Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Zero Charisma
    Affectionately captures the tail end of a culture in which specialized dice, character sheets and hand-painted figurines were the gateway to elaborate flights of imagination.
  2. In the Earth
    The film feels right in line with the kind of mayhem that Wheatley has been serving up his entire career, including some graphically gory details that are hard to unsee. And in that way, it’s not unlike the pandemic itself, infecting our brains with sick ideas — which, of course, is just what a certain audience wants from a horror movie.
  3. Beau Is Afraid
    Three hours doesn’t feel at all reasonable for such an uneven collection of sketches.
  4. A Haunting in Venice
    Playful turns from a shrewdly selected supporting cast elevate the case from just another murder mystery to suitably arch gothic horror.
  5. Megamind
    Comes off as a derivative wisecracking machine rather than a feat of sustained imagination.
  6. The Signal
    Borrowing heavily from the current trend in zombie comedy and apocalyptic horror but shifting it away from the usual undead norms, pic carves out a fresh angle in the crowded indie horror universe while blatantly stealing ideas from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Pulse."
  7. Burn After Reading
    Nothing about the project's execution inspires the feeling that this was ever intended as anything more than a lark, which would be fine if it were a good one. As it is, audience teeth-grinding sets in early and never lets up.
  8. 12 Hour Shift
    Grant’s screenplay builds a Rube Goldbergian narrative of escalating, piled-up crises, from which she also engineers a just-credible-enough exit strategy.
  9. Invincible
    Handling both directing and cinematography duties, Core invests both with a clearly impassioned sense of place, period and perspective regarding this fanfare for common men.
  10. The Matrix Resurrections
    Essentially a greatest hits concert and a cover version rolled into one (complete with flashback clips to high points from past installments), the new movie is slick but considerably less ambitious in scope than the two previous sequels.
  11. Peter von Kant
    Everything in Fassbinder’s rightly canonized movie is fake, except the emotions. In Ozon’s loving, diverting but inessential homage, everything is real except the bitter, glycerine tears.
  12. Shutter Island
    Even when it's clear Scorsese has decided to employ fakery and allow it to be obvious, it's done with elegance and beauty.
  13. Allegro
    Sophomore effort by Danish helmer Christoffer Boe offers a mix of cerebral sci-fi conceits, baroque visual texture and romantic melancholy similar to that in his Cannes kudo-reaping debut, "Reconstruction." Still, pic is remarkably original and reps further evidence of a unique directorial vision.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shinjuku Incident
    Though hyped as a rare straight dramatic outing by Chan, the picture still has him displaying his action skills, if less sensationally than usual.
  15. Boiler Room
    Begins extremely well as a saga of greed and conspicuous consumption, but gradually loses its bite.
  16. This Girl's Life
    May not be a complete success, but it is in some ways that rarest of commodities in American movies: It is a movie about sex and sexuality, in its many perversions and permutations, done without falling back on an exploitatively comic or violent scenario.
  17. Diamonds and Rust
    Expertly edited chronicle doesn't lead to any major explosion, but reveals plenty -- little of it pleasant -- en-route.
  18. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
    Will interest Rivette admirers at fests and in the niche arena but will do nothing to broaden his appeal.
  19. The Parking Lot Movie
    Unfortunately, picture's concept doesn't stretch to 74 minutes.
  20. Amigo
    Good intentions can't breathe fresh life into cliches or dispel the overall impression of schematic didacticism.
  21. Wretches & Jabberers
    The ability to mix humor and emotion is the strong suit of this upbeat, music-saturated documentary.
  22. The Nine Muses
    Akomfrah's steady, patient pace makes it fairly easy and ultimately fascinating to absorb his many heady references.
  23. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
    "Sweet, funny, clever comedy seeks crossover" would be the Craigslist come-on for Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, and it may well come true via Madeleine Olnek's wry homage to '50s sci-fi, urban dating and interspecies romance.
  24. Keyhole
    Maddin's singular humor and fabulous black-and-white mise-en-scene can't sustain this fever dream beyond its initial fascination, making for an intriguing transitional work unlikely to broaden his audience.
  25. Student
    There’s much to admire in the film’s elegantly classical tempo and the way Omirbayev achieves so much with so little.
  26. Peaches Does Herself
    This high-grade concert film will enthrall fans and amuse more open-minded newbies, though it suffers from the most dynamic material being largely clustered in the pic’s front section.
  27. Brand: A Second Coming
    Brand: A Second Coming is never dull, moving at a busy clip appropriate to its seemingly tireless globe-trotting protagonist.
  28. Love at First Fight
    Though the slow-boil chemistry is there, the script feels flat, content to rely on the surface friction between its lead actors, rather than creating scenes in which we can really get to know the pair’s respective personalities before testing their limits in the field.
  29. Margarita with a Straw
    Overall, Margarita, With a Straw is an unexpected delight of charm and substance.
  30. A Good American
    If the doc’s ultimate argument is less than wholly persuasive, A Good American nonetheless paints a fascinating picture of Binney’s mind, and the way in which he first envisioned ThinThread as a giant neural network-like globe filled with graphically linked nodes.
  31. Ana, Mon Amour
    Călin Peter Netzer’s follow-up to his Golden Bear winner “Child’s Pose” lacks that film’s directness and drive, and not only because this time he’s chosen to shuffle the sequence of events.
  32. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
    Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is an outstanding Stanley Kramer production, superior in almost every imaginable way, which examines its subject matter with perception, depth, insight, humor and feeling.
  33. Sheikh Jackson
    All told, it’s a well-crafted but middling drama whose attention-catching gimmick only gets in the way.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Night Shift
    Though the plotline hardly sounds like a family film, this is probably the most sanitized treatment of pimps and prostitution audiences will ever see. None of this much matters, because director Ron Howard and screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, all TV veterans, are only bent on giving the audience a good time.
    • Variety
  35. Dying to Survive
    Director and co-writer Wen Muye’s feature debut is a classy crowd-pleaser and an interesting example of a Chinese film that shows public protests and casts officialdom in a frequently unflattering light yet still received the stamp of approval from state censors.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Punisher
    Dolph Lundgren looks just as if he’s stepped out of a comic book. Thankfully, he breezes through the B-grade plot with tongue firmly placed in cheek.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Strongest Man in the World
    The students of Medfield College unintentionally zap the laws of nature with unexpected and sometimes hilarious results.
  38. Age Out
    Despite its climactic eye-rolls, Friday’s Child is a great showcase for Sheridan
  39. Amanda
    The film — in tandem with Lacoste’s lovely, unguarded performance — works as a magnified study in coping, charting the stages of his jumpstarted growing-up alongside the more meandering course of his grief.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man from Snowy River
    A rattling good adventure story, inspired by a legendary poem [by A.B. 'Banjo' Paterson] which nearly every Australian had drummed into him as a child, filmed in spectacularly rugged terrain in the Great Dividing Ranges in Victoria.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreamscape
    Film [from a screen story by David Loughery] centers on 'dreamlinking', the psychic projection of one person's consciousness into a sleeping person's subconscious, or his dreams. If that sounds far-fetched, it is.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Phantom of the Opera
    Phantom of the Opera is far more of a musical than a chiller, though this element is not to be altogether discounted, and holds novelty appeal.
  43. Sing Me a Song
    While more than an hour and a half seems like a long time to make the simplistic statement that the internet is bad, Balmès has greater profundity in mind when disseminating astute observations about how modern necessities and communicative devices impact cultures and ecosystems.
  44. Tove
    Marking her fifth feature, Bergroth flexes her considerable cinematic powers, conjuring vibrantly expressive visuals and confident performances from her talented cast, especially the petite theater thesp Pöysti, who excels in her first leading film role and strongly resembles the real Tove.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Outsider
    The Outsider represents the first attempt to get behind the incessant headlines and into the minds and motives at work on one of the longest-fought terrorist campaigns of the times - through an intelligent fictional story with an Irish setting.
  46. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    “Money Shot,” with a no-fuss journalistic evenhandedness, makes the case that the reaction against the site, though most of it came from an unassailable moral place, may have been out of balance — that it wound up hurting sex workers without actually doing anything tangible to help the victims of trafficking.
  47. Butterfly Vision
    It would be unfortunate if this contextual thicket were to obscure the merits of Butterfly Vision, which, while certainly not reinventing the war-is-hell wheel, is interesting to analyse in formal terms, especially in its sometimes effective, sometimes glib use of modern tech.
  48. The Beautiful Summer
    In the end, this is a tender tale befitting its summer trappings. It is wistful and witty, sultry and soothing.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Created Woman
    In Frankenstein Created Woman the good doctor, as usual, played by Peter Cushing, doesn't really create woman, he just makes a few important changes in the design. Considering the result is beautiful blonde Susan Denberg, most film fans would like to see the doctor get a grant from the Ford Foundation, or even the CIA.
  50. Bone Lake
    While not perfect, the psychological thriller is cleverly conceived and confidently executed enough to make for a fun ride, one that eventually takes the full plunge into bloody black comedy terrain.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crime in the Streets
    Crime in the Streets, in its jump from a TV origin, sets out to be a gutsy melodrama about slum area delinquents and, within the framework of Reginald Rose's highly contrived story, succeeds in making its shock points under Don Siegel's pat directorial handling.
  52. Bubble
    Likeable if unexciting little tale.
  53. ATL
    Higher on stylistic dazzle than originality or coherence.
    • 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.
  55. Thanksgiving
    Thanksgiving follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have.
  56. Youth in Revolt
    Cera and his gifted comic co-stars elevate the mediocre source material into a semi-iconic coming-of-age story.
  57. Love and Monsters
    In Love and Monsters, love is good, monsters are bad and feeling like Tom Cruise is “awesome.”
  58. Mayhem
    A smartly constructed and sardonically funny indie with attitude that somehow manages the tricky feat of being exuberantly over the top even as it remains consistently on target.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stage Fright
    Alfred Hitchcock doesn't stress melodrama throughout. He plays a surprising number of sequences strictly for lightness. Also, he has a choice cast to put through its paces, and there's not a bad performance anywhere [In this adaption by Alma Reville of a novel by Selwyn Jepson]. The dialog has purpose, either for a chuckle or a thrill, and the pace is good.
  60. Stander
    Takes a notorious true story about a loyal soldier-turned-bank robber, and pumps it up into charged if uneven entertainment.
  61. Stinking Heaven
    Whether scenes tilt toward very mordant farce or gut-stabbing trauma, there’s a compelling sense — crafted or otherwise — that the actors are driving the tone from scene to scene, with Silver and his incisive editor Stephen Gurewitz determining the emotional transitions between them.
  62. Uncorked
    An earnest, scrappy, and finally touching drama about a young man from Memphis who’s got a dream — he’s a wine buff who wants to become a sommelier — but if he follows it, it will tear him away from everything his father yearned for him to be. That, of course, is part of why it’s a tasty dream.
  63. Julia
    The miscalculated and overlong Julia proves a startling misfire for "The Dreamlife of Angels" writer-helmer Erick Zonca and dependably fearless actress Tilda Swinton.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tequila Sunrise
    There's not much kick in this cocktail, despite its mix of quality ingredients. Casually glamorous South Bay is the setting for a story of little substance as writer-director Robert Towne attempts a study of friendship and trust but gets lost in a clutter of drug dealings and police operations.
  65. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    An energetic, nicely balanced documentary containing all the necessary elements for sports reportage with the added advantage of meatier issues attached.
  66. Farmageddon
    Racks up damning anecdotal evidence without substantially altering the discussion.
  67. Amerikatsi
    Eventually, the two opposing modes of visual storytelling at its core (one distinctly intimate, the other distant and observational) come into explosive contact like matter and antimatter, as the idea of art metaphorically gazing back at its viewer takes distinctly literal form.
  68. Hotel Mumbai
    Sitting through the harrowing events again nearly a decade later could hardly be described as entertainment, and the film plays to many of the same unseemly impulses that make disaster movies so compelling, exploiting the tragedy of the situation for spectacle’s sake.
  69. Anything's Possible
    It still plays a bit too much like a public service announcement — where characters embody and express trans-accepting talking points — and not enough like the funny, sexy teen rom-coms that clearly inspired it.
  70. Severance
    Escalating blend of black humor and grisly goings-on in the wilds of Hungary fully delivers in its latter half.
  71. Totally F***ed Up
    This ultra-low-budget, Godardian "homo movie" feels like a step backward to his earlier group mopes rather than an advance beyond his provocative last film, The Living End.
  72. Happy, Texas
    Steve Zahn shines throughout Mark Illsley's feature debut, Happy, Texas, elevating this eccentric small-town comedy a notch or two above its level of writing.
  73. The Young Karl Marx
    It’s dutiful, but it’s also superficial and polite, and it commits the genteel sin of the old biopics: It turns its hero into a plaster saint.
  74. V for Vendetta
    Suffers from many of same problems as last two installments of producers Andy and Larry Wachowski's "Matrix" franchise: indigestible dialogue, pacing difficulties and too much pseudo-philosophical info.
  75. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    A work of both modest enchantment and enchanting modesty, grounded in a classically Spielbergian realm where childlike wonderment crosses paths with the tough realities of young adulthood.
  76. Oh, Hi!
    Gordon and Lerman are two committed performers with excellent chemistry and comic timing during these scenes, and much of Gordon’s physical work as the crazy soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend is genuinely impressive and funny. But the seams of Brooks’ writing show often, becoming impossible to ignore.
  77. Bleak Street
    Certain images...leave lasting impressions, though Garciadiego’s script doesn’t seem to do enough with the story, other than laying it out in linear order for Ripstein to film.
  78. Misbehaviour
    Misbehaviour says good riddance to a bad era in the brightest, politest way possible: too politely, perhaps, if you’re seeking a feminist comedy that actually lives up to the raucous promise of its title.
  79. The Same River Twice
    Has the built-in curiosity value of watching real people evolve on camera -- a fascination increased by subjects' original, variably sustained commitment to countercultural ideals.
  80. Simon & the Oaks
    Though it retains the narrative complexity of the Swedish bestseller on which it's based, WWII saga Simon and the Oaks never creates an emotional or intellectual throughline of its own.
  81. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Closer to a straight-ahead medieval battle picture than the fantastical, other-worldly journey depicted in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," this new entry is a bit darker, more conventional and more crisply made than its 2005 predecessor.
  82. Lee
    Even at her character’s most vulnerable, the Oscar-winning actor presents Lee with an edge of defensiveness, her guard never fully down, likely tied to a traumatic event in childhood.
  83. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    It has a kicky, kinetic heist movie at its heart, and its action sequences are machine-tooled spectacles of the first order. Its performances, starting with Alden Ehrenreich as the young Han Solo and extending to the film-stealing Donald Glover as his wily frenemy Lando Calrissian, are consistently entertaining.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Two Mules for Sister Sara
    Two Mules for Sister Sara might have worked. But with Clint Eastwood as one of the mules, an American mercenary looking for a fast peso in old French-occupied Mexico, Shirley MacLaine as a scarlet sister disguised in a nun's habit, and Don Siegel's by-the-old-book direction, it doesn't.
  85. The Mask of Zorro
    The return of the legendary swordsman is well served by a grandly mounted production in the classical style.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Arizona Dream
    Impeccably lensed in Alaska, New York and Douglas, Ariz, pic remains stuck in an awkward netherworld between slapstick and pathos.
  87. Iron Man 3
    Iron Man 3 is more perfunctory and workmanlike than its two predecessors, but this solid production still delivers more than enough of what fans expect.
  88. The Sweet East
    The film is intriguingly anthropological in its take on America as a subject, viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience — there’s a sense of disintegration and incipient violence seeping through everything, which occasionally explodes to entertaining effect, but there’s clearly deep affection there too.
  89. Alien: Resurrection
    As a series of action set pieces, the movie is frequently gripping and always highly watchable. However, when the movie strays into weirder territory --- where, one feels, Jeunet's heart really lies --- there's a growing feeling of inadequacy.
  90. Hollywoodland
    First-time scripter Paul Bernbaum's framing story, designed to stir up suspicion that George Reeves was a murder victim rather than a suicide, unfortunately proves far less intriguing than does the melancholy tale of a limited actor reaching the end of the line during a transitional period in Hollywood.
  91. Backcountry
    MacDonald has seen enough horror movies of varying kinds to know what audiences expect, and one of the pleasures of Backcountry is how skillfully it toys with those expectations, setting us up for something like a Mumblecore “Straw Dogs” and ending up somewhere closer to a landlocked “Jaws.”
  92. Ma' Rosa
    As in most of the director’s repertoire, he portrays working class family relations with unpretentious warmth. Boasting a simple, coherent plot shot with real-time, handheld verismo, it’s a work of understated confidence.
  93. Executive Decision
    Ultimately, it’s the film’s sly irony that sets it a notch above similar actioners. The Thomas brothers’ script repeatedly draws us down dead-end alleys only to reverse expectations and top white-knuckle situations with thrilling conclusions.
  94. Call Jane
    The female empowerment message comes through loud and clear in “Call Jane,” especially in Banks’ performance. What’s missing from the picture is the threat of discovery, the dangling sword of Damocles that might chasten anyone taking so much responsibility on themselves.
  95. Dogma
    A very vulgar pro-faith comedy rather than a sacrilegious goof, Dogma is an extraordinarily uneven film.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crocodile Dundee
    Hogan is comfortable enough playing the wry, irreverent, amiable Aussie that seems close to his own persona, and teams well with Kozlowski, who radiates lots of charm, style and spunk.
  97. Set It Off
    Influenced by "Thelma & Louise" and "Waiting to Exhale," F. Gary Gray's "Set It Off" is a well-crafted girls-n-the-hood actioner, with an acute social conscience and plenty of soul. A tale of female bonding and empowerment, this relevant film boasts a terrific cast, headed by Jada Pinkett and Queen Latifah in career-making performances.
  98. Skin
    One of the more bizarre illustrations of racial injustice under apartheid is dramatized in Skin.
  99. 42
    A relentlessly formulaic biopic that succeeds at transforming one of the most compelling sports narratives of the 20th century into a home run of hagiography.
  100. Disturbia
    Squirmingly fun suspenser that brings Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" into the era of vidcams and cell phones, serving up hearty, youth-skewing portions of PG-13 violence and bikini-bait along the way.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »