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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  1. Shawn Mendes: In Wonder
    Singer does find a slight bit of drama to seize on at about the two-thirds point of the film, which, for understandable purposes of having anything at all happen in the movie, he trumps up to the point it becomes nearly comical.
  2. Godmothered
    The movie does serve up a rather satisfying ending, suggesting the studio’s latest politically correct reinterpretation of “true love.” The rest looks cheap and lacks much of a personality.
  3. A Good Man in Africa
    It stakes out Our Man in Havana territory in its ironic tone, but it's not nearly as humorous or as successful in delivering up a satisfying soupcon of caustic wit. Commercial prospects are tepid for what's essentially a shaggy dog story.
  4. The Little Things
    This sort of clinical detective movie hinges on creating a feeling of revelation, a kind of horror-saturated awe. The Little Things is just a warmed-over set of serial-killer-thriller clichés, like crime-scene photos we’ve seen before. And some of it doesn’t track all that well.
  5. For Love or Money
    Michael J. Fox has charm to burn in his latest screen outing "For Love or Money." A contemporary spin on bygone romantic comedies, the tale of an ambitious young man and the seemingly elusive woman in his life has a definite emotional pull. It falls short on story, however, and no amount of good humor can deter the thin tale from evaporating before the final clinch.
  6. The Marksman
    The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jade
    A muddled mix of sex, political corruption and murder, Jade is a jigsaw puzzle that never puts all the pieces together.
  8. The Ultimate Playlist of Noise
    In the last 20 minutes, Keean Johnson, who mostly acts cool and on top of things, drops his guard, letting in an honest ripple of pain and fear. He hits a true note, and the fact that Marcus can’t hear it almost makes up for the doom-laden whimsy of the rest of the movie.
  9. Striking Distance
    Columbia apparently dragged the river to come up with the script for this Bruce Willis vehicle -- an OK action movie until it sinks under the weight of implausible plotting and over-the-top direction.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sheena: Queen of the Jungle
    There are plenty of laughs to be had in Sheena, but it's quite impossible to tell how many of them were intentional. Attempt to install this 1930s jungle heroine in the pantheon of the contempo adventure icons fails to find a consistent tone.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Airborne
    Kids might enjoy this teenage fish-out-of-the-surf comedy , but anyone approaching the high school age of the movie's characters will spot the obvious formula within 15 minutes of opening credits.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Switch
    Switch is a faint-hearted sex comedy that doesn't have the courage of its initially provocative convictions. Undemanding audiences will get a few laughs from the notion of a man parading around in Ellen Barkin's body.
  13. Bad Tales
    Drowning in style but shallow in substance.
  14. Silk Road
    A fervently topical, at times intriguing, but ultimately rather sketchy drama about the online black market.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    True Colors
    True Colors represents a cloyingly schematic attempt to portray the political and moral bankruptcy of the 1980s in a neat little package. Pic condemns but doesn't begin to analyze the corrupted values of the Reagan years, leaving one feeling soiled but unenlightened.
  16. Bitter Moon
    Four years after Frantic, Roman Polanski approaches rock bottom with Bitter Moon, a phony slice of huis clos drama between two couples aboard a Euro ocean liner. Strong playing by topliner Peter Coyote can't compensate for a script that's all over the map and a tone that veers from outre comedy to erotic game-playing.
  17. Getting Even with Dad
    Neither Macaulay Culkin nor Ted Danson has improved his luck in selecting projects with this schizophrenic comedy, which can't decide if it wants to be broadly farcical or fuzzily heartwarming. While it fares better on the latter front, pic doesn't succeed on either level and should test the patience even among Culkin's peer group.
  18. Freaked
    Loud and flamboyant, pic takes a few shots at societal sacred cows but more often misses the target. The effort comes off much in the prankish manner of a student film. “Freaked” thumbs its nose at the status quo, but few will find themselves on the filmmakers’ side when the last laughs are counted.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Texasville
    Peter Bogdanovich's sequel to The Last Picture Show is long on folksy humor and short on plot. In adapting Larry McMurtry's 1987 follow-up novel (predecessor was penned in 1965, filmed in 1971), Bogdanovich uses an impending county centennial celebration as the weak spine for this slice of small-town Texas life.
  20. Yes Day
    Yes Day strings together a series of just-say-yes set pieces that don’t play out the central premise so much as they turn it into an extended kiddie-action-movie burlesque.
  21. Life in a Day 2020
    Life in a Day 2020 is quick to fall back on tidy montage methods — grouped shots of babies being born, skydivers jumping from planes, believers grouped in prayer, mourners in cemeteries — that rather strenuously force a sense of global communion, rather than seeking and stressing life’s more diverse and disorienting juxtapositions.
  22. Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words
    It’s curiously difficult to stay engaged with Mock’s film that merely puts forth a paint-by-numbers assembly of the wealth of material it has at its disposal.
  23. Dennis the Menace
    Dennis the Menace isn't really appropriate for anyone over the age of 12. Very young children may find the numskull, by-the-numbers gags here amusing, but teens will consider this kids' stuff and adults will be pained.
  24. The Rookies
    Lame humor and incoherent plotting are among the shortcomings of “The Rookies,” an initially engaging but increasingly tedious Chinese action-comedy-thriller that not even kick-ass movie queen Milla Jovovich can breathe much life into.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Desperate Hours
    Desperate Hours is a coldly mechanical and uninvolving remake of the 1955 Bogart pic The Desperate Hours, with Mickey Rourke as the hood terrorizing a suburban family.
  26. Natural Light
    Audiences amenable to cold, meticulous shots where people are accorded the same attributes as a landscape will find elements to admire, and certainly on a cerebral level there’s much to appreciate, yet Natural Light sheds no warmth and offers no insight into the horrors of the human condition during wartime.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Grass Is Greener
    The Hugh and Margaret Wilson screenplay, adapted from their London stage hit, slowly evolves into a talky and generally tedious romantic exercise, dropping the semi-satirical stance that brightens up the early going.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fat Man and Little Boy
    Newman has no trouble bringing the tough-talking ‘can do’ general to life. The trouble is the scriptwriters have no interest in exploring the man behind the mission. This tends to tilt the dramatic balance toward Oppenheimer. The film falls short here, too, partially because of Schultz’ lackluster performance, but primarily because the script fails to give a clue to what made this man tick.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gladiator
    Marshall, cast as the new kid in school, is sullen and far too low key through much of the picture. Director Rowdy He§rrington, who poured on the trash in Road House, aims for a grittier feel this time, with dull results.
  30. He's All That
    While it’s possible to make the formulaic and familiar resound fantastically, that concept has evaded these filmmakers here. Neither bland regurgitation nor innovative retelling, the remake falls somewhere in between, suffering greatly by not establishing a more distinctive identity.
  31. Jakob's Wife
    Despite Crampton and Fessenden’s game playing, and a few nicely icky practical effects, “Jakob’s Wife” feels strangely anemic, which, as we all know is more fatal to the already iron-deficient movie vampire than garlic, holy water and sunshine combined.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dad
    There’s certainly much that’s funny, warm and endearing about Dad, which, based on William Wharton’s novel, deals with the familiar theme of a grown child resolving his sense of duty toward an ageing parent. Unfortunately, prolonged tilling of that emotional terrain and seemingly endless verbalization of feelings diminish most of what’s good about the film.
  33. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    So is it, you know, fun? At times it is; at others it’s exhausting. Let’s call the whole thing fun-xhausting.
  34. Spirit Untamed
    Very little of Spirit Untamed lives up to what the studio is selling.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stay Tuned
    Hyams’ lensing and Philip Harrison’s production design are slick, and Peter E. Berger’s editing works hard to simulate the zapping effect of cable remote control, but technical cleverness can’t overcome the deadly lack of intellectual invention on display in this mechanical exercise.
  36. Flashback
    The movie’s pileup of dislocating side-swipes from any tangible here/now is intriguing and well-crafted to a degree many genre fans will find exciting. But others will be justified in wondering if all this stylish, increasingly frenetic sleight-of-hand obscures scant substance.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fire Birds
    Originally titled Wings of the Apache for the Apache assault helicopters prominently featured, Fire Birds resembles a morale booster project leftover from The Reagan era.
  38. Shotgun Wedding
    When it sticks to the trivial stuff, Shotgun Wedding is at least capably mediocre, coasting on its coastal scenery — actually the Dominican Republic, and brightly shot by David Lynch collaborator Peter Deming, not that you’d ever guess — and Lopez’s reliably sparky screen presence. It’s intermittently stolen, however, by everyone’s favorite Jennifer of the moment, Coolidge, as the gaffe-prone mother of the groom.
  39. Carnaval
    Director Leandro Neri’s lighthearted romantic comedy delivers hijinks and a few sweet sentiments about having the courage to embrace destiny. Nevertheless, its broad comedy and thoughtful themes aren’t completely cogent, due to a lack of properly motivated character developments and questionable scenarios.
  40. Awake
    Awake is bonkers in a fun way from time to time . . . but gives the distinct impression that the most interesting crises are happening off screen.
  41. The Last Mercenary
    You could call the film a slightly absurd corruption thriller, an action movie with not enough action, or a by-the-numbers father-son bonding movie. Yet here’s what’s weird about it. The Last Mercenary thinks it’s a comedy, but not because anything in it is actually funny.
  42. The Kissing Booth 3
    There’s plenty of fan service (including a whole new list for Elle and Lee to exhaust), but also a late-arriving sense of identity that gives this junk-food sequel just enough nutritional value to help its young audiences reconsider how to determine their own post-high school priorities.
  43. Three Floors
    Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature.
  44. Dancing Queens
    There’s an interesting film to be made about women cracking the drag scene, shuffling through complex layers of gender identity and identification, but this innocuous feel-good trifle hasn’t exactly found it.
  45. Sugar Hill
    A self-indulgent drama about a Harlem drug kingpin trying to go straight, Sugar Hill plays like a dreary variation on New Jack City.
  46. Dating & New York
    While following a typical rom-com pattern isn’t inherently unpleasant, the movie’s wink-wink insinuations that it’s going to take things in a novel direction, followed by its embrace of the very clichés it’s poked fun at, makes it feel disingenuous and stale.
  47. Great White
    Though boasting a few adequate action sequences, and foregoing the more gonzo schlockiness of peer projects like The Meg and Shark Night, the film’s human characters make for drab company, leaving one with little to do but admire the scenery, waiting for dinnertime.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Stepmother Is an Alien
    My Stepmother Is an Alien is a failed attempt to mix many of the film genres associated with the 'alien' idea into a sprightly romp.
  49. Prime Time
    In “Corpus Christi,” Bielenia was electric, but then he had Mateusz Pacewicz’s great script to work with. Here, he retains some charisma in a hard-working performance, but it’s not enough to singlehandedly provide this screenplay with meaning.
  50. Jane by Charlotte
    Gainsbourg doesn’t cram the film with all that much material, and spares her mom the embarrassment of showing her personal clutter. She essentially goes easy on Birkin, asking intimate questions but settling for shallow answers.
  51. The Last Matinee
    The Last Matinee is less effective as a straight horror film than it is as a self-conscious genre homage, providing excitement more of the eye-candy design than the visceral ilk. Still, it’s adequately diverting fare for those who’ll grok its somewhat insular appeal.
  52. America Latina
    America Latina may frequently look and sound terrific, but a Ferrari spinning its wheels is spinning its wheels just the same.
  53. Mosquito State
    Mosquito State gradually allows its mise-en-scène to swamp its human narrative, not that the latter offers us much to care about anyway. As far as we’re concerned, the mosquitoes can have it all.
  54. The Voyeurs
    Writer-director Michael Mohan’s film plays like rehashed leftovers cooked up for young viewers who’ve never seen any of its superior inspirations.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Voyage of the Damned
    Fact that the story is based on an actual, and shocking, incident makes all the more disappointing its transfer to the screen. The action zigs and zags between the cluttered set of characters.
  56. The Starling
    Suffice it to say that The Starling’s emotional arcs are as narratively complete as they are psychologically dashed-off.
  57. Love Hard
    With its prevailing sentiments on dating in the digital age feeling more than a decade old, and themes centered on honesty and shallowness ringing hollow, this feature is fairly forgettable.
  58. The Last Bus
    For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes
  59. Harold and the Purple Crayon
    The film ends with an overly spelled-out plea for the value of “imagination,” but about the only thing the filmmakers are drawing with their purple crayon is algorithms.
  60. The Desperate Hour
    Watts’ commitment holds the movie together. She acts as if that phone were her flesh-and-blood partner. But it’s not. It’s a device impersonating something human. And so is Lakewood.
  61. South of Heaven
    The movie gives Jason Sudeikis a chance to act without the safety net of comedy, and he proves that he’s got the right stuff. But next time he needs to do it in a movie that offers the safety net of believability.
  62. Dashcam
    The result is at once fun and fatiguing. Scary it’s not, and many viewers will find their patience tested by the character they most hope will be dealt a quick demise being the one we’re principally stuck with.
  63. Bingo Hell
    It works hard stylistically to provide a good time. But that would have been a better bet had at least as much effort been put into a screenplay whose ideas, both comic and macabre, remain undernourished.
  64. Heart of Champions
    As inspirational college sports movies go, Heart of the Champions doesn’t go, or row, nearly far enough off the beaten path. It’s every bit as boilerplate as its generic title might indicate.
  65. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
    Far from the definitive version of the tale, this lavish but overwrought melodrama is in many ways less compelling than even a recent made-for-cable movie and a 1973 miniseries starring Michael Sarrazin that was less faithful to the source material.
  66. Sisters
    [A] generations-spanning yet emotionally and visually flat familial movie.
  67. 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.
  68. WarHunt
    A wink here or a smirk there, and the whole kit-and-caboodle could have collapsed into laughable nonsense way before “Warhunt” finally does run off the rails. You still might chuckle from time to time, but not as often as any plot synopsis might lead you to expect.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hero
    Third-act heroics help but can't rescue filmmaker Stephen Frears' most concerted mainstream push. Muddled effort cleverly skewering media and societal fascination with heroes doesn't create compelling characters for its big-name leads.
  70. Against the Ice
    To reduce a titanic struggle for survival in one of the most inhospitable climes on earth to such by-the-numbers drama is in many ways akin to standing on a jagged frozen peak, gazing across blizzard-assailed permafrost plains to crumbling white cliffs and ice shelfs beyond and thinking “Snow.”
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Big Bad Mama
    Big Bad Mama is mostly rehashed Bonnie and Clyde, with a bit more blood and Angie Dickinson taking off her clothes for sex scenes with the crooks in her life.
  72. The Sky Is Everywhere
    The Sky Is Everywhere finds director Josephine Decker indulging in affectation overload in an effort to imbue her adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s young-adult novel with uplifting magic. Whereas individual moments might work on their own, however, the “Madeline’s Madeline” auteur’s latest never provides its romantic tale with room to breathe, so intent is it about operating with maximum whimsicality.
  73. A Quiet Place: Day One
    “Day One” ought to have been the mind-blowing origin story, and instead it’s a Hallmark movie, where everyone seems to have nine lives — not just that darn cat.
  74. Cheaper by the Dozen
    This new adaptation’s noteworthy commentary on poignant, timely issues is often eclipsed by predictability, superficial character development and inconsistent pacing.
  75. Firestarter
    The whole thing plays like “Logan” done in the worst humdrum rhythmless made-for-streaming generic style, the lighting flat, the soundtrack heavy with John Carpenter’s old-school one-man-at-the-synthesizer horror music, because if you took that sound of processed dread away you wouldn’t have much else.
  76. The Pact
    This well-dressed midcentury period piece keeps teasing a darker, more perverse take on a familiar story of cross-generational creative mentorship. Yet despite a performance of unnerving severity by Birthe Neumann as the rancorous Blixen, the film remains too polite and light on incident to deliver on that promise.
  77. House Party
    The film taps into the glitz ethos of the age of social-media envy without necessarily scrutinizing what it all means. Kid ‘n Play had put on a party to remember, but the new movie, much like Kevin and Damon themselves, just goes with the flow of the scam.
  78. The Burning Sea
    The movie has every right to be fiction, but the heart of its drama lies in its patina of plausibility.
  79. Gold
    As a lone drifter guarding a precious quarry in deadly desert conditions in a faintly futuristic nowhereland, [Efron's] good, as anyone’s who been paying attention should expect. Beyond that, it’s a somewhat arid exercise.
  80. Meg 2: The Trench
    The Meg 2 is numbingly formulaic, promiscuously derivative and, for a few stretches (like the over-the-top third act), diverting in its very shamelessness. It is, in other words, all an August movie really needs to be. But there’s a way that the line between August movies and movies, period, is growing thinner every day.
  81. Gone in the Night
    What at first looks like a standard missing-person suspense tale turns out to have a more complicated agenda — but it is so haphazardly advanced and clumsily articulated, the film itself seems to be fumbling around for a cohering structure or mood.
  82. The Cellar
    Writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s latest lacks the thick atmospherics that might have punched across a sketchy screenplay, which falls short in expanding the premise of his 2004 short “The Ten Steps.”
  83. Till
    It would take a tough constitution not to be moved by Till, although that doesn’t necessarily make it great drama.
  84. Corner Office
    Like head-in-the-clouds Orson, Back’s debut feature imagines more for itself than others can see, though only the latter has earned a shot at another job.
  85. Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between
    Even though this Netflix original doesn’t condescend to its targeted teen audience, it fails to surmount basic issues dealing with narrative credulity and the outcome’s predictability.
  86. Persuasion
    Cracknell approaches the project with confidence and a clear (if clearly derivative) vision. Her compositions are striking and swooningly romantic at times, though she has a curious idea of Anne Elliot.
  87. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    So why is “Bardo,” for all its skill, reach-for-the-stars aspiration, and majestic sweep, such a windy, confounding, and — okay, I’ll just say it — monotonous experience? The movie is full of good things, but it’s three hours long and mostly it’s full of itself.
  88. The Invitation
    The predictability of events during the film’s first hour of gothic-thriller setup is all the more annoying because of the plodding pace. Evie finally stands up for herself during some modestly clever third-act turnabouts, but, really, that’s not quite enough to regenerate a rooting interest in the character.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Basically a student effort (Cronenberg was 26), pic tests the viewer’s patience and endurance even with its hour’s running time due to its emphatically dry, scientific narration and deliberate emotional distancing.
  90. Rodeo
    Rodeo is a movie that’s all surface, all present tense, all too-cool-to-be-anything-but-French-vérité gestures.
  91. Brother and Sister
    Alice and Louis are such artificial, wanly self-absorbed characters, forever speaking in finely turned, therapy-honed aphorisms that never sound anything other than screen-written, that it’s hard even to invest in their conflict at an abstract level.
  92. Steel
    Writer-director Kenneth Johnson provides a tinny story and a leaden pace for his tarnished titan. There’s a coziness and simplicity to the production that would be better served on TV. Cinema-size, it comes off as corny, antiquated and slightly cheesy.
  93. Disenchanted
    Obvious in its comedy, at once overblown and undernourished in its fantasy, Disenchanted, at times, is like a kiddified “Don’t Worry Darling” crossed with “Cinderella Strikes Back.” At others, it’s a light show in search of a movie. The visual effects are all swirling sparkles and sprouting vines, but the real problem is that the film has a pandering impersonality, along with the busy skewed logic of a metaverse.
  94. Pinocchio
    Roping a game Tom Hanks into the fold as the kindly woodworker Geppetto, and employing countless digital artisans to recreate the iconic character design of the protagonist to eerily lifeless effect, “Pinocchio” is a lavish yet hollow retread that will surely give the original a boost when it arrives on Disney+ this weekend.
  95. Alone Together
    The film’s low-key charms, such as they are, aren’t restrained by adherence to formula so much as its myopic worldview.
  96. Glorious
    Even at 80 minutes, Glorious feels four times too long for what it is.
  97. Daylight
    Daylight is a lower-echelon disaster thriller, in which the best character is knocked off early on and the leading man runs out of ideas with a third of the picture still to go. Noisy, technically proficient actioner about a group of people trapped in the Holland Tunnel after an explosion gets off a few decent blasts, but is just too limited in scope, imagination and excitement to burst out as a major B.O. winner domestically.
  98. Mulholland Falls
    Mulholland Falls is a "Chinatown" wannabe that comes up short in every department. Although loaded with talent on both sides of the camera, this sex-and-corruption-drenched mystery meller about a big official cover-up in postwar L.A. simply feels underachieved, as it lacks the heady atmosphere, tasty intrigue and dramatic punch the alluring premise would seem to promise.
  99. End of the Road
    Director and cast do their best — well, maybe not their best, but their competent professional duty — with a formulaic, contrived screenplay. Still, the results do no one much credit, landing closer to overripe cheese than taut suspense, or even guilty-pleasure terrain.
  100. Terrifier 2
    Terrifier 2 is essentially a series of grotesque homicidal set pieces stitched together into a threadbare narrative of midnight funhouse clichés.
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