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. Abraham's Boys: A Dracula Story
    As the celluloid universe spun from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” continues to accrue remakes, spin-offs, addendums and miscellany, “Boys” does provide one potentially compelling footnote. But its execution feels like a missed opportunity.
  2. Henry Johnson
    Watching it, you feel the depth of Mamet’s talent. It’s never left him. But you also feel the contempt he now has for the verities of entertainment. He wants to take us out of our comfort zone. The trouble is that he’s created his own rarefied discomfort zone of self-indulgence posing as importance.
  3. The King of Kings
    The King of Kings is a serviceable if uninspired take on a story told countless times in just as varied formats.
  4. Die My Love
    By the time Die My Love reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie.
  5. Everything's Going to Be Great
    Everything’s Going to Be Great is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it.
  6. Little Buddha
    Little Buddha is a visually stunning but dramatically underwhelming attempt to forge a bridge between the ancient Eastern religion and modern Western life. Bernardo Bertolucci's second foray into remote Asian territory is considerably less successful than his first, "The Last Emperor," as the double narrative is awkwardly structured and never comes into sharp focus.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blackmail
    Blackmail is most draggy. It has no speed or pace and very little suspense.
  8. Anemone
    As you watch the film, though, it’s amazing how things that should mean a lot could come to so little, including the return of Daniel Day-Lewis.
  9. Alpha
    It’s painful to watch such talents pour so much into roles that are fairly common, if not clichéd by American indie standards.
  10. Fuori
    Martone’s repetitive, tediously non-linear film attempts something more impressionistic and expansive, with emotionally muted and sometimes strangely exploitative results.
  11. Eleanor the Great
    Johansson, however, while she does a perfectly efficient job of directing, doesn’t hone the tone of her scenes. She keeps the whole thing earnest and rather neutral in a plot-driven way, with Squibb as her wild card.
  12. The Man in My Basement
    The result is a tale made up of numerous endpoints and thematic conclusions, whose dots don’t feel meaningfully connected, and whose situational oddities rarely yield excitement or intrigue.
  13. My Oxford Year
    What should be a tender, feminist-minded story centered on a young woman rediscovering her dormant childhood dreamer turns into a middling melodrama about being with a cute guy in desperate need of her rescue.
  14. North
    Ultimately, its message is the familiar "there's no place like home." But rather than creating a modern "Wizard of Oz," this noble misfire just barely manages to pull back the curtain and reveal the man manipulating the image.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ghosts of Mississippi
    Tepid and two-dimensional in the manner of many telepics, this “Ghost” bodes to haunt the vid shelves after a short theatrical life.
  16. Guns & Moses
    Guns & Moses can be accused of implausibility, tonal missteps and sporadic heavy-handedness — but you can’t say it lacks chutzpah.
  17. Anaconda
    The movie could have really used some of that anarchic, industry-skewering “Tropic Thunder” energy. The only risk taken here was asking Sony — plus any surviving members of the original cast — to poke fun at themselves, which only goes so far when the film has no fangs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Three on a Match
    It amounts to a picture which has tried but failed to photographically decipher four characters. [01 Nov 1932, p.12]
    • Variety
  19. 100 Nights of Hero
    It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but a drag.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Isle of the Dead
    Isle of the Dead is a slow conversation piece about plagues and vampires on an eerie Greek island. It's better handled and directed than most though thriller fans will still find its lack of action a drag. Even Boris Karloff fans will note the tired way he rambles through it all.
  21. Violent Ends
    Writer-director John-Michael Powell maintains a likably low-key interest in the local flavor of his home state, but it’s small potatoes in terms of personality. His self-serious approach proves a terminal match for his crime yarn’s familiar, simplistic plotting.
  22. Scream 7
    Simply put, Scream 7 isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Grey
    Ritchie goes relatively easy on the joy-of-killing stuff, at least until the climax, and there’s an engaging couple of minutes en route thanks to the simplest, cleanest action filmmaking the film has to offer: a chase involving motorcycles, police cars and some proficient editing.
  24. Merv
    Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to its charming premise, spending most of its runtime chasing its own tail with pointless jokes and dog-related puns that are only mildly amusing, along with an undercooked love story that doesn’t know how to steal our hearts.
  25. They Will Kill You
    The twists of its premise soon end up souring it conceptually, resulting in rapidly-diminishing returns, with derivative formal flourishes that largely recall other, better films. It is, by the time its credits roll, completely exhausting.
  26. In the Blink of an Eye
    Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.
  27. Remarkably Bright Creatures
    Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.
  28. Pretty Lethal
    Pretty Lethal is a wonderfully original idea, but its execution falls flat.
  29. You, Me & Tuscany
    You, Me & Tuscany passes the time painlessly enough, but it’s never quite the escape it wants to be: It’s packaged so familiarly and so cautiously, we hardly believe its celebration of free, restlessly wandering impulse.
  30. Parallel Tales
    The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel in such a sodden way. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.
  31. Happy Tears
    A contradictory creature, both insightful and dumb, sometimes innovative and sometimes just plain inept. Dreamy, funny but also weirdly disjointed, it’s as if the very film itself were stoned, just like its two pot-smoking sister protags.
  32. The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
    Feels larger in scope yet sorely lacking in originality.
  33. Pandorum
    Special effects are none too convincing, while sound effects are of the cheaply jolting variety favored by producer Paul W.S. Anderson in his films as director ("Resident Evil," "Event Horizon"). Other tech credits are, like the pic as a whole, lazily derivative.
  34. Transylmania
    Fangs aside, it sticks with the same basic menu of T&A and lowbrow humor.
  35. Antichrist
    Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.
  36. Amelia
    What rankles most about Amelia is the timidity and lack of imagination with which Nair approaches one of America's most exceptional and intriguing celebrity life stories.
  37. Away We Go
    Emerges as an oddly sour, unappealing road-trip scenario.
  38. Miss March
    Miss March is overall a raggedy, unfocused affair that wastes both directors' acting talent and feels like too much work between the laughs.
  39. Death at a Funeral
    This slavishly faithful update... fails to tap into anything culturally specific or uniquely funny in its Pasadena setting or its theoretically looser, livelier black cast. And because the characters are so flat, we couldn't care less about the blows to their sense of propriety.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Solitude
    Despite good thesping, particularly from Belton, it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to spend time with this trio.
  41. Alone in the Dark
    Fans of the source material probably won't be switching platforms to catch this bizarre Lions Gate pickup, and non-fans definitely won't.
  42. Son of the Mask
    The net result is a truly numbing experience.
  43. Bigger Than the Sky
    Unconvincing poser.
  44. Be Cool
    A staggeringly flat sequel that trades filmdom for the music bizbiz and could hardly be less cool.
  45. King's Ransom
    An innocuous abduction of viewers' time, if nothing else, King's Ransom is an appealingly cast but terminally bland farce.
  46. Dead & Breakfast
    Offers plenty of splat with its slapstick. But this strenuous zombie yukfest is no more sophisticated than its nail-on-head title -- making it a joke no smarter than the movies it riffs on.
  47. Death of a Dynasty
    The execution is so amateurish and the script so witless the filmmakers appear to be having a far better time than the audience.
  48. Monster-in-Law
    Shrill, undermotivated, feature-length catfight.
  49. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    Rude, crude and, uh, cosmopolitan, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo waves the flag for R-rated politically incorrect studio comedy but doesn't top the laugh ratio of the first Deuce misadventure.
  50. The Chumscrubber
    An insufferable, self-conscious cult movie, The Chumscrubber smugly heaps on half-baked ideas about media violence, the homogeneity of suburbia and the disintegration of the American family.
  51. Chaos
    Chaos may not quite be "the most brutal, horrifying film ever made," as its garish ads promote. But it does contain moments as thoroughly sickening as any in Herschell Gordon Lewis' or Lucio Fulvi's bloody exploiters.
  52. Now & Forever
    A preposterously convoluted and exasperatingly sappy saga.
  53. Dirty Deeds
    A dispiritingly lazy high school comedy.
  54. Matando Cabos
    A perfect example of the sad trend in contempo Latin American filmmaking to imitate old Tarantino with only a fraction of the stylistic cojones, frantic comedy dealing with two pairs of confused guys and one pair of kidnap victims is an empty exercise that loses its juice before first reel's end.
  55. Underclassman
    So far-fetched as to make "Kindergarten Cop" look comparatively austere.
  56. Dear Wendy
    Well made but unlikable and dramatically absurd picture.
  57. Little Manhattan
    Resting almost entirely on the shoulders of its young leads, both they and the pic lack the sparkle to sustain what seeks to be a whimsical premise but, except for a few moments, proves ponderous instead.
  58. I Love Your Work
    Wallow in Hollywood hipster self-absorption.
  59. Niagara Motel
    A blue chip cast is wasted in the painfully unfunny ensemble comedy Niagara Motel.
  60. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    Japanese horror doesn't get more tedious.
  61. Big Momma's House 2
    So episodic and flat it should be a letdown even to those amused by the original.
  62. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    Though it's decidedly for perverse palates, some kind of cult audience seems assured for this one-note onslaught, which exercises a bizarre fascination despite its excesses.
  63. The King
    The story of a veritable devil who comes to test and destroy a family of faith, The King is a noxious film morally and an aggravating one dramatically.
  64. Land of the Blind
    One of the more spectacular misfires of recent years, Land of the Blind's lack of originality is only slightly exceeded by its failure to work as political satire.
  65. Little Man
    There are probably some moviegoers who can laugh at the sight of a groin-punching, breast-grabbing baby, possibly even find it cute. Everyone else should steer clear of Little Man, which welds Marlon Wayans' head to a diminutive body double, offering up the creepiest bigscreen dwarf since the last David Lynch movie.
  66. Pulse
    A dumbed-down remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's disturbingly abstract Japanese horror film.
  67. Zoom
    This tepid comic-bookish comedy should zip through its theatrical run faster than a speeding bullet. It likely won't perform much more superheroically in ancillary venues.
  68. The L.A. Riot Spectacular
    A comedy that's vulgar, disturbing, distasteful and violent, but so is injustice and civil unrest.
  69. The Quiet
    A Lifetime movie on crack, The Quiet dredges up every lurid cliche from the well of teen hormonal havoc in a tale of dysfunctional family meltdown that seems unsure whether to push for suburban-Gothic psychosexual excess or tongue-in-cheek malevolence.
  70. Surviving Eden
    A flighty and unnecessary send-up of reality television.
  71. Crossover
    Overshadowed by vastly superior sports movies like Invincible and hardly disguising its low-budget sources, pic isn't in any kind of shape for the theatrical leagues.
  72. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
    Liebesman hews close to the 2003 pic’s bile-tinged snuff-film aesthetic. His approach falls somewhere between the overwrought sadism of the “Saw” series and the giddy gore-for-gore’s-sake energy of “The Devil’s Rejects,” sharing those films’ twisted notion that today’s auds are willing to embrace such homicidal maniacs as heroes.
  73. Tideland
    Dragged down by a sputtering script and torpid pacing. Way too disturbing for kids and too weird for most grown-ups.
  74. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    A shake 'n' bake Brit teen-spy actioner, without a smidgeon of originality, humor or involving characterization, Stormbreaker is a high-profile bust.
  75. Color of the Cross
    Once the revisionist frisson of a black Jesus, not to mention Mary, Joseph and Judas, has worn off, one is stuck with more mundane matters such as story dynamics, visual style and character verisimilitude, much to the misfortune of the audience.
  76. Night of the Living Dead 3D
    A juiceless quasi-remake of George Romero's 1968 classic that, cardboard glasses aside, brings absolutely nothing new to the party.
  77. Deck the Halls
    A lifeless, workmanlike comedy conceived to provide holiday shoppers an inoffensive respite from the mall.
  78. Sun Kissed
    Without the songs, the underdeveloped bisexual triangle would seem shapeless. Even with the music, the film is a poorly crafted grab-bag of ideas barely elaborated upon enough to sustain a 20-minute short.
  79. Epic Movie
    If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, big studio Hollywood hitmakers should consider themselves lauded to the max in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Selzer's Epic Movie, the latest (and epically unfunny) entry in the movie parody franchise.
  80. Norbit
    Murphy's story lacks even the basic form that held most of "The Nutty Professor" together.
  81. Reno 911!: Miami
    All of which goes to demonstrate that while it's easy enough to slap a colon on a lowbrow cable TV show, additional punctuation by itself isn't sufficient to actually transform it into a movie.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    Only those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics.
  83. Caffeine
    Nonsense, hysterics and many cuppas spill in Caffeine, an ensembler that serves up a menu's worth of forced and trite situations.
  84. What Love Is
    Picture looks and sounds like an Off Off Broadway play.
  85. The Hawk Is Dying
    Already gasping for breath in its opening scenes, picture takes two bleak, unyielding hours to finally expire.
  86. Perfect Stranger
    A disorienting cocktail of illogic and hysteria that requires an 11th-hour soliloquy just to explain what's happened.
  87. The Condemned
    Picture aims for nonstop thrill ride, but for all its brainless brawn, it has plenty of stops and few real thrills.
  88. The Tripper
    A mostly dull-blade exercise that offers little to think or scream about.
  89. Kickin It Old Skool
    An inauspicious feature debut for director Harv Glazer and all three scenarists, the "Big"-meets-breakdancing comedy will be kickin' it to ancillary by swimsuit season.
  90. The Far Side of Jericho
    Far too aggressively seamy (and ferociously foul-mouthed) to please diehard fans of traditional sagebrush sagas, this misfire offers nothing in the way of wit, innovation or even marquee allure to interest auds accustomed to edgier revisionist oaters.
  91. L'iceberg
    A brave but doomed attempt to revive the art of pure physical comedy, the willfully eccentric, practically dialogue-free, Iceberg sets itself a high standard with an opening 15 minutes of the most delicious slapstick, but thereafter only a few moments of gentle surrealism and the occasional poetic image justify the ride, with only 10% of the pic's potential laughs evident above the surface.
  92. Linda Linda Linda
    This aimless, lifeless time-killer about four teenage girls prepping for their rock-band gig in a school talent show proves entirely the wrong choice.
  93. Georgia Rule
    No offense to either of them, but Georgia Rule suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone's going to be hit with a pie.
  94. DOA: Dead or Alive
    So insubstantial that it practically evaporates on screen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Nancy Drew
    Purportedly an attempt to modernize the young detective's adventures for a new generation of tweens, the pic instead serves up stale mystery-movie cliches and overcooked red herrings in a thoroughly wooden adaptation.
  96. License to Wed
    Pic is at best a relatively harmless way to enjoy air conditioning for those who admire Williams' ability to riff, even at his most irritating.
  97. I Know Who Killed Me
    Much like the ongoing real-world meltdown of its troubled star, Lindsay Lohan, I Know Who Killed Me is a disaster that exerts a perverse fascination.
  98. Daddy Day Camp
    This sequel to the 2003 Eddie Murphy comedy may appeal to auds still young enough not to have seen it all before, or who still find flatulence hilarious, or who think adults, when agitated, flail about like epileptic marionettes.
  99. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Has the unmistakable look and feel of a micro-budget indie produced for a small circle of friends, many of whom are listed in the credits.
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