Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lord of the Flies
    Director Harry Hook’s literal, unimaginative visual approach makes the tale seem mundane and tedious.
  2. Primal
    That this mashup of too many familiar action-thriller elements doesn’t emerge a generic mess is a credit to all involved. That it’s passably entertaining but also instantly forgettable comes as less of a surprise.
  3. Sink or Swim
    The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting.
  4. The Gentlemen
    The actors, splendidly kitted out in autumnal suiting and knitwear by costume designer Michael Wilkinson, have what fun they can with such thin, dated material, but everyone here deserves better.
  5. Tell Me Who I Am
    In the documentary, the director appears to be interviewing the twins separately, but he’s really just filming them as they recite their own story. They’ve chosen their words carefully; they cry on cue; and they share just enough, while holding back an enormous amount of information.
  6. The Sandlot
    Sweet and sincere, the film is also a remarkably shallow wade, rife with incident and slim on substance.
  7. That Darn Cat
    It's not quite a catastrophe, but the updated remake of That Darn cat is a loud and largely charmless trifle. Very small children may be attracted in sufficient numbers for fair-to-middling opening weekend B.O., but this overbearing comedy isn't likely to pussyfoot very long in theaters before it high-tails to homevideo.
  8. Radioflash
    Ultimately it seems a message movie not quite willing to deliver any clear message, as well as a genre film shy about admitting as much. It’s too melodramatic to be taken as gritty realism, yet not suspenseful enough to work as a straight thriller.
  9. Cold Brook
    There’s no complexity to anyone or anything here. Even the hint of family conflict in the portrayal of our heroes’ children as bratty teens goes nowhere in the director and Cain DeVore’s screenplay, which at times teeters on the edge between simple and simple-minded.
  10. Blank Check
    Blank Check wallows in the exuberance of excess so enthusiastically, for so long, that even naive youngsters may have trouble buying pic’s ultimate “money can’t buy happiness” message.
  11. The Current War
    It benefits from a smart, snappy script and a well-rounded cast, and gives its director the chance to employ virtually every camera trick known to man. What it can’t do, however, is generate even the slightest bit of interest in what happens to any of its characters.
  12. A Kid in King Arthur's Court
    Run-of-the-mill modern retelling in which a schnooky kid is transported to days of yore to revivify the glory of Camelot. But the juvenilization of the hero turns into an ill-fitting concept that unbalances an already fragile fantasy.
  13. Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit
    Lacks the charm and buoyancy that made the first "Act" a mass-appeal hit
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Swiss Family Robinson
    The rather modest 1813 Johann Wyss tale has been blown up to prodigious proportions. The essence and the spirit of the simple, intriguing story of a marvelously industrious family is all but snuffed out, only spasmodically flickering through the ponderous approach.
  15. Wendy
    What felt so revolutionary in 2012 is no less visionary today, but packs a disappointing sense of familiarity this time around, like tearing open your Christmas presents to find … a huge stack of hand-me-down clothing. Or else, like watching a magic trick performed a second time from a different angle.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Necessary Roughness
    Essentially, this is a football version of the equally contrived and only slightly less hokey baseball comedy Major League.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Black Christmas, a bloody, senseless kill-for-kicks feature, exploits unnecessary violence in a university sorority house operated by an implausibly alcoholic ex-hoofer.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People Under the Stairs
    A pretense of social responsibility and most of the necessary tension get lost in a combination of excessive gore and over-the-top perfs in The People Under the Stairs.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Body of Evidence
    A courtroom drama built around the charge that Madonna's body is a deadly weapon with which she 'fornicated' a man to death, this showcase for the singer-thesp as femme fatale is more silly than erotic.
  20. Rabid
    Overlong, undercooked Rabid can’t settle on a unified tone for its actors, let alone its narrative. Even its misanthropy ultimately feels indecisive and trifling.
  21. Spies in Disguise
    The trouble with a film like Spies in Disguise isn’t that it’s less than sparklingly animated but that as technically bravura as it is, there is never anything at stake.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fire in the Sky
    A truly harrowing sequence in the final reel fails to save Fire in the Sky, an otherwise prosaic approach to the gee-whiz genre of UFO aliens snatching a human specimen for examination.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Comes a Horseman
    Alan Pakula’s Comes a Horseman is so lethargic not even Jane Fonda, James Caan and Jason Robards can bring excitement to this artific- ially dramatic story of a stubborn rancher who won’t surrender to the local land baron.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    House Calls
    Despite some horsepower casting, House Calls is overall a silly and uneven comedy about doctors which wants to be as macabre as, say, Hospital, and at the same time as innocuous as a TV sitcom. It manages to be neither.
  25. The Roads Not Taken
    The movie is an exasperating puzzle with most of the pieces missing.
  26. VHYes
    The best thing the film has going for it is editor Avner Shiloah’s scrambled channel-surfing assembly, which seldom sticks with any bit long enough for it to get too stale. Still, VHYes feels overextended even at the 66 slim minutes it takes to reach the final credits.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Striptease
    Writer-director Andrew Bergman has good fun sending up the weak morals, outrageous hypocrisy and trashy lifestyles of many of his characters, but his satirical aim is wobbly, the jibes and potshots falling short of their mark more often than not.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Prophecy
    Director John Frankenheimer has made a frightening monster movie that people could laugh at for generations to come, complete with your basic big scary thing, cardboard characters and a story so stupid it's irresistible.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Guardian
    Who knows what possessed director William Friedkin to straight-facedly tell this absurd 'tree bites man' tale, but it's an impulse he should have exorcised.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Under the Cherry Moon
    In Under the Cherry Moon, Prince tries to direct too, giving himself a lot of closeups kissing but hardly any of him singing. What is left is a trite story about a rich girl and a poor musician (Prince) that's set on the Riviera and shot in, of all things, black and white.
  31. Vivarium
    Vivarium has a canny visual design (you won’t soon forget the rows of Monopoly houses), but the movie becomes an example of the imitative fallacy. It makes the audience feel deadened too.
  32. Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia
    It’s an inspired goof — for a while, before it turns into waaaaaay too much of a good thing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Big Business
    A shrill, unattractive comedy.
  34. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions
    Part of the problem is that since everything is at so incessant a fever pitch, suspense flattens rather than builds, and we don’t care much about characters who spend nearly all their time yelling instructions at each other.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
    The film [based on The Destroyer series by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy] never seems to know where it's going and, when the smoke has cleared, doesn't seem to have got there either.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eyewitness
    Weaver plays her part very well, but simply can’t justify the character’s actions, which ripple through the murder plot in several directions. Consequently, the story gets more and more strained before it’s resolved.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Suspect
    Art imitates art - and not very well - in Peter Yates' gimmicky suspense drama sabotaged by a flimsy script full of cliches.
  38. Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    No, the “Saw” series hasn’t really changed. So depending on whether you’re a fan or not, eat up…or throw up.
  39. i'm thinking of ending things
    It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie — it’s didactically morose.
  40. My Salinger Year
    The movie doesn’t show a complex enough representation of either adult life or the New York literary world to offer much depth to grownups (it’s far more engaged with Joanna’s romantic life and dream sequences set at the Waldorf Astoria), which means that My Salinger Year must have been intended to inspire young women for whom 1995 seems like the ancient past.
  41. Impractical Jokers: The Movie
    Impractical Jokers: The Movie is an undistinguished and unnecessary extension of a brand whose primary attributes are likability, authenticity and relative modesty (given the worst impulses of the genre).
  42. The Postcard Killings
    This uninspired detour into impersonally commercial English-language terrain for Bosnian director Danis Tanovic (an Oscar winner for 2001’s “No Man’s Land”) should provide Patterson’s fans and undemanding miscellaneous viewers with an acceptably slick if not-particularly-suspenseful crime potboiler for home viewing.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Boys Next Door
    Unfortunately the film itself doesn’t live up to the expectations. Even if intentions are worthy, it emerges glib and uninvolvingly.
  44. 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.
  45. The High Note
    The script of The High Note, by Flora Greeson, is long on wish-fulfillment and short on inside authority, and the director, Nisha Ganatra (“Late Night”), stages it with a hit-or-miss geniality that keeps cutting corners on the story’s emotional honesty. The feel-good factor hovers over this movie like a fuzzy bland cloud.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Troll
    Troll is a predictable, dim-witted premise executed for the most part with surprising style.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pennies from Heaven
    Almost as if he were directing Pinter, Herbert Ross has actors speak a line, then wait two beats before delivering the next phrase. Technique smothers such ordinarily lively performers as Martin, Peters and Harper.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We're No Angels
    Pug-faced, slack-jawed and marble-mouthed, De Niro and Penn mug their semiarticulate proles with relish, but as religioso fish out of water their con game becomes a tiresome joke.
  50. Coffee & Kareem
    Shane Mack’s screenplay is not without laughs, but it is certainly lacking in prudence.
  51. Dosed
    This is a subject that deserves a rigorous documentary exploration, like Alison Klayman’s must-see psychotropic exposé “Take Your Pills.” But Dosed isn’t that kind of movie.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    52 Pick-Up
    52 Pick-Up is a thriller without any thrills. Although director John Frankenheimer stuffs as much action as he can into the screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel (previously filmed by Cannon in Israel in 1984 as The Ambassador), he can't hide the ridiculous plot and lifeless characters.
  53. The Lost Husband
    Rushing through an emotional journey with an uneven pace and clumsy dialogue, The Lost Husband aims for familiar sentiments around loyalty, family and sacrifice, but bypasses sincerity, the most crucial ingredient.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pirates
    Roman Polanski's Pirates is a decidedly underwhelming comedy adventure adding up to a major disappointment.
  55. To the Stars
    To the Stars needn’t have taken itself so seriously, but the fact that it ultimately does is exactly what turns it from a potentially charming, bittersweet fable to a pretentiously overblown yet undercooked Amerindie soap opera.
  56. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Whereas most of the movie takes place in a grubby, blue-tinged murk — a blend of hokey day-for-night lensing and virtual set extensions that’s badly suited for home viewing, but might look frightening in darkened theaters — day breaks just in time for a big, Michael Bay-style climax. The film has clipped along at a reasonably brisk pace until this point, only to downshift into a laughably protracted slow-motion finale, full of gratuitous lens flares and overwrought strings.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pride and Prejudice
    The film is something less than satisfactory entertainment, despite lavish settings, costumes, and an acting ensemble of unique talent.
    • Variety
  58. 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.
  59. Castle in the Ground
    The result is an earnest, sometimes skillful effort that nonetheless often feels slack and underwritten, as well as ultimately less-than-rewarding.
  60. Tammy's Always Dying
    Competently crafted, Tammy is too glib to be poignant and too defeatist to be amusing.
  61. Dreamland
    For all its salaciousness and scenery-chewing, it’s the dullness of Dreamland that provides further proof that dreams tend to be of fascination mainly — perhaps only — to the dreamer.
  62. Hamilton
    The film aims to be more intimate, but it frequently deprives audiences of the show’s ingenious spatial design. Still, this original cast is so charismatic — and Miranda’s ultra-dense, dizzyingly clever book and lyrics are so effective — that they maintain our attention even when the edit feels like one of those live sporting events, as a producer sits in the control booth choosing between cameras in the moment, rather than planning out the shoot in advance.
  63. An American Pickle
    Of course, the essence of the fish-out-of-water comedy is that it’s never been a realistic genre — it’s pure Hollywood fantasy. Yet An American Pickle, in its ethnically satirical and scattered way, lacks the integrity of its own ridiculousness. It’s pungent but flavorless: an unkosher dill.
  64. Infamous
    One can always make the argument that it’s not absolutely necessary to have sympathetic protagonists for a drama to enthrall or enlighten. But Infamous pushes way, way too far in the opposite direction: Dean and especially Arielle seem so irredeemably psychotic even before they begin to mount a body count, you actively wish for them to be caught or killed.
  65. The Crush
    In fact, with its basic shortage of gore and only brief glimpses of nudity, it’s hard to imagine what in the film prompted an R rating, unless it stands for “ridiculous.”
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Deathsport
    David Carradine is the quiet good guy and the best thing that can be said about his acting and his part is that he doesn’t say much. Claudia Jennings is his partner good guy, the one who gets to amuse the bad guy in the dark room. The best thing that can be said about her performance is that she gets to take off her clothes, twice.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Poison Ivy
    Suicide, hints of lesbianism, murder, staged accidents and every other applicable melodramatic contrivance is dragged in. Unfortunate thesps take it all very seriously, while technical aspects are emptily polished.
  68. The Kissing Booth 2
    It delivers a few refreshing details by giving the heroine more agency in her quest to find happiness — yet not quite enough to justify its interminable run time.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shoot the Moon
    A number of high-powered artists fail to coalesce their talents in Shoot the Moon a grim drama of marital collapse which proves disturbing and irritating by turns.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Capricorn One
    Capricorn One begins with a workable, if cynical cinematic premise: the first manned space flight to Mars was a hoax and the American public was fooled through Hollywood gimmickry into believing that the phony landing happened. But after establishing the concept, Peter Hyams' script asks another audience - the one in the theatre - to accept something far more illogical, the uncovering of the hoax by reporter Elliott Gould...In general, it is a script of conveniences.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Blob
    Neither the acting nor direction is particularly creditable.
  72. 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.
  73. I Am Vengeance: Retaliation
    Here and there, amid the tedious sound and fury, you can spot some genuinely witty touches. Lynch and Shapiro are initially portrayed as flirty happy warriors who clearly delight in working with each other, and it’s a pity the movie didn’t make more of the chemistry generated between Robinson-Galvin and Benjamin.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Horn Blows at Midnight
    This one is a lightweight comedy that never seems able to make up its mind whether to be fantasy or broad slapstick. There are some good laughs but generally The Horn Blows at Midnight is not solid.
  75. Olympia
    Olympia for all its fondness, is just too cursory a portrait of a complex woman: depth presented as a series of glinting surfaces.
  76. Paydirt
    Paydirt is a crime drama with darkly comical touches that possibly will be enjoyed best while you’re periodically distracted by other things — microwaving leftovers, feeding pets, washing face masks — and are unable to constantly focus on arrant contrivances and gaping plot holes.
  77. Made in Italy
    A cringingly syrupy tale of overdue bonding between an estranged father and his only offspring.
  78. Widow of Silence
    Widow of Silence is a classic example of festival filler, the sort of issue-driven art-house film that masks a plodding obviousness of intent beneath a thick varnish of righteousness and attractive visuals.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    On Dangerous Ground
    Ray manages to inject an occasional bit of excitement into the yarn, and had the psychotic touches been eliminated in the script, film could have qualified as okay, even if grim, melodrama.
  80. Random Acts of Violence
    The result is more flashy and shallow than ingenious, let alone terrifying. Yet it’s also a committed effort, one whose energy and style command some appreciation even when they overwhelm the shaky story gist.
  81. The Binge
    If the premise sounds more fun than the execution, that’s because The Binge doesn’t seem to recognize how or why people indulge in such substances to begin with, treating intoxication as the punchline rather than the setup for what should have been a more subversive satire.
  82. The Argument
    The Argument is amusing for a while, and some of the ensemble — Maggie Q and Coleman in particular — manage to access something both human and humorous in what might have seemed harsh in another actor’s hands. But silly as the filmmakers intend for this to be, there’s something unpleasant about the whole ordeal.
  83. Sno Babies
    It’s the casualness of the drug use, extreme yet just another part of life, that’s the 2020 element. Kristen wants to have her dope and eat it too. And that means turning herself into an invisible junkie.
  84. 2067
    The result is a movie that seems unaware just how generic the should-be-distinguishing details of its earnest eco-cautionary tale have turned out.
  85. Rifkin's Festival
    A scenic summer-wind romcom that was presumably a good time for everyone involved. Saying the same for the audience would be a stretch, but on the spectrum of late Woody Allen clunkers, it registers on the mild, instantly-evaporating end of the scale, unlikely to change the positions of any loyalists, detractors, ex-fans or distributors with regard to the controversy-tailed filmmaker.
  86. Another Round
    Another Round is the kind of movie that’s so into its cool concept that it doesn’t sweat the details. Yet the film’s sloppy broadness ends up fighting the Dogme style, which keeps telling us that these people are authentic.
  87. Mainstream
    A brittle, exasperated satire on social media celebrity, her sophomore film, like the tacky messiah it creates in Andrew Garfield’s YouTube sensation, soon becomes the very thing it sets out to expose: a glittery, jangly image machine that manufactures little of actual substance, except the conclusion that social media = bad.
  88. Penguin Bloom
    Shrewdly, Watts goes for something subtle and soft here — instead of clichéd garishness, her performance hinges on her doleful gaze and melancholic tinge, ultimately helping Penguin Bloom honor its real-life character’s journey with some respect.
  89. Shortcut
    With lackluster character development, a few ill-conceived situations in the second half and dialogue that sounds like it’s been run through Google Translate, there’s only a modest amount of entertainment value found therein.
  90. The Devil Has a Name
    What should have been a galvanizing David-versus-Goliath story pales in comparison with Amazon series “Goliath,” which is comparably colorful but far more coherent as it hits so many of the same beats.
  91. The Craft: Legacy
    The original “Craft” may be a mess, but it does have a legacy, and this ain’t it.
    • 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.
  93. A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting
    A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting simply pushes forward insistently and efficiently in a spirit of organized, slushie-colored fun, which isn’t quite the same as a sense of humor, much less a sense of urgency.
  94. Wander
    The film’s hyperbolic style and convoluted storytelling tend to exhaust patience rather than build intrigue, making for a muddle whose too-many twists and turns ultimately seem meaningless as well as implausible.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    Bring Me the Head of Alfred Garcia is turgid melodrama [from a story by Frank Kowalski and Sam Peckinpah] at its worst.
  96. Operation Christmas Drop
    An anodyne, friction-free romantic comedy that faintly distinguishes itself from its snow-sprayed genre brethren with enticingly balmy South Pacific scenery. If nothing else, it gives viewers something to daydream about while they keep half an eye on its story.
  97. 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.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Woman of Straw
    Director Basil Dearden seems, here, to have temporarily misplaced the vigorous insight that has earned him some top credits. Best that can be said of Straw [from the novel by Catherine Arley] is that it looks handsome. But the film gets bogged down by stilted dialog and by the situations.
  99. Earwig and the Witch
    Something’s clearly missing, and the most obvious answer is magic, both on-screen and in the project’s conception.
    • 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.
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