Variety's Scores

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For 17,835 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 2.3 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: 9,166 out of 17835
  2. Mixed: 7,032 out of 17835
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17835
17835 movie reviews
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  1. Moss
    In addition to its scenic virtues, there’s a pleasant sense of life’s innate harmoniousness here.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
    Writer-director Tom McLoughlin, who made the scare entry One Dark Night, puts comic spin on some of the predictable material and turns in a reasonably slick performance under the circumstances.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    State of Grace
    State of Grace is a handsomely produced, mostly riveting, but ultimately overlong and overindulgent gangster picture.
  4. Cold Skin
    A good-looking and well-crafted if familiar chunk of creature-siege horror.
  5. Running for Grace
    Imagine a Troy Donahue-Sandra Dee teen romance of the early ‘60s with an inoffensive undercurrent of social consciousness, and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect from director David L. Cunningham’s thoroughly predictable but lightly enjoyable tale of love and prejudice in 1920s Hawaii.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Enchanted April
    A slim comedy of manners about Brits discovering their emotions in sunny Italy, Enchanted April doesn't spring many surprises. Strong cast's reliable playing is undercut by a script that dawdles over well-trod territory
  7. The Prodigy
    While it lacks gripping, nail-biting tension, the unnerving horror that underscores the family drama brings it to life.
  8. The Feels
    As a comedy, The Feels has considerable sprightly appeal, although it could have used slightly more assertive visual packaging.
  9. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    There’s nothing particularly inspired about Mitchell’s treatment here — he’s directed a lot of DVD extras, and this first feature feels like a plus-sized version of one — but there’s considerable entertainment value in its subject.
  10. Final Score
    Park your brain cells in the lobby, and this U.K. production about a terrorist attack on a London soccer stadium — with Dave Bautista as Bruce Willis plus 100 or so extra pounds of muscle — is an entertainingly over-the-top ride that doesn’t even try to be “credible.” It’s not quite daft or otherwise distinctive enough to be memorable.
  11. Major Payne
    It’s relatively foolproof light entertainment, undone only when it strays too far into the absurd or wears the mantle of Wayans’ comedy persona.
  12. Outrage Coda
    It’s a testament to Kitano’s effortlessly sleek, inherently watchable filmmaking (he reteams with regular DP Katsumi Yanagijima and uses the atonal descending motif of composer Keiichi Suzuki’s score to good effect) that you’re just about kept in your seat throughout all the speechifying.
  13. The Beverly Hillbillies
    It’s thin stuff, but the ingratiating naivete of the characters and the aw-shucks friendliness of the cast are disarming, and it becomes easy to just let this go down as a country tune with some moonshine on the side.
  14. Cut Throat City
    Cut Throat City has vivid moments, but RZA’s direction is better than P.G Cuschieri’s script. The film is a muddled social-protest thriller that tries to bridge the corrupt machinations upstairs with the desperation of the streets, and can’t find a way to connect them convincingly.
  15. Love Affair
    A film of gorgeous surfaces and negligible emotional resonance, this third rendition of a perennial sentimental favorite is easy on the eyes and has its share of beguiling moments in the early going, but crucially lacks a compelling climax and any sense of urgency in its storytelling.
  16. The Trigger Effect
    David Koepp's writing-helming bow is a bleak, highly stylized view of modern civilization. While The Trigger Effect maintains a potent mood of postmodern dread, even its proponents will be wondering what all the queasy fuss was about.
  17. MDMA
    None of the sizzle is as compelling as this character study of a young woman who confesses that her only childhood companion was the TV.
  18. Quincy
    Stretching to more than two hours, Quincy stumbles into some pacing problems as it goes, and considering the sheer number of turns the man’s life took, one wonders if a miniseries might have served him better.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Life Stinks
    Mel Brooks' Life Stinks is a fitfully funny vaudeville caricature about life on Skid Row. Premise of a rich man who chooses to live among the poor for a spell feels sorely undeveloped, and suffers from the usual gross effects and exaggerations.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Touch of Evil
    Touch of Evil smacks of brilliance but ultimately flounders in it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trick or Treat
    Like a relatively dark street on Halloween night, Trick or Treat is ripe for howls and hoots, but only manages to deliver a choice handful of them when the festivities are just about over.
  22. A Boy. A Girl. A Dream.
    If Basir and Samantha Tanner’s screenplay ultimately feels like less than a full meal, its intelligence and restraint — particularly in resisting the lure of a heavier-handed message — are nonetheless admirable.
  23. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
    It takes a lot of chops to shoot the majority of a movie underwater, and Johannes Roberts is a skillful crafter of images ... But he’s a throw-what-he-can-at-the-audience director, and there’s little in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged that really sticks. The shocks, however, are consistently well-timed, and for the audience that seeks out a movie like this one that’s probably enough.
  24. What Men Want
    But the thoughts she overhears don’t, for the most part, have the snap of comic surprise. They just fill in the walking alpha blanks we already know.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Philadelphia Experiment
    The philadelphia Experiment had a lot of script problems in its development that haven't been solved yet, but final result is an adequate sci-fi yarn.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Places in the Heart
    Flawlessly crafted, Benton creates a full tapestry of life in Waxahachie, Texas circa 1935, but filmgoers may find his understated naturalistic approach lacking in dramatic punch.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Guns II
    Although it's more ambitious than most sequels, Young Guns II exhausts its most inspired moment during the opening credits and fades into a copy of its 1988 predecessor - a slick, glossy MTV-style western.
  28. The Oath
    Here’s a project that had the nerve to address these tensions in a megaplex environment, only to squander them on a standoff it pretends could be so glibly resolved.
  29. 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.
  30. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.
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