Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. How I Killed a Saint
    Though weak in the drama department, the story of a brother and sister who love each other but have different political ideas and personal agendas effectively captures the tension of the time.
  2. The Other Guys
    The laughs ultimately take a backseat to a convoluted white-collar crime story.
  3. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
    It’s an affectionate, sometimes downright slobbery career salute with a soft, unexamined center — a moving experience for all involved, no doubt, but one of limited interest outside the celebrity bubble it depicts.
  4. Kelly & Cal
    This disarming pic navigates tricky emotional territory to emerge as an impressive feature debut for helmer Jen McGowan and scribe Amy Lowe Starbin.
  5. Medeas
    A primal tragedy rendered with exquisite imagery and very little dialogue or exposition, Andrea Pallaoro’s Medeas is a striking debut feature that will fascinate some viewers and exasperate others.
  6. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    One part inspiration to two parts exasperation, Andrew T. Betzer’s debut feature, Young Bodies Heal Quickly, is an initially arresting road trip for some off-the-wall characters that takes its sweet time going nowhere in particular.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Serpent and the Rainbow
    A better-than-average supernatural tale [inspired by Wade Davis’ book] that offers a few good scares but gets bogged down in special effects.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flight of the Navigator
    Instead of creating an eye-opening panorama, Flight of the Navigator looks through the small end of the telescope. Life on Earth is magnified but without an expansive vision.
  9. The Traitor
    It’s clearly made by a master filmmaker questioning the nature of repentance, and as such is far from superficial; and yet while it never loses our attention, it also doesn’t deliver much of a punch.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Train Robbers
    The Train Robbers is an above-average John Wayne actioner, written and directed by Burt Kennedy with suspense, comedy and humanism not usually found in the formula.
  11. Mafia Inc
    Somewhat fictionalizing a few elements from that decades-spanning exposé, Mafia Inc isn’t the most stylistically flamboyant, violent or memorable specimen within its screen genre. But it does provide an engrossing thicket of criminal intrigue that ultimately comes down to a conflict between two families.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens
    This is the umpteenth in Meyer’s vixen series. But are they satire, as Meyer would have one believe, or fantasy, or both? If anything, they are funny and though a bit too long, Meyer, who does everything (directs, edits, photographs and produces), keeps the action fast and furious.
  13. Gladiator II
    The movie is a solid piece of neoclassical popcorn — a serviceable epic of brutal warfare, Colosseum duels featuring lavish decapitations and beasts both animal and human, along with the middlebrow “decadence” of palace intrigue.
  14. Snack Shack
    Armed with a talented cast, writer-director Adam Rehmeier’s 1991-set feature happily squares itself in a tradition of teenage hedonism and broad learning opportunities, settling into a generic but warm glow.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Thin Man Goes Home
    Based on the characterizations originally created by Dashiell Hammett, the story emerges as a neatly-fashioned whodunit. Richard Thorpe paces the plot nicely, overcoming, before too long, the hurdles of a rather slow opening.
  16. Woman and Child
    The psychology simply doesn’t add up.
  17. Something New
    Wispy at best, this romantic comedy from a first-time director and screenwriter feels as if whole chunks have been left on the cutting-room floor, with what remains mustering intermittent charm thanks to the attractiveness, if not chemistry, of Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker.
  18. Nobody
    Nobody is a thoroughly over-the-top and, at times, loony-tunes entry in the live-and-let-die vengeance-is-mine genre. Is it a good movie? Not exactly. But its 90 minutes fly by, and it’s a canny vehicle for Odenkirk, the unlikeliest star of a righteous macho bloodbath since Dustin Hoffman got his bear trap on in “Straw Dogs.”
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriot Games
    Tom Clancy was right the first time. Paramount's Patriot Games is an expensive stiff. Mindless, morally repugnant and ineptly directed to boot, it's a shoddy followup to Par's 1990 hit "The Hunt for Red October."
  20. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    Writer-director Jared Moshé’s solidly entertaining period drama...can be enjoyed as both a straight-shooting homage to crotchety sidekicks and shoot-’em-up conventions, and a well-crafted movie about loyalty, betrayal, and redemption.
  21. Finding Fela!
    While the filmed stage performances are among the pic’s most galvanizing sequences, their inclusion underscores how flat Gibney’s combination of archival footage and talking-head interviews otherwise plays.
  22. Halston
    When it reverts to conventional documentary storytelling, then, “Halston” is thrilling stuff for fashion nerds, as well as a poignant character study of a misfit ultimately undone by an excessive hunger to prove himself.
  23. Greenland
    In its relatively small-scale, often rather plodding B-movie way, it wants to do for apocalypse thrillers what “Contagion” did for outbreak movies. And there are moments when it does.
  24. The Mountain
    Having dipped a toe into bigger-name casting with his previous feature “Entertainment,” Alverson experiments intriguingly with performance style here, submitting his otherwise rigorously controlled filmmaking to the whims of unpredictably idiosyncratic thesps like Lavant, Goldblum and Udo Kier. It’s a calculated clash that perhaps reflects the film’s own theme of agitated minds at odds with the stoic status quo.
  25. Kinds of Kindness
    Lanthimos trades in discomfort, trusting his audience enough to take his brand of provocation as they please.
  26. Bright Future
    Occupies wavelengths too remote to be tuned in by audiences other than diehard Asian esoterica enthusiasts.
  27. Futuro Beach
    Its visual and sonic verve more than compensate for some overworked symbolism.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Great Santini
    Robert Duvall gives an excellent portrayal of a semi-psychotic, softened with a warmer side. But Duvall has to fight for every inch of footage against the overwhelming performances by several others in the cast - and that's the strength of The Great Santini.
  29. Ready Player One
    It’s an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie. Yet you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It Could Happen to You
    What really make the film are Bergman’s general restraint despite the nature of the material, and the strong central performances.
  31. Proof
    But despite less-than-ideal casting of the male roles, and a tendency to soften the Pulitzer Prize-winning work's thorny humor with a more sober tone, director John Madden has woven together an elegant, intelligent drama of a breed increasingly rare in mainstream American movies.
  32. Star Trek: Insurrection
    Even though Frakes is back, Star Trek: Insurrection plays less like a stand-alone sci-fi adventure than like an expanded episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
  33. Amistad
    Aiming to instruct as well as entertain --- and often struggling to reconcile these two divergent goals.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Donovan's Reef
    Donovan's Reef, for a director of John Ford's stature, is a potboiler. Where Ford aficianados will squirm is during that occasional scene that reminds them this effort-less effort is the handiwork of the men who made Stagecoach and The Informer.
  35. Jack Goes Boating
    Displaying a girth that will give hope to overweight romantics everywhere, Hoffman knows his character inside and out and invites the viewer close to this limited, good-hearted fellow.
  36. In a Valley of Violence
    We never get more than a glimmer of personality within these well-worn character types, and West never digs beneath them to offer any sort of commentary or criticism.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big Picture
    The Big Picture is a surprisingly genial, good-natured satire on contemporary Hollywood mores.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Muppet Christmas Carol
    This adaptation of Charles Dickens' Christmas classic is not as enchanting or amusing as the previous entries in the Muppet series. But nothing can really diminish the late Jim Henson's irresistibly appealing characters.
  39. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
    Had Arakawa widened the portrait just a bit to include other voices — whether artistic collaborators or the young audiences still just discovering his work — the film would easily have demonstrated how his legacy will live forever. Then again, it’s assumed that anyone watching “Never-Ending Man” knows that already.
  40. The Lodge
    There are too many explanations dangled here, to ends somewhat frustratingly contradictory rather than usefully ambiguous.
  41. Sebastian
    Despite the film’s confident naturalism, it seems less intimate as it goes on, with Max somehow growing more distant and generic as he becomes more comfortable in his own skin.
  42. Café Society
    The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it’s a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.
  43. Peter Pan
    Handsome, respectable and well cast, elaborate production lacks the excitement and magic that would elevate the film to beloved status, and sheer abundance of CGI work weighs on it too heavily.
  44. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    Racy subject aside, the film provides a good-humored yet serious-minded look at sexual self-liberation, thick with references to art, music, religion and literature, even as it pushes the envelope with footage of acts previously relegated to the sphere of pornography.
  45. Gattaca
    Gattaca, New Zealander helmer Andrew Niccol's impressive feature debut, is an intelligent and timely sci-fi thriller that, with the exception of some illogical plot contrivances, is emotionally engaging almost up to the end.
  46. Robots
    It's meant as high praise to say that, very early in Robots, the extraordinary starts to seem perfectly ordinary.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fire
    The third feature from this Indian-born writer-director... is an underwhelming effort that adds little new to the debate over arranged marriages and fails to ignite much interest in the problems faced by two frustrated New Delhi wives.
  48. Summer of 69
    It’s a big step backward from the likes of “Anora” in terms of respecting sex workers, but at least it scores as many laughs.
  49. Last Call at the Oasis
    Whether the glass is half full or half empty isn't the point of the effervescent Last Call at the Oasis: It's whether there'll be anything in the glass at all.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Marathon Man
    Film spends literally half of its length getting some basic plot pieces [from the novel by William Goldman] fitted and moving.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Starting Over
    Starting Over takes on the subject of marital dissolution from a comic point of view, and succeeds admirably, wryly directed by Alan J. Pakula, and featuring an outstanding cast.
  52. I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not
    If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won’t be disappointed.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ladyhawke
    LadyHawke is a very likeable, very well-made fairytale that insists on a wish for its lovers to live happily ever after.
  54. The Apprentice
    For its first half, “The Apprentice” is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting. Yet I have an issue with the movie, and it all pivots around the mystery of Trump. I don’t think “The Apprentice” ever penetrates it.
    • Variety
      • Posted May 20, 2024
  55. Greyhound
    When the mortars aren’t firing, the movie ebbs, flows, occasionally sags, and sometimes rivets.
  56. The Mystic Masseur
    Succeeds as light entertainment -- even if at the cost of the material's greater potential.
  57. Trekkies
    A largely affectionate look at the weird and the wonderful subculture that's ensued and endured since the sci-fi series first beamed up in 1966.
  58. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    A not-inventive-enough romp that belches out gags at a rapid-fire clip but connects so sporadically as to leave the audience enervated but only sparingly entertained.
  59. The Butterfly
    A solidly entertaining, cross-generational two-hander, The Butterfly strikes the right balance between humor and observational bite.
  60. Vengo
    Music has always played a vital role in the films of Tony Gatlif, and in Vengo it finally threatens to take over, submerging the frail, familiar vendetta plotline.
  61. Blood Work
    The 72-year-old star, who is centerscreen throughout, makes this rather far-fetched yarn go down much more easily than it otherwise might have.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men
    For his second British live-action production, Walt Disney took the legend of Robin Hood and translated it to the screen as a superb piece of entertainment, with all the action of a western and the romance and intrigue of a historical drama.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fourth Protocol
    The Fourth Protocol is a decidedly contempo thriller, a tale of vying masterspies and a chase to head off a nuclear disaster. Its edge is a fine aura of realism.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silverado
    Rather than relying on legendary heroes of Westerns past, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan with his brother Mark have used their special talent to create a slew of human scale characters against a dramatic backdrop borrowing from all the conventions of the genre.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Paradine Case
    The Paradine Case offers two hours and 11 minutes of high dramatics.
  66. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    Performances are aptly quirky and ingratiating, Holdridge's seriocomic balance nicely judged. But the most outstanding element in an accomplished low-budget package is Robert Murphy's lensing, which recalls "Manhattan" in its B&W celebration of a cityscape.
  67. Lymelife
    Intense perfs by Rory Culkin and Alec Baldwin are standouts in a movie that brims with vivid supporting turns.
  68. The Professional
    Widescreen lensing favors tight close-ups, and multiple shoot-'em-ups are edited with panache.
  69. Cupcakes
    Momentarily abandoning the strain of imagining liberation within a realistically perceived Israel, Fox here settles for the ephemeral glow of an exuberant block party.
  70. Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
    Ultimately, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans comes across as a portrait of the artist as a spoiled jerk, albeit a jerk whose charisma cannot be denied, and whose artistic ambitions elicit grudging admiration.
  71. Maya and the Wave
    Has some gaps in storytelling and contextualization that leave it feeling like a less-than-complete picture of the protagonist’s career to date. Yet the film more than succeeds in its primary goals of providing an inspirational role model plus lots of stupendous surfing footage, a combination that will enthrall most viewers.
  72. Shortbus
    Unquestionably the most sexually graphic American narrative feature ever made outside the realm of the porn industry, John Cameron Mitchell's ambitious attempt to merge his characters' active sexual lives with more conventional emotional content is playfully and provocatively entertaining for roughly the first half, but loses staying power thereafter when investment in the uncompelling characters' problems is requested.
  73. The Grey
    The picture's dialogue-heavy stretches and ambiguous finale could leave ticketbuyers impatient for less chatter and more chomping.
  74. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.
  75. The History of Sound
    The History of Sound is a movie that never fully finds a life beyond what it is on paper.
  76. The Long Dumb Road
    Instead of slapstick laughs, The Long Dumb Road pays attention to how these two opposites connect.
  77. Fast Food Nation
    Richard Linklater's rough-hewn tapestry of assorted lives that feed off of and into the American meat industry is both rangy and mangy; it remains appealing for its subversive motives and revelations even as one wishes its knife would have been sharper.
  78. The Bad Guys
    Cheery and diverting as The Bad Guys is, it has all the emotional weight of a few crisp, stolen Benjamins.
  79. District 13: Ultimatum
    The fight sequences (choreographed by Raffaelli) are especially creative, with the combatants using any available object, including a priceless Van Gogh painting, to get the job done.
  80. Michael
    Illustrating the banality of evil in an impressively controlled and sometimes darkly humorous fashion, Michael takes a coolly nonjudgmental, non-psychological approach to a disturbing topic.
  81. The Salvation
    There’s really only one ingredient for which The Salvation is likely to be remembered: Eva Green.
  82. Serial Mom
    Fun, almost endearing in its cheeky irreverence, but also rather mild and scattershot in its satiric marksmanship, Serial Mom provokes chuckles and the occasional raised eyebrow rather than guffaws and gross-outs.
  83. To the End
    To the End keeps its large canvas entertaining and informative. Even so, it preaches enough to the choir that this documentary can hardly serve as an introduction for those belatedly coming to terms with its central issues.
  84. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Tin Drum
    Adheres to the book more than enough not to disappoint avid readers of the bestseller.
  86. Words of War
    It’s a polished, pedestrian biopic, with direction by British TV veteran James Strong that smooths over instead of elevating Eric Poppen’s cliche-riddled script. While the subject matter is compelling, one hopes Politkovskaya can someday get a punchier, less formulaic screen treatment.
  87. Dora and the Lost City of Gold
    The most endearing quality of Nicholas Stoller and Matthew Robinson’s script — not counting the fact they didn’t try to whitewash their Latina heroine — is the way it permits Dora to remain indefatigably upbeat no matter what the situation, whether navigating treacherous Incan temples or facing an auditorium of jeering teenage peers.
  88. Tokyo!
    An uneven but enjoyable trio of films that take affectionate (and sometimes literal) aim at the Japanese capital.
  89. Woman Is the Future of Man
    Taken as a film about muddling along, "Woman" never bores the viewer with indecisive filmmaking. Basically, it's an elegant jeu, played and constructed with an almost Gallic lightness heightened by Jeong Yong-jin's bursts of music, all bouncy piano and pizzicato.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Big Man
    Little Big Man is a sort of vaudeville show, framed in fictional biography, loaded with sketches of varying degrees of serious and burlesque humor, and climaxed by the Indian victory over Gen George A. Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876.
  91. Good Girls Get High
    With heartening, encouraging messages that speak to the target audience and beyond, Good Girls Get High doesn’t stray too far from the formula, but manipulates it in such a way that feels fresh.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Defending Your Life
    Defending Your Life is an inventive and mild bit of whimsy from Albert Brooks.
  93. Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult
    Loaded with the usual barrage of irreverent, politically incorrect and virtually non-stop gags. Director Peter Segal and writers Pat Proft, David Zucker and Robert LoCash succumb to occasional bouts of toilet humor, but there’s also some extended hilarity in a scene set around the Academy Awards.
  94. Anna and the Apocalypse
    “Anna” picks itself up, dusts itself off, and comes home with a finale that’s so satisfying and sincere, it’ll make some viewers misty-eyed.
  95. Dancer in the Dark
    A 2½-hour demo of auteurist self-importance that's artistically bankrupt on almost every level.
  96. Official Secrets
    The crux of Gun’s struggle is that she risked everything to tell the truth, and the war happened anyway. Ultimately, her personal story was neither uplifting, nor tragic, which means the film surrounding her doesn’t hurtle toward a satisfying arc.
  97. Seoul Searching
    Lee’s movie at once examines and embodies the complicated riddle of cultural identity: Beneath its boozy antics and largely predictable narrative developments, it offers warmly perceptive insights into how difficult it can be for so many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants to define themselves.
  98. Gwen
    Approach the film with managed genre expectations, however, and there’s much to admire (and duly shiver over) in its formidable, stormcloud-hued atmospherics, low-simmer storytelling and a particularly fine, unaffected breakout performance by teenage actress Eleanor Worthington-Cox in the testing title role.
  99. 16 Blocks
    Not that it ever rises to the level of Sidney Lumet's Gotham police pics ("Serpico," "Prince of the City"), but 16 Blocks does raise the banner for the tradition of the textured urban cop drama, spurred by action but made substantial by characters at crossroads.
  100. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    Companion piece to Teboul's "Yves Saint Laurent -- Time Regained" nicely complements that excellent film but is less riveting as a free-standing experience.
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