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. Bless the Child
    Combines the most rudimentary of Catholic-inspired good vs. evil plots with visual effects that would barely pass muster in episodic TV.
  2. Pokémon 3: The Movie
    The series' quest for different and challenging Pokemon reaches a nearly absurd endpoint this time.
  3. Whatever It Takes
    Makes little impression and is sure to leave few memories for a teen.
  4. State Property
    Result is fairly good-looking video shot down by a hackneyed script, atrocious acting and a total lack of redeeming social value.
  5. Who Is Cletis Tout?
    A convoluted comic caper that labors to affect a lighthearted, off-the-cuff feel, and winds up being a copy of a copy of a bad Tarantino-Elmore Leonard forgery, with Tim Allen as a glib cinephile hitman.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Gloria
    A travesty trying to be a Sharon Stone vehicle, this wooden crime yarn easily qualifies as the most tired, unexciting mob movie in recent memory.
  7. Twentynine Palms
    Fails to captivate or intrigue at the most basic level.
  8. Message in a Bottle
    Dreary, lachrymose and incredibly poky tear-jerker that makes its audience wait and wait and wait until nearly the last second for its jerking.
  9. Merci Docteur Rey
    A disastrous stab at contemporary farce.
  10. Drowning Mona
    A white-trash black comedy, a caustic working-class whodunit in which the solution to the murder mystery takes a distant back seat to countless barbs and jibes tossed in the direction of the mostly imbecilic cast of characters.
  11. Double Take
    It's doubtful that anyone, even executors of Greene's literary estate, will be able to discern much of the source material in this frenetic trifle.
  12. Fleeing by Night
    An embarrassing failure at almost every level.
  13. National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
    By turns pointless and pointlessly mean-spirited.
  14. Corky Romano
    Ranks as the most slapdash comedic star vehicle to hit screens since Harland Williams misfired with the career-stalling "RocketMan."
  15. Halloween: Resurrection
    More uselessly redundant and shamelessly money-grubbing than most third-rate horror sequels.
  16. New Best Friend
    Obvious and exploitative even by low-bar youthpic standards.
    • 7 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Baby Geniuses
    A thoroughly misguided, unfunny film that proves you shouldn't beat a dead horse.
  18. 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.
  19. Turn It Up
    Patently absurd in both the details and larger aspects, the ultraserious pic is undermined by poor casting.
  20. The New Guy
    Overall aroma of movie junk food.
  21. No Such Thing
    Deadly dull in stretches, and just plain embarrassing in others.
  22. Joe Dirt
    Takes a prominent place along with "Tomcats," "Say It Isn't So," "Saving Silverman" and "Get Over It" on the list of reasons why raucous teen farce is headed six feet under.
  23. Bound
    Debuting writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski come off like Coen brothers wannabes with no sense of humor.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    I Love You to Death
    I Love You to Death is a stillborn attempt at black comedy.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Coming to America
    Coming to America starts on a bathroom joke, quickly followed by a gag about private parts, then wanders in search of something equally original for Eddie Murphy to do for another couple of hours. It's a true test for loyal fans.
    • 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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Scrooged
    Scrooged is an appallingly unfunny comedy, and a vivid illustration of the fact that money can't buy you laughs. Its stocking spilling with big names and production values galore, this updating of Dickens' A Christmas Carol into the world of cutthroat network television is, one episode apart, able to generate only a few mild chuckles.
  29. Cool World
    Style has seldom pummeled substance as severely as in Cool World, a combination funhouse ride/acid trip that will prove an ordeal for most visitors in the form of trial by animation.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Black Stallion Returns
    The Black Stallion Returns is little more than a contrived, cornball story that most audiences will find to be an interminable bore.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Lost Boys
    The Lost Boys is a horrifically dreadful vampire teensploitation entry that daringly advances the theory that all those missing children pictured on garbage bags and milk cartons are actually the victims of bloodsucking bikers.
  32. Killers
    Bullets fly and jokes land with a thud in Killers, a deadly dull hubby's-a-hit man farce that alternately resembles a knockoff of 2005's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and a rehash of "Knight & Day" avant la lettre .
  33. The Annihilation of Fish
    A minnow of a movie. A drear moment in the careers of all concerned.
  34. The Price of Air
    Wallows in the deviant proclivities of the rich, wearing its rancor like a merit badge.
  35. Scumrock
    Actors who can't act, musicians who can't play, and storylines that go absolutely nowhere.
  36. Hoboken Hollow
    With plenty of cheap shocks but little real suspense, Hoboken Hollow is nothing more than an uninspired cavalcade of carnage, much of it shamelessly gratuitous.
  37. Lower Learning
    Too raunchy for kids, too sophomoric for adults, this underachiever comedy targets the narrow demographic of disgruntled educators.
  38. Reunion
    Drearily pretentious, ultra-stagy exercise in middle-age self-loathing.
  39. 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.
  40. The Killing Jar
    A spectacularly boring chamber thriller.
  41. Twelve
    Can't decide if it's a cautionary tale or a lifestyle catalog.
  42. Your Highness
    That skunky smell emanating from Your Highness ain't pot; it's the stink of miscalculation that surrounds an inside joke gone awry.
  43. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    One of the most astonishingly unfunny films of this or any other year.
  44. One for the Money
    Tedious and tonally inept.
  45. 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.
  46. Fading of the Cries
    The connective tissue between its separate segments is so tenuous and unconvincing that "Cries" almost suggests a failed anthology.
  47. 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.
  48. Prince of Swine
    Incompetent on every level, from its haphazard staging to its amateurish sound mix.
  49. I, Frankenstein
    Utterly witless, listless, sparkless and senseless, this supernatural actioner makes one long for the comparative sophistication of the conceptually identical “Underworld” franchise (with which it shares producers and a writer).
  50. The Reunion
    A flabby, unfunny action-comedy produced, directed and written by former WWE exec VP Mike Pavone, The Reunion boasts one of the most poorly assembled scripts to emerge from the wrestling franchise.
  51. 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.
  52. Grown Ups 2
    Among the slackest, laziest, least movie-like movies released by a major studio in the last decade, Grown Ups 2 is perhaps the closest Hollywood has yet come to making “Ow! My Balls!” seem like a plausible future project.
  53. 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.
  54. Walk of Shame
    Watching the redoubtable Elizabeth Banks try to breathe life into the stillborn farce Walk of Shame is like watching a team of paramedics perform CPR on the corpse of Ulysses S. Grant.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Hell Baby
    Tedious and tasteless in equal measure, the lazy horror parody Hell Baby gives grossout comedy a bad name.
  56. Apartment 1303 3D
    As it is, your monthly rent is probably scarier than what writer-director Michael Taverna has cooked up in this inept and derivative tale of a Detroit flat that mysteriously drives its tenants to suicide.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Brain Donors
    The title Brain Donors sounds like a horror film and for those expecting a comedy, it is.
  58. The Ultimate Life
    At least the narrative sloppiness and ineptly delivered themes in the script by Brian Bird and Lisa G. Shillingburg (freely adapted from the novel by Jim Stovall) feel of a piece with the entire production.
  59. 36 Saints
    This confused and confusing pic delivers no thrills, chills or anything remotely surprising.
  60. I Spit on Your Grave 2
    Gore and nastiness are plentiful, but they’re just wearyingly gratuitous rather than truly shocking.
  61. Charlie Countryman
    Fredrik Bond’s direction and Matt Drake’s screenplay deliver a charisma-free trip into a world of gratuitous violence, contrivances and tedium.
  62. The Starving Games
    It seems even more slapdash and desperately unfunny than their earlier work.
  63. 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.
  64. Geostorm
    The only thing more reliable than bad weather is bad movies, and in that respect, Geostorm is right on forecast.
  65. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    Fittingly, though, given the uniformly regurgitated feel, the projectile-vomit effects are superb.
  66. Among Ravens
    Nicely shot, atrociously written, shoutingly acted and intrusively scored (to classical selections and the heavy synth accompaniment of Fall on Your Sword), this roundelay of misery drowns itself in cliche after cliche.
  67. The BreakUp Guru
    A helming debut for mainland star Deng Chao and theater director Yu Baimei, who have claimed that they’re pushing the envelope of Chinese comedy but have in fact merely pushed the genre to a new low in terms of racist and homophobic humor.
  68. Behaving Badly
    [A] ruthlessly unfunny misfire.
  69. Septic Man
    Jack’s predicament is both revolting and claustrophobic, but he never emerges as any kind of hero or villain, just a passive victim, which makes the pic’s most off-putting quality its endless tedium.
  70. Another Me
    Stunningly unsuccessful on all levels, this gothic dud wants to play on the real and metaphoric anxieties of post-adolescents discovering who they are, but the ham-fisted script is incapable of a multilayered approach, while the helming and editing are at the level of mediocre TV.
  71. Plastic
    A dismal My First Heist thriller that is all-too-aptly nailed by its own title.
  72. Let's Kill Ward's Wife
    [A] torturously unfunny exercise, which doesn’t even rise to the level of competent misogyny.
  73. Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    About as appealing as day-old beer littered with cigarette butts, the abysmal caper drama Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is one of those international co-productions produced for all the right tax-credit reasons and none of the right artistic ones.
  74. 3 Holes and a Smoking Gun
    No amount of industry-jargon blather and flashback-fractured plotting, however, can mask the wholesale phoniness and overpowering lethargy of this dreary drama.
  75. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    Six just wants to shock, though his imagination is so primitive that the effort is strained and a bit pathetic. Initially abrasive, the whole enterprise grows simply tedious well before the now-epically-scaled titular phenom is unveiled in the prison yard.
  76. Just Before I Go
    Dull and tamped down throughout, Scott convinces well enough as a guy who wants be put out of his misery, and there isn’t an actor here who doesn’t look ready to join him.
  77. Pay the Ghost
    This somnolent supernatural thriller is a low-energy wash from start to finish.
  78. The Ridiculous 6
    The scenery ain’t bad but the laughs are tumbleweed-sparse in The Ridiculous 6, a Western sendup so lazy and aimless, it barely qualifies as parody.
  79. Cabin Fever
    Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.
  80. The Final Project
    The Final Project does feel like a student film, though not in a way that benefits its own found-footage conceit.
  81. From Vegas to Macau III
    Single-handedly killing a once internationally beloved, one-of-a-kind Hong Kong genre that Wong himself invented, the filmmakers have so mangled their material to suit mainland criteria that they’re left with a string of moronic gags barely held together by cheapskate production values.
  82. Honeyglue
    Throughout, Bird’s visuals are consistently flat, and his habit of cinematographically spinning around his characters (at a dinner table, on a dance floor, in a field) is dizzying in an unpleasant, nausea-inducing way — thus creating a fitting marriage of form and content.
  83. Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    "Hillary’s America” is a slow-motion seizure of ideological rancor, served up in the filmmaker’s trademark style of wide-eyed schoolbook infamy. The only novelty here is that there’s been a subtle shift of emphasis in the D’Souza vision. It’s now really all about him.
  84. 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.
  85. The Book of Love
    Pseudo-revelatory bombshells and heart-healing epiphanies inevitably arrive by film’s climax, which only reaffirms that — no matter how it’s cleaned up, reconstituted and transformed into something new — garbage is still garbage.
  86. Just Getting Started
    Some bad movies trigger swells of anger and outrage, while others prompt industrial-grade snark and scorn. And then there are leaden clunkers like Just Getting Started that provoke an ineffable sense of sadness as one considers how much time, money and talent has been squandered on something so thoroughly useless.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Game Over, Man!
    Game Over, Man! is a movie with few original ideas, plenty of tropes, and not enough love for the Bill Paxton “Aliens” character who made its eponymous catchphrase popular
  88. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    A ludicrously scattershot drama in which overwrought feminine rage, diary-of-a-mad-woman craziness, and inept filmmaking are all but inseparable.
  89. 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.
  90. Samson
    Even if you’re willing to forgive the laughably fake beards, the unconvincing computer-generated imagery, and a man-versus-lion skirmish that might have embarrassed Ed Wood, the overall clunkiness of this enterprise may tempt you to shout rude things at the screen.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
    Jason goes to hell, and not a moment too soon. His descent has been far too long in coming, as the exhausted, witless Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday demonstrates.
  92. Total Eclipse
    A good biographical film about artists should, at the very least, inspire the viewer to learn more about its subjects and the work they created. Total Eclipse has totally the opposite effect, of making one never want to hear about its protagonists again. This misbegotten look at the mutually destructive relationship between the 19th century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaineis a complete botch in all respects.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Encino Man
    Encino Man is a mindless would-be comedy aimed at the younger set. Low-budget quickie is insulting even within its own no-effort parameters.
  94. Replicas
    How late can a thriller spring a plot twist that at least partially compensates for all the cavernous plot holes, risible dialogue, and ludicrously illogical behavior that precede it? Probably not nearly as late as the makers of Replicas wait before introducing a third-act reveal that brazenly acknowledges just how silly things have been up to that point.
    • 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.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part III
    Friday the 13th Part III is terrible, too...There are some dandy 3-D sequences, however, of a yo-yo going up and down and popcorn popping.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Police Academy: Mission to Moscow
    An inept, geriatric romp that's for completists only.
  98. The Other Side of Heaven 2: Fire of Faith
    As tedious as rush-hour traffic and as bland as a communion wafer.
  99. Polar
    Gratuitous sex, gruesome torture, copious amounts of gore, and garish imagery populate the picture. Those qualities might be reason enough for some to watch, although a great many others would do well to scroll right past it on their Netflix feeds.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Happy Birthday to Me
    Certainly, there’s nothing to be said for the acting, direction or story, which is monumentally stupid, dependant throughout on a frail girl to kill and carry the bodies away so they can’t be found, taking time out along the way to dog up a casket and haul away the contents. In her film debut, Melissa Sue Anderson clumsily carries the suspense of whether she is or isn’t the killer, with director J. Lee Thompson helping her with clouds of confusion that just get dumber and dumber until the fitful finale.
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