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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    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Cruising
    Like any approach to the bizarre, it is fascinating for about 15 minutes. In many respects, Cruising [from the novel by Gerald Walker] resembles the worst of the ‘hippie’ films of the 1960s. Taking away the kissing, caressing and a few bloody killings, Friedkin has no story, though picture pretends to be a murder mystery combined with a study of Al Pacino’s psychological degradation.
  2. All Is True
    The result is a revisionist fiasco, too dense with Shakespeare allusions for casual moviegoers, and too fast and loose with the facts for those who know a thing or two about the man. In short, All Is True takes the English language’s most gifted dramatist and reduces his sunset years to a sloppy soap opera.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    House
    Filmmakers Sean S. Cunningham and Steve Miner scored hits with several simple Friday the 13th films but tackle a more complex story here with embarrassing results.
  4. Red Joan
    Tweedy, dreary, and unconvincing. ... It’s dismaying that so little drama is wrung out of the tale, and that what we get too often feels like a cliché-riddled romantic pulp.
  5. Coyote Lake
    While the movie doesn’t work, it isn’t idiosyncratic enough even to hold attention as a misfired oddity.
  6. Being Frank
    Being Frank isn’t very amusing, which normally would be the most damning thing one might say about an ostensible comedy. But that really isn’t the worst thing about it. There is something ineffably creepy about this contrived and mirthless farce.
    • 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.
  8. Saturday Fiction
    [A] grandiloquently incoherent misfire
  9. Jacob's Ladder
    You can forge a decent drama out of elements this scrappy, but not necessarily a film like Jacob’s Ladder.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Unfortunately, the caricatures are so crude and the ‘revelations’ so unenlightening of the human condition, that the satire is about as socially incisive as a Police Academy entry.
  11. Synchronic
    Making underwhelming use of its not-bad ... conceit, Benson’s sci-fi-tinged script is not at all ingeniously plotted, insists we care about tritely sketched characters, and is never credible enough to transcend an air of escalating silliness.
  12. Color of Night
    Color of Night is a knuckleheaded thriller that means to get a rise out of audiences, but will merely make them see red. It's confounding and sad that director Richard Rush waited 14 years to make another film after his striking "The Stunt Man," only to choose a script as dismal as this.
  13. Followed
    At nearly 100 minutes — way too many for material this flimsy — Followed even has time for a couple clumsily maudlin bits, not excluding brief yet awesomely trite address of “the homeless issue” in downtown L.A. A movie like this doesn’t need to have a social conscience. It ought to have worried first about having a brain, period.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Men's Club
    Film is a distasteful piece of work that displays the worst in men. Leonard Michaels’ screenplay (from his novel) is all warts and no insight, full of self-loathing for the gender. In addition, film making is as tired as the material. Pic plays like a stageplay, so static is Peter Medak’s direction.
  15. 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.
  16. Mighty Oak
    This is a fuzzy-headed, badly made cheeseball schlock fable for everyone!
  17. 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.
  18. Cherry
    There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.
  19. Blithe Spirit
    A tin-eared, lumpen-footed, almost perversely unfunny new spin on Noël Coward’s breezy 1940s farce.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Look Who's Talking Now
    One nagging point: Pic seems aimed at kidvid market, but it revels in its ongoing references to open sexuality, including a reprise of opening credits that run over a microscopic view of squirming sperm. Very tasteful.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Sentinel
    The Sentinel is a grubby, grotesque excursion into religioso psychodrama, notable for uniformly poor performances by a large cast of familiar names and direction that is hysterical and heavy-handed.
  22. Vanquish
    Vanquish isn’t bad so much as inert — nothing here is convincing, tense, kinetic, outrageous, or silly enough to give the movie even fleeting life. The script is so by-the-numbers, the performers can hardly hide their disinterest, a feeling soon to be shared by viewers
  23. The Virtuoso
    Hopkins isn’t awful in The Virtuoso, but the movie that surrounds him is.
  24. Eat Wheaties!
    Its content and execution are innocuous to the point of tedium, while the protagonist is no undervalued sweetie but the kind of grating personality that can clear a room.
  25. American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally
    Clumsy, campy and kitsch, but also deadeningly dull for long stretches.
  26. Grace and Grit
    The film unfortunately anchors itself in an exploitative mode, insincerely using terminal illness as inspirational fodder.
  27. The Misfits
    The movie feels like both an advertisement for this posh, ultra-modern oasis and a late-20th-century smear of the people and culture one might expect to find there.
  28. Broken Diamonds
    It strikes not a single authentic chord, and that also goes for the lead performance of Ben Platt, whose overdone theater-kid turn further dooms the material’s stabs at humor and pathos.
  29. Habit
    It’s an embarrassing vanity showcase that’s deliberately campy without actually being fun, and whose stalled-adolescent “transgression” may only appeal to a few actual adolescents.
  30. Bigbug
    The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future.
  31. La Soga: Salvation
    Despite the mayhem, the film remains curiously inert, unable to generate even the B-grade buzz of a lower-tier Liam Neeson paycheck picture.
  32. The Other Me
    Its cast struggling against material with little real-world or emotional logic, the attempted “surreal” elements uninspired both conceptually and aesthetically, this is a misfire whose intentions are as murky as its results are hapless.
  33. The Bubble
    Judd Apatow made a movie. A very bad movie.
  34. Madame Web
    Madame Web feels like a cross between an extended soda commercial and a teaser trailer for still more spinoffs.
  35. Spiderhead
    Kosinski is a gifted director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. He is not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. The execution is tone deaf.
  36. Forever Young
    [Bruni Tedeschi] fails to make much of a case for why any of it should resonate with anyone outside this tiny, hermetically enclosed community. ... [An] indulgent, histrionic personal history.
  37. Final Cut
    It’s a messy and annoying one-joke movie that repeats the joke over and over again — and guess what, it was barely funny the first time.
  38. Vendetta
    Vendetta, which is so curiously timid it doesn’t even provide one memorable bit of gratuitous B-movie gore, will evaporate from your memory the moment you return the disc to the Redbox kiosk from which you rented it.
  39. Two If by Sea
    The dialogue has the crispness of aging lettuce, and the situations rely on coincidence, disbelief and a singular disregard for character.
  40. Righteous Thieves
    Director Anthony Nardolillo and writer Michael Corcoran’s film strikes a pose of sly ingeniousness throughout that is uncorroborated by any actual cleverness, surprise, wit, tension, thrills or much else you’d hope for in a high-end-heist tale.
  41. Children of the Corn
    Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.
  42. Pain Hustlers
    Pain Hustlers takes an off-putting mock-documentary approach to this tragedy, focusing on a handful of sleazebag salespeople who bent the rules to incentivize doctors to prescribe Lonafin (the film’s fictional Subsys substitute) first for treating cancer pain, and later for conditions as mild as migraines.
  43. Heart of Stone
    What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.
  44. One Ranger
    It’s a self-canceling combination of the earnest and the clueless, its technical competency shorn of any leavening style or personality.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Choirboys
    When Robert Aldrich's filmmaking is good, it's very, very good; and when it's bad it's awful. This cheap-looking ultra-raunchy alleged comedy about policemen leaves no stone unturned in its exploitation of vulgarity.
  46. Founders Day
    There are enough formulaic elements, especially teens meeting gory deaths, to keep undiscerning viewers in their seats. But the script (co-written by Erik and sibling Carson) stumbles in its climactic revelations, with an even worse epilogue bound to send patrons out rolling their eyes in unamused disbelief.
  47. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
    It’s a mad jumble, an eager product-tie-in mess.
  48. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness. No, the movie isn’t dumb fun. It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film.
  49. Flight Risk
    A crude, unimaginative, suspenseless adventure whose tension mostly derives from deciding which of its three main characters will prove the most unlikable by the time it ends.
  50. Lumina
    There’s ambition exceeding your grasp, and then there’s Lumina.
  51. 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.
  52. Old Guy
    What should be a plucky, whip-smart character-driven actioner about an elderly assassin fighting career obsolescence morphs into a dusty, no-stakes patchwork of clichés that shrugs off any resonance, let alone entertainment value.
  53. Off the Grid
    This half-baked potboiler leaves one with the nagging suspicion that it was produced simply to meet some sort of quota, and cast with actors who came on board only because they lost bets.
  54. War of the Worlds
    When it comes to customer satisfaction, does Amazon’s refund policy apply to stuff like this?
  55. Greenland 2: Migration
    Greenland: Migration is a dystopian dud. It’s like the boring middle section of a picaresque disaster film, minus the showy kickoff and catchy climax.
  56. The Singing Forest
    Provides scant entertainment value, intentional or otherwise.
  57. All About Steve
    Sitting through the picture is an endurance test.
  58. Happy Gilmore
    Added together, there are about three minutes of funny material in Happy Gilmore, and pretty much all of them are in the trailer, leaving a sometimes painfully unfunny 90 minutes with which to contend.
  59. Murder-Set-Pieces
    Pic's nastiness is so insistent, one-dimensional and excessive it risks self-parody.
  60. Fascination
    Glacially paced, self-consciously acted and narratively risible.
  61. Black Christmas
    It's debatable whether the original 1974 "Black Christmas" is, as its most rabid fans claim, the mother of all slasher movies. But there can be no argument regarding the scant merits of its slapdash, soporifically routine remake, suitable only for the least discriminating of gore hounds.
  62. Dog Lover's Symphony
    Dog Lover's Symphony feels as if an alien species had been studying Hollywood movies for 50 years and tried to make one themselves.
  63. Hitman
    A Eurotrashy vidgame knockoff that misses its target by a mile. Numbingly unthrilling as it lurches from one violent encounter to another, the pic's dark roots in an electronic, non-dramatic medium are plain to see, and unsuspecting gamers lured to theaters will soon wish they were back home participating in the action themselves.
  64. 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.
  65. Meet the Spartans
    Lazy, lame and painfully unfunny, Meet the Spartans is yet another scrambled-genre parody.
  66. Strange Wilderness
    Obviously the product of minimal effort by all parties involved, Strange Wilderness is a slovenly, slapped-together stoner comedy.
  67. Vantage Point
    A 23-minute movie dragged out, via some narrative gimmickry, to a punishing hour and a half.
  68. 88 Minutes
    Ludicrous in the extreme, the picture easily snatches from "Revolution" the prize as Al Pacino's career worst.
  69. Surfer, Dude
    Hapless, laughless movie.
  70. 12 Rounds
    The viewer, even from a seated position, deserves a championship belt for surviving this overlong actioner.
  71. Crank: High Voltage
    Benefits of the first film's ancillary gross-out will jolt "Voltage" like a speedball shot to the groin, until word of mouth spreads like an STD.
    • 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.
  73. Two Can Play That Game
    Few recent movies have conceived their central female character more contemptuously -- a fanatic for a lifestyle that appears to have come from the bestselling "The Rules."
  74. The Specials
    A vulgar, Z-grade variant on last year's "Mystery Men" for those who didn't get their fill the first time around.
  75. The Wash
    A sloppy and shoddy piece of work, filled with just about every cliche and caricature common to low-budget, low-brow comedies with predominantly African-American casts.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Running Free
    A profoundly disappointing attempt to reinvigorate the animal movie genre with the classic ingredients of physical poetry and mythical storytelling.
  77. Held Up
    A shoddy vehicle for Jamie Foxx to ride into the summer season on.
  78. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
    Silly script, broad slapstick and overstated lead perfs by B-team cast might be acceptable to target audience.
  79. Deuces Wild
    In its overwhelmingly artificial depiction of the street gangs that ruled Brooklyn's mean streets in the 1950s, Deuces Wild draws from a phony deck.
  80. The Mod Squad
    Feels like the most shameless effort yet in the renewed exploitation of the youth market.
  81. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    Disappointing in every aspect.
  82. Collateral Damage
    More than an embarrassment, it's an insult.
  83. 200 Cigarettes
    Dismally unfunny...It's clear from the first few minutes that the performers are fighting an uphill battle against lame material, and the situation never improves as pic labors on.
  84. Idle Hands
    Perhaps thinking he had a farce to play with, Flender encourages tons of mugging; by overplaying what should be underplayed, helmer and cast deliver a fatal stab to the intended comedy-horror.
  85. Sorority Girls' Revenge
    Midnight moviegoers aren't so desperate that they will opt for such trailer trash.
  86. I Am Sam
    An especially insipid example of the Hollywood message movie.
  87. The Glass House
    There's nothing in genredom quite so unhinged as the badly made psycho-thriller, and long before it's over, The Glass House collapses from wretched design and execution.
  88. Boat Trip
    Washout. Lacking the mojo even to be offensive in its stereotypical view of gays and women, this excruciating cocktail of sitcom plotting and gross-out humor makes a clunky cheesefest like "The Love Boat" look like breezy, sophisticated fun.
  89. Pootie Tang
    Has the distinction of being one of the most amateurish features ever released by a major studio.
  90. Rape Me
    This hard-core pic is a half-baked, punk-inflected porn odyssey masquerading as a movie worth seeing and talking about.
  91. Thomas and the Magic Railroad
    All mish-mash.
  92. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    A poorer film than the paltry original even as it strikes a self-consciously clever pose.
  93. Inspector Gadget
    A new standard for wretched excess is established by Inspector Gadget, a joyless and charmless disaster in which state-of-the-art special effects are squandered on pain-in-the-backside folly.
  94. Soul Survivors
    A horror movie without horror, a spook pic without spookiness and a metaphysical drama without the slightest spiritual tug, Soul Survivors virtually dwindles away on the screen.
  95. Screwed
    Latenight cable TV filler disguised as a feature film.
  96. Dungeons & Dragons
    Stunningly bad sci-fi/fantasy hokum.
  97. Bully
    By turns turgid, embarrassing and plain off-putting.
  98. See Spot Run
    Gruff and downright smelly, especially when star David Arquette is forced at one point to flop around in a pile of doggy doo.
  99. Whipped
    Grotesquely smutty and obnoxiously overbearing, this is a pitiful excuse for a comedy.
  100. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    Scarcely seems worth the expenditure of time, money and talent.
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