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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It's Alive
    Stomach-churning.
  2. Where Hands Touch
    Amandla Stenberg carries the magnetism she brought to her breakthrough role in the YA romance “Everything, Everything,” but she’s betrayed by a stilted rendering of a rarely illuminated piece of history.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eddie and the Cruisers
    A mish-mash of a film, combining elements of the ongoing nostalgia for rock music of previous decades with an unworkable and laughable mystery plotline.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Screwballs
    A poor man's "Porky's". This compendium of horny high school jokes set in 1965 is full of youthful exuberance and proves utterly painless to watch, but it is so close in premise and tone to its model that negative comparisons can't help but be drawn.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    8 Million Ways to Die
    What could have been a better film delving into complexities of one tough-but-vulnerable alcoholic sheriff out to bust a cocaine ring, instead ends up an oddly-paced work that is sometimes a thriller and sometimes a love story, succeeding at neither.
  6. Our Time
    Die-hard acolytes will argue that the camerawork transcends or even complements the storyline; most everyone else will wonder what happened to an auteur whose work was awaited with such eager anticipation.
  7. American Dharma
    What you see in American Dharma isn’t investigative filmmaking — it’s a toothless bromance.
  8. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
    The emotions of the stories have been lost. We could be watching the standard ghoulish CGI effects that take place in any horror movie of the week.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Child's Play 3
    Noisy, mindless sequel.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Return of the Living Dead II
    Billed as a comedy/horror flick, Return of the Living Dead Part II is neither scary nor funny and adds salt in the wound with an obnoxious soundtrack of grating rock music.
  11. 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 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    King Kong Lives
    Director John Guillermin loses all control of the pic.
  13. At First Light
    Apart from the uncommon notion that these mysterious visitors may actually mean us well, the film seems a little too comfortable with clichés, right down to the men in black who show up mid-movie to ruin everybody’s fun.
  14. Mobile Homes
    This is a dour and deeply unpleasant film that wears its gritty realism as a badge of honor, while failing to recognize the motivations that explain such behavior in reality, which makes him neither an attentive journalist nor a particularly good storyteller (at least not yet).
  15. REC
    Lazily scripted, without even a pretense of character development or psychological depth, it offers nothing new for genre fans and no reason for mainstream auds to bite.
  16. All Creatures Here Below
    It’s a decently acted and crafted drama that nonetheless seems built on a foundation of phony pathos, revolving around doomed lovers whose fate seems more a matter of contrived miserabilism than authenticity.
  17. Escape Room
    The first part of the film gets some airy momentum going. Then, however, we learn the secret of what the characters have in common, and it gives you that slightly sinking feeling of one contrivance too many.
  18. The Dark
    In trying to succeed as something both metaphorical and very literal-minded, the movie ends up being neither one nor the other — not psychologically deep enough to succeed as pure drama, and too earnest to offer the usual rewards of a genre film.
  19. In Harm's Way
    In the end, In Harm’s Way struggles to please so many theoretical audiences that it winds up feeling like a film for no one at all.
  20. Brightburn
    A watchable but super-silly mix of superheroics and evil-child horror that mashes together singularly uninspired ideas from both.
  21. All the Devil's Men
    Resourceful and energetic, All the Devil’s Men is better than it might have been. But it’s still not very good.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Oh, God! Book II
    Absence this time of John Denver, his chemistry with lead George Burns, and the original's solid comedy material lead to a bland, unstimulating film.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Villain
    Rarely has so much talent been used to so little purpose.
  24. Triple Frontier
    There’s a dullness at the core of Triple Frontier.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Return of Swamp Thing
    The Return of Swamp Thing is scientific hokum without the fun. Second attempt to film the DC Comics character will disappoint all but the youngest critters.
  26. 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mission
    The script is based on a little-known but nonetheless intriguing historical incident in mid-18th century South America, pitting avaricious colonialists against the Jesuit order of priests. The fundamental problem is that the script is cardboard thin, pinning labels on its characters and arbitrarily shoving them into stances to make plot points.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Brewster's Millions
    It’s hard to believe a comedy starring Richard Pryor and John Candy is no funnier than this one is, but director Walter Hill has overwhelmed the intricate genius of each with constant background action, crowd confusions and other endless distractions.
  29. The Devil All the Time
    The Devil All the Time shows us a lot of bad behavior, but the movie isn’t really interested in what makes the sinners tick. And without that lurid curiosity, it’s just a series of Sunday School lessons: a noir that wants to scrub away the darkness.
    • 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.
  31. Saint Judy
    Monaghan radiates a winning measure of defiant resilience and dignity, even when she and her illustrious co-stars are reduced to mouthpieces for political sentiments (as in Common’s censure of ICE) — which is depressingly often.
  32. Billboard
    Zelker’s three-ring circus of digital and social-media content needs a compelling main event, and this movie seems unlikely to inspire many to check out the supplementary materials.
  33. Berlin, I Love You
    By and large, the film feels aimless and uninspired.
  34. Tolkien
    The film – stately, well-acted, and ultimately unsubstantial – dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Marked for Death
    This dim-witted revenge yarn is the simplest of showcases for Steven Seagal - an extremely compelling action presence with his brutal martial arts fighting style, imposing size and nasty demeanor.
  36. After
    An innocuous teen pulp soap opera that flirts with “danger” but, in fact, keeps surprising you with how mild and safe and predictable it turns out to be.
  37. The Dirt
    It’s just a thinly written (by Rich Wilkes and Amanda Adelson), generically staged (by Jeff Tremaine, director of the “Jackass” films) VH1-style sketchbook of a movie — which is to say, it’s a Netflix film, with zero atmosphere, overly blunt lighting, and a threadbare post-psychological telegraphed quality that gives you nothing to read between the lines.
    • 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.
  39. The Glimmer Man
    For a rock'em, sock'em action thriller, The Glimmer Man is a hopelessly slow-moving, slow-witted shaggy-dog tale that delivers the jolts but lacks the juice necessary for high-voltage entertainment.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tora! Tora! Tora!
    Both overall director Richard Fleischer and his Japanese counterparts do a dull job, and the monotonously low-key tone of scene after scene almost suggests that each was filmed without a sense of ultimate slotting in the finished form.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Straight Time
    Straight Time is a most unlikeable film because Dustin Hoffman, starring as a paroled and longtime criminal, cannot overcome the essentially distasteful and increasingly unsympathetic elements in the character. Ulu Grosbard's sluggish direction doesn't help.
  42. The Sunlit Night
    Here, Wnendt suppresses his naturally provocative streak to deliver an aggressively cute existential comedy instead.
  43. Corporate Animals
    Corporate Animals is a character sketch in search of a plot.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wild Orchid
    What doesn’t work is the hold Rourke is supposed to have over Otis. Looking pudgy and puffy-faced, with a little gold earring, he is anything but an appetizing sex object...As Emily, Otis really is hypnotically attractive, but she plays the still-waters-run-deep country beauty with expressionless immobility. Bisset, always a class act, here bubbles over with caricatured joie de vivre.
  45. Blush
    Admirably acted and powered by a loopy internal rhythm, the film nonetheless wears out its welcome long before it’s done inflicting indignities on its heroine, arriving at its main point early and then repeating it again and again.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vanishing Point
    The action is almost entirely made up of one man driving a car at maximum speed from Denver to, hopefully, San Francisco, against various odds, from the police who try to intercept him, to the oddball individuals he meets along the way.
  47. Child's Play
    This is the new normal for horror movies: The screenplays have to seem hipper than the premise they represent, which puts “Child’s Play” in the weird position of pointing out and poking fun at all the ways it fails to make sense.
  48. Yesterday
    In Yesterday, [Boyle and Curtis] reduce the Beatles to the ultimate product by declaring, at every turn, “These songs are transcendent!” And it’s the fact that they keep telling us, rather than showing us (i.e., with musical sequences that earned their transcendence), that makes Yesterday, for all the timeless songs in it, a cut-and-dried, rotely whimsical, prefab experience.
  49. Coming 2 America
    For the most part, Coming 2 America falls back on familiar punchlines, serving up nearly word-for-word repeats of amusing bits from the original, but they don’t necessarily play the same in this context.
  50. The Kindness of Strangers
    Too much of the kindness in “Strangers” feels sentimentally story-dictated rather than born of profound human observation, leaving you with mild, woolly good feeling but little to contemplate or chew on.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rollover
    Although elegantly appointed and possessed of a provocative theme, Rollover is a fundamentally disappointing political-romantic thriller [from a story by David Shaber, Howard Kohn and David Weir] set in the rarified world of international high finance.
  52. Something
    Something has a few observations to make about the perils of contemporary parenthood, but instead of whipping them into tension it douses them in catch-as-catch-can thriller vagueness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Man Called Horse
    A Man Called Horse is said to be an authentic depiction of American Indian life in the Dakota territory of about 1820. Authentic it may be, but an absorbing film drama it is not.
  54. Breakthrough
    What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.
  55. Tell It to the Bees
    Within the film’s modest scale, the period trappings feel apt, and its aesthetic packaging is attractive enough. But particularly for a movie largely about repression, “Bees” is so full of forced emotions that it teeters on the brink of cliche-riddled camp.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Valley of the Dolls
    Parkins and Tate, the latter particularly good, suffer from under-emphasis in early reels, and corny plot resolution.
  57. Chance
    “Bambi” perhaps did it best, but Chance is on the opposite end of the spectrum in both overall tone and filmmaking skill. Though the message here is one everyone should hear, clichéd characters and a dark, derivative dirge of a story end up feeling more manipulative than motivational.
  58. El Chicano
    The problem here isn’t the fairly apparent budgetary limits — it’s the limitations of style and imagination.
  59. Lady and the Tramp
    It’s as creatively anemic and blandly calculated as, say, this summer’s billion-grossing “The Lion King.”
  60. Come to Daddy
    Moderately funny and strangely dated ... The blend of tired jokes and body horror here seems entombed in amber, as every lacerated scalp, loudly broken limb, and use of the C-word makes it feel that much less original.
  61. Georgetown
    It’s downright tricky to maintain the tone Waltz is going for here, but the story is consistently outrageous enough to keep us guessing, and Redgrave goes a long way to offset the lunacy of it all. ... But instead of getting more interesting as it goes on, Waltz’s performance grows tiresome.
  62. Lost Transmissions
    It doesn’t sentimentalize Theo’s illness (much) or pull back from how disconnected he can be. “Lost Transmissions” may even sound like it deserves props for its straight-up, objective view of mental illness. Except for one small detail: That stance ends up removing the basic dramatic motor of the film.
  63. Papi Chulo
    An egregiously miscalculated rent-a-companion comedy from Irish writer-director John Butler (“Handsome Devil”).
  64. Just Say Goodbye
    This melodrama, released to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Month, lacks the necessary polish to elevate not just its message, but also the actors’ performances.
  65. Trial by Fire
    Every line of dialogue in Trial by Fire is wrapped with so much exposition that the film feels tied to the train-tracks of good taste. Characters don’t converse, they simply say all their thoughts aloud.
  66. Perfect
    What it means, Alcazar leaves open for interpretation. He’s more a mood maker than a story teller, and the film feels like people watching at a fancy party and inhaling different wafts of perfume.
  67. Crawl
    Crawl has no pretense and not very much range; it’s “Jaws” set in an old dark house.
  68. Anna
    It’s nowhere near the embarrassment of Brian De Palma’s “Domino,” or any number of recent studio tentpoles. Nor is it fresh enough to pretend that audiences had missed out on something special if it had been buried altogether — except perhaps for Luss, who’s bound to get another shot.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Foxy Brown
    Even by the gutter-high standards of the genre, Foxy Brown is something of a mess. Jack Hill’s screenplay has peculiar narrative gaps.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tank Girl
    A classic case of kitchen-sink filmmaking, in which the principals have thrown everything into the stew, hoping enough will stick to the audience...What’s missing from the mix is an engaging story to bind together its intriguing bits. And Lori Petty as Tank Girl, aka Rachel Buck, has the spunk but, sadly, not the heart of the post-apocalyptic heroine.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gun Crazy
    Script points up the physical attraction between Dall and Cummins but, despite the emphasis, it is curiously cold and lacking in genuine emotions. Fault is in the writing and direction, both staying on the surface and never getting underneath the characters.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bright Lights, Big City
    This novel-cum-feature film (from Jay McInerney's book) is a distinctly morose and maudlin journey through one man's destructive period of personal loss.
  74. The Addams Family
    The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    This film, about a homicidal orphan girl, is farfetched nonsense with precious little to appease shriek freaks. Laird Koenig's screenplay from his novel is riddled with unsuspended disbelief - coincidences, gimmicks.
    • 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.
  77. Last Christmas
    As much as we go into Last Christmas eager to see a nicely wrapped package of acerbic fun, the film falls short of that. It’s not so much clever, toasty, and affectionate as it is the faux version of those things. It’s twee, it’s precious, it’s forced. And it’s light on true romance, maybe because the movie itself is a little too in love with itself.
  78. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
    To the extent that audiences are willing to go along with an overwrought documentary that strives to imitate what far more professionally executed podcasts have innovated in recent years ..., Berman’s stunt could turn into one of the year’s buzzier nonfiction releases.
  79. ECCO
    There’s more repetition and ponderousness than compelling intrigue in the end result here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Walkabout
    Roeg's bag is photography, but pretty pictures alone cannot sustain - and, in fact, inhibit - this fragile and forced screen adaptation of a James Vance Marshall novel.
  81. The Divine Fury
    Kim’s film is a slick concoction that affords moderate guilty-pleasure fun for a while, though it goes on too long to diminishing effect.
  82. The Sky Is Pink
    The emotions we witness and feel should have more force given the obviously stressful circumstances depicted. But they feel like all the edges have been sawed off to flatter both the subjects and principal actors.
  83. The Song of Names
    It’s a fatally old-fashioned and lugubrious historical drama, muting the emotional payoff it labors so hard to deliver.
  84. Guest of Honour
    At once overplotted and under-reasoned, hysterical and stiffly earnest, Guest of Honour is finally one of those strenuously diagrammatic mysteries in which everything notionally connects, which isn’t quite the same as everything making even marginal emotional sense.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Great Balls of Fire!
    It's a thin, cartoonish treatment of the hellbent, musically energetic young Jerry Lee Lewis.
  86. Angel of Mine
    Oddly, after leaving us aching for the film to go off the rails, when “Angel of Mine” finally does in the final scene, its message is so screwy that the audience might feel as loopy as poor Lizzie.
  87. 15 Minutes of War
    Grivois’ purpose is not to force a conversation about France’s colonial past or a comparison between Africa then and now. As the body count increases in this tense but troublingly context-free drama, he mistakenly believes we’ll gladly put politics aside to revel in the French gift for the kill shot.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Hand
    It’s not a pretty sight.
  89. Halloween Kills
    Halloween night may be Michael Myers’ masterpiece, but Halloween Kills is no masterpiece. It’s a mess — a slasher movie that‘s almost never scary, slathered with “topical” pablum and with too many parallel plot strands that don’t go anywhere.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Romper Stomper
    Romper Stomper is a Clockwork Orange without the intellect.
  91. Strange But True
    Both ambitious and overwhelmed, this sophomore feature from British-Indian director Rowan Athale — whose festival-traveled debut “Wasteland” had lively promise and similarly hinky storytelling — can’t quite decide what kind of weird it wants to be: a loopy B-movie corkscrew ride, or an “American Beauty”-style suburban burlesque with Something To Say.
  92. 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.
  93. Edie
    An uneven dramedy from U.K. commercials helmer Simon Hunter, working from a screenplay by Elizabeth O’Halloran that has a big problem in tone and beaucoup clichéd contrivance.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is a disappointing thriller that wastes an oddball premise and offbeat point-of-view.
  95. Bit
    On the one hand, it’s nice that in 2020 this hook should (despite our current political chaos) seem no big deal. On the other, one does wish this exercise in blase attitudinizing paid a little more attention to suspense, thrills, plot, mythology, and the other basic horror elements it leaves underdeveloped.
  96. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    The problem for “As It Was” is that this modest turnaround in lifestyle and attitude comes a third of the way into the movie, leaving an hour still to come that will be devoted almost strictly to how well the comeback is going.
  97. The Last Thing He Wanted
    The human dimension that gives the film brief jolts of energy never takes root. Instead, audiences are left grappling with a stuffy maze, albeit one presented with handsome production values and a filmmaker’s striking visual touch.
  98. American Son
    The overly finished language and theatrical intensity levels that might be potently effective onstage lose any pretense of naturalism under the camera’s unblinking gaze.
  99. Lucky Day
    The trouble is, apart from Glover’s unforgettably weird contribution, Lucky Day isn’t a particularly memorable offering. It’s enough to get Avary back in the game, one hopes, but considering his talent, this is hardly the film his fans have been waiting for.
  100. The Assistant
    Exasperatingly low-key ... This is no time for subtlety, and yet Green’s film feels so restrained, you’d think she was afraid of being sued for slander.
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