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. Superfast!
    Superfast! takes aim at easy targets, and misses by miles.
  2. The Gallows
    The Gallows isn’t without a certain amount of atmosphere, it simply feels borrowed wholesale. That would matter less with a better script, but the four main characters are paper-thin even by genre norms.
  3. Gerontophilia
    Maybe if the actors had been coached to actually act, it would have come across better, but their painfully stilted delivery is leaden rather than campily artificial.
  4. Mojave
    Monahan isn’t required to satisfy bloodlust or to pay off conventional plot points, even if his screenplay for “The Departed” displayed an abundant talent for doing so. But he assumes too much in believing that the audience will connect in any way with a sour, prickly narcissist who’s trapped in the gilded cage of wealth and fame.
  5. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Pacific Rim Uprising delivers plentiful CG mayhem.... What it lacks, though, is both del Toro’s trademark Lovecraftian imagery (all slick tentacles and dank subterranean locales) and the sense of thunderous heft that the Mexican auteur bestowed upon his titans.
  6. Skin Trade
    Snapping necks and shooting limbs have rarely been carried out in service of such a principled cause — or been executed with such formulaic tedium.
  7. American Heist
    Slick but derivative and forgettable on all levels.
  8. Marguerite & Julien
    The film is a painfully silly, laughably naive Romance with a capital “R.”
  9. Daddy's Home
    Daddy’s Home isn’t so much a lump of coal as an empty box.
  10. Big Significant Things
    It’s as hard for us to get invested in his journey as it is for the film to find a narrative foothold.
  11. Jellyfish Eyes
    By second-guessing what audiences want, Murakami falls into the same trap studios do when trying to appease mass tastes, delivering a film that features many of his familiar designs and characters but precious little in the way of personal vision.
  12. Safelight
    A handful of solid performances and some subtle ’70s period detailing are hardly enough to recommend this flat, predictable drama.
  13. Return to Sender
    A queasy but strangely gutless exploitation pic.
  14. The Boy
    So little happens in The Boy, and so little suspense is effectively built around its central figure, that by the time things finally do heat up the movie has flatlined too completely for us to care.
  15. Addicted to Fresno
    A mean-spirited farce whose strenuous bad taste seldom translates into actual laughs.
  16. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    A dramatically flat and tediously disjointed drama that comes across as a standard-issue, cliche-littered, struggling-writer-finds-fulfillment biopic that has been cut-and-pasted into borderline incoherence.
  17. Before We Go
    [A] talky, contrived and ultimately tedious actors’ exercise.
  18. The Curse of Downers Grove
    Although it’s being marketed as a horror film, The Curse of Downers Grove turns out to be something else — a messy hash of teen soap opera, stalker thriller and whatnot whose titular, possibly supernatural aspect is basically irrelevant.
  19. Hellions
    Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract.
  20. Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism
    A chintzy children’s fantasy that summons the powers of suggestion, but falls well short of mesmeric.
  21. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.
  22. Big Sky
    Evan M. Wiener’s screenplay throws in too many disparate elements without developing any of them very effectively, while Grau’s direction is slick but unable to provide the tension or consistency needed.
  23. Norm of the North
    With plot elements cobbled together from recent animated hits, the blandly executed pic might as well be titled “Happy Minions of Madagascar’s Ice Age.”
  24. Fathers and Daughters
    In its shape and sheen, Fathers and Daughters seems dated even before Michael Bolton surfaces to cough up a gelatinous closing-credits ballad.
  25. Love the Coopers
    Decked out in the usual tinsel-and-mistletoe trappings, the film lurches awkwardly between gloominess and giddiness, never hitting the boisterously bittersweet groove it seeks.
  26. The Reflektor Tapes
    Joseph winds up with an disorganized mishmash of visual gimmicks, empty exoticism, and soundbites worthy of “This is Spinal Tap.” Great music and some dynamic, up-close concert footage gives it the occasional life, but The Reflektor Tapes will appeal to Arcade Fire devotees only and even their patience might be tested.
  27. My All American
    Based on fact but mired in cliches, My All-American pays respectful tribute to U. of Texas football legend Freddie Steinmark (1949-71) with the sort of on-the-nose sincerity that transforms biography into hagiography
  28. London Fields
    [A] misbegotten mess.
  29. Asthma
    Ritter’s performance is the liveliest thing in a callow, shallow cautionary tale, which wears its influences on its artfully frayed sleeve and no closer than that to its heart.
  30. The Book of Henry
    The film’s muted yet still rather flamboyant terribleness derives from the fact that it seems to be juggling three or four borderline schlock genres at once.
  31. Expend4bles
    This is true 21st-century trash: a movie in which the action itself is expendable.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Halloween III: Season of the Witch
    There’s not much to say about Halloween III that hasn’t already been said about either of the other two Halloween pics or a slew of imitators.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
    In its only novel twist, Halloween 5 takes the liberty of setting up its sequel (albeit clumsily) at the film’s end rather than ‘killing’ that pesky Michael Myers and then figuring out how to revive him after counting b.o. receipts. Otherwise, this is pretty stupid and boring fare.
  34. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    What could have been a powerful ode to the impact that movies have in shaping our identities — and by extension, the reason broken people are drawn to the profession, through which they hope to reach others like themselves — becomes an over-the-top celebration of Dolan himself.
  35. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    The sheer abundance of on-screen ornamentation isn’t quite enough to make The Huntsman: Winter’s War a beautiful film.... Still, it’s one that has been exhaustively designed by many hands — which only further shows up its inelegant patchwork in the writing department.
  36. Body
    The polished, bland low-budget presentation doesn’t raise much tension, and the script springs no real surprises
  37. Fifty Shades of Black
    At a minimum, a parody should be funnier than the film it’s sending up, but Fifty Shades of Black, a quick-and-dirty riff on last year’s S&M romance “Fifty Shades of Grey,” falls a laugh or two short of even that low standard.
  38. The Other Side of the Door
    The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy’s weekend lineup, The Other Side of the Door brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.
  39. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
  40. The Abandoned
    Despite the capable presence of Jason Patric in a thanklessly one-note role, this generic chiller clings so tightly to conventions that it fails to even moderately raise one’s pulse
  41. Greater
    An insistent, clunky sermon about triumph through faith, David Hunt’s film is so determined to turn its subject into a Christ-like saint that it loses any sense of him as an actual flesh-and-blood man, the result being a third-string sports saga only apt to play to its devout target audience.
  42. 31
    Rob Zombie truly loves horror movies. But he still hasn’t made a good one, and “31” is a perfect encapsulation of the reasons why: It’s a fanboy’s highlight reel of homages, without any of the credibility or context that made most of the films he’s inspired by so fine.
  43. All Roads Lead to Rome
    Though Parker’s assured performance, along with the enchanting backdrop, eases the action toward harmless gentility, they’re hijacked by a plot that mimics the plate-spinning business of classic screwball, but moves at agonizing half-speed.
  44. Correspondence (La corrispondenza)
    Even if Tornatore were deliberately aiming for the artificiality that clings to nearly every frame, the pic would still feel needlessly airless, hampered by an Italian-to-English script translation that may be precise but lacks naturalism.
  45. Colonia
    The leads are given the thankless task of maintaining grim poker faces through scene after scene of high contrivance and cliche-ridden dialogue.
  46. The Darkness
    At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.
  47. A Strange Course of Events
    Too often the pic feels as if it’s killing time to pad itself out into feature length.
  48. The Cloverfield Paradox
    The Cloverfield Paradox is a mind-boggling mish-mosh. It squanders whatever stray crumbs were left of the “Cloverfield” mystique by banging together bits and pieces of what must be a dozen genres. The result is a desperate plunge into the abyss of shoddy sci-fi.
  49. An Eye for Beauty
    An almost bizarrely limp, emotionless, blank greeting card of a movie, this purported romantic comedy-drama contains little of the three, at best serving as a sort of extended L.L. Bean advertisement, full of fabulously shot footage of Eastern Canadian vistas and the well-dressed rustic yuppies who live there.
  50. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    Disappointingly plodding and ham-fistedly obvious in its attempts to offer an up-close and personal portrait of a mood-swinging, self-loathing 59-year-old Ernest Hemingway.
  51. The Girl in the Photographs
    The Girl in the Photographs is a slasher movie filled with smug and self-absorbed characters who are not nearly as clever as they obviously assume they are.
  52. Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe
    Vaxxed comes across as a grab-bag of charts, theories and anecdotal evidence that would never pass muster by the editors of any major scientific journal (like, say, the Lancet), and too often resembles the kind of one-sided, paranoia-stoking agitprop that political activists construct to sanctify true believers and assault infidels.
  53. CHIPS
    Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”
  54. ma ma
    Julio Medem’s film is a smiling-through-tears saga whose generally tasteful execution can’t ultimately salvage a whopping load of maudlin contrivance, all designed to burnish the halo around St. Penelope.
  55. Tulip Fever
    Not only is there nothing presently in the zeitgeist to which to peg such a story (except perhaps the Dane DeHaan-Cara Delevingne reunion nobody asked for, shot before “Valerian” and shelved for nearly a year), but the entire package has a curiously old-fashioned feel — and not just because it takes place 380 years ago.
  56. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
    "USS Indianapolis” is a World War II “epic” that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the audience with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.
  57. The Last Face
    The Last Face would have been a better movie if it had an actual screenplay, rather than the bare-bones one credited to Erin Dignam.
  58. Bazodee
    Bazodee itself dutifully hews to convention, but its plotting is so torpid that it never feels as if there are any genuine stakes to the protagonist’s which-beau-should-I-choose predicament.
  59. Table 19
    Almost everything that happens in this movie rings cloyingly false. It wants to make you laugh and cry, but you may be too busy cringing.
  60. Planetarium
    Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.
  61. A Family Man
    Sparing no maudlin contrivance in a quest to jerk tears that remain stubbornly dry, this hokum is slickly executed by producer Mark Williams in his feature directorial debut. But the result never rises above polished plastic, formulaic, and pedestrian.
  62. Milton's Secret
    Even a prickly pro like Sutherland can’t do anything to elevate a hokey self-help lecture disguised as family entertainment.
  63. Never
    Writer-director Brett Allen Smith’s quasi-romance meanders about with the same aimlessness as its characters, revealing nothing substantial about them, or twentysomething love and identity formation.
  64. Fear, Inc.
    The main thing early reels have going for them isn’t any actual cleverness or wit, but Neff’s pleasant riffing within a stock slacker-bro role. When his character stops having fun, so does the audience. Though needless to say, the unimaginative references to prior/better horror flicks just keep on a-comin’.
  65. Message from the King
    It’s a dark and all-around unpleasant journey to take.
  66. Life on the Line
    The narrative is so predictable that, when an outburst of trash-talking doesn’t escalate into a barroom brawl, it’s not just surprising, it’s pretty close to shocking.
  67. Crosscurrent
    Plotless, pretentiously literary and lousy at explaining geography, the movie fails to put Yang’s vision into a fictional framework that’s even remotely engaging.
  68. Railroad Tigers
    You know things are getting bad when an instantly forgettable, nearly impossible-to-follow, Chinese-language action movie manages to score a U.S. release simply because of Chan’s involvement.
  69. Believe
    An aggressively sincere but off-puttingly saccharine drama.
  70. Burn Your Maps
    Burn Your Maps is one of those movies that’s glib and facile and threadbare all the way through, then the ending sort of gets to you (you’d have to be made of pretty stern stuff if it didn’t), so you think back over what you’ve seen — and it’s still a crock.
  71. Anonymous
    Anonymous plods through a low-stakes tale that’s almost frictionlessly insulated against real-world consequences.
  72. The War with Grandpa
    The combat is neither funny nor intense. The War with Grandpa is like “Home Alone” replayed as a tit-for-tat battle of logistical booby traps that never rises above the innocuous slapstick benign.
  73. Friend Request
    We might lament declining attention spans in general, but more chilling than anything in Friend Request is the idea that anyone’s whole attention could possibly be absorbed by so flimsy and forgettable a film, one that seems made with the sole aim of being perfectly adequate background noise for something else.
  74. Wheeler
    The term “vanity project” doesn’t come close to adequately describing the hubristic folly that is Wheeler, an excruciatingly dull and self-indulgent faux documentary
  75. Arsenal
    Arsenal, a pulpy crime drama about desperate characters and excessive carnage in Biloxi, Miss., is memorable primarily for some random scraps of loopy dialogue, the credible evocation of a sleazy demimonde rife with white-trash lawbreakers, and yet another Nicolas Cage performance that could be labeled Swift’s Premium and sold by the pound.
  76. Youth in Oregon
    Maudlin and mannered, this contrived indie squanders another fine late-career performance from Frank Langella, dousing its treatment of the subject in affectations until it’s snuffed out any trace of genuine life.
  77. Lost in Florence
    Bland even for the armchair traveler, “Lost” is as inoffensive as a picture-souvenir booklet, and equally unmemorable.
  78. The Ottoman Lieutenant
    Though the film ultimately hinges on a “forbidden” Muslim-Christian romance, almost nothing is made of the enormous hurdles that would be present in this time and place.
  79. The House
    The House, like too many Hollywood comedies of outrage, turns the extreme into the innocuous.
  80. Midnight Sun
    The trouble isn’t just that Midnight Sun cherry-picks the most poetic elements of a real-world disease to serve its transparently manipulative ends, but that it offers audiences such an unrealistic portrait of romance in the process.
  81. Paris Can Wait
    The trouble with Paris Can Wait — apart from the sheer agony of being trapped with two insufferable characters as they sample gorgeously photographed food and wine that we can’t taste — is the way the movie seems so willing to let its leading lady be defined by her husband’s job.
  82. Eloise
    Reasonably slick but empty, Eloise is no “Session 9” as far as haunted-former-mental-hospital horrors go. Heck, it’s not even a “Grave Encounters 2.”
  83. You're Killing Me Susana
    Somewhere buried deep within You’re Killing Me Susana is a commentary on loutish manliness, and the way in which romances are inherently fraught with tensions between individual and shared desires. Unfortunately, such notions are drowned out by all manner of irritating shenanigans.
  84. Brain on Fire
    This embarrassingly earnest film — produced by Charlize Theron — argues for the importance of doctors going the extra mile, when textbook diagnoses won’t do.
  85. War Machine
    Everyone has a different idea of what’s funny, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being amused by War Machine, a colossally miscalculated satire.
  86. Despite the Falling Snow
    When a film’s basic strategy is to cut between the past and the present, it should create ripples of anticipatory tension. But Despite the Falling Snow is one of those movies in which the cross-cutting keeps destroying all mood and momentum — it feels more like channel-surfing.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ed
    Almost painfuly modest in its ambition and accomplishment, this slow-pitch offering might tolerably amuse the under-10 crowd, but will prove borderline intolerable for everyone else.
  88. Dolittle
    What should have been an awe-filled adventure quickly curdles into an awful one, thanks to a pedestrian formula and the filmmakers’ fixation on fart jokes.
  89. Pitching Tents
    The big giveaway: While some of the genuine articles sporadically earned chuckles with vulgar sight gags and gratuitous nudity, Pitching Tents is too timorous to risk being truly offensive.
  90. Home Again
    Once Nancy Meyers went out on her own, she became a wittier and more nimble filmmaker. So maybe Hallie Meyers-Shyer will follow in her footsteps and improve. Right now, she’s got nowhere to go but up.
  91. Bulletproof
    The criminal activity onscreen in “Bulletproof” is penny ante compared with the felonious slaughter of story, character and logic exacted by the pic’s filmmakers.
  92. The Clapper
    The movie is not entirely without charm — although it’s safe to say, it’s mostly without charm. In fact, the movie has so little charm to offer that it borders on insipid.
  93. The Last Shaman
    At once superficial and overblown, this documentary also often feels downright phony.
  94. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    The film enunciates its raw themes — punk means individuality! the aliens are all about conformity! — but never begins to figure out how to embody those themes in a narrative that could lure in the audience.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Road House
    With Road House, United Artists hotwires Patrick Swayze a star vehicle shackled by a couple of flat tires in the script department. Ill-conceived and unevenly executed, pic essentially is a Western - a loner comes in to clean up a bar, of all things, and ends up washing and drying the whole town - but its vigilante justice, lawlessness and wanton violence feel ludicrous in a modern setting.
  96. Forever My Girl
    Forever My Girl is a sweet but slight romantic drama that got lost on its way to the Hallmark Channel — or, more likely, was rebuffed by that channel’s gatekeepers for being, even by their standards, entirely too predictable — and wound up in theaters instead.
  97. Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween
    Tyler Perry hasn’t generally been in the business of sequels, but apart from Joe’s overly salty soul-food patter, this one has a joyless, obligatory, cardboard feeling that marks it as one of Perry’s least satisfying films.
  98. Sherlock Gnomes
    The actors give little life to the proceedings, since no one’s bothered to figure what this movie has to offer beyond terrifically tactile stone figures going through the motions of what might be called Generic Animated Action Rescue Plot.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Taps
    Taps labors at an unbearably slow pace to an inevitable, depressing conclusion.
    • Variety
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Joe Versus the Volcano
    An overproduced, disappointing shaggy dog comedy.
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