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. The November Man
    Runs through spy-movie cliches with such dogged obligation that it often plays like a YouTube compilation of scenes from older, better thrillers, generating little overall tension and only occasionally approaching basic coherence.
  2. Flight Risk
    A crude, unimaginative, suspenseless adventure whose tension mostly derives from deciding which of its three main characters will prove the most unlikable by the time it ends.
  3. Goats
    This monotonously deadpan coming-of-age comedy has little to recommend it beyond some beautiful widescreen cinematography and the momentary kick of seeing David Duchovny looking like a stoned Jesus as Goat Man.
  4. 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.
  5. Lay the Favorite
    Rebecca Hall's enjoyably bubbly lead performance lends the picture an occasional frisson of amusement.
  6. Ghosts of War
    It’s the kind of narrative leap that can make or break a film. But here it overcomplicates a narrative that should’ve better developed its basic elements, rather than lunging for a big-picture profundity it falls short of. Beautifully atmospheric to a point, handsomely produced, “Ghosts” gradually disappoints because its thematic ambitions add more clutter than depth to a story that’s most effective at its simplest.
  7. The Rite
    While marred by cheap tricks and borderline camp, picture comes off as a largely low-key, intelligent effort.
  8. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    Be prepared to laugh less at a lot more of the same thing in this overbearing but underwhelming sequel.
  9. Laws of Attraction
    While slight comic concoction is so airy it seems in danger of floating right off the screen, the pleasant retro vibe and a handful of effervescent moments carry this film no self-respecting heterosexual male would dare see except on a date.
  10. The Other Side of Heaven
    Rousing, family-friendly item has a big, epic look and state-of-the-art visual effects, which help to make pic -- a high-profile example of the mainstreaming of Christian entertainment.
  11. Raising Helen
    An undemanding dramedy.
  12. Paparazzi
    Visually uninspired and dramatically overheated, Paparazzi has overall look and feel of generic direct-to-video production.
  13. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Slick, good-looking, cluttered pic won't please fans of novelist Susan Cooper's original "The Dark Is Rising" sequence. But then, they are mostly grown-ups by now, and this very Hollywood-style adaptation of a very English book is aimed squarely at tweens.
  14. Eva
    Eva begins as hot buttered nonsense of the least resistible variety before, echoing the writer’s block that propels its daft narrative, it runs drily out of ideas.
  15. Chaos Walking
    When it comes to confrontations, the movie wimps out, putting more effort into New World-building than in the largely generic characters who populate it.
  16. Bad Santa 2
    It’s essentially a hangout movie populated exclusively with some of the worst people imaginable, rarely with any sort of solid scene-setting or straight-men to provide context.
  17. The Collection
    An energetic but utterly weightless exercise in slice-and-dice cinema. This sequel to 2009 chiller "The Collector" is in many ways bigger (more characters, more locations, more carnage), but in no way better than its predecessor.
  18. Death and Texas
    Audiences won't show much clemency toward Death & Texas, an uneasy (and very unfunny) marriage of sports culture satire and death penalty polemic.
  19. 12 Rounds
    The viewer, even from a seated position, deserves a championship belt for surviving this overlong actioner.
  20. BearCity
    Helmer/co-writer Doug Langway's first feature has the right basic elements for niche DVD and cable success, but its overly digressive storytelling cries out for considerable tightening.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
    Together again, Jones finds once more he is at the mercy of Herbie, who time and again takes matters into his own hands for often slapstick and mirthful effect as they roar toward their destination.
  22. DOA: Dead or Alive
    So insubstantial that it practically evaporates on screen.
  23. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    Pic's not-so-hidden agenda is to promote the fusion of science and New Age religion, making it a close cousin to ventures as Bernt and Fritjof Capra's "Mindwalk."
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sliver
    Blame it on the editing and reediting, but even the sex scenes aren’t all that steamy, and the movie suffers from some choppy moments and highrise-size lapses in logic.
  25. BASEketball
    The vulgar, obvious humor of Zucker brother David and "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone elicits easy, guilty laughs, yet the material has an underlying innocence that's just shy of good clean fun.
  26. The Ward
    Fans excited to see John Carpenter back in bigscreen action after nine years' absence will find limited cause for joy in The Ward, a horror opus that briskly -- maybe too briskly -- charts ghostly doings at a nuthouse.
  27. Think Like a Man Too
    Although funnier and mercifully shorter than its 2012 battle-of-the-sexes predecessor, this third collaboration between manic comedian Kevin Hart and director Tim Story (hot on the heels of their January hit “Ride Along”) is an exceedingly formulaic and ultimately exhausting thing to experience.
  28. August Rush
    Only auds immune to diabetic rushes should head for August Rush, though tolerant parents wanting wholesome entertainment for the kids will like it for its repetitive encouragement of creativity.
  29. Meeting Spencer
    Brit helmer Malcolm Mowbray's film assumes the constrictions of a stagebound farce, taking place on a single set in real time, and swept along in magisterially broad strokes by Jeffrey Tambor's playfully theatrical perf.
  30. A Case of You
    A lot of interesting, funny performers aren’t very interesting or funny in director Kat Corio’s A Case of You.
  31. Vacation Friends 2
    If anything, delving into action/comedy territory distracts from what made the original kinda-sorta touching at a few key moments: the heart beneath the hijinks. It’s still beating here, but not as strongly as it did the first time.
  32. One Fall
    Clunky allegorical elements, however, remain unsatisfyingly ambiguous throughout the picture.
  33. The Sound and the Fury
    The Sound and the Fury is certainly a folly, failing to capture the weird, entrancing, often maddening ambiance of the great writer’s elliptical masterpiece, and its surfeit of half-baked film-student flourishes and needless cameos occasionally give it an amateur-hour feel.
  34. Black Coffee
    The timidly plotted proceedings never veer from romantic-comedy formula. There’s a whole lot of talk and very little action here, and not just because the squeaky-clean pic wears its PG rating like a badge of honor.
  35. One Night with the King
    Blessed with abundant production values and a minimum of campy excess, One Night With the King is a surprisingly satisfying attempt to revive the Old Hollywood tradition of lavishly appointed Biblical epics aimed at mainstream auds.
  36. The Stand In
    Ultimately, the only respectable thing that remains consistent throughout The Stand In is the beguiling appeal Barrymore brings to both of the personalities, even though neither of them is particularly likable.
  37. Free Birds
    A cute but disposable item were it not for the story’s weird racial undertow.
  38. A Rainy Day in New York
    It is a retread of territory Allen has extensively covered before, but while the same can be said about almost all of his late-career work, seldom have the gears ground quite so loudly, and never before has the writing felt this chronically out-of-phase with the era it depicts.
  39. American Hangman
    American Hangman belongs to that species of grade-Z movie that’s at once grisly and pretentious. It’s trash with a lot on its mind.
  40. The Moth Diaries
    The body count runs high at Brangwyn boarding school, but tension, surprise and viewer interest are the real casualties in The Moth Diaries.
  41. The Golden Glove
    The Golden Glove may not celebrate its subject, but the intimate examination it offers him is itself a privilege — one for which this ugly, unenquiring film scarcely makes a case.
  42. The Astronaut's Wife
    Aggressively stylish but dramatically flaccid.
  43. The Devil's Violinist
    The film is proof of both Garrett’s titanic skill at putting bow to string, and his decidedly less accomplished gifts as an actor.
  44. 2 Fast 2 Furious
    While this John Singleton-directed sequel provides a breezy enough joyride, it lacks the unassuming freshness and appealing neighborhood feel of the economy-priced original.
  45. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Sarah Jessica Parker's myriad fans will doubtless appreciate her frazzled warmth in a part she energetically inhabits, but the picture at times feels out of step with contemporary reality and humorless in its adaptation of a comic bestseller.
  46. Flubber
    Despite a couple of slow stretches along the way, director Mayfield does a generally fine job of integrating the eye-popping special effects with the simple but serviceable plot. The pace is just brisk enough to satisfy youngsters with short attention spans, and Williams is winning enough to keep audiences of all ages involved.
  47. 2 Jacks
    Slack narrative and abysmal dialogue render the vague generational satire meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with Tolstoy’s work (and depressing to those in the know).
  48. Oh. What. Fun.
    Director Michael Showalter’s yuletide anthem for unheralded matriarchs fumbles severely, delivering bland comedic hijinks, insufferable characters and generic conundrums.
  49. Youth in Oregon
    Maudlin and mannered, this contrived indie squanders another fine late-career performance from Frank Langella, dousing its treatment of the subject in affectations until it’s snuffed out any trace of genuine life.
  50. And So It Goes
    For all of its 93 minutes, you never feel anything significant is at stake for anyone — save for a paycheck.
  51. V/H/S: Viral
    While the scares are in short supply, there’s a surfeit of macabre, tongue-in-cheek creativity to be found here.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Navy Seals
    Nifty performances make this routine action flick better than it probably has a right to be.
  53. Fools Rush In
    In a role that Tom Hanks might have played a decade or so ago, Perry is pretty bland and doesn't provide any hints as to why Alex is so emotionally stymied.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Scrooged
    Scrooged is an appallingly unfunny comedy, and a vivid illustration of the fact that money can't buy you laughs. Its stocking spilling with big names and production values galore, this updating of Dickens' A Christmas Carol into the world of cutthroat network television is, one episode apart, able to generate only a few mild chuckles.
  55. Otherhood
    While the filmmakers have crafted compelling characters and conundrums, they unfortunately fail to give them better connective tissue and a satisfying third act.
  56. America: The Motion Picture
    No aspect of history is off-limits here, the result being a grab bag of references, battles, and jokes that are constantly trying to one-up each other in terms of absurdity.
  57. Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer
    A would-be new “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” it’s energetic and polished enough to avoid feeling like a rip-off — “Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny,” this is not — but there the compliments pretty much end.
  58. Ode to Joy
    Mostly known for his behind-the-camera TV credits on shows like “Modern Family” and “1600 Penn,” Winer doesn’t bring much finesse into the generic visuals of Ode to Joy. In fairness to him, no amount of directorial elegance could have saved the artificial beats of a narrative that fails to create believable sexual tension between its “romantic” leads and amounts only to an utterly shallow showdown between brothers with long-standing scores to settle.
  59. The Medallion
    At times plays as if it were aimed at children, but more often simply seems to be aiming blind at whatever genre cliche the five credited writers fix upon in any given scene.
  60. Rugrats Go Wild
    Screechily abrasive and sorely lacking in elements that engage the imagination.
  61. A Dog of Flanders
    This Dog won't hunt. Although well crafted and handsomely mounted, pic lacks sufficient sizzle.
  62. Death to Smoochy
    Pushes its dark, smart, clever, cynical, satirical, nasty, provocative and sarcastic instincts to the point of heavily diminished returns -- to the point where the very amusing premise just isn't funny anymore.
  63. Don't Say a Word
    Generates tension from the get-go, albeit of an increasingly unpleasant variety, on its way to a disappointingly generic climax.
  64. The Pink Panther
    Neither the disaster one might have suspected nor a fully realized madcap farce; rather, Steve Martin's foray as Inspector Clouseau exhibits bursts of wild-and-craziness, but hardly enough to sustain even its relatively brief running time.
  65. Yours, Mine and Ours
    Generally pleasant family-friendly fare.
  66. Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    Functions swimmingly as both a bigscreen inflation of smallscreen icons and a fairly hilarious stand-alone.
  67. Brake
    Mannion's script goes a bit too far in terms of twists, capping the third-act suspense with a plot U-turn, and then another, that leaves audiences feeling played. Worse, the final development loses credibility in retrospect, reducing the film to the level of an exercise in paranoia, effects and one actor's ability to hold attention for nearly 90 minutes.
  68. Curvature
    Part metaphysical thriller, part inquiry into scientific ethics and the morality of revenge, the sci-fi indie Curvature wants to get the heart racing and the mind bending simultaneously, but flatlines in both departments.
  69. Third Person
    Though virtually every twist on this emotional roller coaster feels preordained by its architect, the director leaves certain mysteries for the audience to interpret, making for a more open-ended and mature work all around.
  70. Men, Women & Children
    This painfully well-meaning but largely unpersuasive bid for cross-generational understanding feels at once of-the-moment and too obvious by half, like a less overblown version of “Crash” for the information superhighway.
  71. 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.
  72. Role Play
    The players are deft enough that a little more wit in the writing would have surely been well-served. (Nighy in particular makes much of relatively little.) And while briskly handled, none of the ideas here are fresh enough for Role Play to score points on narrative or character unpredictability.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Frisco Kid
    Director Robert Aldrich has always adroitly mixed comedic and dramatic aspects in his films, and Frisco Kid is no exception. For audiences expecting Mel Brooks belly-laughs amidst the Yiddishisms, however, there’s bound to be disappointment.
  74. Crossing Over
    The way the picture dwells almost exclusively on cinematically exploitable elements -- gangbanger crime, prostitution, honor killing, terrorism paranoia -- gives it a sordid patina that even the classy, able thesps can't offset.
  75. Ben-Hur
    Minus a hero who has the macho charisma to wrap a movie around him like he owned it, the new Ben-Hur is an oddly lackluster affair: sludgy and plodding, photographed (by Oliver Wood) in nondescript medium close-up, an epic that feels like a mini-series served up in bits and pieces.
  76. Midnight Sun
    The trouble isn’t just that Midnight Sun cherry-picks the most poetic elements of a real-world disease to serve its transparently manipulative ends, but that it offers audiences such an unrealistic portrait of romance in the process.
  77. Jurassic World Dominion
    Of the three “Jurassic World” movies, “Dominion” is the least silly and most entertaining. But that’s not saying much. This “stop to ask if they should” cycle’s human characters were never especially interesting, and why should we trust Trevorrow to suddenly make them so?
  78. Double Parked
    The picture is stronger the closer it sticks to the streets and raw emotions and the more it avoids routine dramatic crutches and forced comedy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Uncommon Valor
    All of the top talent involved - especially Gene Hackman - is hardly needed to make Uncommon Valor what it is, a very common action picture.
  80. Fakers
    Despite engaging performances from a cast led by Matthew Rhys and Kate Ashfield and pro direction by first-timer Richard Janes, yarn about art grifters lacks real snap, which ultimately stems from the so-so script and lack of real coin.
  81. The Changeling
    As a stripped-to-essentials "canned theater" version of a classic Jacobean drama, The Changeling likely will prove most useful as a teaching tool in college-level drama courses.
  82. Ong Bak 3
    Too much contemplation and not enough demonstration sends Thai-socky Ong Bak 3 slumping to the canvas.
  83. Dad's Army
    Amiable to a fault, with gags both broad and gentle, Oliver Parker’s pic prompts sporadic chuckles rather than guffaws.
  84. The Park Bench
    Hayden and Perez do their best to generate sweetness and spark, but the obstacles separating these characters are as contrived as the cliches that animate them.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Porky's II: The Next Day
    Everyone who saw it remembers ‘that scene’ from the original. Here, some of the boys get back at Balbricker by sending a snake up into her toilet.
  86. Tulip Fever
    Not only is there nothing presently in the zeitgeist to which to peg such a story (except perhaps the Dane DeHaan-Cara Delevingne reunion nobody asked for, shot before “Valerian” and shelved for nearly a year), but the entire package has a curiously old-fashioned feel — and not just because it takes place 380 years ago.
  87. Murder Mystery
    Murder Mystery feels as shamelessly gaudy as paste jewelry — a trinket for nights that aspire to nothing more exotic than a pizza — but Aniston sparkles like the real deal.
  88. Ladies First
    Rather than stirring a debate, or even inspiring deeper cultural introspection, Sharrock and her collaborators deliver a trifle. For a satire about progress, “Ladies First” relies on far too many ideas from the past — cinematic even more than cultural.
  89. Hillbilly Elegy
    As long as Close is acting up an award-worthy storm (her performance is actually quite meticulous), Hillbilly Elegy is never less than alive. Adams does some showpiece acting of her own, but as skillful as her performance is, she never gets us to look at Bev with pity and terror.
  90. The Trouble with Bliss
    One can guess how the elements here might have been alluring on the page, but helmer/co-scenarist Michael Knowles' third feature doesn't find the distinctive tone needed to make its eccentric characters less than irksome and its plot more than arbitrary.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Amos & Andrew
    A one-joke sketch that doesn't work as a feature, Castle Rock's Amos & Andrew raises the question: "How did this film ever get made?" Few audience members will sit through its entirety to ponder that issue.
  92. Blade: Trinity
    Won't linger in the memory long, but gives pretty good action eye-candy while it's going.
  93. Kids in America
    Josh Stolberg launches a scalding attack on the stodgy conservatism of the American public school system, only to end up stacking the deck in egregiously smirky and simple-minded ways.
  94. Her Private Hell
    Her Private Hell is a disaster, but even that’s part of its hipster factor. The film practically announces that it’s too cool to be coherent.
  95. The Return
    Forgettable PG-13 pic will particularly strike fans of harder-edged recent horror pix as much ado about not much.
  96. Extraterrestrial
    Good-looking and entertaining, if unmemorable.
  97. Scary Movie
    It’s jammed with spoof-genre history, but that makes it feel more exhausting than exhilarating. It’s a top-heavy satirical party that’s become so meta it’s meh.
  98. The Abandoned
    Despite the capable presence of Jason Patric in a thanklessly one-note role, this generic chiller clings so tightly to conventions that it fails to even moderately raise one’s pulse
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Out for Justice
    Director John Flynn does a fair job of keeping the minimal storyline crawling along well enough to justify all the mayhem. Too bad the climactic confrontation doesn’t justify the build-up. Stuntwork, however, is first rate, and Seagal remains a convincing action figure.
  100. The Specials
    A vulgar, Z-grade variant on last year's "Mystery Men" for those who didn't get their fill the first time around.
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