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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    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Spies Like Us
    Spies is not very amusing. Though Chase and Aykroyd provide moments, the overall script thinly takes on eccentric espionage and nuclear madness, with nothing new to add.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maximum Overdrive
    Master manipulator Stephen King, making his directoral debut from his own script, fails to create a convincing enough environment to make the kind of nonsense he's offering here believable or fun.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Pet Sematary
    Pet Sematary marks the first time Stephen King has adapted his own book for the screen, and the result is undead schlock dulled by a slasher-film mentality – squandering its chilling and fertile source material.
  4. The Gracefield Incident
    There are some unintentional laughs to be had from this hectic, silly, defiantly un-scary mashup of stock “cabin in the woods” and alien-invasion formulae. But that dubious plus won’t be enough to soften the scorn of horror fans who plunk down hard cash for this feeble, somewhat amateurish if enthusiastic retread.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Creepshow 2
    Tied together with some humdrum animated sequences, three vignettes on offer obviously were produced on the absolute cheap, and are deficient in imagination and scare quotient.
    • Variety
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cujo
    Although well-made, this screen adaptation of Stephen King's Cujo emerges as a dull, uneventful entry in the horror genre. Novel about a mad dog on the rampage occupies a low place in the King canon, which is understandable if the film's stupefying predictability is an accurate reflection of the book.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sleepwalkers
    Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is an idiotic horror potboiler.
    • Variety
  8. Thinner
    There’s really nothing particularly fresh in this routinely crafted, banally scripted and directed effort. Mantegna’s humorously arrogant performance is the pic’s sole distinctive element, and it’s saved for the finale. Still, it’s just not good enough to make up for the rest of the drudgery and put a smile on one’s face leaving the theater.
  9. Village of the Damned
    Awful scripting and an unimaginative approach to re-imagining material's potential have left Universal with a theatrical in-and-outer on its hands.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    School Daze
    As a director, Lee fails to strike the right note between realism and fantasy, and the heavy subject matter just falls with a thud. As an actor, however, Lee does a good job creating a sort of black babe in the woods.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jumpin' Jack Flash
    Jumpin' Jack Flash is not a gas, it's a bore. A weak idea and muddled plot poorly executed not surprisingly results in a tedious film with only a few brief comic interludes from Whoopi Goldberg to redeem it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hot Shots!
    Jim Abrahams tries to tap the zany Airplane! vein with this Top Gun spoof but bats far too low a percentage with the usual rapid-fire assault of numbingly stupid gags.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriot Games
    Tom Clancy was right the first time. Paramount's Patriot Games is an expensive stiff. Mindless, morally repugnant and ineptly directed to boot, it's a shoddy followup to Par's 1990 hit "The Hunt for Red October."
  14. Kuso
    The referentiality of “Kuso,” its general snark, and even its defensive self-criticism (characters state “I hate this movie!” more than once) fail to make it any more funny or inspired, let alone any less of a shapeless chore to sit through.
  15. Gemini Man
    Gemini Man is a case in which an awful lot of effort has gone into making an awfully lazy action movie.
  16. Chaos Walking
    When it comes to confrontations, the movie wimps out, putting more effort into New World-building than in the largely generic characters who populate it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dawn of the Dead
    Dawn pummels the viewer with a series of ever-more-grisly events - decapitations, shootings, knifings, flesh tearings - that make Romero's special effects man, Tom Savini, the real 'star' of the film - the actors are as woodenly uninteresting as the characters they play. Romero's script is banal when not incoherent - those who haven't seen Night of the Living Dead may have some difficulty deciphering exactly what's going on at the outset of Dawn.
  18. The Black Prince
    Clunkily scripted and generically pretty in a Stately Home porn kind of way, the film is vaguely accurate in its sequence of events but falls completely flat on personal relationships, psychology and political undercurrents — in other words, the stuff that makes history come alive.
  19. Stratton
    Solidly pro in overall packaging yet cliched, pedestrian and indistinct in specific contributions, this thriller never finds (let alone raises) its own pulse.
  20. Gun Shy
    Gun Shy is the sort of leaden misfire in which actors labor mightily to transform themselves into cartoon caricatures in a desperate (and largely unsuccessful) attempt to make viewers think, despite all evidence to the contrary, they are watching a comedy.
  21. Super Troopers 2
    Super Troopers 2 is an aggressively lame and slobby comedy full of cardboard characters and in-your-face naughty jokes that feel about as dangerous as old vaudeville routines.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jaws 3-D
    The Jaws cycle has reached its nadir with this surprisingly tepid [Arrivision] 3-D version.
  23. Wetlands
    This soggy stab at neo-noir finds Italian-born writer-director Emanuele Della Valle out of her element in a pretentious meller set on the Jersey shore.
  24. The Show
    This Is Your Death deeply misunderstands depression, treating suicide as a convenient device for its pea-brained premise.
  25. November Criminals
    It’s a low-budget generic shrug of a movie, one that recycles clichés both ancient (testy drug dealers) and slightly less ancient (the hero films his life with a camcorder).
  26. Euphoria
    The catharsis feels fake and unearned. Moreover, the film lacks the warmth and respect for all of of its characters displayed in Langseth’s previous work.
  27. Psychopaths
    Devoid of characters or a story about which one might care, Psychopaths proves to be a fright-free pastiche without purpose — save, that is, for unimaginatively paying homage to a string of superior genre predecessors.
  28. Hangman
    If Hangman were just a tad less formulaic, and settled for a slightly smaller body count, it might pass muster as the pilot movie for a basic cable police procedural.
  29. The Strange Ones
    There’s a point beyond which it’s difficult to believe anything that happens on screen, and impossible to care what is supposed to be real or not. Unfortunately, the movie continues for a lengthy stretch after that, until it literally trudges into a deep, dark hole.
  30. Amanda & Jack Go Glamping
    A thin, sparkless romantic comedy that takes satirical aim at a host of current hipster-culture targets, before concluding that merely identifying them is droll enough.
  31. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.
  32. Smallfoot
    It’s messy and distressingly unmemorable, which is a shame since there are no shortage of great Looney Tunes-level cartoon gags wasted along the way, including an ingenious rope bridge sequence worthy of golden-age Warner Bros. animation.
  33. Sundowners
    Pleasant in the blandest sense of the term, writer-director Pavan Moondi’s film likely won’t entice anyone outside die-hard fans of cult-comic co-star Tim Heidecker.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Barbarella
    Despite a certain amount of production dash and polish and a few silly-funny lines of dialog, Barbarella isn’t very much of a film. Based on what has been called an adult comic strip, the Dino De Laurentiis production is flawed with a cast that is not particularly adept at comedy, a flat script, and direction which can’t get this beached whale afloat.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood is a Robin of wood. Murky and uninspired, this $50 million rendition bears evidence of the rushed and unpleasant production circumstances that were much reported upon.
  36. Entanglement
    Like James’ direction, full of off-center and oddly angled compositions that aren’t warranted by the action, Entanglement dresses up familiar romantic-comedy themes with affected gimmicks to jumbled ends.
  37. A Futile and Stupid Gesture
    Wain made a terrible mistake when he decided to turn Kenney’s story into a goof, a sketch, a riff of threadbare mockery, instead of treating it as a relatively straight movie with laughs. If he had done that, it might have been hilarious, though in an acidly downbeat and far-reaching way.
  38. Slender Man
    Slender Man is the kind of movie in which images come before logic, because there really isn’t much logic. There’s just a movie out to goose you.
  39. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    The movie isn’t scary, it isn’t gripping, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t fueled by any sort of clever compulsion. It’s just a strangely arduous exercise that feels increasingly frantic and arbitrary as it goes along.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Death Wish II
    Charles Bronson, as the avenging vigilante Paul Kersey, is turned loose this time on the creeps of Los Angeles and the results are every bit as revolting as in the original 1974 jackpot fantasy.
  41. Death Wish V: The Face of Death
    Slackly paced and unexciting, Death Wish V comes off as a flat-footed, by-the-numbers programmer that, judging from what’s onscreen, failed to spark much enthusiasm among the people who made it.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Son of the Pink Panther
    Starring Italian comedian Roberto Benigni as the new bumbling inspector, it is a tired pastiche of recycled sketches and gags.
  43. The Vanishing Of Sidney Hall
    Sidney Hall strings its audience along on a tedious journey that runs out of steam long before reaching an embarrassingly overwrought finale.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Trail of the Pink Panther
    A patchwork of out-takes, reprised clips and new connective footage, Trail of the Pink Panther is a thin, peculiar picture unsupported by the number of laughs one is accustomed to in this series. Stitched together after Peter Sellers' death, this is by a long way the slightest of the six Inspector Clouseau efforts.
  45. Breaking In
    Coasting for as long as it can on the considerable charms of its star, Breaking In is otherwise a work of profound half-assedness, running through the paces of its bare-bones framework with all the verve, energy and invention of a night-watchman winding down the last hour of his shift.
  46. The Music of Silence
    A toothless ode to a still-living celebrity, it’s a film that may appeal to very young children and very old ladies, but seems sure to bore everyone in between.
  47. Domino
    To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.
  48. Unicorn Store
    There’s a serious mismatch between the personality of Samantha McIntyre’s script (which seems to be written as a kooky, do-it-yourself comedy, à la “Being John Malkovich” or “Napoleon Dynamite”) and Larson’s directing style, which feels entirely incompatible with whimsy.
  49. Looking Glass
    The movie offers a great deal more mood than matter.
  50. The Competition
    Imagine a standard-issue romantic comedy drained of humor and suffused with sincerity, and you’ll know what to expect from The Competition, a ponderous trifle that plays very much like the cinematic equivalent of a 45 RPM record spun on a turntable set at 33 1/3.
  51. Sorry to Bother You
    Paradoxically, the more ridiculous Riley’s gonzo social critique gets, the more boring it becomes, to the point that its out-of-control second half starts to feel like some kind of bad trip.
  52. The Hurricane Heist
    The Hurricane Heist is...a perfect storm of deliriously watchable inanity and ineptitude. It may be a strong early candidate for the worst movie of 2018, but don’t let that deter you – bad movies this fun don’t come along every day.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Gumball Rally
    The Gumball Rally is a silly forced, one-note and strident comedy about a cross-country auto race by a bunch of formula-kooky characters. Former stunt coordinator Chuck Bail produced and directed but he didn't have much of a plot.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cannonball!
    Cannoball will please those who won’t rest until they see every car in creation destroyed and aflame.
  55. Irreplaceable You
    Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a charming actress who radiates poise and intelligence, which is why Irreplaceable You — in which her character acts in ways that are clearly self-destructive and counterproductive — rings so false.
  56. Lies We Tell
    Very much to its detriment, Misra’s ambitious, overflowing soap opera of a debut is not content with being the character portrait that Byrne’s inherently interesting Donald deserves.
  57. Josie
    While eschewing genre formula is admirable, England’s tack proves enervating, since Hank and Josie generally feel like archetypes devoid of purpose.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    K-9
    There are a few amazing moments (the dog’s rescue of Belushi in a bar). In between lingers lots of standard action-pic fare, plenty of toothless jokes and some down-right mangy dialog.
  59. They Remain
    They Remain is a movie that lives down to your worst expectations.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Her Alibi
    He’s a mystery writer, she’s a mystery; and it’s also a mystery how TV fodder like this manages to get the high-gloss, top-talent treatment at studios.
  61. Serenity
    Serenity sees a usually reliable screenwriter-turned-director take a bold swing and miss the mark completely, so intent on pulling the rug out from under you that he never notices you weren’t even standing on it.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hitcher
    The Hitcher is a highly unimaginative slasher that keeps the tension going with a massacre about every 15 minutes.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hanoi Hilton
    The Hanoi Hilton is a lame attempt by writer-director Lionel Chetwynd to tell the story of US prisoners in Hoa Lo Prison, in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Pic is a slanted view of traditional prison camp sagas, injecting lots of hindsight and taking right-wing potshots that do a disservice to the very human drama of the subject.
  64. Status Update
    Inasmuch as one can complain about a film having plot holes when it hinges entirely on a magic cellphone app, much of “Status Update” feels cursory and unconsidered by its hokey standards.
  65. The Happys
    When the jokes don’t actually materialize (or land), the proceedings become bogged down in drama that the film’s one-dimensional characters can’t sustain.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Way West
    Project probably looked good on paper, but washed out in scripting, direction and pacing. Incidents do not build to any climax; excepting the first and last reels, any others could be shown out of order with no apparent discontinuity.
  67. Book Club
    Really, it’s sad that the best Hollywood can come up with for so much seasoned talent is this stale shake-and-bake combining upscale-lifestyle porn with some tepid smirky humor.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Raw Deal
    Comic book crime meller suffers from an irredeemably awful script, and even director John Irvin’s engaging sense of how absurd the proceedings are can’t work an alchemist’s magic.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    St. Elmo's Fire
    Beyond occasional mutterings of words like ‘love’ and ‘beer,’ there’s never any explanation in the dialog that would hint at motivation.
  70. Life Itself
    It is sentimental and sprawling, which are not necessarily bad things, but also manipulative and contrived, which very much are.
  71. Paradox
    Paradox, a waste of time made bearable only by its brevity, plays like a bad acid flashback from the 1970s, a time when similarly self-conscious trippy pastiches of rock music and genre conventions proliferated on the midnight-movie circuit.
  72. Krystal
    Though Macy is an odd fit to direct (coming at the talky script like it was a madcap piece of theater), the wonky tone is all screenwriter Will Aldis’ invention.
  73. Caught
    Instead of emphasizing tense action and atmosphere — the usual limited-budget solutions — the filmmakers here seem to think having their characters nervously chatter on about their situation in reams of clumsy dialogue will do the trick. It does not.
  74. Peppermint
    As a onetime Girl Scout den mother turned brass-knuckled avenging angel, Garner gives everything that is asked of her, from brute physicality to dewy-eyed tenderness, but this half-witted calamity botches just about everything else. Drably by-the-numbers except for the moments where it goes gobsmackingly off-the-rails, Peppermint misfires from start to finish.
  75. The Grudge
    The Grudge plods on as if it were something more than formula gunk, cutting back and forth among the thinly written unfortunates who’ve been touched by the curse of that house.
  76. Baja
    Blandly competent in assembly, Baja has only pedestrian comic ideas, and even those aren’t executed well.
  77. Gehenna: Where Death Lives
    It’s not a total wash, but the eventually dreary mix of vague religious morality and rather ponderous horror suggests Katagiri should pay more attention to script development next time out.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Clash of the Titans
    Clash of the Titans is an unbearable bore that will probably put to sleep the few adults stuck taking the kids to it. Desmond Davis directs with a tired hand, not helped much by the lackadaisical writing.
  79. Vampire Clay
    Nothing this absurd should be this boring.
  80. 211
    A rote, overstuffed compilation of genre cliches with pedestrian handling of action elements and frequent notes of maudlin contrivance.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    Performances are dull. Whatever sociological, political or dramatic motivations may once have existed in the story have been ruthlessly stripped from the plot, leaving all characters bereft of empathy or sympathy. There’s hardly a pretense toward justifying the carnage
  82. Good Boys
    A little too imitative of “Superbad” ... Good Boys lacks that film’s wit and heart. It’s a lively, slick package, yet crude and obvious at every turn.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Orca
    Orca is man-vs-beast nonsense. Some fine special effects and underwater camera work are plowed under in dumb story-telling.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Toys
    Only a filmmaker with Barry Levinson's clout would have been so indulged to create such a sprawling, seemingly unsupervised mess as Toys, a painful exercise that makes Hudson Hawk look like a modest throwaway.
  85. Angel Face
    Filho obviously wants to convey the naive outlook an impressionable young girl would have on her own situation, but there’s far too much manipulation involved to take her selection of scenes seriously.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    This trashy, gaudy, sound-stage vulgarity about low life among the high life is as funny as a burning orphanage.
  87. 7 Splinters in Time
    A time-traveler becomes fragmented in disastrous ways, and so too does the film itself, in “7 Splinters in Time,” edited to ribbons in a schizoid manner that likely only makes complete sense to its maker.
  88. Poor Boy
    Robert Scott Wildes’ directorial debut is the sort of out-of-control whatsit that spins about like a decapitated chicken in its spastic death throes.
  89. Like Father
    So, if you like piña coladas, or movies in which severe childhood trauma can be hugged out on an ocean cruise, then you’ll like Like Father. For everyone else, skip the imitation and seek out “Toni Erdmann” instead.
  90. Damascus Cover
    Unfortunately, Berk’s movie is too plodding and predictable to generate anything more than a modest level of suspense; worse, it lacks enough excitement to qualify even as instantly forgettable popcorn entertainment.
  91. Siberia
    In the end, it can never decide what kind of film it wants to be, drifting into drab formlessness when it needs to find moments of poetry, and reverting to dull clichés when it wants to indulge its thriller instincts, winding up as frosty and uninviting as its setting.
  92. Broken Star
    Broken Star is a thriller interested in voyeurism, the camera’s affect on both subject and photographer, and the tangled relationship between art and artist, fiction and reality. What it’s not, however, is capable of processing those ideas in a manner that might be compelling, much less thrilling.
  93. Incident In a Ghostland
    It all seems slick, intense, and unpleasant in the same hollow way “Martyrs” did, because all the cruelty is so meaningless.
  94. China Salesman
    It’s the rare kind of sprawling, costly hot mess that achieves instant camp gratification other fiascos must wait decades to ripen toward.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt
    Even for this level of by-the-numbers action filmmaking, Cedric Sundstrom’s script is incredibly lame, and his staging of chopsocky violence is little better. Cheap-looking pic was produced in South Africa.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach
    Miami field trip only brings a pastel backdrop to the insipid infighting of the boobs in blue.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Karate Kid Part III
    The makers of The Karate Kid Part III - also responsible for its successful predecessors - have either delivered or taken a few too many kicks to the head along the way, resulting in a particularly dimwitted film that will likely spell the death of the series.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Casino Royale
    A film of astounding sloppiness, an insult to the Bond name (most likely deliberate) and a dark spot on the resumes of all involved (surely unintentional).
  99. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
    The music is overbearing, the camera and lighting too bright and obvious, and the production design borders on the cheesy. Performances range from competent to just plain embarrassing.
  100. Breaking & Exiting
    Despite surface polish, this indie feels like a classroom exercise that checks off the basic technical and narrative-beat boxes needed to get a passing grade, yet never develops any real personality of its own or raison d’etre.
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