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. In the Name Of
    While thesps Chyra and Kosciukiewicz... embody the physical aspect of their characters’ relationship comfortably enough, their pairing as lovers lacks both chemistry and narrative credibility.
  2. Cassadaga
    Equal parts gory mayhem, convoluted mystery and rote romance, none of which gel together very well.
  3. Red Wing
    Will Wallace's turgid indie tells an earthbound and anemic story about an orphan's progress in small-town Texas.
  4. Boss
    The deafening Bollywood action comedy Boss, directed in broad, heavy strokes by Anthony D’Souza (“Blue”), is a relentless hard-sell star vehicle, a two-and-half-hour string of sledgehammer fighting and dancing sequences.
  5. Endless Love
    In “The Greatest” (2009) and “Country Strong” (2010), Feste proved herself quite skilled, if not especially innovative, at limning her characters’ emotional travails. But subtlety, complexity and even the slightest modicum of realism elude her here.
  6. Paris Countdown
    This been-there-done-that story marks a pretty banal debut for writer-director Alain Marie, who seems far more interested in aping Refn and early-career Michael Mann than in finding his own style.
  7. Expecting
    Even when judged by the standards of broad farce, however, Expecting repeatedly strains credibility and defies logic in ways too glaring to ignore.
  8. Lion Ark
    Overlong film quickly becomes tedious whenever the camera strays from the lions, who don’t have much personality but prove more compelling than the humans.
  9. It's Better to Jump
    The three director-producers’ inability to come up with stronger narrative or thematic organization makes “It’s Better to Jump” play like the professionally polished side product of a vacation stay.
  10. The Boy Next Door
    The film’s initial formulaic competence gives way to outright preposterousness rather quickly, hinging on idiot-plot character motivations.
  11. Live at the Foxes Den
    The pacing is tortured. Plot doesn’t so much twist as rupture and spill forth, and character arcs, as if part of a case being built by a cut-rate lawyer, frequently skip discovery and are forgotten before summation.
  12. Barefoot
    If the film had a loopier or more fable-styled atmosphere, the concept might have seemed easier to swallow. But Fleming treats Stephen Zotnowski’s script with a glossy literalism that doesn’t do it or the actors any favors.
  13. R... Rajkumar
    The Whoopee Cushion hijinks here are punctuated with incongruous outbursts of bloody violence.
  14. Gods of Egypt
    This is by any measure a dreadful movie, a chintzy, CG-encrusted eyesore that oozes stupidity and self-indulgence from every pore. Yet damned if Proyas doesn’t put it all out there with a lunatic conviction you can’t help but admire.
  15. The Lazarus Effect
    “Lazarus” shamelessly steals from superior genre efforts and lacks any distinguishing traits beyond a wildly overqualified cast.
  16. The Gunman
    Penn’s veiny, sweat-glazed biceps are the most objectively impressive feature of this rote, humorless thriller, a distinctly unconvincing attempt to refashion the star — who also co-wrote and produced — as a middle-aged action hero in the Liam Neeson mold.
  17. And So It Goes
    For all of its 93 minutes, you never feel anything significant is at stake for anyone — save for a paycheck.
  18. The Captive
    The deftness with which the helmer manipulated time in his earlier pics eludes him in this generic procedural context... leaving us with obfuscation but no genuine sense of mystery.
  19. Hollywood Seagull
    Despite retaining the basic narrative architecture of its classic source, Hollywood Seagull too often feels like a trite, sudsy take on privilege, ambition and angst among showbiz players and wannabes — one that seemingly exists mostly to showcase real-life C-listers, aspirants and pals in the tradition of Henry Jaglom’s films.
  20. Stalingrad
    Assaults are filmed in ubiquitous slow-mo to better register the way bodies are thrown into the air. It’s all rather confusing, actually, since the monochromatic tonalities and weak script, lacking in any comprehensible battle strategy, tend to meld the two sides together.
  21. The Interview
    An alleged satire that’s about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted.
  22. Black Coffee
    The timidly plotted proceedings never veer from romantic-comedy formula. There’s a whole lot of talk and very little action here, and not just because the squeaky-clean pic wears its PG rating like a badge of honor.
  23. Freezer
    Freezer is a mediocre work built on a flimsy, nonsensical premise that squanders its modest potential with a cornucopia of bad plot twists.
  24. The Longest Ride
    Appealing performances by a trio of second- and third-generation Hollywood kids keep this three-hankie twaddle more bearable than it deserves.
  25. God's Pocket
    John Slattery makes a wobbly transition into feature filmmaking with this drab and uninvolving dark comedy.
  26. Wish I Was Here
    The result is unquestionably an auteur film, but one festooned with so many bad and unnecessary ideas that one can’t help wondering if a more modest, hemmed-in version of the same project might not have proved more effective.
  27. Somewhere Slow
    This tonally all-over-the-place drama fails to convince.
  28. Shirin in Love
    When not serving up sentimental contrivance, Shirin in Love is just tepidly cute, with wan comic situations and lines that provide little opportunity for a game-enough cast.
  29. Maladies
    It’s hard for the audience to invest in a protagonist this solipsistic.
  30. Better Living Through Chemistry
    There isn’t a pharmaceutical cocktail powerful enough to improve the dreadful comedy of Better Living Through Chemistry.
  31. Bad Johnson
    The film manages to be an often uncomfortable experience without fully embracing its own bad taste, starting with an inherently insane premise and somehow steering it through the most basic of romantic comedy paces.
  32. Down and Dangerous
    Relying on a synthesized score, over-saturated cinematography and frustratingly cliched dialogue, this is an extremely generic, truly empty tale of a drug smuggler involved with cops and criminals alike.
  33. Get Hard
    Whatever one makes of Get Hard’s contribution to our ongoing national debate about race, class and sexuality, there’s no denying that too much of it simply feels cheap, flailing and tired.
  34. Tasting Menu
    Bringing together some of the least compelling dinner guests in recent memory at a world-class restaurant that’s about to permanently close its doors, this blandly seriocomic misfire from Spanish co-writer/director Roger Gual is too lazy to rise to the level of farce, too banal and insincere to work as drama.
  35. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    When does an exercise in style become a wearying ADD slog through blood-splattered pseudo-Freudian nonsense? When it’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.
  36. Total Siyapaa (Total Chaos)
    Ethnically barbed hijinks ought to ensue, but jinks of any sort are in short supply, due to drowsy pacing and a string of distracting staging mistakes that suffocate just about every gag.
  37. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Any message about the need for open-mindedness in life and love, however, is muddled by a slapdash plot that ultimately cares less about taking a stand in favor of progressive values than it does in superficially employing such feel-good ideas for unimaginative, hyperactive adolescent slapstick.
  38. Blumenthal
    A limp facsimile of a Woody Allen ensembler set in a familiar world of New York Jewish intellectuals — minus only the wit, and the intellect.
  39. Locker 13
    Only those scared of being bored to death need fear Locker 13, an omnibus of horror stories that could hardly be more tame, talky and tepid, both individually and as a whole.
  40. Into the Storm
    Into the Storm can make it rain like nobody’s business, but when it tries to be smart, it comes out all wet.
  41. A Promise
    Led by a trio of lackluster performances from Alan Rickman, Rebecca Hall and “Game of Thrones” thesp Richard Madden, this awkward, passionless drama conveys neither the sensuality nor the drawn-out sense of longing required by its period tale of a young secretary who falls in love with his employer’s wife.
  42. Burning Blue
    Bearing a distinctly musty odor confirmed by its 2011 copyright date, this day-and-date Lionsgate pickup never achieves dramatic liftoff.
  43. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    Though much of the script borders on unbearable, compounded by “Juno” composer Mateo Messina’s tell-you-how-to-feel score, writer Daniel Taplitz manages to sneak in some poignant self-help aphorisms here and there.
  44. The Hero of Color City
    Cheerfully exhorting imagination, creativity and bravery in children while demonstrating none of those virtues itself, The Hero of Color City proves to be a dispiritingly colorless feature-length babysitter.
  45. The November Man
    Runs through spy-movie cliches with such dogged obligation that it often plays like a YouTube compilation of scenes from older, better thrillers, generating little overall tension and only occasionally approaching basic coherence.
  46. Mortdecai
    There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.
  47. London Has Fallen
    For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.
  48. Rage
    Proficiently made but fatally unpersuasive in its portrayal of internecine gang warfare, this thuggish melodrama piles on the foreign accents and paint-by-numbers brutality, all served up with a grim, operatic self-seriousness that gives Cage’s antihero little room to maneuver.
  49. Rigor Mortis
    The cause of death would appear to be visual-effects overkill in the case of Rigor Mortis, a flashy, incoherent and virtually scare-free Hong Kong horror exercise that marks the directing debut of actor, singer, record producer and fashion maven Juno Mak.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Baby Boom
    Baby Boom tries to be a lot funnier than it actually is, and handsome production design and cinematography do little to compensate for its annoying over-reliance on cornball action montages and a dreadfully saccharine soudtrack score.
  51. The Possession of Michael King
    That Jung and his collaborators haven’t found any new angles to explore in this endlessly overworked religio-horror claptrap would matter far less if they had a firmer grasp of form and technique.
  52. Affluenza
    A splashy-looking yet depressingly empty exercise that is never more shallow than the times when it tries to go deep.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Harry and the Hendersons
    Harry and the Hendersons is proof that the folks at Amblin Entertainment, a.k.a. Steven Spielberg’s production company, can’t keep using the same E.T. formula for every kiddie pic.
  54. Under the Electric Sky
    The pic provides lots of sexy, neon-hued eye-candy but not many images of deeper resonance.
  55. Premature
    Premature winds up resembling nothing so much as the coarsely smutty teen-sex comedies that abounded throughout the ’80s in the wake of “Porky’s.”
  56. The Prince
    The action sequences are competently directed, but exhibit virtually no flair or invention.
  57. America: Imagine a World Without Her
    For the most part, however, D’Souza gives the impression of someone obsessed with whitewashing any and all dark chapters in U.S. history books. There are times when his defenses and rationalizations come across as almost laughably facile.
  58. Heatstroke
    An underwhelming survival thriller.
  59. Kite
    At the very least, Kite could have given Jackson some scenery to chew.
  60. Tiny Times 3.0
    The film’s vacuous characters and inherent vanity have become awfully grating
  61. Sinister 2
    A retread of such brainless, shameless lameness that it’s hard to imagine anyone begging for another installment.
  62. The Young Messiah
    This pious drama is a work of minimal imagination and even less subtlety.
  63. Cam2Cam
    [A] rather sleazy time-killer.
  64. Jersey Shore Massacre
    As willfully lowbrow dumb fun goes, it’s pretty painless.
  65. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    This crudely made thriller plays like a stilted Cantonese riff on organized-crime cliches, substituting blood and brutality for novelty or insight.
  66. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Neither warm and fuzzy in the best holiday movie traditions, nor edgy and irreverent a la “Bad Santa” (coincidentally also co-starring Graham, to better effect), it’s something of a mystery what audience A Merry Friggin’ Christmas intends to serve.
  67. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    Visual spectacle still takes precedence over coherent plotting, and the human characters retain all the gravitas of generic placeholders who accidentally made it into the shooting script.
  68. Autómata
    Even for sci-fi, some logic has to enter the plot, which also needs to be devoid of major holes if it’s not to fall into ridiculousness, and that, unfortunately, is where Automata lies.
  69. The Pact 2
    The Pact 2 simply stretches out rather than elaborating on its predecessor’s already thin premise, creating holes that are poorly patched over with false scares and unconvincing character behavior.
  70. Burying the Ex
    Strained, sexist schlock, which raises zero jolts and only fitful chuckles with its gamely performed tale.
  71. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    This tediously metatextual exercise conjures few inspired jolts of its own.
  72. Elsa & Fred
    For a movie that’s ostensibly about casting off the shackles of old age and embracing excitement in life, there isn’t a single moment here that feels original or spontaneous.
  73. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    21 Years: Richard Linklater makes for a disappointingly hollow hagiography: gushy, superficial and strangely overdue — arriving significantly later than its title prescribes.
  74. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances.
  75. Taken 3
    A mind-numbing, crash-bang misfire that abandons chic European capitals for the character’s own backyard.
  76. The Culture High
    The film’s haphazard structure and freewheeling arguments only serve to reinforce tired pothead cliches — it’s paranoid, prone to starry-eyed dorm-room philosophizing, and it doesn’t know when to quit.
  77. Hitman: Agent 47
    Insofar as Hitman: Agent 47 is about anything, really, it’s about the pleasures of being on location — from the gratuitous image of Ware taking a dip in a five-star-hotel swimming pool to the sight of Singapore’s staggering Gardens by the Bay.
  78. The Toy Soldiers
    The Toy Soldiers sports a basic competence in assembly that slightly elevates its material. The same can’t be said of the performers, though they try, some achieving a semblance of naturalism, others more inept or hammy.
  79. Criminal
    Struggling to generate much tension, the film opts for sensory battery in the action scenes, rendering gunshots as loud as cannon fire and splashing blood every which way.
  80. All Relative
    Even a brisk running time, barely topping 80 minutes, is too long to ask audiences to stay in the company of these characters and their terrible self-inflicted predicaments.
  81. The Color of Time
    Tonally surprisingly coherent, Franco’s apostles seem to have directed, as Pauline Kael would’ve said, on their knees.
  82. Poker Night
    Flashbacks within flashbacks exhaust viewer patience in this snarky mix of crime, action and sadism.
  83. Unfinished Business
    A comedy with its heart in the right place and everything else bizarrely out of joint.
  84. Inside the Mind of Leonardo
    The documentary envisions the groundbreaking visionary as a voracious polymath (true) while giving shockingly short shrift to the man as artist.
  85. No Escape
    Grittily propulsive filmmaking and solid performances from Owen Wilson and Lake Bell aside, there’s no escaping the movie’s hand-wringing manipulations and pandering sense of privilege.
  86. Woman in Gold
    This is manufactured sentiment, less interested in provoking thought than in manipulating emotion, constructed of human obstacles overcome, stirring speeches delivered and heart-rending flashbacks unveiled, all suspended like so much Spam in the jelly of its own score.
  87. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    A mostly harmless yet plenty rough assemblage of musical numbers and rote chases that barely add up to a movie.
  88. Dark Summer
    While competently made, Dark Summer makes no effort to lend its characters any psychological complexity, or even much distinguishing personality. Nor are the proceedings very scary.
  89. Accidental Love
    The disparate tones never gel, and the movie has an airless, stop-and-go feel, as if a studio-audience laugh track were intended but never inserted.
  90. The Principle
    It’s easy to see a skewed argument in the making.
  91. The Devil's Violinist
    The film is proof of both Garrett’s titanic skill at putting bow to string, and his decidedly less accomplished gifts as an actor.
  92. Old Fashioned
    The line between priggishness and creepiness is repeatedly smudged by multihyphenate Rik Swartzwelder in Old Fashioned, a faith-based drama that looks as lovely as an expensive greeting card, but moves as slowly as a somnolent turtle.
  93. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    While Wenders has argued intelligently in interviews for the merits of realizing character-driven drama in three dimensions, this isn’t the most helpful case-maker — not least because Norwegian writer Bjorn Olaf Johannessen’s screenplay has barely been rendered in two.
  94. Hot Pursuit
    A few mildly tone-deaf jokes are hardly enough to sink Hot Pursuit. What does, however, is its tendency to belabor the laziest, most obvious gags beyond the point of reason.
  95. My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
    Though billed as a documentary, this 59-minute doodle barely rises above homemovie status.
  96. Do You Believe?
    When all its threads are finally pulled into place, Do You Believe? proves about as spiritually enlightening as a Kmart throw rug.
  97. Broken Horses
    Fails to convince on several crucial levels, including plotting and dialogue.
  98. The Forger
    Nothing feels fresh here — not even Christopher Plummer hamming it up as a crusty-coot grandpa — and Philip Martin’s routinely polished direction only underscores the cliche-composting of Richard D’Ovidio’s script.
  99. The Squeeze
    Jastrow is a longtime helmer of PGA events, and as expert at choosing just the right camera angle for his shots on the course as he is apparently confounded over fashioning believable dialogue or characters.
  100. Shut In
    As thrillers go, Shut In is conspicuously short of thrills. It’s an undistinguished and predictable hodgepodge, so blandly generic as to suggest that it was cobbled together by filmmakers referencing a how-to handbook who picked spare parts from other, better thrillers.
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