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. Best Night Ever
    The four leads are nothing if not game, and actually earn respect, along with a fair amount of sympathy, for their uninhibited willingness to go to extremes. But there are limits to what they can do to dispel the overall sense of mounting desperation as the gross-out tomfoolery grows ever more tedious.
  2. Merry Christmas
    There doesn’t appear to be any purpose at all to the random exchanges and interactions that pass for a plot.
  3. Sweet Talk
    Hopelessly stagebound, despite halfhearted efforts to open up what’s basically a talky two-hander, and risibly pretentious in the manner of soft-core porn that’s no sexier than glossy ads for expensive perfume.
  4. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    [A] stunningly joke-free comedy-horror hybrid.
  5. Raze
    Raze is a brutally monotonous fight-to-the-death-contest actioner whose novelty element — all-female competitors — is undermined by lack of imagination on every other level.
  6. Interior. Leather Bar.
    A partly authentic, partly scripted behind-the-scenes featurette that never quite conveys the star’s “high/curious” interest in all things taboo.
  7. Lost River
    A risible slab of Detroit gothic that marks an altogether inauspicious writing-directing debut for Ryan Gosling.
  8. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    The term “freewheeling” does not begin to describe the slapdash, anything-goes quality of the screenplay co-written by Troma mogul Kaufman.
  9. Truth
    A low-budget potboiler with an overblown score not loud enough to drown out the hackneyed dialogue.
  10. The Cobbler
    The result is a slow-motion zeppelin crash that starts as a dull-edged fable, and then spirals further and further out of control without ever growing more exciting or interesting.
  11. Indigo Children
    Eric Chaney’s debut feature, Indigo Children, doesn’t so much copy Terrence Malick as swallow the filmmaker’s stylistic tics whole and vomit them out onscreen in an ungainly if mercifully brief mess.
  12. After the Dark
    Credit for being offbeat can only do so much to redeem a neither-fish-nor-fowl bore like After the Dark, whose exploitable elements go tastefully unexploited while its gestures toward profundity turn out to be playing air guitar.
  13. Cavemen
    An utterly unevolved romantic comedy, “Cavemen” tries to split the difference between raunchy and sweet and fails miserably on all counts.
  14. The Bag Man
    It’s only the Brazilian-born Da Costa who seems to be trying to create a real character.
  15. Jinn
    [A] ponderously paced, needlessly convoluted and altogether unexceptional thriller.
  16. God's Not Dead
    Even grading on a generous curve, this strident melodrama about the insidious efforts of America’s university system to silence true believers on campus is about as subtle as a stack of Bibles falling on your head.
  17. Jai Ho
    There’s nothing easier to like than a tear-jerking, action-packed melodrama that knows no shame. But a minimal amount of skill and sensitivity are required.
  18. Demi-Soeur
    French actress-writer-director Josiane Balasko plunges in with all the finesse of a hopped-up Pollyanna, her simplistic interpretation of an impaired sexagenarian coming close to outright parody.
  19. A Long Way Down
    It’s worse than tacky, trivializing depression for a handful of easy laughs and pop-psychology platitudes.
  20. Lucky Bastard
    A new low for found-footage films, Lucky Bastard uses a porno shoot as the stage for a thriller with little mystery and lots of pointless moralizing.
  21. Ride Along 2
    Another tired, witless and potentially lucrative attempt to spin an exhausted buddy-cop template into action-comedy gold.
  22. Moms' Night Out
    There’s nothing wrong with Moms’ Night Out that couldn’t be fixed by a massive rewrite, preferably one that involves a lobotomy for the main character.
  23. 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.
  24. Buttwhistle
    The second feature from writer-director Tenney Fairchild (“The Good Humor Man”) actually attempts to be an emotionally resonant relationship tale, but lives down to its title by delivering nothing but inane comedy and insufferable drama.
  25. My Man Is a Loser
    A dismally stupid and sexist romantic comedy.
  26. The Letters
    Opting for dutiful, reverent beatification over flesh-and-blood characterizations (or insights), the film is merely a clunky primer on how poor storytelling can make even the grandest of figures seem small.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Beastmaster
    When The Beastmaster begins, it is very hard to tell what it is all about. An hour later, it is very hard to care what it is all about. Another hour later, it is very hard to remember what it was all about.
  28. Very Good Girls
    The screenplay is so vapid and cliched, and the casting so terrible, that viewers may wind up entertaining themselves with other thoughts.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th
    Lowbudget in the worst sense – with no apparent talent or intelligence to offset its technical inadequacies – Friday the 13th has nothing to exploit but its title.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Teen Wolf
    Lightweight item is innocuous and well-intentioned but terribly feeble, another example of a decent idea yielding the least imaginative results conceivable.
  31. Ironclad: Battle for Blood
    Writer-director Jonathan English’s dank-looking film delivers enough amputations, decapitations and other instances of rusty-bladed gore to distract undiscerning genre fans stuck between seasons of “Game of Thrones,” but serves no other obvious purpose.
  32. Humshakals
    The problem is not the stretched improbability of the film’s premise, or even the political incorrectness of its caricatured stereotypes (this is slapstick, after all), but rather that the actors fail to come off as funny in any of their incarnations.
  33. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Happiness means steering clear of Hector and the Search for Happiness.
  34. Exists
    Sanchez’s thoroughly conventional approach here does little to elevate a dismally generic script from frequent collaborator Jamie Nash.
  35. Rock the Kasbah
    Laughs are few, attempts at feel-good catharsis fizzle out limply, and all of Murray’s most elaborate performance setpieces — especially his endless rendition of “Smoke on the Water” for tribal elders — fall embarrassingly flat.
  36. Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
    It’s hard to imagine anyone, however, having a “Eureka!” experience watching these lame movies, this latest least of all.
  37. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    A witless undead retread served up as a vulgar revenge-of-the-dorks comedy.
  38. Reach Me
    A misbegotten venture that constantly ups its own ante on histrionic overacting, ludicrous plot twists and insipid empowerment mantras.
  39. Vacation
    Key to the success of the Vacation movies was their underlying sweetness — the sense that, for all their foibles, the Griswolds were a surprisingly functional lot. Families looked up at the screen and saw a version of themselves reflected back. Look at the new Vacation and all that stares back is a great comic void.
  40. The Last Witch Hunter
    There are certainly enough dopey diversions here for The Last Witch Hunter to be considerably more fun than it is, but even its most extravagant bouts of silliness are hampered by desultory plotting and Eisner’s oppressively synthetic mise-en-scene.
  41. Vice
    Conveying zero grit, atmosphere or texture (exterior shots are repetitively bathed in cobalt blue), and gathering little in the way of force or dramatic momentum, “Vice” barely engages with its potential ideas beyond the most blandly expository, bullet-ridden level.
  42. Strange Magic
    A thoroughly derivative and unengaging fantasy.
  43. Little Boy
    The problem here isn’t theological; even if it were in service of a different message entirely, the sheer gracelessness of Monteverde’s storytelling would be a massive turnoff.
  44. Kill Me Three Times
    Director Kriv Stenders’ tiresome tale of scheming adulterers, cruel spouses and one bemused hitman (Simon Pegg) feels like poser noir all the way, never achieving the darkly comic flair or freshness of style needed to sell its fatalistic twists.
  45. Rings
    The movie, which will be lucky to eke out a weekend’s worth of business, isn’t scary, it isn’t awesome, and it doesn’t nudge you to think of technology in a new way. But it does make you wish that you could rewind those two hours, or maybe just erase them.
  46. Home Sweet Hell
    Heigl’s performance as a coolly murderous model housewife is the only real reason to even consider watching Home Sweet Hell, an otherwise flailing and risible tale of adultery, extortion and suburban malaise that suggests a poor woman’s “Gone Girl” — one stripped of all tension, style and subtext, and instead rendered with a level of over-the-top gore that would give even David Fincher pause.
  47. Beyond the Reach
    A preposterously bad, grade-Z adventure yarn.
  48. Zoolander 2
    The results may delight those who believe recycled gags and endless cameos to be the very essence of great screen comedy, but everyone else will likely recognize Stiller’s wannabe Magnum opus as a disappointment-slash-misfire, the orange mocha crappuccino of movie sequels.
  49. Absolutely Anything
    It’s devastating to think how far Jones has fallen in the four decades since “Holy Grail,” in which he got more laughs banging a few coconuts together than he musters from his entire movie.
  50. The Sea of Trees
    This risibly long-winded drama is perhaps above all a profound cultural insult, milking the lush green scenery of Japan’s famous Aokigahara forest for all it’s worth, while giving co-lead Ken Watanabe little to do other than moan in agony, mutter cryptically, and generally try to act as though McConaughey’s every word isn’t boring him (pardon the expression) to death.
  51. Faith of Our Fathers
    A clumsily told story of friendship and wartime remembrance that has a tough time serving up a halfway believable moment, let alone a moving and powerful testimony about the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
  52. The Seventh Dwarf
    At half the length or twice the budget, this CG-animated musical mash-up of fairy tales would still be a pretty pathetic excuse for children’s entertainment, short on charm and utterly devoid of magic.
  53. Father Figures
    Father Figures...is a limply spritzing fountain of unconvincing (and unfunny) tricks out of the how-to-write-a-comedy-hit manual.
  54. The Anomaly
    From its elaborate but incoherent premise to its clunkily staged time-freeze fight sequences, not one detail of “The Anomaly” hasn’t been borrowed from a better movie. That magpie opportunism would matter less if the film at least had barreling narrative momentum.
  55. The Choice
    Director Ross Katz’s The Choice, which mimics “The Notebook” in everything but meaningful conflict, believable characters, style and emotional honesty, is a very unsuccessful story.
  56. Fist Fight
    A risible excuse for comedy that treats compulsory education as a joke and violence as a reasonable way to solve problems.
  57. 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.
  58. The Space Between Us
    If romance-seeking audiences know what’s best for them, they’ll put some space between themselves and this movie.
    • 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.
  60. The Masked Saint
    Veering from broad small-town comedy to heavy-handed vigilante dramatics, and marbled with the sort of spiritual epiphanies typically mastered in Sunday school rather than seminary, this Canadian indie seems unlikely to galvanize the faithful.
  61. Yoga Hosers
    If it’s true, as Kevin Smith noted in his lengthy introductory remarks at Sundance, that “failure is just success training,” then he should be in the best shape of his career after Yoga Hosers, an imbecilic, strenuously wacky helping of see-what-sticks juvenilia.
  62. 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.
  63. The Assignment
    Nobody — not even viewers willing to settle for good, unclean B-movie fun — is done any favors by something as crude as (re)Assignment, which gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny “Oh no! I’m a chick now!!” gender-change narrative hook.
  64. Mr. Church
    A crude sugary-sweet fantasy.
  65. Trespass Against Us
    It’s hard to say what the title of Trespass Against Us actually means, but then it’s hard to know what anything in this movie thinks it’s about. Even Ed Wood would have said, “Needs work.”
  66. Max Steel
    [A] drearily lame time-waster.
  67. The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez
    'Aranjeuz” has less of a pulse than the already inert “Every Thing Will Be Fine."
  68. Spark: A Space Tail
    It’s hard to imagine that even the least demanding of tykes will ask for a second sampling of this thoroughly second-rate animated feature, which has all the charm, and twice the volume, of a barking dog.
  69. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    What scant charms this direct-to-video-style Nineties throwback has belong mostly to Willis.
  70. Illicit
    Illicit is too tepid to qualify as an erotic thriller, or even a guilty pleasure, and the performances range from over the top to tiresomely obvious.
  71. Winchester
    Winchester is the supernatural-schlock version of a liberal think-tank paper.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Mangler
    With its clunky narrative and lack of solid scares or gory effusions until the obligatory all-stops-out climax, pic ends up with little to excite fans of “Elm Street”-style shockers or Hooper’s own “Poltergeist.”
  73. The Happytime Murders
    It should come as no surprise that “Happytime” comes up farcically short as a metaphor for racism. But its most fatal miscalculation is the decision to frontload so many of its crassest setpieces into the first 15 or 20 minutes, depriving the rest of the film of the shock value that is its entire raison d’etre.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Money Pit
    The Money Pit is simply the pits. There is really very little else to be said about this gruesomely unfunny comedy. Unofficial remake of the 1948 Cary Grant-Myrna Loy starrer Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House begins unpromisingly and slides irrevocably downward from there.
    • Variety
  75. Gotti
    [Travolta's] performance ain’t lousy, but the movie that surrounds it is, and it’s almost laughable to see this iconic star trying so hard on behalf of a project that is so compromised in its intentions.
    • 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.
    • 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).
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Death Wish 3
    Death Wish 3 adds significantly to the body count scored to date in this street-rampant series. Thrills, however, are way down due to script’s failure to build motivation for Paul Kersey’s latest killing spree.
  79. Showdown in Manila
    Its intrigue and action neither very well developed nor integrated, Showdown in Manila feels like a checklist of elements typical of such movies — hey, where’s our training montage?!? — with arthritic-level connective tissue.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
    Only saving grace is the satire pic’s opening titles, a clever lampoon of theatre trailers and advertising pitches, including a mid-credit title card that boasts, ‘This space for rent’. There’s also a tongue-in-cheek parody of disaster pic music, sung in a deep basso voice, but that’s over in about two minutes. Thereafter it’s all downhill, rapidly.
  81. Desolation
    Around the halfway mark, Desolation stops making sense altogether and spins off into the realm of free-form absurdity.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    An Innocent Man
    This collection of cliches accomplishes the almost unthinkable by bringing the prison genre to a new low.
    • 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.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Firefox
    Firefox is a burn-out. Despite the tense mission being depicted, there’s no suspense, excitement or thrills to be had, and lackadaisical pacing gives viewer plenty of time to ponder the gaping implausibilities.
  85. America's Musical Journey
    Even at 40 minutes, America’s Musical Journey could have taken us on an organic and inspiring musical adventure. But what’s odd about the movie is that instead of reveling in the jewels of our cultural past, it seems to be twisting itself in knots to avoid the past.
  86. The Outsider
    Dull, flavorless, and fundamentally incurious, “The Outsider” is a clueless misfire, the cinematic equivalent of a study-abroad student showing off the kanji forearm tattoo whose meaning he never bothered to learn.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Masters of the Universe
    All elements are of epic proportions in this Conan-Star Wars hybrid ripoff, based on the best-selling line of children’s toys. Epitome of Good takes on Epitome of Evil for nothing less than the future of the Universe, and the result is a colossal bore.
  88. Supercon
    The humor misfires painfully even when it just tries to be charming.
  89. Billy Boy
    Billy Boy is the worst kind of grab for “indie cred”: It’s exasperatingly undercooked and arted-up, failing on basic levels of character definition and narrative coherence, too often feeling like a classic indulgence for pretty-boy actors playing tough.
  90. Billionaire Boys Club
    There are no billionaires here, just a lot of testosterone where the movie’s brains ought to be.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Highlander: The Final Dimension
    An unbelievably trashy meltdown of the tartan warrior franchise, Highlander III checks in as a breakneck, roller-coaster genre ride that’s brainless fodder for undiscriminating auds.
  92. Along Came the Devil
    The budget may be low, but the level of scares and imagination are lower still in Along Came the Devil, a feeble indie horror film that sometimes seems like a straight retread and other times feels like a movie aimed specifically at Christian audiences.
  93. The Little Mermaid
    Creaky visual effects, slapdash plotting and a script drunk on cliché: There’s pretty much nothing but cheap parlor trickery here.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Amityville 3-D
    There is hardly anything original about the picture. A new cast of characters and the addition of 3-D does little to pump new life, supernatural or otherwise, into this tired genre.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Critters
    Critters resemble oversize hairballs and roll like tumbleweeds when prodded into action, the perfect menace for this irritatingly insipid and lightweight film which unfolds with plodding predictability and leaves few cliches unturned.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Hellraiser: Bloodline
    Fourth installment of Hellraiser series proves to be so bad that the director of record is Alan Smithee, the name used under Directors Guild rules when the real helmer refuses credit. The director billed in early announcements was special effects whiz Kevin Yeager -- who retains credit in that category -- but who wisely realized the released film would not enhance his resume. Except for the most undiscriminating gorehound, pic is a pointless mess.
  97. Silencio
    This turgid fantasy thriller, boasting scant thrills or imagination, douses a mystic time-travel concept with soap operatic hand-wringing to mawkishly unconvincing effect.
  98. The Intruder
    The Intruder offers few surprises of any sort.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Silent Rage
    Silent Rage seems as if it were made with a demographics sampler entitled ’10 Sleazy Ways to Cash in on the Exploitation Market’. The result is a combination horror-kung fu-oater-woman in peril-mad scientist film with more unintentional laughs than possible in the space of 100 minutes.
  100. Overcomer
    Laced with white-savior undertones this vaguely “The Blind Side”-esque sports drama doesn’t bother investigating (if it recognizes them at all), Overcomer offers nothing in the way of nuance — even its title is awkward — and, also, no respite from its religious propagandizing.
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