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. The Last Victim
    Director Naveen A. Chathapuram and scripter Ashley James Louis, working from a story by Chathapuram and Doc Justin, have cobbled together a derivative and numbingly pretentious piece of work distinguished only by the relative novelty of a female lead (well played by Ali Larter) who’s as resourceful, resilient and, when push repeatedly comes to shove, purposefully brutal as guys usually are in movies like this.
  2. Tchaikovsky's Wife
    It’s a drama of dour and often impenetrable obscurity. ... Yet everything about it that’s unsatisfying is also weirdly intentional.
  3. The School for Good and Evil
    Sure, it’s a “Harry Potter” rip-off, but had Feig taken the time to let the film breathe, it might have stood on its own. Unlike Hogwarts, where fresh surprises lay waiting around every corner, this school seems to exist in concept only — and not a particularly good one at that.
  4. Orphan: First Kill
    Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.
  5. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” lumbers and meanders, and not just because the structure isn’t there. What we’re seeing, on a human level, is only half-interesting and rather slipshod. Like “Green Book,” “Greatest Beer Run” is based on a true story, but what Peter Farrelly responded to in that story translates, this time, into a token “relevant” boomer nostalgia that hasn’t been fully thought through.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Blood of a Poet
    On the face of it, this film represents six reels of scraped together footage from off the cutting room floor. A more vague or hopeless mess could not have resulted.
  7. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.
  8. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    Though this ’80s-set horror-comedy takes an old-school approach to capturing the horrific happenings, the stunts are lackluster and the comedic hijinks are a tiresome bore. With very little interest conjured from the filmmakers to properly develop their characters, there’s little incentive to stay interested.
  9. No Way Out
    There’s enough sex and violence here to hold attention for an hour and a half, but the care or conviction to explain why it all happens — let alone why viewers should care — proves elusive.
  10. Slumberland
    Slumberland is stronger at conjuring elaborate dream worlds than it is at crafting a satisfying emotional foundation, which is generally true of Lawrence’s past projects as well.
  11. Traveling Light
    Traveling Light is an experimental attempt at social commentary that fails to provide any insight, emotion or even entertainment of the most basic kind.
  12. The Garfield Movie
    It’s a Garfield movie for audiences who have never heard of Garfield, which reads as an attempt at erasing history and reintroducing him in this high-octane, overly stimulated form for a generation with reduced attention spans.
  13. Your Place or Mine
    Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction.
  14. Marlowe
    A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir.
  15. On Sacred Ground
    The result is a movie that is not merely disappointingly uneven, but irredeemably unbalanced.
  16. The Locksmith
    The plot is so straightforward and reminiscent of a thousand other crime movies that nothing will be missed. Alas, nothing is gained either, and the entertainment value is subpar at best.
  17. White Men Can't Jump
    Director Calmatic’s 2023 remake not only fails to recapture the energy of the first film but seems to misunderstand the cinematic language of streetball, and is largely uninterested in utilizing stars Sinqua Walls and Jack Harlow except as delivery systems for exposition.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Passion of Joan of Arc
    Here is a deadly tiresome picture that merely makes an attempt to narrate without sound or dialog an allegedly written recorded trial in the 15th or 16th century of Joan of Arc for witchery, leading to her condemnation and burning at the stake. [10 Apr 1929, p.25]
    • Variety
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Society
    Society is an extremely pretentious, obnoxious horror film that unsuccessfully attempts to introduce kinky sexual elements into extravagant makeup effects.
  20. A Little White Lie
    Director Maren doesn’t trust Shannon to convey this inner monologue via his performance — just one example of the film’s plodding lack of wit or sophistication.
  21. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    This threequel is surprisingly lifeless and almost laugh-less.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Minnie and Moskowitz
    Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel play the title roles in Minnie And Moskowitz, an oppressive and irritating film in which a shrill and numbing hysteria of acting and direction soon kills any empathy for the loneliness of the main characters. John Cassavetes wrote and directed in his now-familiar home-movie improvisational and indulgent style.
  23. Lift
    Practically every scene is a cliché, every line of dialogue an echo of a better one you’ve already heard in a better film.
  24. Ghosted
    The movie is a romantic action comedy that starts off light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a dead-weight spectacle of wretched excess.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Cassandra Crossing
    The Cassandra Crossing is a tired, hokey and sometimes unintentionally funny disaster film in which a trainload of disease-exposed passengers lurch to their fate.
  26. Five Nights at Freddy's
    Faced with a flat script and uninspired direction, the actors can’t save Five Nights at Freddy’s.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    They Might Be Giants
    It’s not only unfunny, but increasingly preachy and sentimental – hammering at the cliched tale of the good-hearted nut who’s basically saner, and certainly nicer, than the pack of meanies who attempt to defeat him.
  28. The Out-Laws
    A by-the-books comedy, “The Out-Laws” misses its target. It doesn’t make its audience laugh, and it wastes its cast by putting them in the most obvious situations and giving them forgettable jokes.
  29. Eric Larue
    A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.
  30. The Modelizer
    The Modelizer feels like a sketchbook version of the movie it could, or should, have been.
  31. Good Burger 2
    It’s the lame jokes and repetitive dialogue that keep it from landing any laughs. The cast is essentially left stranded, mugging for the cameras as they desperately try to compensate for the undercooked script.
  32. Choose Love
    These filmmakers have trouble finessing their shenanigan-laced setups into anything but frequently frustrating, unsatisfactory conclusions. This title urges us to choose love, but audiences should choose to not play along.
  33. Cabrini
    Little insight is gained from what’s on screen.
  34. Enea
    The director himself has described the film as a “genre story without a genre,” and as such Ena effectively mirrors its protagonist’s equal detachment from all facets and possibilities of his fabulously floundering life. In theory, this makes sense. Dramatically, however, it’s a dead end, unaided by sporadic, leaden stabs at farce and whimsy.
  35. Brightwood
    Awkwardly enamored by the thin novelties of its sci-fi trappings, Brightwood doesn’t possess the imagination to blossom beyond them, occupying an unflattering intersection of modest production resources and unrefined form.
  36. The Family Plan
    Each setpiece is composed and paced much like the last, which only amplifies the sense of Dan as some kind of unflustered, largely unsympathetic man-machine, paused only by the script’s fleeting interpersonal conflicts.
  37. Night Swim
    Everything is at once telegraphed and derivative.
  38. The Painter
    While most performers are fine within the material’s limitations, principal villains Avgeropoulos and Montesi are notably underwhelming.
  39. Limonov: The Ballad
    Given all its omissions and elisions, and the sense of coolness-cosplay that permeates this noisy but lifeless film, “Limonov” might not be a total misapprehension of the mercurial, charismatic and infuriating Eduard Limonov, but it is at least a mispronunciation.
  40. Mother Mary
    “Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.
  41. Tarot
    Set in a world where every door creaks and there isn’t a single well-lit location, Tarot is little more than a clearinghouse of horror clichés.
  42. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2
    There may be a lot more going on “Blood and Honey 2,” but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly a shambles.
  43. Atlas
    Atlas is predictable, overlong and bland, the kind of experience it’s hard to get excited about when the star player seems to be perfunctorily running the bases.
  44. Back in Action
    The two actors are appealing; they’ve got marriage-as-domestic-fight-club chemistry. And when Glenn Close shows up as Emily’s British mother, a former superspy herself, the film calms down for a bit ­— and perks up.
  45. Our Little Secret
    You watch Our Little Secret, seeing through the paper-thin contrivances, tittering at the imbecilities, and somehow that all becomes part of the experience. It’s mainstream fodder as downgraded camp. It’s pablum so numbing it makes you feel good.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Gardens of Stone
    Gardens of Stone, Francis Coppola's muddled meditation on the Vietnam War, seems to take its name not so much from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery, where much of the action takes place, but from the stiffness of the characters it portrays.
  47. The Greatest Hits
    “The Greatest Hits” feels like the remainder-bin version of better love stories.
  48. Love Hurts
    Most audiences want action to feel like action, whereas Eusebio makes it look too much like choreography: No matter how dynamic, every fight scene seems rehearsed to within an inch of its life.
  49. It's Pat: The Movie
    Sweeney, who first invented the character while a member of the L.A.-based Groundlings comedy troupe, has almost perversely turned the relatively harmless TV character into a boorish, egotistical creep for the bigscreen. Fans of the “SNL” sketches will be disappointed. Non-fans won’t bother.
  50. Cash Out
    Every line of dialogue that follows from this tired premise is like an echo of one from a better movie.
  51. Summer Camp
    It’s surely a worthy enough premise for a good time, but one “Summer Camp” squanders through dull jokes, an uninspiring story without any real stakes and an overall phony feeling that the film can’t shake.
  52. The Woman in the Yard
    The Woman in the Yard never musters the imagination to horrify or even jolt you. It’s a tale of one-note inner demons.
  53. The Monkey
    It’s a ham-handed, lurchingly obvious mess, without the glimmer of human interest that even a sensationalist horror film needs.
  54. Double Dragon
    Even kids won't get much of a kick out of this high-energy, low-IQ futuristic slugfest, which plays down to, and in many ways, below the level of some Saturday-morning cartoons.
  55. Eden
    While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie that’s not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.
  56. The Duel
    The movie looks sharp enough, but lands like a rapier with a cork on it.
  57. Hellboy: The Crooked Man
    Everything that unfolds in The Crooked Man does so with exceptional dullness, including various psychic visions experienced by the characters, which feel more obligatory than inspired.
  58. The Silent Hour
    Not only does it lack a satisfying payoff when it comes to its set-up of intriguing, character-driven action sequences, the narrative’s emotional pull also yields diminishing returns.
  59. Decoded
    Crowded with shallow characters (particularly Jinzhen’s loved ones: his wife and adoptive family) there to forcefully inject emotion, overlong and technically pristine while devoid of cinematic personality, “Decoded” is pleasant to look at but difficult to feel much toward.
  60. The Merry Gentlemen
    Not only does the story flail trying to find its footing after a well-presented first act, some of the more cost-conscious aspects detract from the picture’s meaningful, understated sentiments.
  61. Stealing Pulp Fiction
    Malformed comedy and character beats keep the movie feeling like a rough first draft.
  62. Hurry Up Tomorrow
    Hurry Up Tomorrow bears all the signs of pop star hubris masquerading as artistic candor, despite game performances by Jenna Ortega and Barry Keogan to prop up the budding thespian.
  63. Autumn and the Black Jaguar
    You want to be moved by this seemingly conservation-minded affair, but Autumn and the Black Jaguar sadly turns into a cringe-inducing experience fast in a number of ways, undermining the intelligence and taste level of its young audience in the process.
  64. Alarum
    Michael Polish’s film gamely tries to compensate for unspectacular production values with a lot of action — but its staging is pedestrian at best. Alexander Vesha’s script never convinces, and the competent actors fail to spark, despite Sylvester Stallone’s presence as a reluctantly reunited former colleague.
  65. Juliet & Romeo
    Improperly developed, poorly executed and containing no indelible music numbers for us to tap our toes to, this “La La Land”-wannabe take on the Bard’s story serves to frustrate and bore.
  66. Until Dawn
    It’s monotonous and derivative and numbing. It’s a grab bag that traps you in a version of hell, though the problem isn’t that the movie is like a video game. It’s that it’s like a video game that’s got no game.
  67. Bubble & Squeak
    Not all movies need to serve up profound insights into the human condition, but the ones that don’t should at least be entertaining, and Twohy’s particular strain of absurdism is not just contrived, but deeply unfunny.
  68. Two Women
    The best that can be said for Robichaud’s film is that her two leads, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman and Laurence Leboeuf, give committed performances
  69. Uppercut
    The director and star’s efforts may have lifted the German-language edition, but this static, lost-in-translation revamp just comes off as effortful, for little reward.
  70. Between Borders
    Between Borders runs on didactic writing that renders the Petrosyans’ plight into a derivative period drama.
  71. My Fault: London
    Charlotte Fassler and Dani Girdwood (the duo also goes by “Similar but Different”) demonstrate visual dexterity within the propulsive action sequences, yet fail to avoid the lazy, clichéd pitfalls of the pre-existing narrative.
  72. Gunslingers
    Goosed by a couple gratuitous interludes of gory amateur surgery, the movie is eventful, with a high body count. But there’s never the baseline authenticity of atmosphere or character depth that might make so much action meaningful, or even particularly exciting.
  73. Clown in a Cornfield
    You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be.
  74. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    I appreciated that Robinson was actually trying to make a real movie out of all this. Yet it’s not a real movie. It’s a concoction impersonating one.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Number 17
    Like the play, the story is vague and, despite its intended eerieness, unconvincing. [02 Aug 1932, p.17]
    • Variety
  76. Oh. What. Fun.
    Director Michael Showalter’s yuletide anthem for unheralded matriarchs fumbles severely, delivering bland comedic hijinks, insufferable characters and generic conundrums.
  77. The Home
    Davidson shows he may not have the chops to carry a horror film, while DeMonaco fails to deliver any thrills this time. Ultimately, it’s a by-the-numbers effort that proves quite disappointing.
  78. Madea's Destination Wedding
    Nearly every scene plays a bit too long. The characters keep at it until they exhaust the situation and whatever jokes it brings, to the point it stops being funny and starts to grow tiresome.
  79. Regretting You
    The line between a good soap opera and a bad soap opera can sometimes be razor-thin. Regretting You walks the line for a while but lands on the wrong side of it.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    In Whose Name?
    The film as a whole is as tedious and frustrating as West himself, a figure who is so deeply certain of his opinions yet wildly unmoored.
  81. Swiped
    Wolfe’s particular genius seems to have been for marketing. Maybe it’s appropriate that a movie about her plays like a marketing exercise: simplified, sanitized, suspect.
  82. Glenrothan
    It’s unfortunate that the film itself is more like a bottom-shelf blend: easily drinkable, highly forgettable, bland. Worse still, it won’t get you even mildly buzzed.
  83. Driver's Ed
    Not that this is the fault of an appealing young cast gamely doing their best to inject energy and personality into inert, exposition-heavy, joke-light dialogue that could not sound less like the way modern teenagers talk if every second word was “rad.”
  84. Vicious
    The movie devolves into something inexact and thoughtless, without anything distinct to recenter it. It’s hardly a sin for cruelty to be the point, especially in horror. But you have to at least land your punches.
  85. Tyler Perry's Finding Joy
    It’s Perry’s version of a holiday movie and a connect-the-dots love story, but it’s cliché-driven in such a minimal way that it almost makes you yearn for the Perry movies that can feel like a long night of channel surfing all rolled into one.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Brave
    The main fault lies with the writing. Lacking both a realistic grounding and compelling internal momentum, pic wastes its handsome mounting and capable cast on a plodding tale that eludes either psychological or allegorical sense.
  87. Dracula
    It’s not as if we needed to see “Dracula” remade as a blood-soaked Valentine’s Day movie.
  88. The Electric Kiss
    It seemed like an entertainment that might have something for everyone. But The Electric Kiss is so overcalculated, so stuffy and labored, so infatuated with its own conceits that I suspect it will end up satisfying virtually no one.
  89. The Good Guy
    Lacking much of a satirical bite, the pic's quasi-celebration of crude laddishness becomes oppressive.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Halloween II
    There are incredibly almost never any really terrific scares in 92 minutes - just multiple shots of violence and gore that are more gruesome than anything else.
  91. House of Wax
    Direly predictable, with candle-drip pacing and a pervasive unpleasantness.
  92. A Sound of Thunder
    A clunky and cheesy disaster.
  93. Dirty Love
    Few pretty actresses have so thoroughly discarded their vanity in an outright vanity piece as Jenny McCarthy does in Dirty Love, so it's unfortunate for her this exercise in comic self-abnegation, which she wrote for herself, falls so awfully flat.
  94. BloodRayne
    Anemic action-fantasy.
  95. London
    For those who enjoy fashion-model-looking twentysomethings yelling at each other in bathrooms while doing too much cocaine, voila! Heaven is a place called London.
  96. 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.
  97. Ultraviolet
    Pic is hermetically sealed in a synthetic wrapping that's so total -- Sony's top-flight high-def cameras, visibly low-budget CG work, exceptionally hackneyed and imitative action and dialogue --that it arrives a nearly lifeless film.
  98. Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
    Juggles three separate time periods -- and is completely formulaic in each one.
  99. Nightmare Man
    Perfs are either absurdly stiff or over-the-top, and effects and makeup look like they were made in someone's garage.
  100. The Covenant
    Muddled and most unmagical offering.
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