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. 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up
    There’s barely enough plot for a half-hour episode of a weekly TV series spinoff. And there’s even less here in terms of acting, writing and filmmaking polish to appeal to anyone over the age of 10.
  2. 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain
    Only small children with limited attention spans will be impressed by the lackluster kung-foolishness in 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain.
  3. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    If America goes to war sometime in the next year, pundits will have a field day with this movie. But barring that, it’s just another ugly, unpleasant slog through a disposable fantasy universe. The true Disney villains in this case are off screen, sabotaging the studio’s canon from within.
  4. Hell Fest
    Eye candy without much to offer the brain or emotions, Hell Fest is a competently crafted slasher film rendered instantly forgettable by its disinterest in character, plot, and motivation, let alone original ideas.
  5. Mr. Magoo
    By turns frenetic and flat-footed, Mr. Magoo is an uninspired live-action comedy.
  6. Stuart Saves His Family
    This feeble comedy isn't the worst pic ever to be spun off from a "Saturday Night Live" sketch --"It's Pat!" maintains a firm grip on that dubious distinction -- but it is woefully lacking in the humor and charm needed to attract mainstream audiences.
  7. Blue Iguana
    Blue Iguana strains to be antic in every joint, from gimmicky editorial and camera choices to a soundtrack cluttered with early ’80s New Wave tracks by the B-52’s, Violent Femmes, Only Ones — great stuff, but they can’t get a party started that’s already flatlined.
  8. Fathers' Day
    Robin Williams and Billy Crystal can each provoke a lot more laughs in a minute of standup than they jointly manage during the entire running time of Fathers' Day.
  9. Mara
    A generically conceived horror thriller distinguished only by its belief that more hysteria equals a more frightening movie.
  10. Songwriter
    Murray Cummings’ film is a cautiously peppy, unrevealing affair, showing little of the trial and tension that goes into artistic creation — just the finger-snapping moments when it all comes together.
  11. Cats
    Tom Hooper’s outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie).
  12. The Basement
    There’s a big twist at the end, but like everything else here, it aims for a shock effect that the film is simply too clumsy and psychologically far-fetched to pull off.
  13. Love Is Blind
    Perhaps the biggest problem with this story is that the filmmakers work from the assumption that the audience instantly cares about these characters. We don’t, especially when we’ve been given no good reason to. As the film’s tagline prophetically declares, “We all have blind spots.” It’s okay to keep this one in yours.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Amityville II: The Possession
    There are actually two films meandering in this mess – one a second-rate horror flick about a family in peril, and another that is a slight variation on the demon-possessed Exorcist theme.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Child's Play 2
    Child’s Play 2 is another case of rehashing the few novel elements of an original to the point of utter numbness.
  16. Change in the Air
    Without a compelling, coherent narrative drive, the film’s own spirit sags.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes Part II
    It’s dull, formula terror pic cliches, with one attractive teenager after another picked off by the surviving cannibals.
  18. Reach
    Though its heart is in the right place when it comes to many of the boldly-portrayed sentiments, the indie melodrama plays like a hokey, weak after-school special rather than a powerful and alarming wake-up call.
  19. Don't Go
    All this adds up to a big “whatever.” Don’t Go isn’t sure whether it wants to be a frightening fantasy or a poignantly warm-and-fuzzy one.
  20. The Church
    Despite all rough edges, you want to root for a project that’s so clearly homegrown. (It was shot in Philly’s First Corinthian Baptist Church, which filmmaker Frank’s family has attended for decades.) But The Church’s problem isn’t so much that it lacks polish or spectacle, or even that its special effects look like something a kid developed as an unenthusiastic school project.
  21. The Christmas Chronicles
    With its saccharine score, saturated cinematography, and trite platitudes, the film is formulaic and forgettable except for Russell’s performance as the lovable legend.
  22. Rambo: Last Blood
    Here, it’s the screenwriters, not the cartel, who should be held accountable for conjuring a virginal relative only to violate and degrade her.
  23. High Voltage
    Short on thrills and energy despite its title, this slick yet sluggish feature often seems barely interested in the horror elements that are, after all, what will primarily lure viewers in.
  24. Air Strike
    Air Strike feels like a movie whose populist yet complicated narrative elements have been haphazardly pared to the nub, while the money shots — all things that go boom, as a great many do here — were left intact.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The End
    Production is a tasteless and overripe comedy that disintegrates very early into hysterical, undisciplined hamming.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Invasion U.S.A.
    A brainless plot would be almost forgivable were it not for the perverse depiction of innocents butchered in Invasion U.S.A.
  27. Angel Has Fallen
    The plot — which is to say, the plot against the president — is, once again, a violently overwrought confection of “topical” comic-strip ludicrousness; that’s the DNA of the “Fallen” series. Yet when you’re watching a big-budget B-movie, there’s good preposterous and there’s bad preposterous.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hunter
    Steve McQueen may have felt that the time had come to revise his persona a bit, but what’s involved here is desecration.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flowers in the Attic
    V. C. Andrews novel of incestuous relationships and confined childhood always has been a superb candidate for a film treatment, but director Jeffrey Bloom has taken this narrative and squeezed the life from it. Performances are as stiff and dreary as the attic these children are imprisoned in.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Two Moon Junction
    Two Moon Junction is a bad hick version of Last Tango in Paris down to the poor imitative scoring by Jonathan Elias. Sexual obsession might be the aim, but the result is anything but hot.
  31. Braid
    Braid does look great. But Mitzi Peirone’s debut feature is so void of any substance beyond the pretentiously pictorial that one suspects her real calling is in music videos or advertising.
  32. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    While Talbot and Fails claim to have walk-and-talked their way all over San Francisco, the script — and especially the dialogue — is the most disappointing element of their first feature.
  33. Unplanned
    Unplanned isn’t a good movie, but it’s effective propaganda — or, at least, it is if you belong to the group it’s targeting: those who believe that abortion in America, though a legal right, is really a crime. It’s hard to imagine the movie drawing many viewers outside that self-selected demographic.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Endless Love
    A Cotton-candy rendition of Scott Spencer's powerful novel, Endless Love is a manipulative tale of a doomed romance which careens repeatedly between the credible and the ridiculous.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Looker
    Writer-director Michael Crichton has used interesting material, public manipulation by computer-generated TV commercials, to create Looker, a silly and unconvincing contempo sci-fi thriller.
  36. Elisa & Marcela
    A dully made, frequently ridiculous eye-roller shot in standard issue black-and-white that gussies itself up as a brave clarion call for gay rights.
  37. The Golden Glove
    The Golden Glove may not celebrate its subject, but the intimate examination it offers him is itself a privilege — one for which this ugly, unenquiring film scarcely makes a case.
  38. Poms
    Overall, Poms isn’t a film that demands the audience’s attention — and that’s a shame given the breadth of skilled, seasoned talent involved. The blueprint for a genuinely inspired, warm-hearted dramedy is indeed there, it’s just that the filmmakers can’t figure out how to properly utilize what they have.
  39. Adopt a Highway
    All evidence here suggests that Marshall-Green needs a strong collaborator — or maybe just someone else’s screenplay — the next time he gets behind the camera.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    True to form, John Cassavetes challenges a Hollywood cliche: that technology is so advanced even the worst films usually look good. With ease, he proves that an awful film can look even worse.
  41. No Manches Frida 2
    dreary...Bright, crude and aggressively hackneyed, director Nacho G. Velilla’s follow-up prizes energy over originality. While its humor elicits far more eye-rolls than laughs — and will thus leave franchise newbies cold — its high-octane style should appeal to fans of the first film.
  42. Bruce!!!
    The film moves along lackadaisically, without any knack for establishing scenarios, or setting up punchlines, that might lead to laughs — which, in turn, often makes it play like an enervating drama. Bruce!!!! makes a lot of verbal noise, but it says nothing worth remembering.
  43. Lucy in the Sky
    Distractingly over-directed ... [Hawley] triple-knots his own shoelaces here, stumbling over cumbersome metaphors (butterflies, floating) and high-concept solutions to straightforward dramatic problems when he should have just entrusted his leading lady to carry the narrative.
  44. The Professor and the Madman
    For those that have been anticipating this curious, much-delayed oddity, the good news is that Gibson is fine; it’s everything else that doesn’t work.
  45. American Woman
    “American Woman” tries to give us a fresh angle on a familiar subject, but the film is listless and desultory. It sketches in the scuzzy power dynamics of these characters but fails, in most cases, to dramatize what made them tick.
  46. Isabelle
    Isabelle is curiously old-fashioned and not at all original enough to distinguish itself in American release.
  47. Bull
    A disappointment ... The story feels lean, and most of the cast, while convincing, don’t leap off the screen the way the ensemble in an Andrea Arnold movie does.
  48. Joan of Arc
    Needless to say, a historical anti-musical that makes [the previous film] “Jeannette” look like “Moulin Rouge!” by comparison is going to win the filmmaker few converts.
  49. The Specials
    The Specials, in the end, is not a very compelling movie. It’s arduous and rambling and repetitive; it skitters across the surface of the story it’s telling. The film lacks a vibrant structure, but more than that, it never brings us close to the people it shows us.
  50. The Professor
    From its rigid, symmetry-inclined compositions to its heavily worked one-liners, this is cautious, stifling filmmaking in thrall to a reckless, retrograde man, who does little in the course of 90 minutes to merit great fascination or pathos.
  51. The Poison Rose
    It’s just a sad, unimaginative affair in which an impressive lineup of talented names goes to waste before our eyes.
  52. Killers Anonymous
    It doesn’t strike an assertively comic tone either, resulting in a superficially colorful but hollow pile of contrivances that are neither clever nor convincing enough to achieve more than time-passing diversion.
  53. Phil
    Phil is a trifle, and there’s no harm in that, but it’s an unconvincing trifle. The words “coy” and “whimsical” scarcely do justice to its coy whimsicality.
  54. Zeroville
    Franco has a truly radical streak in him, and considering how poorly the movie functions as a traditional crowdpleaser, he might as well have gone all out and pushed Zeroville to whatever event horizon the deranged project called for. His mistake wasn’t trying to adapt Erickson’s novel at all, but attempting to turn it into a tragic romance between Vikar and Soledad.
  55. Ride Your Wave
    Sooner or later, Hinako is going to have to learn to face the world on her own, which is where the tension finally arises before this dopey film reaches its sappy conclusion — by showing its heroine, so effortless on water, “learning to ride life’s waves, too.”
  56. Darlin'
    This first feature from “Walking Dead” thesp-turned-writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh (who played the feral captive in “The Woman”) proves an increasingly wobbly mix of comedy, horror and social critique, its heavy-handed indictment of stereotypical religious hypocrisy finally dragging the enterprise into caricature.
  57. The Red Sea Diving Resort
    American audiences typically adore “white savior movies,” but this one pushes the stereotype to such an extreme ... it’s impossible to ignore how badly the film marginalizes the courageous Ethiopian refugees about whom it purports to care so deeply.
  58. Ode to Joy
    Mostly known for his behind-the-camera TV credits on shows like “Modern Family” and “1600 Penn,” Winer doesn’t bring much finesse into the generic visuals of Ode to Joy. In fairness to him, no amount of directorial elegance could have saved the artificial beats of a narrative that fails to create believable sexual tension between its “romantic” leads and amounts only to an utterly shallow showdown between brothers with long-standing scores to settle.
  59. Our Friend
    So much of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the picture, until what remains is precisely the kind of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death that inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place.
  60. Sextuplets
    What was novel when Eddie Murphy did it for “The Nutty Professor,” however, feels lazy by comparison here, with hardly enough story to support them, and even though the transformations are impressive, there’s an alarming clumsiness when it comes to Wayans acting against himself.
  61. Dead Water
    As bad as Dead Water might seem while you’re watching it, it’s even worse when you replay it in your mind after the fact, and pay stricter attention to holes in the plot and gaps in the logic.
  62. Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.
  63. Nekrotronic
    The fact that none of this usually-surefire mindless stimulus is remotely inspired — let alone that the plot feels like a barely-there afterthought — turns so much cheerful sound and fury into near-senseless din.
  64. Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood
    Neither funny enough nor scary enough to be satisfying as either a shocker or a spoof.
  65. Underwater
    Underwater is a stupefying entertainment in which every claustrophobic space and apocalyptic crash of water registers as a slick visual trigger, yet it’s all built on top of a dramatic void. It’s boredom in Sensurround.
  66. The Woman in the Window
    The Woman in the Window would like to be a contempo “Rear Window,” but it’s so riddled with things you can’t buy that it plays like a bad Brian De Palma movie minus the camera movement.
  67. In the Shadow of the Moon
    The dedicated entertainment junkie now has more options than ever before. So if you’re wondering which logy, derivative, visually pedestrian piece of made-for-Netflix pulp you should avoid at all costs this week, it would be hard to top In the Shadow of the Moon.
  68. Sister Aimee
    Unfortunately, the invention on display is of a helter-skelter variety, as Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann’s film so madly lurches about in search of a tone that it feels like the first draft of a gonzo faux-biopic.
  69. The Great Alaskan Race
    With its general tone of inspirational uplift that’s too often spelled out in dialogue rather than felt, The Great Alaskan Race bears the same relation to “faith-based entertainment” that it does to action-adventure cinema: It gestures in that direction, yet doesn’t actually make the commitment.
  70. Mary
    Beyond de rigueur jump scares, Mary has little real atmosphere or suspense, and that is at least partly due to the fact that its supernatural force is so generically ill-defined.
  71. Mister America
    The movie amounts to a few weak gags stretched out to feature length.
  72. Playing with Fire
    Playing with Fire . . . is a barely glorified sitcom made in the overlit and benignly smart-mouth Nickelodeon house style.
  73. A Rainy Day in New York
    It is a retread of territory Allen has extensively covered before, but while the same can be said about almost all of his late-career work, seldom have the gears ground quite so loudly, and never before has the writing felt this chronically out-of-phase with the era it depicts.
  74. Mrs. Lowry & Son
    The disappointment of Mrs. Lowry & Son is that it finds neither of its star attractions at the peak of their powers: Both Spall and Redgrave feel stifled and stiff-jointed, hemmed in by a thin, shallow-focus script that betrays its origins as a radio play all too easily.
  75. Dilili in Paris
    In its native France, “Dilili” was released in stereoscopic 3D, which may have helped things look less wooden, but it feels as if the director stuck to a style that works well in silhouette — where characters typically appeal in profile, and bend only at elbow, knee and waist. In any case, it hurts the brain, which is clearly the opposite of what Ocelot intended.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    She's Out of Control
    Somewhere lurking behind the scenes of She's Out of Control is the germ of a good idea. Despite some funny scenes, the sitcomish treatment of a father's anxiety over his teenage daughter's budding sexuality is mostly shallow and uneven.
  77. Dirt Music
    Centered on characters who act without much in the way of logic, with much of its dialogue confined to clipped bursts of unsatisfying Hemingwayisms, “Dirt Music” is a fine-looking romance that never finds the right key.
  78. Guns Akimbo
    This undeniably slick, energetic contraption plays somewhere between grating and numbing.
  79. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    Managed (more than directed) by motion-capture star-turned-aspiring blockbuster helmer Andy Serkis, Venom: Let There Be Carnage has all the indications of a slap-dash cash grab. The set-pieces look sloppy, the visual effects are all over the place, and the laughs come largely at the movie’s expense.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    House II: The Second Story
    Director Ethan Wiley is determined to be cute rather than scary. He intros some cuddly creatures – a baby pterodactyl, plus a critter who’s a cross between a dog and a caterpillar – but they don’t add anything to the pic’s charm. Action scenes aren’t very thrilling or suspenseful.
  81. Knives and Skin
    The positive qualities lie in the surrealistic film’s bold cinematography, distinctive use of music, and diversity of cast, though that’s not enough to redeem this tedious viewing experience.
  82. Heavyweights
    There's never been a remotely significant summer camp film, and Disney's Heavyweights does nothing to advance the genre. Far worse, this yarn about an adolescent fat farm is shameful in its execution and content.
  83. Mob Town
    “You think you’re in the movies or something?” crows Davi’s Genovese to an underling, but Mob Town’s wink-wink address of its own artificiality doesn’t excuse its inept execution, which extends to a stereotypical Italian score by Lionel Cohen.
  84. Blumhouse's Fantasy Island
    The finished film plays at times like an out-of-control pitch meeting, lurching from one ostensibly clever idea to the next without having taken the trouble to connect the dots, or even to remain consistent with the two simple rules it sets out for itself.
  85. Grand Isle
    A sub-Tennessee Williams potboiler triangle between restless sexpot, impotent husband, and hunky handyman ever-so-slowly congeals into a lumpy gumbo of thriller elements in Grand Isle.
  86. En Brazos de un Asesino
    Even as a luxe fantasy of danger and hotness, the film falls short — though competently assembled in general, real high style is lacking. Too many scenes take place in empty warehouses or obviously dressed sound stages, budgetary concerns apparently hobbling the story’s feinted milieu of decadent haunts of the criminal-rich.
  87. The Secret: Dare to Dream
    Littered with confounding clichés and hokey devices, director/co-writer Andy Tennant’s feature is the exact inverse of what a passionate romance should aspire to be, let alone one preaching the power of positivity.
  88. Three Christs
    As audiences, we trust filmmakers to do a reasonably accurate job of representing stories based in truth, and we get angry when they take the kind of liberties Avnet and company allow themselves here. As if it weren’t bad enough that Three Christs were boring, it’s impossible to believe, and for that, there is no cure.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Swarm
    Killer bees periodically interrupt the arch writing, stilted direction and ludicrous acting in Irwin Allen's disappointing and tired non-thriller.
  90. Morbius
    Morbius is a movie in which it’s clear that no one ever sent the script back for a rewrite with the instructions, “Please add a script.” As in: Add spice, add dialogue, add something so that the movie plays like more than a barely colored-in diagram.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Rookie
    Overlong, sadistic and stale even by the conventions of the buddy pic genre.
  92. Come Away
    As it is, the film feels simultaneously far too heavy and not at all substantial, a long, slow buildup to something wondrous that never comes.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Legacy
    The Legacy tries for an added dimension of satanic possession, but winds up a tame, suspenseless victim of its own lack of imagination.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Graffiti Bridge
    A half-baked retread of tired MTV imagery and childish themes.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    King Solomon's Mines
    Cannon’s remake of King Solomon’s Mines treads heavily in the footsteps of that other great modern hero, Indiana Jones – too heavily. Where Jones was deft and graceful in moving from crisis to crisis, King Solomon’s Mines is often clumsy with logic, making the action hopelessly cartoonish. Once painted into the corner, scenes don’t resolve so much as end before they spill into the next cliff-hanger.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ironweed
    Unrelentingly bleak, Ironweed is a film without an audience and no reason for being except its own self-importance. It's an event picture without the event. Whatever joy or redemption William Kennedy offered in his Pulitzer prize-winning novel is nowhere to be found, surprising since he wrote the screenplay.
  97. Lazy Susan
    Lazy Susan aims hazily between the sad-sack valentine likes of “Muriel’s Wedding” and something more satirically misanthropic, missing a target it never quite commits to in the first place.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bolero
    Poor Bo no sooner has her initial introduction to amour than the new lover gets gored in a sensitive location, putting him out of commission.
  99. Emerald Run
    Emerald Run is one of the weirdest hodgepodges to make its way to theater screens and digital platforms in quite some time.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rhinestone
    Effortlessly living up to its title, Rhinestone is as artificial and synthetic a concoction as has ever made its way to the screen.
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