Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. Saving Silverman
    Misbegotten, unimaginative buddy pic.
  2. Recess: School's Out
    Animation is dull and characterless, and vocal talent has evidently received blanket direction to, when in doubt, shout.
  3. American Virgin
    Ambitious but flawed comedy.
  4. 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.
  5. Masked and Anonymous
    Evinces no interest in such niceties as credible dialogue, character motivation or forward momentum.
  6. The Kid
    Director Jon Turteltaub's insistence upon hammering every point home with giant closeups and relentless musical underlining makes this insufferably cloying and sickly sweet.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Gone in Sixty Seconds
    Perfectly dreadful in every respect.
  8. Stealing Harvard
    Depressingly thin and exhaustingly contrived. Only masochistic moviegoers need apply.
  9. 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.
  10. Formula 51
    There's an appalling amount of talent at waste up on the screen, starting with Jackson and Carlyle whose tall/short, silent/motormouth double act never clicks.
  11. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    Johnny Depp's impersonation of the Thompson figure is effective up to a point, but it's hard to imagine any segment of the public embracing this off-putting, unrewarding slog through the depths of the drug culture.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Hudson Hawk
    A relentlessly annoying clay duck that crash-lands in a sea of wretched excess and silliness.
  13. Mr. Deeds
    A perfectly dreadful film.
  14. 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.
  15. Out Cold
    A few minutes of good snowboarding footage -- all in the first reel, alas -- after which it's strictly downhill, bunny-slope style.
  16. John Q
    A shamelessly manipulative commercial on behalf of national health insurance.
  17. Friday After Next
    Surely one of the most frantic, virulent and foul-natured Christmas season pic ever delivered by a Hollywood studio.
  18. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    Shrill, strenuous and entirely without charm, Ron Howard's attempt at a Christmas classic is an elaborately wrapped empty box that will fool many people into buying it but will not greatly please its recipients.
  19. MVP: Most Valuable Primate
    A lark gone utterly awry.
  20. The Chronicles of Riddick
    May not quite gain entry to the hallowed pantheon of interstellar cheese of a "Battlefield Earth," but it's not far behind.
  21. Say It Isn't So
    Even dumb farce has to be built on logic, but that crumbles in the face of a set of tired routines playing off of stock types.
  22. Surviving Christmas
    An almost mirth-free, poorly conceived comedy destined to offer Ben Affleck bashers satchels full of new ammunition.
  23. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    Falls short on nearly every level, from production values to an inexplicable cameo by Whoopi Goldberg.
  24. Spawn
    Spawn is a moodily malevolent, anything-goes revenge fantasy that relies more upon special visual and digitally animated effects for its intended appeal than any comics-derived sci-fier to date.
  25. Schizopolis
    Some of the filmmaker's keen intelligence remains on display, but only in fractured and often obscure form, and pic overall gives the impression of a giant expurgation of negative feelings about things in general rather than a carefully articulated brief on recognizable subjects.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    White Nights
    Pic shies away from the world of classical dance, personified by leading man Mikhail Baryshnikov, in favor of Gregory Hines' 'improvography' and assorted modern stuff in blatant music video contexts.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Staying Alive
    The bottom line is that Staying Alive is nowhere as good as its 1977 predecessor, "Saturday Night Fever."
  28. Southie
    Bottom-drawer plot of a South Boston bad boy returning to tie up loose ends reads like every other "Mean Streets" knockoff in the past decade, with no scene, development or performance standing out from undifferentiated din.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Look Who's Talking
    Like a standup comic pouring 'flopsweat', this ill-conceived comedy about an infant whose thoughts are given voice by actor Bruce Willis palpitates with desperation.
  30. Swing Kids
    Apart from its appealing young cast and period score, it has precious little to entice audiences into movie theaters.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Spaceballs
    Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Unfortunately, what he does in Spaceballs, a misguided parody of the Star Wars adventures, isn't very funny.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Wall Street
    Watching Oliver Stone's Wall Street is about as wordy and dreary as reading the financial papers accounts of the rise and fall of an Ivan Boesky-type arbitrageur.
  33. All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    Will greatly peeve many hardcore fans.
  34. Astoria
    A muted coming-of-age piece that more often reflects rusty movie conventions than it freshly observes real-life struggles.
  35. Tattoo Bar
    Simple tale is made unnecessarily complex by script's desire to give everything a metaphysical flavor, characters are across-the-board disagreeable and portentous art-school atmospherics are barely redeemed by occasionally good dialogue and a strong visual sense.
  36. Mail Order Bride
    Dismally unfunny cross-cultural farce posits stupidity as the universal language.
  37. Trouble Every Day
    Over-long, under-written and needlessly obscure instead of genuinely atmospheric.
  38. Games People Play: New York
    This artless, unpolished venture adds a heavy sex-and-skin factor to a poorly defined game show, lurching awkwardly between exploitative voyeurism, maudlin confessions and self-consciously risque titillation.
  39. Strippers
    Amateurish, undramatic and bereft of any sense of pacing.
  40. Nola
    Screwball elements feel overly theatrical -- one can almost see the actors waiting calmly in the wings for their breathless entrances.
  41. After the Apocalypse
    A numbingly pretentious approach to a moldy premise -- a handful of strangers interacting amid rubble in wake of WWIII.
  42. Three Days of Rain
    Rain strives for a "Magnolia"-type tapestry of quiet desperation. But after 90 unremitting minutes of badly acted, atrociously written histrionic misery, pic leaves one praying for frogs.
  43. Toro negro
    Aimless direction and subject's self-destructiveness add up to a long, unpleasant sit.
  44. Arthur and the Invisibles
    Haplessly blends live-action and visually repellent computer-animated work.
  45. Tortilla Heaven
    As flat as a tortilla and considerably less nourishing.
  46. The Parallel
    Writer-director Jack Piandaryan appears as tone-deaf to his miscalculated dialogue as he is unable to eke out convincing perfs from his cast.
  47. How to Rob a Bank
    Amateurish, half-hearted romantic comedy-cum-heist film twists itself into unconvincing knots to pull off a guilt-free bank robbery.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Boarding Gate
    Thrills and drama are left standing on the tarmac in Boarding Gate a limp, sleazy inanity by renowned French critic cum erratic helmer Olivier Assayas.
  49. Backseat
    Culturally falling somewhere between "Sideways" and "Dumb and Dumber," this low-rent road movie similarly rides on principles of audience identification, largely minus competent helming, thesping or scripting.
  50. Harold
    A terminally lame puberty comedy.
  51. Otto; or, Up with Dead People
    Meandering at the same draggy pace as its titular gay zombie, eroto-horror-satire mixes movie-within-a-movie machinations with graphic sex scenes that will titillate anyone who's ever wanted to see someone shagging an open wound.
  52. The Black Waters of Echo's Pond
    This generic horror meller would be most at home debuting on Syfy -- perhaps double-billed with "Pinata: Survival Island."
  53. The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
    Only real payoff is seeing the monstrosity assembled, and though that will surely earn the Dutch writer-director a cult reputation on the genre circuit, "going there" does not a movie make.
  54. The Last Airbender
    This is all enormously disappointing, of course, since the best we could hope for from a live-action "Avatar" adaptation is the mind-blowing equivalent of our first encounters with wire-fu, rather than this cartoony nonsense.
  55. Standing Ovation
    At once annoyingly hyper and underwhelmingly dull.
  56. 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.
  57. Halloween II (2009)
    Repellent not only in content but in visual style, writer-director Rob Zombie’s hatchet job on the series he revived so artfully two years ago plays like a violent act of euthanasia upon the huge, brain-dead body of work inspired by the 30-year-old “Halloween.”
  58. Vampires Suck
    The lame mediocrity of Vampires Suck undeniably reps an advance for writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. By just about any other standard, however, this instantly forgettable trifle is fairly close to worthless.
  59. Saw 3D
    That Saw 3D is relentlessly repugnant will delight the franchise's fans and surprise almost no one. The best that can be said for the picture, gamely directed by longtime "Saw" cutter Kevin Greutert, is that it offers little in between the traps, which are more creatively vicious than they've ever been.
  60. My Soul to Take
    This dumb, derivative teen slasher movie would be uninspiring coming from any writer-director, let alone one with several genre classics under his belt.
  61. Wild Target
    Nearly every element here is wildly off-target, from Jonathan Lynn's ("The Whole Nine Yards") lazy helming and Lucinda Coxon's shambolic script to the embarrassed-looking perfs from usually excellent lead thesps Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt.
  62. As Good as Dead
    A muddled script, spatially confounding direction and four thesps seemingly acting in four different movies are only a few of the problems with the misbegotten political thriller As Good as Dead.
  63. Larry Crowne
    Movie stars may be less valued than they used to be, but it's still puzzling to see Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts stuck in a romantic comedy as flat-footed and tone deaf as Larry Crowne.
  64. The Apparition
    This enervating muddle of paranormal nonsense manages the difficult feat of seeming frenzied and lethargic all at once, while building toward the sort of ludicrous cop-out climax that often incites die-hard genre fans to shout rude things at the screen.
  65. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    More boring than stomach-churning, the film nevertheless contains scattered scenes and sequences so far beyond the tolerance of the squeamish that it can't be overstated.
  66. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    Less a movie than a ill-advised lab experiment in which classic children's stories are injected with Bond-movie stylings, inane wisecracks and martial-arts mayhem, this manic misfire takes storybook revisionism to ever more irritating ends.
  67. Cat Run
    If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with genre baloney -- and enough shoplifted visual trickery to fill Quentin Tarantino's kitchen sink.
  68. Redland
    The kind of willfully obscure, excessively stylized exercise that's bound to exasperate most viewers while enthralling a few.
  69. A Love Affair of Sorts
    Tedious enough to serve as a cautionary example of the pitfalls of DIY filmmaking.
  70. Impolex
    Reveling in its provocative absurdity, Impolex is a madly uncommercial head-scratcher that will strike a dream-logic chord in some viewers and leave others in a "My kid could do better than that" mood.
  71. All's Faire in Love
    Verily, this Scott Marshall-helmed production has several nutjob supporting performances that almost rescue its hackneyed plot, but there's not enough consistent madness to keep the film from what will be a fleeting theatrical career, followed by entombment on homevid.
  72. Pixels
    Where Sandler once exulted in our outrage (and frequently, our laughter), he now seems barely capable of mustering enough effort to carry a scene, let alone advance to level 255 of “Galaga.” There’s no joy left in his shtick.
  73. Alex Cross
    The cross-dressing "Madea" star seems out of his depth playing the hard-boiled detective made famous by Morgan Freeman in "Along Came a Spider" and "Kiss the Girls." Even action helmer Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious," "XXX") seems to be off his game here.
  74. My Way
    Picture operates on the notion that indiscriminate action in service of a formulaic script will keep audiences clutching their armrests, but the results fail to grip.
  75. The Intouchables
    Though never known for their subtlety, French co-helmers/scripters Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache have never delivered a film as offensive as "Untouchable," which flings about the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.
  76. 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.
  77. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    A cheaper, cheesier sequel that's worse than its predecessor on every level (save being a half-hour shorter) and takes no special advantage of the stereoscopic process.
  78. Dead Man Down
    As Scandi directors go, Niels Arden Oplev couldn’t be hotter. After putting his stamp on “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the Dane has what appears to be his pick of projects. So why follow it up with such revenge-fantasy dreck as Dead Man Down, a derivative collection of brazen plot holes and latenight-cable cliches into which he drags “Dragon” star Noomi Rapace?
  79. Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
    According to "Caesar's Messiah," Jesus Christ is an entirely fictional character and the New Testament is nothing but pro-Roman, anti-Semitic propaganda. That's quite a provocative premise for such a didactic, monotonous and unconvincing documentary.
  80. We're the Millers
    Even a premise this stupidly contrived stands a fair chance of working if there are a few decent yuks to be had, but absent any such inspiration, We’re the Millers falls back on the sort of lazy but desperate, sexually fixated non sequiturs that have become de rigueur in studio comedies, jabbing repeatedly at the human groin in hopes of eventually hitting something funny.
  81. Excuse Me for Living
    A catchy but irrelevant title is the first of many problems with Excuse Me for Living, which throws together a lot of superficially flashy elements that never gel in any organic way.
  82. Gut
    A psychological thriller requires some psychology as well as thrills, two things almost entirely absent from Gut. Its title isn't the only terse thing about this monotonous quasi-horror tale, which aims for a minimalist intensity by providing precious little character detailing or location color.
  83. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    If nonchalance were an Olympic sport, Max would be a gold medalist, and watching Somebody Up There Likes Me is about as much fun as being a spectator at that event might sound.
  84. Would You Rather
    Results are simple-minded at best, contemptible at worst; most audiences would rather watch anything else.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Xanadu
    Xanadu is truly a stupendously bad film whose only salvage is the music.
  86. Grace of Monaco
    Amel’s script is agonizingly airless and contrived
  87. Freaks of Nature
    Aiming to give teens everything they ostensibly like, and yet coming up with little more than a steaming pile of mash-up nonsense, Freaks of Nature proves a lifeless combination of alien invasion saga, zombie thriller, vampire romance and high-school drama.
  88. Paris-Manhattan
    This update-cum-ripoff might be aiming for witty and romantic, but it’s mostly a hollow, rambling effort leavened with some stargazing.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
    The earlier films in the series were far from perfect, but at their best they had some flair and agreeable humor, qualities this one sorely lacks. Hackman gets a few laughs, but has less to work with than before, and everyone else seems to be just going through the motions and having less fun doing so.
    • Variety
  90. A Haunted House 2
    It’s certainly likely to be among the worst movies in wide release this year, but it’s far from the most hateable, and that should count for something.
  91. The Expendables 3
    This is the sort of numbskull non-entertainment that considers it worthwhile to fly in a martial-arts superstar like Jet Li and have him sit around firing a machine gun, pausing every so often to deliver the most awkward line readings of his career.
  92. Stargate
    What this juvenile adventure has in spades is special effects and picturesque locations. What it lacks is an emotional link to make the Saturday afternoon he-man posturing palatable, or at least bearable.
  93. Vampire Academy
    Mead’s six Vampire Academy books (there’s also an ongoing spinoff series, “Bloodlines”) are relatively brainy and complex within their young-adult subgenre, but their virtues have been reduced to a derivative hash here.
  94. The Dirties
    This sloppy, button-pushing black comedy reveals a crew desperately in need of counseling — less in anger management than in the fundamentals of screenwriting, camerawork and structure.
  95. Chavez: Cage of Glory
    There’s precious little glory — and not even that much cage fighting — in Chavez: Cage of Glory.
  96. Ghost Team One
    An aggressively obnoxious tone undermines a decent concept and appealing cast.
  97. The Green Inferno
    Empty cynicism isn’t a substitute for well-reasoned critique, and Roth winds up looking more clueless than the so-called “social justice warriors” he’s trying to satirize.
  98. CBGB
    Transforms the glory days of Hilly Kristal’s Bowery punk/No Wave club into exactly the sort of moldy sitcom one might expect from writer-director Randall Miller.
  99. We Will See Tomorrow
    Essentially a homemovie cobbled together with bland talking-head interviews, director Yuliya Tikhonova’s film offers little to interest jazz aficionados or those simply curious about the band’s lineup of veteran sidemen from the era of classic jazz.
  100. The Unbelievers
    While every moment is captured with the reverence of a fawning fan, Holwerda’s star-struck approach neglects to shed new light on his subjects or even showcase their greatest hits.
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