Variety's Scores

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For 17,828 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 2.3 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: 9,160 out of 17828
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17828
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17828
17828 movie reviews
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  1. Jersey Guy
    The unfocused writing makes the film increasingly less convincing as it stumbles toward an awkwardly structured resolution -- closing on a conga line that makes "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" seem cutting-edge.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Harlem Nights
    This blatantly excessive directorial debut for Eddie Murphy is overdone, too rarely funny and, worst of all, boring.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Shanghai Surprise
    But centerstage is the completely illogical relationship between the hustler and missionary. Penn seems game and has energy while Madonna can’t for a moment disguise that her character makes no sense at all.
  4. ClownTown
    The greasepaint-by-numbers terror is often so laughably rote, not to mention so poorly written and acted, that some viewers will find considerable entertainment value here — albeit very little of the intentional kind.
  5. Surfer, Dude
    Hapless, laughless movie.
  6. Kangaroo Jack
    For auds unwilling or unable to grapple with the subtle nuances of "Scooby Doo," Warners now gives us Kangaroo Jack, a shrill and silly farce.
  7. Tomcats
    A boner-headed comedy whose sense of gross-out humor is calculated rather than inspired.
  8. The Cookout
    Loosely plotted and wildly uneven farce.
  9. My Boss's Daughter
    Director David Zucker, a master of whacked-out visual comedy during his “Airplane!” era, drops the ball here.
  10. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
    A plodding patchwork of derivative fantasy-adventure, medieval production design, risible dialogue, unimpressive CGI trickery and haphazardly edited action sequences.
  11. Darkness
    Though pic boasts decent perfs, potent atmospherics and eye-catching visuals, both psychology and plot are bargain-basement.
  12. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    Disappointing in every aspect.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Piranha Part Two: The Spawning
    This is a routine monster film, unrelated to Joe Dante’s 1978 Piranha. Idiotic premise has US government genetic engineering experiments creating a deadly form of grunions (hinted at being used in the Vietnam war).
  14. Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
    No cuddly, funky "Pokemon" pocket monsters populate this pic; this game is for the big kids, rife with a ruthless tone, heightened violence and cold calculation. However, fans will put up with a dull tale to finally see their obsession on the bigscreen.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Jaws: The Revenge
    Pacing leaves a lot to be desired and the moment-of-attack sequences, full of jagged cuts and a great deal of noise, more closely resemble the view from inside a washing machine.
  16. The Courier
    Stridently dumb action thriller.
  17. The Last Days of American Crime
    It’s an offensive eyesore in which looting and anarchy are treated as window dressing, law and order come in the form of mind control, and police brutality is so pervasive as to warrant a trigger warning.
  18. Disaster Movie
    Seldom has a pic been more appropriately titled than Disaster Movie, yet another frantically unfunny free-form farce.
  19. 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.”
  20. To Age or Not to Age
    Pappas' scattershot musings on the social, political and metaphysical implications of extended healthy seniority come off as positively crystalline compared with the random natterings of the director's friends and neighbors, who are invited to chime in.
  21. College
    Hardly superbad, but sorta OK.
  22. 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.
  23. House of the Dead
    Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on just how much 14-year-old boy you've got in ya.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Carpool
    Arthur Hiller's pacing is crude, but that seems to be the point.
  25. Evidence
    The movie itself is conclusive proof that the found-footage horror cycle sparked by “The Blair Witch Project” and mined successfully by the “Paranormal Activity” series has finally reached its low ebb.
  26. What Love Is
    Picture looks and sounds like an Off Off Broadway play.
  27. The Pretenders
    While the film’s sense of experimentation carries a fair amount of intrigue, it traps its central threesome in an Easter egg-filled intellectual exercise punctuated by melodramatic strokes. It’s skillful enough to tickle the mind and the emotions but not effective enough to fully engage them.
  28. After We Collided
    “After” was merely awful. After We Collided is atrocious. Naturally, it’s proving an enormous pandemic-era hit.
  29. The Omega Code
    By turns laughably simplistic and confoundingly muddled as it charts the "final battle" between good and evil.
  30. Rollerball
    Sheer chaos on wheels, a hysterically edited jumble that defies belief at nearly every juncture.
  31. A Little Bit of Heaven
    An only fitfully convincing Hudson leads a strong-on-paper cast, but most of the actors look uncomfortable here, particularly Gael Garcia Bernal as her love interest.
  32. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    Consistently silly and intermittently laugh-out-loud funny spoof.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
    Jensen Daggett is a standout as the troubled young girl on whom Jason is fixated. V.C. Dupree has vibrant energy in his boxing scenes, Sharlene Martin has a fine time with the bitch role, and Martin Cummins is funny as a video freak who compulsively films the proceedings.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Sculptress
    While good to look at, is devoid of psychological depth or credibility, and further marred by weak, often risible performances.
  35. Dungeons & Dragons
    Stunningly bad sci-fi/fantasy hokum.
  36. From Justin to Kelly
    The most resounding thuds in From Justin to Kelly, however, come from the musical numbers.
  37. Glitter
    Glitter deserves yet another title: "A Star Is Dull." As phony a vehicle as one could possibly concoct for a wannabe movie star, pic carries Mariah Carey into a swamp of gloppy melodrama.
  38. The Killing Jar
    A spectacularly boring chamber thriller.
  39. Condemned
    Writer-director Eli Morgan Gesner (a clothing designer and skateboarder who previously helmed the skateboarding and hip-hop doc “Concrete Jungle”) could have milked the premise for gleeful counterculture exploitation (like a 21st-century “Basket Case”) or campy John Waters-style gross-out comedy, but settles for mean-spirited banality.
  40. 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.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The In Crowd
    Murky, unappealing The In Crowd is a femme-centered melodrama that makes an awkward stretch into thriller territory.
  42. City of Dreams
    Ramchandani’s baffling screenplay contains the most obvious, stock archetypes of people recurrent in Hollywood’s uninteresting depictions of Latino communities. Yet, its dialogue, which ranges from the laughably stereotypical to the downright absurd in the context of a sweatshop, stands out as the most unforgivable affront.
  43. Cabin Fever
    Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.
    • 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.
  45. Love, Wedding, Marriage
    Performances range from wooden to hysterical, and it's largely due to Mulroney's inexperience behind the camera.
  46. 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.
  47. Fascination
    Glacially paced, self-consciously acted and narratively risible.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Fair Game
    Fair Game is otherwise notable only for its jaw-dropping stupidity, the sort of action yarn that hopes nonstop mayhem will help cloud just how nonsensical it is.
  49. Freddy Got Fingered
    One of the most brutally awful comedies ever to emerge from a major studio.
  50. A Beautiful Life
    A waste of a talented, earnest cast, this borderline offensive indie, set for an Oct. 2 limited release, shouldn't take up too much valuable theater space before fading away.
  51. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    Nothing aired by WikiLeaks could possibly be more destructive to Sony’s reputation than the release of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, the sort of movie that goes beyond mere mediocrity to offer possible evidence of a civilization in decline.
  52. Golf in the Kingdom
    In this shoestring outing, Susan Streitfeld ("Female Perversions") opts for an unsettling mix of low-tech cinematic tricks and temporal reshufflings to simulate the process of enlightenment to sometimes laudable, usually ludicrous effect.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Down to You
    Something oddly appealing about this mushy romantic tale, but first-time feature writer-director Kris Isacsson doesn't have the skills to raise it far above its formulaic foundation.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
    Although their duel offers original effects-laden thrills and stunts, it’s too little and too late.
  55. Run Hide Fight
    Merely pedestrian at the levels of direction, craft and performance, the film instead makes a grab for attention by peddling an ambiguous line on gun control and eye-for-an-eye morality. Any controversy that ensues, however, won’t disguise the phoniness of this exploitation exercise, which milks the worst fears of millions in pursuit of empty tension.
  56. New Best Friend
    Obvious and exploitative even by low-bar youthpic standards.
  57. Red Hook Black
    The characters are wearisomely one-dimensional and their situations and motives almost indecipherable due to poor exposition, weirdly pretentious dialogue and amateurish thesping.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Cannonball Run II
    Execution is uninspired, laughs are hard to find, and the script is also difficult to locate. Reynold’s high-pitched laugh is wearing thin.
  59. Murder-Set-Pieces
    Pic's nastiness is so insistent, one-dimensional and excessive it risks self-parody.
  60. Armed Response
    Armed Response has less story than your average first-person shooter video game — and far fewer moments of exciting action or nerve-wracking suspense as well.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Nothing But Trouble
    It’s a good bet a film is in trouble when the highlight comes from seeing John Candy in drag.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Avengers
    What's missing is chemistry: the right blend of seriousness and whimsy, and charmingly compelling interplay between leads Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    10 to Midnight
    William Roberts’ screenplay, while it sags in the middle, is damnably clever at dropping in its vicious vigilante theme without being didactic, and J. Lee Thompson’s direction, borrowing from Hitchcock’s editing in Psycho, creates the full horror of blades thrusting into naked bellies without the viewer ever actually seeing it happen.
  64. Nothing Left to Fear
    Features fewer small-town scares than a rerun of “Dawson’s Creek” and more wooden acting than a marionette theater. Memo to Rob Zombie: Don’t fear the competition.
  65. Strange Wilderness
    Obviously the product of minimal effort by all parties involved, Strange Wilderness is a slovenly, slapped-together stoner comedy.
  66. Left Behind
    With a “Sharknado”-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order.
  67. The Emoji Movie
    There have been worse ideas, but in this case the execution isn’t good enough to bring the notion of an emoji movie to funky, surprising life.
  68. Slackers
    Awful and subversively spunky at the same time.
  69. Jersey Shore Massacre
    As willfully lowbrow dumb fun goes, it’s pretty painless.
  70. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
    The proper mix is never found. Ill-conceived and expensive project that winds up looking like a bunch of talented thesps slumming it.
  71. The Master of Disguise
    Vehicle for Dana Carvey as a chameleonic crime-fighting imbecile is noisy, colorful and fart-gag-filled enough to amuse undiscriminating auds under the age of 10.
  72. The Trouble with Romance
    Very little that anyone here says, or does, has the slightest connection to any known reality, and if a film is going to perform an autopsy on love, the corpse should at least be recognizable.
  73. King's Ransom
    An innocuous abduction of viewers' time, if nothing else, King's Ransom is an appealingly cast but terminally bland farce.
  74. The Final Project
    The Final Project does feel like a student film, though not in a way that benefits its own found-footage conceit.
  75. Persecuted
    At a time when the world offers us no shortage of examples of what actual religious persecution looks like, for a film to indulge in this particular brand of self-righteous fearmongering isn’t just clueless or reckless; it’s an act of contemptible irresponsibility.
  76. 3 Strikes
    Exuberantly rude and crude, but generally more frantic than genuinely funny.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
    Pic consists largely of choppily edited fight scenes (usually involving somersaults and back flips) combined with various computer graphic effects.
  78. Love, Weddings & Other Disasters
    If Love, Actually had actually been as bad as its most vociferous detractors have long insisted, it would have looked and sounded a lot like this misfire.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Police Academy: Mission to Moscow
    An inept, geriatric romp that's for completists only.
  80. Date Movie
    Arguably the lamest of all the free-wheeling genre parodies that have taken flight since "Airplane!," Date Movie is stupefyingly unfunny in its attempts to mock romantic comedies, celebrities, reality TV shows and anything else that pops into the heads of its creators.
  81. Pinocchio
    The spirit of the late Federico Fellini -- with whom Benigni talked of doing the project together -- surfaces repeatedly. But that spirit fails to enliven a film substantially lacking in personality, energy, magic and humor.
    • 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.
  83. Scary Movie 5
    Audiences not inclined to laugh at the sight of a baby’s head catching fire are encouraged to at least chuckle at the various gags made at the expense of Jody and Dan’s housekeeper (a game Lidia Porto), who satisfies many of the picture’s comedic-target prerequisites by being plus-sized, hysterically religious and Latina.
  84. Nine Lives
    Nine Lives is a lot like a cat: It occasionally bestirs itself, and it would like to be stroked with love, but mostly it just sits there. It’s a pet farce so flat it makes you long for the Lubitsch touch of the “Alvin” comedies.
  85. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    From first frame to last, “Some Kind of Beautiful” is some kind of hideous, a perfect storm of romantic-comedy awfulness that seems to set the ailing genre back decades with the sheer force of its ineptitude.
  86. Fading of the Cries
    The connective tissue between its separate segments is so tenuous and unconvincing that "Cries" almost suggests a failed anthology.
  87. Whipped
    Grotesquely smutty and obnoxiously overbearing, this is a pitiful excuse for a comedy.
  88. 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.
    • 10 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
    Not even the addition of satanic rituals, farm implements or a Howard Stern-like shock jock (Leo Geter) is enough to paint over the creaky trappings.
  90. Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
    Vacuous, almost spitefully monotonous ... A dismaying creative dead end from an abundantly gifted filmmaker, the new film escalates its predecessor’s cheeky protest to a form of acute auteur trolling.
  91. Harold
    A terminally lame puberty comedy.
  92. Car 54, Where Are You?
    Crude, virtually laughless and aimed at a target audience that's probably never heard of the source material, "Car 54" should have a short patrol of theaters before being towed away to the vacant lot of "10 worst" lists.
  93. Mail Order Bride
    Dismally unfunny cross-cultural farce posits stupidity as the universal language.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Saturn 3
    Douglas is sprightly, but he has to handle some pretty awful lines in this Martin Amis script [from a story by John Barry]. Keitel’s dialog, if quoted, would be on a par.
  95. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    One of the most astonishingly unfunny films of this or any other year.
  96. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    Yet the overall look, though derivative ("The Matrix," "Blade Runner," "Waterworld," etc.), rates as Battlefield's one non-guilty pleasure.
  97. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    Falls short on nearly every level, from production values to an inexplicable cameo by Whoopi Goldberg.
  98. Supercon
    The humor misfires painfully even when it just tries to be charming.
  99. The Room
    The Room marks the writing-directing-acting debut of Tommy Wiseau, who's not just one of the most unusual looking and sounding (with an unidentifiable Eastern European accent) leading men ever to grace the screen, but a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" seem the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint.
  100. 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.
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