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. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    Mostly clunky and vaguely unsavory.
  2. Copperhead
    Director Ron Maxwell’s adaptation of Harold Frederic’s 1893 novel elicits a certain amount of admiration for its old-fashioned carpentry and earnest, worthy approach, but its stilted dramaturgy and endless speechifying defeat the committed efforts of a sprawling ensemble.
  3. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    Lame and inoffensive.
  4. Finding Home
    Impeccably crafted but dramatically turgid.
  5. Grizzly Falls
    Lame stuntwork and subdued thrills indicate not just a low-budgeter, but a blindness to what target aud demands.
  6. On the Line
    Perfectly harmless, often humorous, featherweight confection -- think "Serendipity" re-imagined as a teen-skewing Saturday morning sitcom.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Life in Ruins
    Feels like warmed-over souvlaki.
  8. The Happening
    In short, this is a Shyamalan movie minus the bravado, the swagger; there are no audacious attempts to pull out the rug from under the audience, no ham-fisted lessons about the importance of religious belief or the power of storytelling.
  9. Aloft
    In the end, everything fits together rather ingeniously, though it’s clear that in orchestrating her needlessly complicated nonlinear narrative, Llosa has mistaken confusion for suspense.
  10. The Dark Tower
    It’s a highly competent and watchable paranoid metaphysical video game that doesn’t overstay its welcome, includes some luridly entertaining visual effects, and — it has to be said — summons an emotional impact of close to zero. Which in a film like this one isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.
  11. The Last Witch Hunter
    There are certainly enough dopey diversions here for The Last Witch Hunter to be considerably more fun than it is, but even its most extravagant bouts of silliness are hampered by desultory plotting and Eisner’s oppressively synthetic mise-en-scene.
  12. The Color of Time
    Tonally surprisingly coherent, Franco’s apostles seem to have directed, as Pauline Kael would’ve said, on their knees.
  13. Sleepless
    Sleepless is a propulsive thin exercise, “energetic” but tedious, the kind of January movie that Jamie Foxx should have permanently graduated from. Foxx is too good an actor — taut and committed — to phone in his performance, yet that hardly matters, since the whole movie is phoned in. It’s far from incompetent, but it’s a who-cares? thriller.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Doctor Dolittle
    Leslie Bricusse’s adaptation retains the delightful aspects while taking considerable liberty with the plot. His music and lyrics, while containing no smash hits, are admirably suited to the scenario.
  15. The War with Grandpa
    The combat is neither funny nor intense. The War with Grandpa is like “Home Alone” replayed as a tit-for-tat battle of logistical booby traps that never rises above the innocuous slapstick benign.
  16. Berlin, I Love You
    By and large, the film feels aimless and uninspired.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    DeepStar Six
    Pic’s cast is a grab-bag ensemble with no real center. It eventually finds its emotional core in an affair between crewmen Greg Evigan and Nancy Everhard. A sharp performance by Miguel Ferrer as a punchy, smartmouthed crewmen is diluted when character goes campily berserk.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    $pent
    Covers familiar territory unevenly, but Gil Cates Jr. directs his freshman feature with a mostly assured hand.
  19. 15 Minutes
    A thriller more contrived than it is exciting.
  20. Dead or Alive: Final
    It's a silly but enjoyable farrago from the cult quickie-meister, again set in an amoral universe-on-a-budget.
  21. The Haunted Mansion
    Mansion's drab comic strokes and narrative render the movie almost superfluous.
  22. Major Payne
    It’s relatively foolproof light entertainment, undone only when it strays too far into the absurd or wears the mantle of Wayans’ comedy persona.
  23. Street Fighter
    Avid users of the videogame and Van Damme’s loyal fans may embrace the film out of curiosity, but this uninvolving movie will fail to achieve the results of the star’s last outings.
  24. Festival of Lights
    Complex story twists unfold to confusing effect, while characters angrily toss cliches at one another and revelations multiply rather than resolve murky plot developments.
  25. Get Hard
    Whatever one makes of Get Hard’s contribution to our ongoing national debate about race, class and sexuality, there’s no denying that too much of it simply feels cheap, flailing and tired.
  26. Brain on Fire
    This embarrassingly earnest film — produced by Charlize Theron — argues for the importance of doctors going the extra mile, when textbook diagnoses won’t do.
  27. Ghost in the Machine
    It’s an effective, if predictable paranoid fantasy. The film’s social statement may be hopelessly muddy, but its adroit sense of fun and thrills cannot be discounted.
  28. Law Abiding Citizen
    True torture-porn aficionados will be disappointed, as editor Tariq Anwar cuts away right before blade meets flesh -- a move that feels a tad, well, gutless under the circumstances. But elsewhere, "Citizen" proves startlingly graphic, even by R-rated standards.
  29. Ghosted
    The movie is a romantic action comedy that starts off light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a dead-weight spectacle of wretched excess.
  30. Russian Doll
    A romantic comedy that treads familiar "Green Card" terrain with considerable charm if no great style or originality.
  31. Demolition Man
    A noisy, soulless, self-conscious pastiche that mixes elements of sci-fi, action-adventure and romance, then pours on a layer of comedy replete with Hollywood in-jokes.
    • Variety
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Private Lessons
    Dan Greenburg’s script from his own novel [philly] is very effective in presenting an innocent youth’s point-of-view confronted with the sexual stimuli that pervade modern society. Inability to flesh out this central notion into a feature-length screenplay is a pity, but Private Lessons should satisfy general audiences with its diversions of frequent nudity, softcore sex, dominant rock music score and gags.
  33. Glenrothan
    It’s unfortunate that the film itself is more like a bottom-shelf blend: easily drinkable, highly forgettable, bland. Worse still, it won’t get you even mildly buzzed.
  34. Friday the 13th
    As in his "Chainsaw" remake, Nispel's scare tactics amount to little more than carefully timed cattle-prod shocks, aided by high-volume speaker blasts that were beyond the budgetary reach of the early '80s films.
  35. Beyond the Reach
    A preposterously bad, grade-Z adventure yarn.
  36. Celtic Pride
    Not quite a three-pointer, but definitely more than an airball, "Celtic Pride" is an uneven but largely likable basketball-themed comedy that should lay up decent B.O. numbers and perform even better in the homevid arena.
  37. Vanguard
    This action spectacular seems hellbent on containing every possible marketable genre element, with no concern for whether they cohere or cancel one another out.
  38. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    The picture is still much too rickety, slapdash and surprisingly dull to qualify as a good barrel-bottom pleasure.
  39. 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.
  40. Looking for Palladin
    Amiable but uneven.
  41. Mother's Day
    Undistinguished apart from Rebecca De Mornay's performance as an unhinged mama.
  42. Year One
    Lacks seismic guffaws but elicits many mild smiles.
  43. Motherhood
    Though pregnant with possibility, Motherhood fails to deliver.
  44. Fireflies in the Garden
    Clumsy melodrama, which looks and sounds no better than an average made-for-cabler.
  45. Red One
    The villains are shape-shifters, but the key thing about “Red One” is that the whole movie is a shape-shifter: arduous action jape, low-kitsch Christmas fairy tale, buddy movie, family-reconciliation movie — every quadrant and demo must be served.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
    A no-frills, workmanlike picture.
  47. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
    Sequel is louder and more elaborate (and even slightly longer) than predecessor, but the law of diminishing returns has caught up with this franchise.
  48. The Ledge
    There's a great deal of on-the-nose talk here about faith, rationality, sin and so forth. But Chapman's sincerity is undercut by the crudely melodramatic explanations of why his principals believe as they do.
  49. Doom
    It's really not all that bad. Ultra-derivative bigscreen transplant of one of the most successful (and controversial) games ever made plays like a mutant cross between a biotech thriller and a zombie movie, with all the alien autopsies, blood-gushing protuberances and meaningless scientific jargon that come with the territory.
  50. Mercy
    The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
  51. The Smurfs 2
    The genially goofy shenanigans, incredibly corny punchlines and Hank Azaria’s go-for-broke performance as the incompetent wizard Gargamel are very much the same ― an entirely welcome thing in a summer movie season full of so much apocalyptic Sturm und Drang.
  52. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    The problem with “Alice” is its lack of narrative imagination.
  53. The Merry Gentlemen
    Not only does the story flail trying to find its footing after a well-presented first act, some of the more cost-conscious aspects detract from the picture’s meaningful, understated sentiments.
  54. The Man from Toronto
    A throwback buddy action-comedy that offsets its run-of-the-mill sense of humor with a pair of appealing leads.
  55. Premature
    Premature winds up resembling nothing so much as the coarsely smutty teen-sex comedies that abounded throughout the ’80s in the wake of “Porky’s.”
  56. Jingle All the Way
    Based on an idea similar to the premise of Home Alone, though not nearly as accomplished or entertaining, and produced by that film's director, Chris Columbus, this family comedy-adventure is decidedly not a vintage Schwarzenegger kidpic on the order of Kindergarten Cop.
  57. Thr3e
    Indeed, you could argue that weighty questions about the nature of evil and the allure of sin figured more prominently in the similarly titled "Se7en," one of several other, better suspensers dimly echoed here.
  58. The Fourth Kind
    Even the most gullible auds will be challenged to buy into the picture, billed as "based on the actual case studies" and, in any case, rendered rather boring by writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi ("The Cavern").
  59. Imaginary
    Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.
  60. Stolen
    A technically polished thriller marred by textbook filmmaking that grows increasingly dull as the plot wears on.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Amityville II: The Possession
    There are actually two films meandering in this mess – one a second-rate horror flick about a family in peril, and another that is a slight variation on the demon-possessed Exorcist theme.
  62. Baggage Claim
    Chemistry you can fake, but charm is far harder to pull off, and Baggage Claim never quite succeeds on that front.
  63. End of Days
    It's good to see Schwarzenegger doing his thing again after what, for him, was a long sabbatical.
  64. Testosterone
    This obsessive love story about a guy seeking closure after being dumped by his Latino boyfriend awkwardly juggles screwball and noir elements with macabre black comedy in a mix that calls for a far lighter, more stylish touch than the obvious one at work here.
  65. Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
    A sibling survivor story of uncommon personal and political breadth.
  66. Cheaper by the Dozen 2
    Bland, canned but studiously professional sequel retains most of the principals from Fox's family-friendly 2003 hit, including the ever-reliable Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt.
  67. The Possession of Michael King
    That Jung and his collaborators haven’t found any new angles to explore in this endlessly overworked religio-horror claptrap would matter far less if they had a firmer grasp of form and technique.
  68. Lake Placid
    To be sure, Kelley's Emmy-winning brand of off-kilter humor and cockeyed affection for rural folk is on display, but his attempt here to blend the citified angst of "Ally McBeal" (co-star Bridget Fonda was Kelley's first choice as that series' lead) with the countrified absurdisms of "Picket Fences," plus bits out of the Peter Benchley playbook, doesn't hold water.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Black Stallion Returns
    The Black Stallion Returns is little more than a contrived, cornball story that most audiences will find to be an interminable bore.
  70. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    It would be generous to call the film a continuation of the “Chainsaw” saga. It’s more like a blood-soaked but unscary footnote.
  71. Bringing Up Bobby
    A technically competent but painfully broad dramedy about a larcenous mother-and-son duo in the Midwest. This gender-flipped, latter-day "Paper Moon" lacks that film's judicious restraint, among other things, alternating hick Americana cartoonishness with maudlin appeals to the tear ducts.
  72. Ninja Assassin
    Seemingly made to capitalize on a dubious CG innovation -- namely, the slicing of bodies in half by whizzing five-pointed stars -- Ninja Assassin has little else to recommend it, not even laughs.
  73. Addicted to Fresno
    A mean-spirited farce whose strenuous bad taste seldom translates into actual laughs.
  74. My All American
    Based on fact but mired in cliches, My All-American pays respectful tribute to U. of Texas football legend Freddie Steinmark (1949-71) with the sort of on-the-nose sincerity that transforms biography into hagiography
  75. Yakuza Princess
    While it generally lacks dramatic oomph and the story is confusing at times, Yakuza Princess delivers plenty of visual excitement.
  76. Devil's Due
    The film expends plenty of effort crafting a few memorable freakout setpieces and nailing down the logistics of its found-footage camera placement, yet it offers precious little in the way of real scares or engaging characters, and even less in original ideas.
  77. Siberia
    In the end, it can never decide what kind of film it wants to be, drifting into drab formlessness when it needs to find moments of poetry, and reverting to dull clichés when it wants to indulge its thriller instincts, winding up as frosty and uninviting as its setting.
  78. The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress
    The title alone should alert auds that The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress is a hatchet job on the controversial politico known as "The Hammer."
  79. Color of the Cross
    Once the revisionist frisson of a black Jesus, not to mention Mary, Joseph and Judas, has worn off, one is stuck with more mundane matters such as story dynamics, visual style and character verisimilitude, much to the misfortune of the audience.
  80. Isn't She Great
    Isn't even unintentionally funny enough to qualify as guilty pleasure a la "Valley of the Dolls."
  81. Chelsea Walls
    Speak a great deal, but they don't have much to say. A dull ensembler.
  82. Basic
    The teasing tale is told with such dispatch it will carry willing audiences along; genre staples of action, macho attitude and corruption through the ranks are delivered intact.
  83. ATM
    Seems assembled from autopilot thriller material, with most of the dull dialogue devoted to plugging potential plot holes rather than anything resembling logic.
  84. Sexual Chronicles of a French Family
    Offers diverting date-night fare for open-minded heterosexual couples and swingers, though its superiority (artistic or otherwise) to actual porn is debatable.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Keep
    Buried deep within The Keep’s mysterious exterior lies that chilling Hollywood question: how do these dogs get made?
  86. Jellyfish Eyes
    By second-guessing what audiences want, Murakami falls into the same trap studios do when trying to appease mass tastes, delivering a film that features many of his familiar designs and characters but precious little in the way of personal vision.
  87. Irreplaceable You
    Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a charming actress who radiates poise and intelligence, which is why Irreplaceable You — in which her character acts in ways that are clearly self-destructive and counterproductive — rings so false.
  88. Kings
    Kings is a tangle of conflicting moods and emotions.
  89. Backtrace
    Throughout most of the movie’s running time, Modine is tasked with the majority of the heavy lifting, and he handles the burden admirably.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Clan of the Cave Bear
    The Clan of the Cave Bear is a dull, overly genteel rendition of Jean M. Auel's novel. Handsomely produced on rugged Canadian exteriors, this is the story of pre-history's first feminist.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eye of the Cat
    Pic has a few good jolts, successful buildups, and good looking people, but stilted dialog and plot shot through with holes keep mystery at a minimum, suspense overdue. Despite San Francisco as backdrop, with North Beach and Sausalito tossed in for spice, film trips over its own cliches and errors.
  92. Uglies
    While the YA genre can be very capable of unearthing outsized desires and rebellions in all of us, the problem here is the source material itself. Or rather, the timing of its screen adaptation.
  93. Even Money
    Standard-issue directorial approach is perfectly in keeping with a script whose natural berth is on the tube.
  94. Disturbing the Peace
    It’s basic action entertainment of a somewhat old-fashioned ilk, giving viewers exactly what they expect in a borderline-hokey yet satisfying way.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Excess Baggage
    Director Marco Brambilla does a serviceable job, without adding much distinction to the piece, and the script --- credited to Max D. Adams, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais --- seems patched together, consisting of a series of scenes lacking a strong narrative hook.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    Only those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics.
  97. Hellions
    Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract.
  98. Big Momma's House 2
    So episodic and flat it should be a letdown even to those amused by the original.
  99. The Last Victim
    Director Naveen A. Chathapuram and scripter Ashley James Louis, working from a story by Chathapuram and Doc Justin, have cobbled together a derivative and numbingly pretentious piece of work distinguished only by the relative novelty of a female lead (well played by Ali Larter) who’s as resourceful, resilient and, when push repeatedly comes to shove, purposefully brutal as guys usually are in movies like this.
  100. Spawn
    Spawn is a moodily malevolent, anything-goes revenge fantasy that relies more upon special visual and digitally animated effects for its intended appeal than any comics-derived sci-fier to date.
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