Günther has manipulated us to make his point. He wants to deliver a statement about the American dream, but we’re not obliged to accept his conclusion. Maybe it’s just the movie that’s rigged.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    A midatlantic mish-mash with some moderately amusing moments but no cohesive style.
    • 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."
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Basically a student effort (Cronenberg was 26), pic tests the viewer’s patience and endurance even with its hour’s running time due to its emphatically dry, scientific narration and deliberate emotional distancing.
  10. Captain America: Brave New World
    It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.
  11. Superstar
    A pleasant surprise...more directorial personality here than most "SNL"-derived features get...the cheerily absurd, color-saturated atmosphere recalls John Waters' "Hairspray."
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lawnmower Man
    The stunning visuals for the ‘virtual reality’ sequences really put The Lawnmower Man over. The computer animation doesn’t necessarily break new ground, but it marks the first time it has been so well integrated into a live-action story.
  13. Phenomenon
    Instead, director Jon Turteltaub has taken the easiest road, emerging with a soppy, soft-headed disease-of-the-week-style piece that sentimentalizes or opts out of every interesting issue the script raises.
    • 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.
  15. A Bird of the Air
    Unable to establish a consistent tone, picture goes derivatively screwball one minute and stickily sentimental the next.
  16. Holy Man
    Complex issues of ambition and consumerism taken to televangelic levels aren't truly addressed or resolved but simply tied up in a box with the message that love conquers all.
  17. Burnt
    Although John Wells’ dramedy is energized by its mouth-watering montages and an unsurprisingly fierce lead turn from Cooper, Steven Knight’s script pours on the acid but holds the depth, forcing its fine actors (including Sienna Miller and Daniel Bruhl) to function less as an ensemble than as a motley sort of intervention group.
  18. Three Worlds
    A glossy, well-meaning but dramatically listless study of class relations in contemporary Paris.
  19. Books of Blood
    With a certain kind of horror, a laugh’s as good as a scream, and Books of Blood delivers plenty of the former.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let It Snow
    Smarter and more appealing than many other recent romantic comedies.
  21. Two Weeks Notice
    An affable but undernourished romantic comedy that fails to match the freshness of the actress-producer and writer's previous collaboration, "Miss Congeniality."
  22. Jurassic Park III
    Game ride that makes the two previous installments look like models of classic filmmaking.
  23. The 13th Warrior
    Bloody but anemic story.
  24. Jackass: The Movie
    It's plotless, shapeless -- and yet, it must be admitted, not entirely humorless. Indeed, the more outrageous bits achieve a shock-you-into-laughter intensity of almost Dadaist proportions.
  25. Bad Samaritan
    It’s all thoroughly unpleasant, but then, that’s what audiences for this kind of movie want from the experience, so consider it a success of sorts.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Amazon Women on the Moon
    Amazon Women on the Moon is irreverent, vulgar and silly and has some hilarious moments and some real groaners too.
  27. 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.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Against All Odds
    If not for a somewhat murky and misanthropic ending, Against All Odds would stand as a well-engineered second-try at 1947's "Out of the Past."
  29. Running with the Devil
    The result isn’t exactly a docudrama indictment like “Traffic,” a thriller a la “Sicario,” a plea for innocent victims, or a Tarantino-esque bloody crime comedy. Rather, Running With the Devil is all the above, confidently blending together many narrative and tonal elements into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
  30. Stargate
    What this juvenile adventure has in spades is special effects and picturesque locations. What it lacks is an emotional link to make the Saturday afternoon he-man posturing palatable, or at least bearable.
  31. 55 Steps
    August, whose English-language films have seldom compared well to his distinguished Scandinavian ones, can’t elevate this material much above the flat, pat TV-movie earnestness it seems content to aim for.
  32. Parker
    Crisp and efficient, with the occasional clunky moments, Parker also shows off Jennifer Lopez (literally) to good effect, while mostly squandering the rest of its first-rate cast.
  33. Papi Chulo
    An egregiously miscalculated rent-a-companion comedy from Irish writer-director John Butler (“Handsome Devil”).
  34. Holland
    Holland blossoms in the space where all-American domestic fantasy ends and nightmares begin, but never quite delivers on its premise, if only because the resolution feels so familiar.
  35. Maybe I Do
    To be fair: Maybe I Do is undemanding, painless and pleasantly diverting, and has the saving grace of never trying too hard for a cheap laugh. There are quite a few undeniably funny lines, many of them made all the more amusing by the perfect-pitch delivery of the pros in the cast.
  36. Wedding Palace
    Too many stretches of Wedding Palace are so garishly lit and broadly overplayed that they seem more cartoonish than the actual animated sequences that pepper the live-action production. That’s a pity, since this indie romantic comedy is not without its minor charms during its infrequent quiet moments.
  37. Three Floors
    Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature.
  38. Celebrity
    The spectacle of Kenneth Branagh and Judy Davis doing over-the-top Woody Allen impersonations creates a neurotic energy meltdown in Celebrity, a once-over-lightly rehash of mostly stale Allen themes and motifs.
  39. Daddy's Home
    Daddy’s Home isn’t so much a lump of coal as an empty box.
  40. Bicentennial Man
    Columbus' approach is intended to cloak such topics as mortality and human identity in the warm glow of greeting card sentiment, which renders the prescription palatable for mass consumption but hopelessly diluted.
  41. The Event
    Middling drama about euthanasia, worked out through a sprawl of underdeveloped characters.
  42. The Rage: Carrie 2
    As generic in every aspect as Brian De Palma's original was inventive.
  43. The Affair of the Necklace
    A staggeringly misguided stab at making the past come alive by people who have absolutely no feel for period filmmaking. Banal at best and laughable at worst.
  44. Vampires
    The pleasures are modest but consistent in John Carpenter's Vampires, a part-Western, part-horror flick that doesn't aim too high but nails the range it occupies.
  45. The Stepford Wives
    Another "remake" that merits the title in name only, The Stepford Wives isn't the "troubled" disaster that media reports have suggested it might be, yet nor do its oddly matched parts ever congeal into a fully formed creation.
  46. Anna
    A likable if overly familiar psychological thriller.
    • 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.
  48. Austenland
    Austenland doesn’t really satirize Austen’s world (or fans) so much as use them as a pretext for a mixture of middling burlesque and routine romantic comedy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Harry and the Hendersons
    Harry and the Hendersons is proof that the folks at Amblin Entertainment, a.k.a. Steven Spielberg’s production company, can’t keep using the same E.T. formula for every kiddie pic.
  50. Under the Electric Sky
    The pic provides lots of sexy, neon-hued eye-candy but not many images of deeper resonance.
  51. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    Rarely do five minutes elapse between some sort of laugh-out-loud absurdity, and the distinction between the film’s intentional and unintentional comedy grows hazier as it goes.
  52. Armageddon
    Much of the confusion, as well as the lack of dramatic rhythm or character development, results directly from Bay's cutting style, which resembles a machine gun stuck in the firing position for 2 and a half hours.
  53. The Great Wall
    Director Zhang Yimou capably gives period fantasy-action The Great Wall the look and feel of a Hollywood blockbuster, but his signature visual dazzle, his gift for depicting delicate relationships and throbbing passions are trampled by dead-serious epic aspirations.
  54. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    The haunted house setpieces provide reliable doses of jolts, even if one can see the scaffolding of each scare being built from miles away, and director Landon has fun with some clever camera placement here and there.
  55. For Love or Money
    Michael J. Fox has charm to burn in his latest screen outing "For Love or Money." A contemporary spin on bygone romantic comedies, the tale of an ambitious young man and the seemingly elusive woman in his life has a definite emotional pull. It falls short on story, however, and no amount of good humor can deter the thin tale from evaporating before the final clinch.
  56. GhettoPhysics: Will the Real Pimps and Hos Please Stand Up?
    For all its street edge, GhettoPhysics pretty much delivers the usual New Age seminar sleight-of-hand, providing a temporary, generalized sense of empowerment without any practical tools to improve one's lot.
  57. Girlfriend
    The bittersweet Girlfriend features Down syndrome actor Evan Sneider in its starring role, and he gives one of the better performances in writer-director Justin Lerner's obviously well-intended and affectionately made first feature.
  58. The Song
    A well-crooned country tune can invest even the hoariest cliches with honest feeling, and in much the same fashion, The Song takes a familiar tale of love, marriage, betrayal and redemption, and delivers a largely satisfying rendition.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Promise
    Kathleen Quinlan is pretty convincing as the painter/photographer and a new, very handsome, young leading man is added to the Hollywood scene with Stephen Collins as the architect.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bug
    Its last half is largely static, and the film never revives much interest.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Terror Train
    Roger Spottiswoode, vet editor who co-authored a respected book on the subject with Karel Reisz, makes a competent directing debut here.
  62. The Bucket List
    A feel-good film about death, a sitcom about mortality, "Ikiru" for meatheads. It's also a picture about two cancer patients confronting reality, and deciding how they want to spend their presumed last days, that has not an ounce of reality about it.
  63. Mystery Team
    A genuinely funny but amateurishly constructed laffer from Derrick Comedy, a troupe of YouTube-savvy NYU grads with promising writing careers ahead of them.
  64. The Family
    Curiously airless, weightless and tonally uncertain, the picture mixes mass murder, dismemberment and rape threats with sappy sentimentality, fish-out-of-water gags and groan-worthy meta-humor, yet very little of it manages to leave any impression.
  65. Albatross
    Brown Findlay, reportedly cast before she filmed "Downton Abbey," is a real find. Germany's Koch suggests astute fishing beyond the obvious casting pools, and Ormond clearly relishes her change-of-pace role as tough, casually profane Joa.
  66. Crooked Arrows
    The story of a ragtag Native American team rediscovering the tribal roots of the game to defeat preppie champions is rife with tired tropes, and lacking in three-dimensional characters or colorful plot-twists. Happily for this Onandaga-financed production and vet director Steve Rash, gifted Native American lacrosse players lend hard-hitting impact to the game scenes.
  67. Fred Claus
    Alternates between unpleasantness and Hallmark-sweet sappiness.
  68. Opus
    With a confused tone stuck between satire and horror (that also informs Malkovich’s eccentric, out-of-place performance), and various half-baked ideas about cultural icons and toxic fandom, “Opus” mostly feels like a missed genre opportunity.
  69. From Paris with Love
    To his credit, Travolta hams it up with the kind of laissez-faire irony that might have made the film a tongue-in-cheek pleasure, had his attitude extended to the filmmakers.
  70. Trapped
    A pretty skillfully handled domestic thriller about a criminal activity that, while always upsetting, is especially noxious now due to the too many recent tragic and highly publicized instances of it.
  71. Underworld
    Takes itself so seriously that it never has fun with its shopworn genre elements.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Footloose
    By writing both the screenplay and contributing lyrics to nine of the film’s songs, Dean Pitchford has come up with an integrated story line that works.
  73. Almost Love
    With Almost Love, Doyle proves he has an eye, a sense of pacing and a thoughtful touch with actors. But the Almost Love saga is about as distinctive as the canvases Adam paints for Ravella.
  74. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    The result may still be a big, bloated spectacle, but it's a big, bloated spectacle you can just about follow.
  75. Strangerland
    Too much of Strangerland simply feels dodgy and overdetermined, veering between art-film pretensions and melodramatic gestures, and governed by ambitions that outstrip the filmmakers’ abilities.
  76. Below Her Mouth
    A sexually frank but narratively flimsy girl-meets-girl romance that never gets under its gorgeous characters’ amply exposed skin.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Crazy People
    Crazy People combines a hilarious dissection of advertising with a warm view of so-called insanity... Finished film is a credit to all hands.
  78. Leave It to Beaver
    Fuzzily conceived and blandly executed, Leave It to Beaver is neither fish nor fowl. Not exactly a straight-faced homage to the classic TV series, but far short of an outright parody, this exceedingly mild comedy plays like the product of a committee that never reached a consensus on which direction to take.
  79. Chalet Girl
    A chirpy, tween-skewing, snowboarding-themed romantic comedy, Chalet Girl slaloms exuberantly down a predictable path, kicking up regular flurries of fun along the way.
  80. Chronicling a Crisis
    Just marginally a documentary, Chronicling a Crisis turns out to be one of Amos Kollek's more affecting films.
  81. The Foxy Merkins
    Olnek and collaborators share a genuinely offbeat sensibility, and The Foxy Merkins would have made a hilarious short. Yet it simply doesn’t come up with enough inventive scenes, let alone overall narrative spine, to sustain itself at feature length.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Airport
    Airport is a handsome, often dramatically involving $10-million epitaph to a bygone brand of filmmaking. However, the ultimate dramatic situation of a passenger loaded jetliner with a psychopathic bomber aboard that has to be brought into a blizzard-swept airport with runway blocked by a snow-stalled plane actually does not create suspense because the audience knows how it's going to end.
    • Variety
  83. Jungle 2 Jungle
    An extremely handsome physical production, with breathtaking Venezuelan vistas by Tony Pierce-Roberts, Jungle 2 Jungle is an otherwise modest effort. Simple truths are often the most effective, but in this instance they are only banal and mildly amusing.
  84. Madea's Witness Protection
    The interaction among opposites inspires an abundance of predictable race-based jokes, many of which have the saving grace of actually being funny.
  85. Lost River
    A risible slab of Detroit gothic that marks an altogether inauspicious writing-directing debut for Ryan Gosling.
  86. Breaking In
    Coasting for as long as it can on the considerable charms of its star, Breaking In is otherwise a work of profound half-assedness, running through the paces of its bare-bones framework with all the verve, energy and invention of a night-watchman winding down the last hour of his shift.
  87. Devil's Knot
    Devil’s Knot only occasionally feels weightier than a high-end Lifetime original or “Law & Order” episode.
  88. The Haunting
    A wannabe horror classic that turns deadly dull once the sense of anxious expectation wears off.
  89. House in the Alley
    Despite the bumpy pacing and the routine plot elements, writer-director Le-Van Kiet periodically generates a sense of palpable trepidation during what might best be described as a worst-case scenario about post-partum depression.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Toxic Avenger
    This madcap spoof on The Incredible Hulk is an outlandish mix of gory violence and realistic special effects.
  91. Guns Akimbo
    This undeniably slick, energetic contraption plays somewhere between grating and numbing.
  92. Brothers By Blood
    It’s only Guez’s second film, although he’s written others (including the similarly genre-subverting zombie movie “The Night Eats the World”), and there’s enough promise here — especially on the performance front — to look forward to future projects.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mountain Men
    It’s a limp feature debut for director Richard Lang.
  94. Sneaks
    Though the story wears down its tread, strong performances elevate the material. Mackie, Fishburne, Lawrence, Bailey and David all pour a ton of heart into their vocal dynamics, allowing nuanced vulnerability and a bubbly buoyancy to shine through, keeping us tethered to the emotional pull of the picture.
  95. The Perfect Game
    It's an unabashedly corny but occasionally stirring dramedy based on the true-life story of scrappy young baseball players from Mexico who, in 1957, scored an improbable string of successes while playing their way from a Monterrey sandlot to the Little League World Series.
  96. Endings, Beginnings
    The movie may be a self-help exercise of sorts — for those who seldom recognize themselves on screen, and who don’t measure up to the expectations set by rom-coms and princess movies — but it’s disguised as a shaggy character study.
  97. Two Tickets to Greece
    Despite occasional detours into darker themes, this is fundamentally a relaxing trip for an audience — ideal for women of a similar age to the main characters who might fancy treating themselves to a trip to the Greek islands without actually having to get on a flight.
  98. Hollywood Buddha
    A refreshingly unpretentious cocktail of karmic serendipity and a tongue-in-cheek look at Hollywood values vs. ecumenical verities.
  99. Along Came a Spider
    Weaves a humdrum plot that's never ahead of the audience until three-quarters through.
  100. Ed Gein
    A disappointingly mild re-creation of true events.
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