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. Never Goin' Back
    Inspired at least in part by stunts Frizzell pulled when she was her characters’ age, this raucous parade of humiliation and embarrassment packs all the appeal of an outrageous anecdote hilariously retold by someone who can scarcely believe they ever did something so stupid.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Abyss
    A firstrate underwater suspenser with an otherworldly twist, The Abyss suffers from a payoff unworthy of its buildup.
  3. The Negotiator
    The teaming of Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey, two of the most highly regarded actors around, in perfectly fitting roles that call for a battle of wits and wills, proves to be a shrewd piece of casting, and the best element of The Negotiator.
  4. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    The docu’s hyperactive editing and visuals eventually grow a tad monotonous, undercutting some of this life story’s poignancy.
  5. A Radiant Girl
    Newcomer Marder’s performance is a thoroughly engaging one. She manages to demonstrate both screen presence and likability, despite a role which requires her to represent youthful optimism to an almost symbolic degree.
  6. Contact
    Beautifully crafted and legitimately involving once it locks onto a dramatic track, film benefits from remaining mysterious about how far it intends to go in pursuing its themes, but also suffers from long-windedness and preachy final-reel explicitness as to its message.
  7. Lamb
    Partridge navigates risky material with assurance, delicacy and a deepening sense of intimacy that can turn, without warning, into complicity: The more at ease we feel in the characters’ company, the more disturbingly questionable the situation becomes.
  8. Lucy
    Giddily recycling everything from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Matrix” to yakuza actioners and National Geographic documentaries, it’s a garish, trippy, wildly uneven and finally quite disarming piece of work, graced by a moment-to-moment unpredictability.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Major League
    Major League lacks the subtlety of Bull Durham or the drama of Eight Men Out, but for sheer crowd-pleasing fun it belts one high into the left-field bleachers...Though the plot turns are mostly predictable, they are executed with wit and style.
  10. The Devil Wears Prada
    Streep single-handedly elevates this sitcomy but tolerably entertaining adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's bestselling 2003 roman a clef about a personal assistant's year of chic hell under the thumb of the dragon lady of the fashion world.
  11. Hello I Must Be Going
    As a director, Louiso operates within a narrow emotional range; while not as bleak as "Love Liza," the film feels similarly monotonous and desperately needs more dramatic fluctuation.
  12. Apostle
    Tantalizingly rich in atmosphere and altogether unhurried in revealing its secrets, the evocatively shot, ultra-widescreen Apostle will eventually veer into dark, mercilessly supernatural territory.
  13. Touched With Fire
    Potent performances by stars Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby, strong contributions by well-cast supporting players and an overall sense of understated verisimilitude offset the predictable aspects of the narrative.
  14. We Are the Flesh
    Serving as co-editor as well as writer and director, Emiliano Rocha Minter is very much the author of all the chaos wrought here, and his thoroughly arresting vision could squat quite comfortably alongside Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of hell.
  15. Butterfly Kiss
    From its opening shots, Butterfly Kiss exudes a confidence and distinctive feel that promises something rather special. Unlike its characters, the pic knows where it's going.
  16. African Cats
    The film captures a wealth of spectacular and wrenching conflicts, and even if its ability to spin a story out of the footage falls somewhat short of the gold standard set by "March of the Penguins," it's nonetheless a remarkably cohesive piece of work.
  17. Eric Larue
    A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Way We Were
    A distended, talky, redundant and moody melodrama, combining young love, relentless 1930s and 1940s nostalgia, and spiced artifically with Hollywood Red-hunt pellets. The major positive achievement is Barbra Streisand's superior dramatic versatility, but Robert Redford has too little to work with in the script.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Anderson Tapes
    Scripter Frank Pierson with director Sidney Lumet has injected broadly comic aspects and the laughs work without reducing suspense.
  20. Zoolander
    Misses its comic targets as often as it hits them but is endearing all the same for the good-natured cheer with which it skewers the eminently skewerable.
  21. 2 Days in New York
    The French are smelly, vulgar, racist and oversexed, or so it would seem based on 2 Days in New York, a scattershot culture-clash comedy that goes down like yesterday's foie gras.
  22. Harmontown
    The extent to which it’s hilarious and revelatory, however, may depend on viewers’ degree of prior intimacy with all things Harmonic.
  23. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    Whimsical, intermittently enjoyable but decidedly unmagical.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Postman Always Rings Twice
    In the key roles, Nicholson and Lange are excellent, as is Michael Lerner as their defense attorney.
  25. Stop-Loss
    A wildly uneven drama, by turns sincere and synthetic.
  26. Words on Bathroom Walls
    There are pockets of truth, grace and pain in this portrait of troubled adolescence, and its talented young stars know where to find them; like many a nervous teen, however, the film itself is caught between standing out and fitting in.
  27. Trollhunter
    Enormously entertaining chiller.
  28. How to Train Your Dragon
    At first, DeBlois’ involvement felt like a way of protecting “Dragon” from some other director coming along and destroying it. But by the end, his vision serves to bring the whole fantastical story one step closer to reality.
  29. Days of Santiago
    Though convincingly set in the lower depths of Lima, the story embodies a universal truth about the experience of former soldiers in many times and places.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Good Shepherd
    Robert De Niro's second film as a director adopts a methodical approach and deliberate pace in attempting to grasp an almost forbiddingly intricate subject, with a result that is not boring, exactly, but undeniably tedious.
  31. Bustin' Down the Door
    With verve, style and a fine sense of the human side of surf culture, Jeremy Gosch makes a terrific splash with his debut doc, Bustin' Down the Door.
  32. Crazy/Beautiful
    The significant potential of its premise is squandered by an increasing reliance on teen movie cliches, silly plotting and the urge to be upbeat rather than to communicate life lessons.
  33. Runaway Jury
    With the standard Grisham formula having grown stale after so many books and film versions, Jury introduces ingredients that add zest to the old recipe and, in cinematic terms, open up increased possibilities for intrigue and narrative layering.
  34. September 11
    A sober, thought-provoking response to a tragedy of worldwide import and a much better film than one might expect from the pre-release publicity.
  35. Stolen
    A documentay that should appeal not just to the legion of Vermeer fans, but to lovers of good mystery.
  36. L'ennemi intime
    Visceral and engrossing.
  37. Valhalla Rising
    With very little dialogue, and even less plot, five chapter stops lend the movie a skeletal structure: "Wrath," "Silent Warrior," "Men of God," "The Holy Land" and "Hell." But any discussion of the Dark Ages conflict between paganism and Christianity is reduced to just grunts or insults.
  38. Big Miracle
    This family-friendly outing captures the story's human snowball effect with a measure of sly, satirical wit, if also an excess of boilerplate subplots and jokey '80s details.
  39. Wrecked
    Greenspan's solid but unexceptional debut, ably carried by Brody's one-hander performance.
  40. Buried Prayers
    Documentary's insistent inflation of buried gold jewelry and watches into symbols of heroic defiance and transcendental tragedy rings hollow in the wake of weightier Holocaust testimonials.
  41. Dhoom 3
    At their best, the lush yet punchy musical numbers that Acharya stages for Dhoom: 3 reach giddy heights of pop romanticism.
  42. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    The constant, genial comic undercurrent of teenspeak exchanges, penned by the writing team of helmer Meyer and Luke Matheny, contrasts satisfyingly with Kingsley’s wry musings and the more serious treatment given to David’s evolving maturity.
  43. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Think of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet as a gift: a work of essential spiritual enlightenment, elegantly interpreted by nine of the world’s leading independent animators, all tied up and wrapped in a family-friendly bow by “The Lion King” director Roger Allers.
  44. Yarn
    It’s less than the sum of its attractive parts, with scant overall insight or weight. Like an old handmade sweater, this is a movie that might unravel too easily if you gave any single element a hard tug.
  45. This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous
    This glossy doc uncovers very little conflict or depth in a personality more colorful than it is interesting, at least as presented here.
  46. Braven
    To put it simply and gratefully: Braven is the sort of unpretentious yet thoroughly professional popcorn entertainment that brings out the best in everybody involved.
  47. The Gardener
    Chabot’s film is not “The Garden,” but The Gardener and as a portrait of the man behind Quatre Vents, unlike the gorgeous flora, it never blossoms.
  48. This Is Our Land
    The film is so calculated in its plotting that it loses some of its chill.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    Performances are dull. Whatever sociological, political or dramatic motivations may once have existed in the story have been ruthlessly stripped from the plot, leaving all characters bereft of empathy or sympathy. There’s hardly a pretense toward justifying the carnage
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    August 32nd on Earth
    An appealing though ultimately slight drama about a young woman who is thrown into an emotional tizzy after surviving a bad car crash.
  51. The Year of Spectacular Men
    With the right script, this trio could make a fantastic flick. Forget these “spectacular” men. These flawed women are plenty.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Longest Yard
    The Longest Yard is an outstanding action drama, combining the brutish excitement of football competition with the brutalities of contemporary prison life. Burt Reynolds asserts his genuine star power, here as a former football pro forced to field a team under blackmail of warden Eddie Albert.
  53. All the Bright Places
    All The Bright Places would be nowhere without Haley’s vision and deft ability to deliver all of the feels. He finds places to let his bright intellect shine, perfectly crafting heartrending melodrama through tonal pacing that’s never cloying nor disgustingly saccharine.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Chalk Garden
    On paper, this sounds like a ripe old piece of Victoriana, but curiously it works, largely because of confident, smooth performances by all concerned.
  55. Babysplitters
    The path to the inevitable but deeply moving conclusion is lively and thoroughly entertaining. Friedlander gets us there by throwing in unexpected yet true-to-life twists and turns that will likely be all too familiar to new parents, who typically don’t have the help of a second couple to share the responsibility.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Day of the Locust
    Magnificent production, combined with excellent casting and direction, make The Day of the Locust as fine a film (in a professional sense) as the basic material lets it be. Nathanael West's novel about losers on the Hollywood fringe has lost little of its verisimilitude in adaptation.
  57. Evolution
    So heavy until now, the movie ends on a soaring note of optimism.
  58. The Year Between
    The result is a useful mix of the pseudo-random and finely honed that refuses to hand-wring over Clem’s travails, yet simultaneously makes an upbeat case for her emerging from them intact — even if she’ll never exactly be Miss Congeniality.
  59. We Bury the Dead
    Its strengths also ensure that no matter how rote “We Bury the Dead” becomes, it remains at least watchable for most of its runtime, even as it ignores its most fascinating ideas in favor of safe, familiar ones.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Isle of the Dead
    Isle of the Dead is a slow conversation piece about plagues and vampires on an eerie Greek island. It's better handled and directed than most though thriller fans will still find its lack of action a drag. Even Boris Karloff fans will note the tired way he rambles through it all.
  61. Margaret
    This unwieldy drama of conscience in the wake of tragedy is hyperarticulate but rarely eloquent, full of wrenchingly acted scenes that lack credible motivation or devolve into shrill hectoring.
  62. Grand Piano
    [An] appealingly absurd thriller.
  63. Copshop
    Copshop is a processed slice of genre meatloaf with the gravy occasionally dribbled in ornate patterns. It’s junky and synthetic, but it fills you up.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Vice Versa
    It is really Savage, best known for his role as the little boy in The Princess Bride, who is particularly winsome as the smart-alecky Dad stuck in his kid’s pint-size body.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kindergarten Cop
    The polished comic vision that gave Twins, Arnold Schwarzenegger's comedy breakthrough, a storybook shine completely eludes director Ivan Reitman here. Result is a mish-mash of violence, psycho-drama and lukewarm kiddie comedy.
  66. A Boy Called Christmas
    “Christmas” is a cut above the usual holiday dross.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    First Blood
    Director Ted Kotcheff has all sorts of trouble with this mess, aside from credibility. Supposedly, the real villain here is society itself, which invented a debacle like Vietnam and must now deal with its lingering tragedies. But First Blood cops out completely on that one, not even trying to find a solution to Stallone's problems.
  68. Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    An illuminating meditation on that deepest of Buddhist philosophical concerns -- impermanence. Study of a threatened culture and people is beautifully shot inside Tibet's most sacred sites and arrives with the blessing of the Dalai Lama.
  69. Ice Age
    An entertaining story that, while not terribly original, is sufficiently arresting and often laugh-out-loud funny.
  70. The Boxtrolls
    The meticulously crafted world is stunning to behold, imagined to the minutest detail and photographed with the sort of dramatic lighting and dynamic camera movement rarely seen in stop-motion. Trouble is, it’s not a place most folks would care to spend any time.
  71. Rosaline
    There’s something fresh about the story’s unwillingness to pit a woman’s romantic quests against her career goals.
  72. Roadie
    Roadie features some wonderfully evocative music out of its characters' collective past (local legends the Good Rats, for instance) but like Jimmy himself, it takes a bit of a push to get the picture going, which it gets, both emotionally and dramatically, thanks largely to its ensemble.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Norma Rae
    Norma Rae is that rare entity, an intelligent film with heart.
  74. Good Fortune
    Even though it’s fairly obvious where “Good Fortune” is headed, Ansari manages to surprise in how he gets there. Like his character, the writer-director-producer-star seems to be juggling one too many jobs here, and yet, it’s that very connection to overworked, undercompensated Americans that makes his movie so right for this moment.
  75. Aniara
    This tale of a spaceship stuck wandering the cosmos after being forced off course is both impressive in its scope and intimate in its portrait of human nature under long-term duress.
  76. He Named Me Malala
    Where the film falters is in its willingness to settle for canned uplift, reducing the substance of Malala’s global activism to multicultural montages, goosed by Thomas Newman’s emotional cattle prod of a score.
  77. Meet the Robinsons
    A sharp-minded, plenty entertaining toon that will keep children of all ages wide-eyed and on their toes.
  78. Land
    Bless Wright for paring Land down to a beautiful haiku, and for delivering a performance that’s ambiguous and understated in all the right ways.
  79. Stuck
    Ingeniously nasty and often shockingly funny as it incrementally worsens a very bad situation, then provides a potent payoff with the forced feeding of just desserts.
  80. Nina's Tragedies
    An amiable, but cluttered dramedy.
  81. Sunshine Cleaning
    Director Christine Jeffs, who previously helmed "Rain" and "Sylvia," tries to strike a balance between the yarn's dark currents and offbeat comedy, but the result is often uneasy, with the humor receding as things progress.
  82. Private
    Political realities are a powerful bonus to, rather than the only reason for, Private, an emotionally gripping drama.
  83. Headshot
    In terms of sheer, punchy physical vigor, Headshot is a knockout.
  84. Wondrous Oblivion
    Full of charming moments, but swinging hither and thither between mainstream entertainment and an over-cooked anti-racist tract.
  85. Word Wars
    There's a pronounced lack of emotional pay-off that likely will derail any attempts to position Word Wars as an aud-friendly crowd-pleaser with breakout potential comparable to "Spellbound."
  86. The Polar Express
    This visually impressive yet emotional frigid fable could perhaps more accurately be tagged "The Bipolar Express."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    La Cage aux Folles
    Though predictable, the film has one solid trump in Michel Serrault who makes the more feminine member of the happy couple a very shrewd limning of outsize campy gay attributes that avoid tastelessness.
  88. Edmond
    Despite agreeably short running time and committed performances, Edmond is rendered inert by its stagy atmosphere and failure to fully mine the depths of its protagonist's complex psyche.
  89. Two Lovers and a Bear
    Somehow, in the final stretch, Nguyen has transformed what felt like a relatively generic, un-special indie love story into something totally unpredictable, taking full advantage of the gorgeous widescreen lensing to convey the atmosphere and magic of his locations.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Natural
    The Natural is an impeccably made, but quite strange, fable about success and failure in America. Redford is perfectly cast as the wary, guarded Hobbs.
    • Variety
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eyewitness
    Weaver plays her part very well, but simply can’t justify the character’s actions, which ripple through the murder plot in several directions. Consequently, the story gets more and more strained before it’s resolved.
  92. Worlds Apart
    It isn’t bad, but it’s kind of a trifle. Though it treats its themes with reasonable honesty, it can’t help but come off as a bit diagrammed.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Eiger Sanction
    Eastwood, who also directs and according to studio did his own mountain climbing without doubles, manages fine suspense. His direction displays a knowledge that permits rugged action.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kill Me Again
    The tale of a down-and-out detective and a seamy femme fatale is a thoroughly professional little entertainment.
  95. White Fang
    The rewards here are ones of fine, subtle sensory detail, be it the shimmering visualization of falling snow on a forest floor, the convincing, characterful nature of the animal sound effects, and the grand, graceful design and movement of the wolfdogs themselves — as expressive and adorable as any Disney critter.
  96. The Wackness
    The Amerindie annals are over-full of withdrawn male loners hoping to quirk or cathart themselves out of teenage purgatory. But like "Donnie Darko," "Thumbsucker" and a few others, The Wackness treads this familiar terrain with assurance and distinction.
  97. Best Worst Movie
    Strangely moving, insightful and entertaining documentary.
  98. Horse Girl
    The transgressiveness of Baena and Brie’s strange and sorrowful Horse Girl, is in how it turns the simplistic, inauthentic tweeness of the generic, quirky indie comedy in on itself to produce a rare and piercingly compassionate exploration of the sorts of madness that come from intense loneliness, and the intense loneliness that comes from being regarded as mad.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Kentucky Fried Movie
    The Kentucky Fried Movie boasts excellent production values and some genuine wit, though a few of the sketches are tasteless.
  100. Screen Door Jesus
    Winner of the Golden Starfish fiction competition at the Hamptons fest, pic's gutsy, madly ambiguous unleashing of a mixed bag of religious reactions attests to a genuine sense of regionalism.
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