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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    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fletch Lives
    Film’s saving grace is its scathing satirical sketches of fictional televangelist preacher Jimmy Lee Farnsworth.
  2. Act of Valor
    A mechanically efficient yet soulless dramatization of the U.S. Navy SEALs in action, Act of Valor ultimately misses its target: The hearts and minds of American audiences.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rocky IV
    Beyond its visceral appeal, Rocky IV is truly the worst of the lot, though Stallone himself is more personable in this one and that helps.
  4. The Boss
    McCarthy, who can toss off an insult like “Suck my d—k, Gigantor!” and give it a vague impression of wit, coaxes forth just about every laugh and stray chuckle that could possibly have been extracted from the material.
  5. Eat Wheaties!
    Its content and execution are innocuous to the point of tedium, while the protagonist is no undervalued sweetie but the kind of grating personality that can clear a room.
  6. Horrible Bosses 2
    This inane and incredibly tasteless sequel qualifies as an excuse to bring back those hard-working funnymen Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis for another round of amateur-criminal hijinks and semi-improvised vulgarity, jabbing away repeatedly at some elusive comic sweet spot where blatant nastiness and egregious stupidity collide — and very occasionally hitting the mark.
  7. Video Games: The Movie
    Video Games: The Movie is content to celebrate without much insight.
  8. Merv
    Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to its charming premise, spending most of its runtime chasing its own tail with pointless jokes and dog-related puns that are only mildly amusing, along with an undercooked love story that doesn’t know how to steal our hearts.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is a disappointing thriller that wastes an oddball premise and offbeat point-of-view.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Final Analysis
    Final Analysis is a crackling good psychological melodrama [from a screen story by Robert Berger and Wesley Strick] in which star power and slick surfaces are used to potent advantage. Tantalizing double-crosses mount right up to the eerie final scene.
  11. 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.
  12. Shaft
    The movie is product, but by the end you want to see this team again.
  13. The Good Heart
    A picture too simplistic and sentimental for art seekers and too rough for general audiences.
  14. Igor
    With its belabored gags, misfired pop-culture references and garish visuals crammed together like so many disjointed body parts, this manic kidpic cranks up the annoy-o-meter early on and rarely lets up.
  15. Here Comes the Boom
    Hands of stone meet heads of air in Here Comes the Boom, a sports story so daffy it may as well star Kevin James.
  16. In the Blood
    Pulses are likely to remain level during In the Blood, a serviceable vehicle for MMA champ Gina Carano.
  17. Derailed
    This murky psychological suspenser manages the tricky feat of being as predictable as it is finally preposterous.
  18. Piñero
    Hectic, sketchy and finally dull.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Next Man
    The Next Man emerges more a slick travesty with political overtones than the cynical suspense meller it was designed to be.
  20. Nightwatch
    The new outing - which retains the essential twists of the original, a hit overseas that was never released Stateside - has been physically enhanced with American production values and a marquee cast, but much of the earlier film's humanity and mordant humor have been lost in translation
  21. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    Euro-financed production throws large chunks of change at a corporate espionage saga spanning several continents, yet most of the money seems to have landed in locations, with too little allocated to the script and stunt departments.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gleaming the Cube
    Slater, who sounds as if he is trying to imitate Jack Nicholson, is the only character who has a shading of personality. His skateboarding buddies are funny, considering one needs a glossary to translate their dialog, while the Vietnamese are mostly sleazy cardboard figures.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Juno and the Paycock
    Irish atmosphere of the tenement life incidental to the country is well caught, director Alfred Hitchcock having a flair for sniping the real feeling of the submerged tenth.
  24. Suicide Squad
    On paper, this could have been the antidote to an increasingly codified strain of comic-book movies, but in the end, it’s just another high-attitude version of the same.
  25. Appleseed
    Craft connoisseurs won't be disappointed with the splendidly executed result. However, everyone else is likely to wonder what the fuss about given the plot's dated cyborgs-and-supercomputers hijinks.
  26. Blumenthal
    A limp facsimile of a Woody Allen ensembler set in a familiar world of New York Jewish intellectuals — minus only the wit, and the intellect.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nightbreed
    Writer-director Clive Barker's Nightbreed is a mess. Self-indulgent horror pic [from his novel Cabal] could be the Heaven's Gate of its genre, of obvious interest to diehard monster fans but a turnoff for mainstream audiences.
  28. 65
    Anchored by another in a series of committed performances from Adam Driver and an ensemble of suitably menacing prehistoric beasts that chase him for just over 90 minutes, Beck and Woods’ adventure delivers requisite thrills even if its creativity seems stuck in the distant cinematic past.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Barb Wire
    Despite its obvious flaws, Barb Wire does what it sets out to do and does it well.
  30. Rising High
    This is a competently crafted movie too shallow to come up with much reason why we should root for these people, and too derivative to make their vertiginous rise and fall more than forgettable formula entertainment.
  31. Ceremony
    Despite a few grace notes and mildly clever twists, this handsomely produced indie is such a grating turnoff throughout its first third that its minor virtues may be discovered only by insomniac latenight cable viewers.
  32. Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    By turns defiant and apologetic, gleefully raunchy and anxiously defensive.
  33. Max Keeble's Big Move
    Surprisingly amusing.
  34. The Phantom of the Opera
    Sumptuous pic version, which evokes the original show while working as a movie in its own right, is lit by a radiant, vocally lustrous perf by teenaged Emmy Rossum.
  35. The Bromley Boys
    Steve Kelly’s lightweight film spins allegedly true events into the stuff of pure sitcom: affable enough, but so glibly inauthentic as to make “Bend It Like Beckham” look like cinéma vérité by comparison. It’s curious how the world’s most popular sport maintains such a thin roster of truly classic movies in its honor; that is unchanged here.
  36. Dance Flick
    This slapstick and scatological spoof settles for obvious punchlines, delivering just enough laughs to justify its existence without coming anywhere near the bar set by "Scary Movie."
  37. The Goldfinch
    What you experience isn’t the book, exactly; it’s the strenuous creative labor that went into adapting it. What cast a winding spell on the page has become an occasionally compelling but mostly labored live-action illustration.
  38. Twixt
    This disarmingly cheeky, intermittently gorgeous trifle would create the perfect bookend to a career begun almost 50 years ago.
  39. Bad Kids Go to Hell
    A slickly produced and brazenly clever piece of work that could attract a cult by sheer dint of its ingenious nastiness and self-aware snark.
  40. Beneath
    That sly toying with audience sympathies is, alas, all that’s notable about this otherwise poverty-row quickie produced for the Chiller cable network.
  41. Meg 2: The Trench
    The Meg 2 is numbingly formulaic, promiscuously derivative and, for a few stretches (like the over-the-top third act), diverting in its very shamelessness. It is, in other words, all an August movie really needs to be. But there’s a way that the line between August movies and movies, period, is growing thinner every day.
  42. The Virginity Hit
    Those with the stomach for 90 slapdash minutes of nonstop crudity and cruelty will be tickled, while their elders will likely despair at these youngsters' lack of a moral center or ability to hold a camera steady.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Over the Top
    Stallone is sincere and soulful as a father who messed up pretty bad and just wants his kid back, Mendenhall is a likable tyke, and justice is served in the end.
  44. French Girl
    For every inventive or simply satisfying rom-com, there are dozens of clumsy, rote ones — French Girl falls among the latter.
  45. Monkeybone
    It's equal parts wacky, sappy and sniggery.
  46. Message in a Bottle
    Dreary, lachrymose and incredibly poky tear-jerker that makes its audience wait and wait and wait until nearly the last second for its jerking.
  47. Bliss
    Cahill gets so bogged down in hair-splitting rules and exposition that he loses track of the bigger themes.
  48. 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.
  49. Tanner Hall
    Refigured from a never-made TV pilot, this shallow boarding school-set coming-of-ager traverses familiar territory without offering anything fresh.
  50. Last Weekend
    Its eventual reach for warm-and-fuzzy emotional catharsis rings hollow among characters that never become more than disagreeably shallow products of unexamined privilege.
  51. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    Recycles characters and plotlines from their show, along with badly made commercials and faux PSAs about inane subjects, a gambit that dates back to such comedy compilations as "Kentucky Fried Movie" or even "Laugh-In." What Tim & Eric has that those others lacked are the many sexually outre, scatological and degrading moments that seem intended to shock -- and perhaps will, if you're really young or really old.
  52. 3 Days to Kill
    The lukewarm family dynamics sit awkwardly alongside equally underwhelming action sequences.
  53. The Other End of the Line
    As cross-cultural bridge-builders go, picture is smart, funny and sweet enough to make you reassess your attitude next time you get reach tech support in New Delhi.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
    The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is just about everything it's meant to be - a couple of diverting hours in the dark. Rollicking, good-natured, a bit spicy and with just enough heart to avoid seeming totally synthetic.
  55. Welcome To Marwen
    The film is far from incompetent, and it brims with ambition, but too much of the time what’s happening just sits there. It’s a lavishly odd concoction, like a feel-good movie for OCD miniature-world Barbie-doll fetishists.
  56. Wicker Park
    All of this was more enjoyable when Bellucci, Cassel and Bohringer were the stars. Hartnett is overly methodical here as Matthew, and Kruger, as in "Troy," is beautiful but lacking in dramatic intensity.
  57. Paris 36
    Schematically scripted tale revels in its multiple story arcs, but shows signs of battle fatigue in the later reels.
  58. Leonie
    Played with a strong spine and a resolute lack of charm by Emily Mortimer, Gilmour is a perfect vehicle for Matsui’s agenda, which is clearly a feminist/revisionist celebration of the life of a major artist.
  59. Good
    Considering its theme and setting, there's something very wrong with a Good that seems merely competent, uninspired and a bit old-hat.
  60. Lord of the Dance in 3D
    Numbingly repetitive in its routines, and seeming to take a bow from the moment it begins, Lord of the Dance 3D makes crystal-clear the sometimes muddied distinctions between a live performance and the filmed alternative.
  61. The Last Word
    Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.
  62. Remember Me
    The modestly scaled film delivers some moving and affecting moments amid a preponderance of scenes of frequently annoying people behaving badly.
  63. Message from the King
    It’s a dark and all-around unpleasant journey to take.
  64. Shawn Mendes: In Wonder
    Singer does find a slight bit of drama to seize on at about the two-thirds point of the film, which, for understandable purposes of having anything at all happen in the movie, he trumps up to the point it becomes nearly comical.
  65. Phantom
    The potential for screw-tightening suspense gets lost amid the ineffectual dramatics in Phantom, a feeble fictionalization of a crucial but little-known moment when a rogue Soviet submarine brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
  66. Fantastic Four
    A wildly uneven, sporadically slapdash action-adventure that amuses in fits and starts.
  67. Deliver Us From Evil
    A professionally assembled genre mashup that’s too silly to be scary, and a bit too dull to be a midnight-movie guilty pleasure.
  68. The Comedian
    Even with a bona fide icon at its center, The Comedian doesn’t dig deep enough to add anything substantial to the subgenre.
  69. Salinger
    It’s difficult to get past the film’s restless, ill-fittingly bombastic style.
  70. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
    The music is overbearing, the camera and lighting too bright and obvious, and the production design borders on the cheesy. Performances range from competent to just plain embarrassing.
  71. Lift
    Practically every scene is a cliché, every line of dialogue an echo of a better one you’ve already heard in a better film.
  72. The Slammin' Salmon
    It is the presence of Duncan as a Mike Tyson-esque, malaprop-spouting ex-champion that, at least momentarily, lifts the pic out of its mediocrity.
  73. Sleepwalking
    The overly simplistic script by Zac Stanford (“The Chumscrubber”) hits nothing but high notes, making the whole dramatically less than the sum of its parts.
  74. Alexander
    At best an honorable failure, an intelligent and ambitious picture that crucially lacks dramatic flair and emotional involvement.
  75. House of Boys
    Thesping is more engaging than accomplished, as Anderson's constant smile cracks around the edges and Northover's dourness is a bit overdone.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Club Paradise
    Williams can be a terrific actor/comedian, but the spark isn’t there. Somehow, Murray might have come up with cleverer ways of getting back at complaining guests (Andrea Martin, Steven Kampmann), nerdy, sex-crazed weaklings (Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy, respectively) and the other expected amalgam of folks.
  77. Scary Movie 4
    Scary Movie 4 finds horror parody overshadowed by ho-hum groin blows, C-list celebrity cameos, slapstick child abuse, soon-to-be-forgotten hip-hop personalities, plus scatalogical and gay jokes; real laughs are few.
  78. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    While the direction is a little anonymous and could use some verve, the comedy-drama gets by thanks to a solid script, witty dialogue and engaging performances.
  79. Mango Yellow
    Like characters out of some Carnival hell, a macho butcher and his born-again wife, a forlorn barmaid, a sinister sadist and the gay manager of a flophouse called the Hotel Texas run in and out of each other's lives in a film as sloppy, sluttish, scruffy and vital as they are.
  80. Bulletproof Monk
    Not surprisingly based on a comic book series by Brett Lewis and R.A. Jones (whom pic fails to credit), pic hurtles along at a pace designed by vet music vid and ad helmer Paul Hunter to engage short attention spans.
  81. Clockstoppers
    A blandly conceived youth adventure lacking zing or style.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Boys from Brazil
    With two excellent antagonists in Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil presents a gripping, suspenseful drama for nearly all of its two hours - then lets go at the end and falls into a heap.
  83. Fire Down Below
    Typical action fare for martial arts star Steven Seagal and, in his limited oeuvre, one of the more entertaining efforts. But the genre is pedestrian, and Seagal makes no new moves here in terms of screen personality or acting skill. What fun there is lies in the villains, some nifty stunts and a bouncy musical score rife with regional sounds.
  84. Abattoir
    Though it’s handsome enough to look at, Abattoir can’t quite seem to decide just how supernatural it wants to be or how meta its horror content should play
  85. National Treasure
    Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.
  86. Shrink
    The film may be too inside-baseball, with strained sympathy and contrived emotions.
  87. It's a Wonderful Afterlife
    It's a Wonderful Afterlife is a movie to make Frank Capra roll over in his grave from indigestion.
  88. Dark Tourist
    Character actor Michael Cudlitz’s first leading role is the sole selling point of Dark Tourist, a well-acted but rote and ultimately repellent character study of a psychologically disturbed loner.
  89. The Thousand Faces of Dunjia
    Bloated with visual effects, martial artists combat and amorous shenanigans, the one thing missing in The Thousand Faces of Dunjia is a comedic touch, which might have made this elaborate blockbuster more appealing.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Three Fugitives
    As for the Nolte-Short pairing, it’ll do, but it’s no chemical marvel. Nolte, not really a comic natural, gruffs and grumbles his way through as hunky straight man to Short’s calamitous comedian.
  91. Margaret Cho: Assassin
    Inspiration is running thin in comedian Margaret Cho's fourth concert film, a routine stand-up set that compares poorly to her oft-hilarious first two.
  92. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    It’s not a rousing animated comedy that parents will cherish along with their kids. It’s more like a colorful and diverting pacifier.
  93. The Sisters
    Even a magnificently inspired Maria Bello proves insufficiently daring to save Richard Alfieri and Arthur Allan Seidelman's Chekhov-based chamber piece Sisters from pretentious psychodrama.
  94. Domino
    To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.
  95. Aloha
    Unbalanced, unwieldy, and at times nearly unintelligible, Aloha is unquestionably Cameron Crowe’s worst film.
  96. Insidious: Chapter 2
    A modestly scaled and highly pleasurable sequel to Wan’s low-budget 2011 smash that should have genre fans begging for thirds.
  97. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    Visual spectacle still takes precedence over coherent plotting, and the human characters retain all the gravitas of generic placeholders who accidentally made it into the shooting script.
  98. Pitch Perfect 3
    As directed by Trish Sie, the movie is bubbly, it’s fast, it’s hella synthetic-clever, and it’s an avid showcase for the personalities of its stars: the skeptically pert Anna Kendrick, the radiant and vivacious Hailee Steinfeld, and the terrifyingly droll Rebel Wilson.
  99. Beautiful Creatures
    Plays like a movie where the script went missing on the third day of shooting.
  100. Luster
    An ensemble seriocomedy that's initially loose to a fault, but gradually wins one over with its shaggy charm -- and by the close has grown more ambitious, and poignant, than initial reels lead you to expect.
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