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. Luckiest Girl Alive
    Because of its unwieldy aspects, primarily those shoe-horned into the climax, its simplistic conclusion draws ire instead of the inspired elation these filmmakers crave.
  2. The Pale Blue Eye
    The Pale Blue Eye wants to get into the 19th-century darkness, but it’s suffocatingly somber and static. The film showcases its two investigators in an ostensibly enigmatic dance-of-the-seven-frontier-high-collars way, but for much of the movie we’re a step ahead of them.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    There Was a Crooked Man...
    It is the type of action drama in which neither the actors nor director appear to believe the script or characters.
  4. Master Gardener
    Master Gardener is all fingers and thumbs for much of its running time, kept sporadically in order only by the stern, trusty presence of Edgerton himself.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
    The overkill and the underdone do it in.
  6. The Enforcer
    Reaching for the grandiose, it never grasps anything beyond the generic.
  7. Kraven the Hunter
    The action in Kraven the Hunter is fine as far as it goes, but it rarely incites or bedazzles you.
  8. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    “Toothless” probably isn’t the first word Magic Mike fans want to associate with Channing Tatum’s aging exotic dancer series, but there’s no denying the female-targeting franchise has dulled its bite over the past decade.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mephisto Waltz
    Main fault is a tired script with more than a full quota of arch, laughable dialog, spouted with relish by performers struggling to keep their heads above water.
  10. Sharper
    A deep ensemble cast is game for this ambitiously overwrought material, but no amount of committed acting can overcome the movie’s manipulative artifice.
  11. Last Man Standing
    Bruce Willis’ one-note performance and the monotonous plotting doom this New Line venture, despite the director’s typically virile staging of the numerous gun battles.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Ref
    Ref takes a one-note premise and claustrophobic setting so far that its eventual message — communication and commitment are good things — arrives DOA after the third or fourth time Leary has carped his disgust at all things yuppiefied.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Rules of the Game
    As an experiment it’s interesting, but Jean Renoir, who directs, wrote the scenario and dialog, and takes a leading role, has made a common error: he attempts to crowd too many ideas into 80 minutes of film fare, resulting in confusion.
  14. Consecration
    In Consecration Jena Malone doesn’t just sport a casually impeccable British accent. She becomes British — her mood and manners, the way she rocks the sweaters and bangs and debonair politeness. She creates a compelling character, only to see the film’s director, Christopher Smith, swallow her up in all the ecclesiastical gothic malarkey.
  15. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    Paine and his crew do muster some decent action, set in places you’d hardly expect (like crowded Piccadilly Circus), but scenery only goes so far to disguise the utter preposterousness of Cross’ script.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Haunted Honeymoon
    Pic provokes a few chuckles along the way, but no guffaws.
  17. Pathaan
    Pathaan has a stop-and-go rhythm, and a strung-together structure, that grows wearying. (Two-and-a-half hours of frenetic derivative pulp is a lot of pulp.)
  18. The Mission
    There’s nothing terribly wrong with Anderson’s documentary — save that after 96 minutes, any viewer could well obliviously walk right past its principal subjects on the street, so fleeting an impression do they make in this surface-level portrait.
  19. Landscape with Invisible Hand
    Finley loses his exacting handle on the material, allowing the story’s more commonplace ideas to dictate its direction in ways both unsurprising and a little rough around the edges.
  20. Manodrome
    The characters feel thin, the secret society seems implausible and its goals too vague to capture the imagination. “Manodrome” taps into a deep unease at play in the wider world, but it presents only the shell of an idea, focusing on a not-terribly-interesting character with only the haziest of goals.
  21. A Family Affair
    Sadly, the film plays more like an artless quickie than a fully fleshed-out romance.
  22. Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert
    In many ways, Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert feels like the exact opposite of the project we ought to be attempting, which is to reclaim the work of women of genius who are in danger of falling into obscurity, without reducing their already threatened legacies to mere romantic biography
  23. Superpower
    Too often, the film’s well-meaning reportage is muddled with needless vanity sequences of the actor-director as an on-the-ground trailblazer, as the film fashions the impression that Penn himself — as much as any news agency — is a vital courier of the horrific events around him to Western audiences.
  24. Perpetrator
    Operating at a strange remove from modern reality, it seems to belong more to the teen experience of a couple of decades ago, the very era from which so many of its reference points hail.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Under Capricorn
    Under Capricorn is overlong and talky, with scant measure of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller tricks.
  26. Problemista
    For all his funny ideas, it doesn’t feel like Torres has a consistent world view, and the movie is poorly organized and unwieldy as a consequence.
  27. Quasi
    Given that this project is piloted by Broken Lizard, it’s clear that “Quasi” is meant to be a comedy, but there are enough long stretches where no jokes are even attempted that you’d be forgiven for thinking that laughs were only an incidental goal.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Safe in Hell
    A sad and unsatisfactory finish is obviously an attempt to lend credence to an impossible yarn. It doesn't help, for as long as the story is thoroughly unbelievable up to the finish, no ending could change that impression. [22 Dec 1931, p.15]
    • Variety
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Calamity Jane
    Giving such Wild West characters as Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok a workout in a tuned-in western doubtless had strong possibilities but Warners comes close to missing the stagecoach. Colorful settings and costumes add the entry some sparkle but the 'book' is lacking in originality and the players simply are uneasy.
  30. Bird Box Barcelona
    Though slick and more expansive in some ways, with bigger action sequences, it proves an overlong, uninvolving entry, in which any attempted fresh wrinkles to this fantasy universe offer scant viewer reward.
  31. Occupied City
    In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it.
  32. Asphalt City
    The flamboyantly heavy, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-it-ends drama of Black Flies isn’t much fun to sit through, but I think that’s ultimately because the movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake.
  33. Cobweb
    A film containing another film; a filmmaker referring to the trials of a filmmaker: it’s a movie of many layers, all of them garish and goofy, none of them great.
  34. The Good Half
    The Good Half reclaims attention every now and then with its occasional humor and grace notes around its side characters. . . But what we eventually get with The Good Half doesn’t even feel half good.
  35. First Time Female Director
    Though its loose, improvisatory feel is suited to the material, most of its humor feels like the first draft of a better film — as though the entire movie consists of what should have been deleted scenes.
  36. The Catholic School
    The Catholic School is about a landmark event that stunned a society, changed Italian rape law, and apparently blighted the lives of all who knew the killers, but it’s strangely uninterested in the two people for whom truly, after that summer, nothing would be the same.
  37. God Is a Bullet
    Nick Cassavetes’ slick adaptation certainly maintains the book’s mix of lurid incident and pontificating pretentiousness — albeit without the kind of intensity that might have made this far-fetched story credible, or the atmospheric style that might’ve pulled it off as a fevered nightmare à la David Lynch instead.
  38. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines
    “Who asked for this?” is the question such projects invoke, and Lindsey Anderson Beer’s film never comes up with a satisfying answer.
  39. The Exorcist: Believer
    The Exorcist: Believer, in its superficially competent and poshly mounted way, feels about as dangerous as a crucifix dipped in a bottle of designer water.
  40. AfrAId
    When crises start occurring at the halfway mark, they pile on too quickly to underwhelming effect, sacrificing credibility for excitement that never really materializes.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Winter Kills
    If there's a decent film lurking somewhere in Winter Kills, writer-director William Richert doesn't want anyone to see it in his Byzantine version of a presidential assassination conspiracy [from a book by Richard Condon].
  42. Next Goal Wins
    The idea is to have a good time, and Waititi knows how to give audiences that.
  43. The Magic Flute
    There's not much magic left in Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute. Relocating the 1791 opera to WWI and adopting a hard-edged approach that worked for "Hamlet," Branagh has wrought a "Flute" for high-end aficionados only. Lavishly mounted and well sung, but thin on charm and spontaneity, pic is likely to hit a bum note at general wickets.
  44. Lisa Frankenstein
    Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.
  45. Animal
    Contrastingly notable for their absence are emotional depth, narrative cogency or non-scatological humor — lacks that much ultra-violence and a surprising amount of sexual content can only distract from so much over such a long, bombastic, shallow course.
  46. Kung Fu Panda 4
    Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.
  47. IF
    Krasinski’s concept borrows generously from Pixar films like “Monsters Inc.,” but is so chaotic and half-considered that you don’t feel as inspired as you should be, making it hard to submit to the film’s alternate reality.
  48. Spaceman
    Spaceman, it’s my duty to report, is a glum and meandering science-fiction fairy tale of a movie.
  49. The Shrouds
    As The Shrouds goes on, it becomes more earnest and more nutty. I think Cronenberg thinks he’s making movies that audiences will experience as feature-length versions of his own dreams. Here’s the difference: When you’re in a dream, you believe what’s happening.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Actor
    The pat nature of its surprisingly sentimental conclusion only highlights the degree to which Johnson’s directorial interventions feel like attempts to gild the lily, registering as surface-level oddities deployed in a half-successful attempt to replace the psychological insight needed to truly explore identity in such an extreme scenario.
  51. Emmanuelle
    Saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honoring the film’s defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief; Audrey Diwan‘s inert, frequently frigid new film opts to do neither.
  52. Havoc
    The cheesy screenplay, shallow characters and wince-worthy acting (from all but A-listers Hardy, Whitaker and Olyphant) suggest that Evans might be better suited to specializing in the second unit or action sequences on a major franchise, rather than writing and directing a quasi-dramatic feature.
  53. Black Tea
    The film aims for woozy sensualism but falls way short on the ambient richness and X-factor chemistry required to sell such an essentially confected exercise.
  54. Abigail
    Abigail was directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who made those last two “Scream” films, and though I was impressed, to a degree, by what they brought off there, this movie feels like a step backward into overwrought generic schlock.
  55. Players
    Trish Sie’s middling and at times mawkish film not only makes us hate the game, but also its players.
  56. Mea Culpa
    Perry knows what he’s doing. He can’t possibly think any of this is believable for one second. But it could be fun to discuss its outlandishness over a few glasses of wine.
  57. 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.
  58. French Girl
    For every inventive or simply satisfying rom-com, there are dozens of clumsy, rote ones — French Girl falls among the latter.
  59. Borderlands
    Marketed to look like a cross between “Suicide Squad” and a Zack Snyder movie, director Eli Roth’s tamer-than-expected take on “Borderlands” doesn’t have half the attitude or style its cyberpunk ad campaign might suggest.
  60. Glitter & Doom
    Frenetic, repetitious and simplistic, it relies heavily on the stylized spectacle of the song numbers and lyrics to bolster the disappointing drama.
  61. Lubo
    The story of the stolen children was a secret way too long buried to be thus buried once more within a movie that is, simply, way too long.
  62. 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.
  63. Arcadian
    Unfortunately, Brewer and screenwriter Mike Nilon ignored an essential rule: Conceiving an original monster isn’t nearly as important as coming up with compelling human characters
  64. Doin' It
    Doin’ It wants to preach sex positivity, but feels stuck in the immature, shock-comedy mode of “American Pie” and early Farrelly brothers movies.
  65. Jacqueline (Argentine)
    Gets points for originality but quickly succumbs to terminal self-amusement.
  66. Run Ronnie Run
    Despite early-on guffaws, pic suffers from the same problem that has plagued nearly all of the similarly adapted “Saturday Night Live” films: It fails to sustain its initial burst of comic inspiration over the course of its feature-length running time.
  67. Trap
    Asking an audience to go with something this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.
  68. Prom Dates
    Unlike this teen raunch-com’s brilliantly conceived inspirations, its main friendship dynamic and ensuing shenanigans fail to resonate due to sloppy character construction and a cadre of cringe-worthy circumstances.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Tarnished Angels
    The Tarnished Angels is a stumbling entry. Characters are mostly colorless, given static reading in drawn-out situations, and story line is lacking in punch.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mountain Men
    It’s a limp feature debut for director Richard Lang.
  71. The Second Act
    Dupieux’s strategy seems to be flipping or repeating certain punchlines for fresh effect, which is fine for a while, until you realize that neither The Second Act nor those second-degree readings have much to say.
  72. Blues Brothers 2000
    Dan Aykroyd and director John Landis take a bumpy trip down memory lane in "Blues Brothers 2000," a sluggishly paced, fitfully funny followup to their 1980 musical comedy extravaganza.
  73. Marcello Mio
    Marcello Mio winds up saying very little about industry power structures, or even about the barbed nature of celebrity.
  74. The Fabulous Four
    Despite the caliber of its cast, “The Fabulous Four” never shakes the feeling that its on-screen talent is being severely misused.
  75. The Front Room
    With the exception of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” Oscar nominee Kathryn Hunter’s fiercely committed performance, much of this well-designed but boring film yields a shrug.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ordinary Magic
    While the actors work hard, script’s overall facile characterizations and predictable plot development detract from real tension.
  77. My Spy: The Eternal City
    The film is light enough without being funny enough, most of it staged, by director Peter Segal (“Tommy Boy,” “The Naked Gun 33 1/3”), in a kind of generic action overdrive.
  78. Here
    Director Robert Zemeckis clumsily replicates the fixed-camera conceit in what plays as an elaborate visual-effects experiment.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gone to Earth
    Primarily a simple yarn about simple people, it is without finesse, polish or sophistication. Dialog just about emerges from the monosyllabical state.
  80. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    That this highly derivative horror series bottoms out by over-investing in the Warrens — its most reliable creation, the only one that’s undeniably its own — is a sure sign that it is well past its utility.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Great Waldo Pepper
    The Great Waldo Pepper is an uneven and unsatisfying story of anachronistic, pitiable, but misplaced heroism.
  82. Wolf Man
    Both intellectually and emotionally, there’s something promising afoot, and yet, Whannell doesn’t go far enough.
  83. The Radleys
    The Radleys is a vampire horror comedy that can’t quite figure out its tone, so more often than not, it ends up in a lukewarm middle ground.
  84. Brothers
    While the entire ensemble comes across fully committed to roles that are well beneath them, it’s not at all clear what the point was in presenting the Moke and Jady characters as twins.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Egg and I
    Shortcoming is in an evenness of treatment – partially in the writing but more importantly in Erskine’s direction – that fails to suck the drama out of the situations presented in the book.
  86. Armor
    Justin Routt’s Mississippi-shot feature is competently made. But neither its staging nor its performances transcend the limitations of Adrian Speckert and Cory Todd Hughes’ script, leaving mediocre material unredeemed by any special thrills, style, or character detailing.
  87. The Electric State
    The filmmakers have diluted the source material, showing a clear lack of interest in making their creation just as haunting, searing and satisfying as the original product.
  88. Say a Little Prayer
    More effective as an aspirational exercise than as a piece of inspired cinema, Say a Little Prayer fulfills the promise of showing Latinos under a different socioeconomic light from what has existed in mainstream media in the past, but not much else.
  89. G20
    Action does not come naturally to the “Under the Same Moon” director, though the script poses an even bigger problem in G20, a movie whose short title manages to reflect both its high concept and shockingly low intelligence level.
  90. Opus
    With a confused tone stuck between satire and horror (that also informs Malkovich’s eccentric, out-of-place performance), and various half-baked ideas about cultural icons and toxic fandom, “Opus” mostly feels like a missed genre opportunity.
  91. Green and Gold
    To put it bluntly, Nelson gives this clichéd indie a lot more than it ever gives him.
  92. Last Days
    Even Yang, whose commitment is admirable, struggles to convey what’s inside John’s head — which, of course, is the whole point of this project.
  93. The Thing with Feathers
    The whole thing is oppressive and, in an odd way, not very interesting.
  94. Tyler Perry's Duplicity
    It’s a strange-looking, odd-feeling film that gestures toward mystery and larger conspiracy, but it seldom pulls on these threads. Instead, it ends up an anodyne political drama that says little of note.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
    Perhaps the film is a triumph of controlled and deliberate mediocrity, but it still closer resembles a clumsy carbon of a bad satire on the original.
  96. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    Reprising high-school slasher cliches dating back at least to 1980’s “Prom Night,” minus any particular invention or irony, this new entry is a slick-enough but disappointingly unimaginative effort that can’t even be bothered to reference the mythology established in the prior films.
  97. Queen of the Ring
    Queen of the Ring is more of a montage of the highlights of Burke’s illustrious life, rather than an entertaining film.
  98. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    The film’s tonal inconsistencies hurt its impossibly talented co-leads considerably.
  99. Clika
    Its rags-to-riches-to-near-ruin storytelling is simplistic, the celluloid craftsmanship B-grade, the acting nothing to write home about. Still, there’s a sense of a fertile cultural moment being captured for posterity, however routinely.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    This Ain't No Heartland
    Given Horvath's multi-tasking, pic is unsurprisingly rough. Nonetheless, for a professional photographer, his DV lensing is disappointing.
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