Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Seemingly composed in a laboratory from stray bits of Betty Boop, Sailor Moon and Daphne from "Scooby-Doo," pop princess Katy Perry is the closest thing to a human cartoon the music business has produced since Kiss. This is an impression that concert-tour documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me looks to round out and humanize, and it's successful in a number of strange, seemingly accidental ways.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Victory
    Script spends so much effort extolling man’s basic goodness and the values of selflessness, teamwork and fair play, that it frequently softens the action. Fortunately, director John Huston has such a firm grip on the dramatic line that does exist – and works some very good performances from the cast, particularly Caine – that the pic survives intact.
  3. The Look of Love
    Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan's fourth feature collaboration is a vivid period whirlwind that impressively showcases the comic thesp's more dramatic side.
  4. The Newton Boys
    An extremely handsome production that meticulously evokes the 1920s, and a likable male-dominated cast, headed by Matthew McConaughey in his best screen performance to date, only partially compensate for a story that's too diffuse and lacks a discernible point of view that would make it dramatically engaging.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Safe in Hell
    A sad and unsatisfactory finish is obviously an attempt to lend credence to an impossible yarn. It doesn't help, for as long as the story is thoroughly unbelievable up to the finish, no ending could change that impression. [22 Dec 1931, p.15]
    • Variety
  6. The Grand
    Safer, more conventional and closer to broad TV sketch humor than Christopher Guest's comedies of manners, The Grand never quite recoups in laughs what it loses in spontaneity.
  7. I, Olga Hepnarová
    Unforgivingly rigorous to its final, exactingly composed monochrome frame, I, Olga Hepnarova shows us scarcely a flickering moment of light or joy in its anti-heroine’s short, loveless life, depicted on screen from adolescence upwards.
  8. Crumb Catcher
    If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale.
  9. The Forbidden Kingdom
    On its own terms, it's a handsome albeit unexceptional juvenile adventure shot on some magnificent Chinese locations.
  10. Albert Nobbs
    It's a career-crowning role for Glenn Close. Too bad the film is such a drag.
  11. Simple Passion
    An imperfect but glassily compelling study of obsessive, finally debilitating desire that honors its source with an unblinking female gaze.
  12. What's Cooking?
    Though often enjoyable, it’s an old-fashioned, feel-good movie whose significance is more sociological than cinematic.
  13. The Human Stain
    Powered by two eye-catching performances.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocky III
    The real question with Rocky III was how Sylvester Stallone could twist the plot to make an interesting difference. He manages. As usual, Stallone the writer-director is less successful in handling all the dramatic interims than staging the battles.
  15. Lights in the Dusk
    Lights in the Dusk finds veteran Finnish helmer Aki Kaurismaki treading water with an amiable but very undercooked noirish fable about a security guard done wrong by a femme fatale.
  16. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    Likeable if rambling first feature by Icelandic helmer Olaf de Fleur Johannesson ("Africa United") evinces the helmer's background in documaking, and reps a kind of quasi-doc itself with real-life trannies riffing on their own personas.
  17. Chimpanzee
    Visually stunning, almost impossibly intimate results. Unfortunately, this footage is welded to a creakily executed story and narrated by a schticky, frequently bellowing Tim Allen.
  18. Teen Spirit
    Teen Spirit is too tidy, concocted, and safe. It longs to channel the high of great pop, but as a movie it lacks the ecstatic imagination to do what great pop does. It never soars.
  19. Southpaw
    The undeniable intensity of Gyllenhaal’s bulked-up, Method-mumbling performance may leave you feeling more pummeled than convinced in this heavy-handed tale of redemption, in which director Antoine Fuqua once more demonstrates his fascination with codes of masculine aggression, extreme violence and not much else.
  20. Instant Family
    It redefines family craziness as normal in a way that those who seek it out will gratefully relate to.
  21. Extraction 2
    The filmmakers’ renewed vigor is our reward as, similar to its unfussy title, this sequel deals in clean-lined action and suspense, removing much of the excessive weight that bogged down the original.
  22. Happy Death Day 2U
    Happy Death Day 2U is more complicated than the first “Happy Death Day,” but in this case more complicated means less fun.
  23. Shirley
    In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.
  24. Anniversary
    Even as it thrusts itself into an electrifying, bloodied thriller of a final act, the film doesn’t land any of its social commentary: Its satire remains much too obtuse, its parable much too diffused.
  25. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    A thoughtful, detailed chronicle of the Fed’s origins, responsibilities and shifting monetary policies.
  26. The Secret Life of Bees
    Like a mouthful of honey, The Secret Life of Bees is cloyingly sweet and gooey, and you're not quite sure you can swallow it undiluted.
  27. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Goldman’s frequently amusing script is the secret ingredient that makes “Miss Peregrine” such an appropriate fit for Burton’s peculiar sensibility, allowing the director to revisit and expand motifs and themes from his earlier work.
  28. Miss Potter
    Renee Zellweger, in another Blighty role, struggles to make Beatrix credible.
  29. Lovely, Still
    The surprise twist brutally defies the opening narration and plot logic that preceded it, alienating viewers who willingly suspended disbelief.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Christine
    Christine seems like a retread. This time it's a fire-engine red, 1958 Plymouth Fury that's possessed by the Devil, and this deja vu premise (from the novel by Stephen King) combined with the crazed vehicle format, makes Christine appear pretty shop-worn.
  31. Piranhas
    To watch young people fall into old patterns is still to watch those old patterns, and the film cannot escape the familiarity of its archetypal, rise-to-power, fall-from-grace narrative.
  32. The Hammer
    This inordinately likable and consistently funny boxing saga-cum-romantic comedy doesn't so much ridicule the "Rocky"-type inspirational sports fable as gently deflate its heroic overdrive.
  33. Limelight
    Watching Limelight, about the rise and politically engineered fall of onetime Manhattan nightclub kingpin Peter Gatien, is like looking through a family album: If you're in the family, you might be interested.
  34. Run Ronnie Run
    Despite early-on guffaws, pic suffers from the same problem that has plagued nearly all of the similarly adapted “Saturday Night Live” films: It fails to sustain its initial burst of comic inspiration over the course of its feature-length running time.
  35. The First Monday in May
    Detailing the eight-month build-up to the show’s debut, First Monday in May is most compelling when simply taking up residence alongside Bolton, Wintour and Wong as they oversee the myriad aspects of their production.
  36. Evil Dead
    Boasts way better production values than the penny-pinching 1981 original and conceivably could delight genre fans who have never seen the first version or its previous remakes/sequels. But it’s bound to play best with those who catch Alvarez’s many wink-wink allusions to Raimi’s picture.
  37. In the Name of My Daughter
    A mobster movie without whackings, a thriller without suspense and a courtroom drama without resolution, this turgid retelling of an unsolved missing-persons case functions mostly as a portrait of a young woman who loved too passionately and the manipulative creep incapable of reciprocating her affections.
  38. Thor: Love and Thunder
    It’s the mix of tones — the cheeky and the deadly, the flip and the romantic — that elevates “Thor: Love and Thunder” by keeping it not just brashly unpredictable but emotionally alive.
  39. Madagascar
    Pleasant, if mediocre family fare.
  40. The Burnt Orange Heresy
    Watching The Burnt Orange Heresy, you may find yourself wishing one of two things: that Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki had been around to make elegant little mystery capers with Alfred Hitchcock in his prime, or that Hitch were around today to direct this one, a marble-cool art-fraud thriller that begins lithely and sexily before, somewhat mystifyingly, it takes a terminal turn for the dour.
  41. Mardi Gras: Made in China
    An obviously sincere but didactically repetitive documentary.
  42. Dreamland
    Jason Matzner's woozily romantic, gorgeously lensed directorial debut about a trailer park love triangle seems to unspool in a dream of its own, and despite some sketchy story elements, much of it is pretty intoxicating -- that is, until the unambiguous life lessons bring pic down to earth with an earnest splat.
  43. Funny Money
    Greif obviously ascribes to the Blake Edwardian school of comedy, laying out gags with commendable topographical precision. But, unlike Edwards' unique mixture of sophistication and slapstick, Funny Money falls squarely in the tradition of pure farce, itself an anomaly in this age of aggressively abrasive personality comedies.
  44. Ten 'til Noon
    Paul Osborne's script delivers an intriguing structure, though dialogue tastes like something warmed over after 12 years in Quentin Tarantino's freezer.
  45. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    An over-the-top and beyond-PC comedy that sometimes deftly, sometimes slapdashedly infuses party-hearty anarchy with hectoring moral outrage.
  46. Defendor
    Harrelson shines, particularly in framing scenes with Sandra Oh as a tactful court psychiatrist.
  47. City of Ghosts
    Despite a name cast, with Dillon playing an insurance crook, pic is holed by a plot-heavy script that's unsatisfying at a character level and plays like a cut-down version of a much longer, more ambitious saga.
  48. My Life Without Me
    With a glowing performance by Sarah Polley as the doomed woman, this Spanish-Canadian co-prod, filmed in English, is surprisingly adept at avoiding the worst cliches and most manipulative elements inherent in such a story.
  49. Titus
    Taymor makes the action clear and easy to follow with her bold physicalization of the story and forceful direction of an astutely chosen cast.
  50. Amen.
    Despite fine performances and the care lavished on the production, Amen. is never as emotionally powerful as it should be.
  51. Hannibal
    The continuing saga of one of contemporary literature and cinema's most fascinating villains, as played once again with exquisite taste and riveting force by Anthony Hopkins.
  52. Faster
    An often thrilling, always compelling intro to the sport.
  53. Code 46
    An intriguing but only partly successful co-mingling of film noir and sci-fi.
  54. Catching Out
    Rambles into unexpected places, some more interesting than others, but it stays on track long enough to take auds somewhere special.
  55. The Cloud of Unknowing
    In service of an eerie Japanese ghost story, the spooky atmospherics prove surprisingly compelling.
  56. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
    Pedantic, humorless and one-sided -- qualities that won't encourage exposure beyond the activist left.
  57. Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control
    Track record of helmer Barry Alexander Brown, and scads of clever writing from scripting producer Dan Harnden, should help this little gem find a home, although it is probably too intimate and original to win more than a cult following.
  58. Yat luk che
    An utterly charming retro romancer set against a background of '70s movie going. Full of lovely touches and well-etched performances, and flawed only by a bland male lead.
  59. Derailroaded
    As discomfortingly fascinating as listening to a couple's heated argument at a table near yours in a restaurant.
  60. Light from the East
    Generates genuine suspense as it follows a group of American actors in the former Soviet Union during a fateful period of the Perestroika era.
  61. Gandhi, My Father
    Classy production values and a textured lead performance by Darshan Jariwala are undercut by a lack of real drama in Gandhi My Father.
  62. Laura Smiles
    Sharp dialogue, idiosyncratic characters and a wickedly brilliant structure that subtly derails expectation make Laura Smiles a rarity among mellers.
  63. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    Overlapping with other recent documentaries, picture nonetheless presents a stimulating argument.
  64. The Stone Angel
    Prolific helmer Kari Skogland draws a fiery performance from vet Burstyn and a beguiling one from Christine Horne as the young Hagar. Yet the book's sheer "Giant"-like scope necessitates generational cross-cutting that's both rushed and cluttered; pic would have have been better served as a more leisurely miniseries.
  65. Sixty Six
    While mazel tovs are due for efficient playing and execution, predictable script seldom scores big laughs.
  66. The Infidel
    The Infidel takes some all-too-predictable detours into moralizing and sentimentality, but remains consistently sharp as long as it sticks to its acerbic tone and saucy comic sensibility.
  67. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
    Paul Viragh's script is too bitty to hold it all together, and filigrees of technique fail to disguise the weaknesses in helmer Mat Whitecross' first solo flight.
  68. Here and There
    Slight, extremely likable picture, a sly variant on recent immigrant movies like "The Visitor" and "Goodbye Solo."
  69. Shake Hands with the Devil
    Spottiswoode's lackluster film fails to offer any fresh perspective on these now well-known events.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gift to Stalin
    Script weaknesses overwhelm ethnographic interest, historical tragedy and some solid performances in period drama "The Gift to Stalin."
  71. Daydream Nation
    Charged with alternating currents of teen angst, sardonic wit, nervous dread and impudent sensuality, Daydream Nation suggests "Juno" as reimagined by David Lynch, or a funnier, sunnier "Donnie Darko."
  72. Barbershop Punk
    Topolski and his story are so engaging that the resulting discord of voices and agendas can't drown out the voice of the little guy questioning the system.
  73. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    The 3D is terrific in Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, but helmer Tsui Hark's costume actioner -- the first Chinese-lingo movie shown in the stereoscopic Imax format -- is let down by two-dimensional characters.
  74. An Affair of the Heart
    While she creates an affectionate portrait of the charismatic musician, helmer Sylvia Caminer is really concerned with the meaning of fandom; anyone harboring an inexplicable or arcane passion could conceivably be interested.
  75. The Maze Runner
    As world-creation YA pictures go, The Maze Runner feels refreshingly low-tech and properly story-driven.
  76. Wampler's Ascent
    Resolutely sappy and sometimes amateurish, the briskly paced doc remains heartfelt and direct about the same admirable mission Wampler had in making the climb.
  77. Geography Club
    The idea here isn’t to titillate with tawdry teen hormones, but to offer an outlet for all that mental distress young people take on while trying to find their place in the world.
  78. Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    There’s no doubting Brook and the performers’ commitment to their craft, even if the end result is somewhat repetitive.
  79. The Sleepwalker
    A consistently intriguing psychodrama that may nonetheless leave many viewers feeling that it’s all buildup and scant payoff.
  80. The Mule
    In the end, The Mule is essentially a straightforward, somewhat overextended crime story enlivened by its uniquely grotesque circumstances (based on a true story, as noted at the beginning), and directed by Mahony in a lean, no-frills style that’s entirely convincing where it counts.
  81. The Barefoot Artist
    We get very little sense of her personal life... Nor do we get much insight into the evolution of her art, which looks fascinating in the glimpses afforded, but is viewed primarily in terms of community art therapy, rather than appreciated as an aesthetic end value in itself. Though these omissions frustrate a bit in retrospect, The Barefoot Artist is nonetheless an engrossing watch.
  82. In the Courtyard
    A wry, oh-so-gentle dual character study saved from sleepiness by the unexpected star pairing of Catherine Deneuve and Gustave Kervern.
  83. Woodlawn
    This overly long yet consistently involving period drama... could be described, accurately, as equal parts “Remember the Titans” and revivalist tent meeting. But until the balance tips rather too blatantly toward the latter during the final minutes, the overall narrative mix of history lesson, gridiron action and spiritual uplift is effectively and satisfyingly sustained.
  84. Band of Robbers
    The performances are deft, the pacing is fleet, and the viewer is left with the agreeable impression that Band of Robbers is a promising work by filmmakers whose next one probably will be even better.
  85. Look at Us Now, Mother!
    The symbiosis between mother and daughter is by turns appalling, charming and endearing.
  86. Kinatay
    Mendoza strengthens his gift for describing space with inquisitive cameras, but as the helmer’s star rises, his subtlety wanes, resulting in obvious statements made banal by heavy-handed ironies.
  87. Lowriders
    Much like classic car customization, effective cinematic storytelling is often all about the detailing, and Ricardo de Montreuil’s Lowriders, which sets a tale of inter-generational rivalry and artistic awakening amidst East LA’s Latino car culture, has style and local color to spare.
  88. River
    Dagg’s thriller is slow to get going and hampered by an inexpressive leading man.
  89. Strange Weather
    There’s no free-at-last rain dance for Darcy, but just about every other lyrical cliche appears on cue.
  90. Finding Altamira
    [Banderas] acquits himself admirably with his restrained yet subtly detailed portrayal of an intelligent man subjected to the stings of intolerant attitudes and professional jealousies.
  91. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    The trouble isn’t that Greenwald is preaching to the choir; a good documentary can increase the passion of the choir. It’s that he isn’t adding in any meaningful way to the choir’s knowledge.
  92. Legend of the Demon Cat
    Lead actors Sometani and Huang are both charming enough even if their emotional struggles are superficially depicted.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wilby Conspiracy
    The Wilby Conspiracy [from Peter Driscoll’s novel] is a good action melodrama about apartheid in South Africa. It was made in Kenya. The stars Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine are relentlessly stalked by Nicol Williamson, superb as a coldly dedicated and brutal policeman out after racial agitators.
  94. Moss
    In addition to its scenic virtues, there’s a pleasant sense of life’s innate harmoniousness here.
  95. Bikini Moon
    Dubbed “a documentary about a fairytale,” Manchevski’s film leaps around in time before eventually indulging in some magic realism, but it’s most compelling when simply fixating on Rashad, who makes Bikini at once wounded and tough, conniving and kind, desperate and volatile.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Greased Lightning
    Greased Lightning is a pleasant, loose and relaxed comedy starring Richard Pryor in an excellent characterization based on real-life racing driver Wendell Scott.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big Jake
    Big Jake is an extremely slick and commercial John Wayne starrer, this time as a long-gone husband out to rescue a grandson from kidnapper Richard Boone.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Onion Field
    James Woods as the near-psychotic Powell is chillingly effective, creating a flakiness in the character that exudes the danger of a live wire near a puddle.
  99. The Lost Sons
    For a while, we’re bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we’ve passed through the looking glass of the story’s peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Haunting of Julia
    Film has a fairly tight script which, in first half at least, builds up scary tensions nicely. There's a performance by Mia Farrow which is somewhat reminiscent of Rosemary's Baby, and enough supernatural trappings to please those who are fascinated by the occult.
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