Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saint Jack
    Shot entirely on location in Singapore, the film (produced by Roger Corman, who gave Bogdanovich his start of The Wild Angels in 1964) is extremely well crafted, finely acted, and conjures up a positively intriguing milieu.
  2. The Dive
    If The Dive’s final stretch feels a bit less urgent than what precedes it, one appreciates that the filmmakers did not pile on the usual melodramatic gotchas, hewing to a relatively realistic course of events.
  3. Paperback Hero
    Charismatic leads and a promising screwball-comedy premise are sadly frittered away by a weak second half in Antony J. Bowman's third feature, Paperback Hero.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Neptune's Daughter
    Neptune's Daughter is a neat concoction of breezy, light entertainment. It combines comedy, songs and dances into an amusing froth.
  5. Iron Man 2
    Isn't as much fun as its predecessor, but by the time the smoke clears, it'll do.
  6. Our Friend
    So much of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the picture, until what remains is precisely the kind of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death that inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place.
  7. Baby Ruby
    Evocative and appropriately aggravating as Baby Ruby is in its portrayal of mental breakdown following traumatic childbirth, however, its parlaying of this condition into full-blown genre tensions and terrors yields mixed rewards.
  8. John Rabe
    Despite the emotive subject matter, picture is often too sluggish dramatically, and never knits together its stock Western characters into a satisfying whole.
  9. Cars 2
    The rare sequel that not only improves on but retroactively justifies its predecessor, this lightning-paced caper-comedy shifts the franchise into high gear with international intrigue, spy-movie spoofery and more automotive puns than you can shake a stickshift at, handling even its broader stretches with sophistication, speed and effortless panache.
  10. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    A more unavoidable obstacle here is that there's not much in the way of plot -- the story is in the tour through the labyrinthian intimacies of inner Earth. As such, it's an f/x wizard's dream, and Brevig makes the most of it.
  11. The Revenant
    An often hilarious living-dead comedy that just had to happen, given the current hunger for zombies, vampires and other things that refuse to keel over.
  12. Days of the Bagnold Summer
    Even if the general ultra-clean cartoonishness of it all is deliberate, the film’s whisper-thin premise and sitcom-like characters are the cinema equivalent of Sweethearts candy: rather too sugared, and immediately forgotten.
  13. France
    Dumont has studied the media enough to get in a few genuinely effective jabs, though it’s hard to engage with the half of France that concerns itself with her private life since she’s such a cold and inscrutable character.
  14. Hatchet
    Joel David Moore leads a cast full of token minorities and bickering bimbos, whom writer-helmer Adam Green dispatches with knowing glee and an obvious love for genre conventions that almost overcomes the derivative scripting.
  15. Toast
    Like the lemon meringue pies and shrimp cocktails it features throughout, Brit comedy-drama Toast is tasty, hearty and rather conventional.
  16. Cirkus Columbia
    Though burdened by major problems of tone, Tanovic's fourth feature succeeds in making clear the incredulity with which most people regarded the thought of war and dissolution of Yugoslavia, as well as the machinations of various opportunistic groups.
  17. Right at Your Door
    Chris Gorak grabs the viewer by the throat in the first few minutes, but quickly fritters away involvement by concentrating almost exclusively on two characters who are both annoying and boring.
  18. Cold Pursuit
    By pumping up the darkly comedic undertones, augmenting the frigid chill of the original, Moland’s terrific, riveting noir-tinged picture distinguishes itself from other rote, reductive remakes.
  19. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    While not terribly original, it would be fair to call the movie inventive, like one of those eccentrics who’s constantly pestering the patent office with what he thinks are fresh ideas, only to discover that someone else got there first.
  20. Generation War
    Overly melodramatic but fairly engrossing.
  21. Strangers with Candy
    A pic that will delight the previously converted, but, as film is just as hit-and-miss as the series was.
  22. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Alternately hilarious and discomfiting, and finally rather poignant.
  23. The Wall
    The Wall succeeds because of Worrell’s words.
  24. Mekong Hotel (2012)
    The pic plays like a bonus track to the Thai auteur’s Palme d’Or winner, “Uncle Boomee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” its esoteric symbiosis of Thai folk culture, spiritualism and current sociopolitical conditions simplified, but no less mystifying.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Addams Family
    Despite inspired casting and nifty visual trappings, the eagerly awaited Addams Family figures as a major disappointment. First-time director Barry Sonnenfeld never really gets past the skeletal plot, which plays like a collection of sitcom one-liners augmented by feature-film special effects.
  26. Saudate for the Future
    A breezy, good-humored love letter to the city itself.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    Despite its anachronistic emulation of mid-1960s cynical spy mellers, Scorpio might have been an acceptable action programmer if its narrative were clearer, its dialog less 'cultured' and its visuals more straightforward.
  28. First Knight
    Literate, sober-minded and almost rigorously chaste, First Knight sweeps the viewer up in the doings of these impressive, larger-than-life characters and offers a credible portrait of regal personages whose priorities are well sorted.
  29. The Wildest Dream
    A solid, gorgeous-looking documentary marred only slightly by a tendency to bury the lead -- namely, its subject, George Mallory.
  30. Charlie Says
    The film Harron delivers is so ambivalent as to be frustratingly gun-shy about truly asserting a point of view, or adding anything meaningful to the already thriving cottage industry of Manson-adjacent storytelling.
  31. The Santa Clause
    This is a hip, likable spin on the seasonal icon told with a deft mixture of comedy and sentimentality.
  32. Bubba Ho-tep
    Mismatched marriage of offbeat character study and unimaginative horror riffs. Most compelling element by far is Bruce Campbell's inspired performance as a nursing home patient who insists he is the real Elvis Presley.
  33. Ordinary Angels
    Gunn adeptly exercises a necessary modicum of visual dexterity to emphasize character drive.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killer Elite
    The Killer Elite is an okay Sam Peckinpah actioner starring James Caan and Robert Duvall as two modern mercenaries who wind up stalking each other in a boringly complex double-cross plot [from the novel by Robert Rostand].
  35. Under Paris
    As a sensory experience, Under Paris is never less than seaworthy.
  36. Snow White and the Huntsman
    Handsome but hollow, Snow White & the Huntsman is easily among the stranger additions to a roster of rebooted fairy tales.
  37. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    The result is at once skillfully observed and a bit so-what.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black Sunday
    John Frankenheimer’s film of Black Sunday is an intelligent and meticulous depiction of an act of outlandish terrorism – the planned slaughter of the Super Bowl stadium audience.
  39. Finch
    Despite the bleak backdrop, Finch manages to stay true to the fuzzy ring of its basic idea, delivering a family-friendly movie that is big-hearted, comfortingly traditional and bolstered by a genuine love of dogs.
  40. Coach Carter
    Both an inspirational sports movie and an unexpected multi-level urban drama that plays by its own clock.
  41. Assisted Living
    A noteworthy piece on a difficult subject.
  42. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Deftly sidestepping both melodrama and family-values messaging, Poppe imbues the film with enormous emotional resonance, brilliantly grounded by his leading lady.
  43. How It Ends
    Sweet and personal, How It Ends is hardly an entertaining movie, or one that will go down as one of the defining films of these unpredictably strange times. But you can’t really blame the artists for trying to make some therapeutic sense of it all, with a little help from one another.
  44. Seriously Red
    Director Gracie Otto’s Seriously Red disarms and delights as a sensationally spirited concoction that neatly balances unfettered outrageousness and unabashed sentimentality.
  45. The Quiet One
    Murray’s job was to curate the extensive Wyman collection and turn it into a story, and he does so without ever digging too deep into Wyman’s psyche.
  46. Brighton Rock
    Joffe's first feature never shakes off the feel of a telepic with above-average production values, and its unsteady lead performances and often garish stylistic touches make a muddle of the source material's psychological acuity.
  47. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    While Ortega and fellow choreographers Charles Klapow and Bonnie Story stretch their imaginations, there's something almost lazy about the picture's underachiever script.
  48. Somebody I Used to Know
    The romantic comedy genre’s broad, patented hijinks and hilarity are indeed on display, but cleverly cloaked by a beautifully-realized portrait of delicately faceted characters and their relatable conundrums.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People Under the Stairs
    A pretense of social responsibility and most of the necessary tension get lost in a combination of excessive gore and over-the-top perfs in The People Under the Stairs.
  50. The Munsters
    The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way.
  51. The Dinner
    Moverman balances the potential for staginess with his flowing cinematic bravura; he keeps surprising you, and he gives the drama a dash of poison elegance.
  52. Home for the Holidays
    But Foster is unable to give the episodic, fragmented film a coherent feel; her prosaic, sometimes irritating picture proceeds scene by scene, with the requisite climaxes and anticlimaxes along the bumpy road.
  53. Hell of a Summer
    The movie’s hella derivative, but still quite entertaining, with an appealing cast and memorable characters.
  54. The Quiet Ones
    Frederik Louis Hviid’s second feature is an absorbing true-crime tale that readily holds attention for two hours, while lacking the deeper emotional involvement to linger in the mind long afterward.
  55. Confetti
    Picture is reminiscent less of Richard Curtis' romcoms and more of Christopher Guest's mockumentaries, with a dash of early Mike Leigh.
  56. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Too formally well crafted to be dismissed, but too straightforward and uncurious to be particularly exciting or insightful.
  57. Backstage
    With its booming soundtrack of songs -- written by Laurent Marimbert and sung by Seigner herself -- and good chemistry between Le Besco and Seigner, pic at times has an operatic emotional intensity that will turn off some viewers but provide a guilty pleasure for others.
  58. Morning Glory
    A genially midrange if overlong romantic comedy.
  59. Traveller
    The film shrewdly humanizes its protagonists to the point where the audience forgets their identity and roots for them to succeed - and survive.
  60. The Last Kiss
    All-American adaptation by Paul Haggis of Gabriele Muccino's 2001 Italian hit "L'Ultimo bacio" is chummy, consensual and always watchable in Tony Goldwyn's polished rendition of emotional messiness.
  61. The Man from Elysian Fields
    A fine cast further illuminates a felicitous script.
  62. Up at the Villa
    This least affected of their (Haases) movies is also the most dramatically and emotionally convincing.
  63. Alila
    An ensemble drama laced with lighter moments that depicts the vitality, resilience and moral dilemmas of the people of Tel Aviv, the film is absorbing and at times moving.
  64. Memoir of War
    Large as its historical canvas is, the film is most artful as an interior evocation of a preemptively grieving state of mind.
  65. Three Peaks
    Superbly crafted, utterly gripping.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wind
    The elements prove far more stimulating than the people in Wind, a sail-racing saga that could have used a great deal more dramatic rigging.
    • Variety
  67. Wrath of Man
    Like the H character, Wrath of Man walks into the room confident and secure in its abilities, professional, efficient and potentially lethal. All of this is best experienced in a movie theater, if possible.
  68. Today's Special
    The picture works best as a vehicle for the likable talents of thesp Aasif Mandvi, arguably best known for his occasional "reporting" on the Middle East on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."
  69. Mascots
    It lopes along, merrily but a bit slack, always reminding you of the earlier Guest films, and then it works up a bit of a fizz in the competition.
  70. The Ritual
    Though well-cast and competently written, The Ritual owes its primary effectiveness not so much to story or character per se as to the unsettling atmosphere Bruckner and company have eked out of the forest itself.
  71. Last Chance Harvey
    Stars Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson (reunited after 2006's "Stranger Than Fiction") are so disarmingly charming that even the most treacly moments work an emotional magic.
  72. Horrible Bosses
    The manner in which the central scheme plays out is predictably moronic, vulgar and juvenile, though the parties involved just about make up for it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    First Love
    While engaging, pic eventually betrays itself as having a trivial attitude to its chosen subject, with a climactic scene that is genuinely, but inappropriately, amusing.
  74. True Adolescents
    The result is Sam (Mark Duplass, "The Puffy Chair" and "Humpday"), a 34-year-old unemployed rocker whose mediocre musicianship is matched only by his abysmal people skills; he's like Jack Black without any energy or confidence.
  75. Mama
    Mama, for all her digital and prosthetic creepiness, is finally a bit of a bore.
  76. The Company You Keep
    Robert Redford’s unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism.
  77. 13: The Musical
    13: The Musical is just catchy enough to make you forget how facile it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Not Without My Daughter
    Sally Field has the stage to herself to engage the audience’s sympathy, and this she does with an earnest, suitably emotional performance as a rather typically sincere, middle-class American.
  79. Everything's Gone Green
    Starring an excellent Paulo Costanzo (late of "Joey") as a twentysomething uberslacker who is nonetheless willing to fall into accidental success, pic is seasoned with fine perfs by JR Bourne as a charismatic, creepy hustler and Steph Song as Constanzo's sexy potential love interest.
  80. Forks Over Knives
    One of the more convincing, radical and politically volatile documentaries to come out of the burgeoning good-food genre.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cujo
    Although well-made, this screen adaptation of Stephen King's Cujo emerges as a dull, uneventful entry in the horror genre. Novel about a mad dog on the rampage occupies a low place in the King canon, which is understandable if the film's stupefying predictability is an accurate reflection of the book.
  82. Them That Follow
    In the last act, Poulton and Savage’s long fuse explodes, and they get to prove they’ve made a hell of a picture.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Legal Eagles
    Loss of intrigue with a scattered plot involving art fraud and murder is made up for by an often witty, albeit lightweight dialog led by the ever-boyish star Robert Redford.
  84. Antibodies
    Not content with a straight psychological police procedural, Alvart mixes in distracting -- and unconvincing --Biblical symbolism in a curious bid for weightiness.
  85. Proxy
    Skirting horror and black-comedy terrain without quite surrendering to either, the pic proves rather bracing even if it doesn’t hold up to much plot-logic scrutiny.
  86. Cet amour-là
    A limp-to-wilted film version of Duras' 16-year-long love affair with a young man who became her secretary and literary executor.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    One from the Heart (re-release)
    A hybrid musical romantic fantasy, lavishing giddy heights of visual imagination and technical brilliance onto a wafer-thin story of true love turned sour, then sweet. (review of original release)
  88. Dark Blue
    Refreshingly devoid of flashiness or artificially pumped-up action, this consistently gripping, well-constructed police thriller… showcases a tightly controlled performance from Kurt Russell.
  89. Two Men Went to War
    Solidly crafted, strongly cast pic doesn't hit a thoroughgoing comic tone.
  90. Bread and Roses
    Its politics and dramatic line are familiar and far from convincing.
  91. Michael Jordan to the Max
    Arguably the finest athlete in living memory deserves better than Michael Jordan to the Max, an honorific but unmoving portrait of the Chicago Bulls' No. 23.
  92. AmnesiA
    The brooding, well-constructed drama gets considerable mileage out of the schizoid twin dynamic.
  93. Disappearances
    A frequently mesmerizing if exceedingly strange coming-of-age odyssey.
  94. Burden
    Hedlund’s humble, hard-to-love performance makes the aptly named Burden work as both a portrait of one weak-minded man, and as a study of the ideas people carry without questioning why.
  95. Flash of Genius
    Moderately inspiring in the way such true-life stories of "the indomitable human spirit" are always constructed to be.
  96. Brother to Brother
    The film's transitions between periods are not entirely seamless and its discourse often becomes didactic. However, the depth and intelligence it brings to issues of black politics and sexuality could help carve an appreciative theatrical audience in upscale gay and/or urban niches.
  97. G.I. Jesus
    A bold, often clumsy, but always intriguing piece of work.
  98. You've Been Trumped
    Collectivist in spirit, this mostly entertaining film lacks an official host or voiceover narration, which first works swimmingly but eventually becomes too diffuse.
  99. It's Complicated
    Cute and clever though the plot may be, everything is played out in the broadest possible terms without an iota of nuance or subtlety.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Back to the Future Part II
    The energy and heart which Robert Zemeckis and story-writing partner Bob Gale (who takes solo screenplay credit this time) poured into the ingenious story of part one is diverted into narrative mechanics and camera wizardry in Future II.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »