Variety's Scores

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For 17,840 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: 9,167 out of 17840
  2. Mixed: 7,035 out of 17840
  3. Negative: 1,638 out of 17840
17840 movie reviews
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  1. The Nun
    Nicloux is unable to instill the material with any tension.
  2. Ana Maria in Novela Land
    Ganem has sufficient verve and appeal to sustain interest in both of her characters, and the sporadic tweaking of telenovelas and the fans who love them is often quite clever.
  3. Best Men
    At heart, Best Men is a modest picture that harks back in many ways to U.S. movies of the late ’60s and early ’70s in its unconventional attitudes and anti-establishment tone. Pacing never lingers, and, unlike in Guncrazy, there’s no narrative fat; at the same time, there isn’t much emotional residue either. In short, it’s simply a quality B movie.
  4. The Monkey King 3
    With Monkey, the film”s most potent protagonist, sidelined for much of the film, the action feels truncated.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    They Might Be Giants
    It’s not only unfunny, but increasingly preachy and sentimental – hammering at the cliched tale of the good-hearted nut who’s basically saner, and certainly nicer, than the pack of meanies who attempt to defeat him.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ordinary Magic
    While the actors work hard, script’s overall facile characterizations and predictable plot development detract from real tension.
  7. Malignant
    It’s hard to say whether a film this bonkers “works” or not, but it’s impossible not to admire both the craft and the extravagant bad taste behind its go-for-broke energy.
  8. Papillon
    On its own terms, Noer’s adventure is ultimately a dramatic and dynamic-enough telling of an indelible fact-based story to connect with viewers.
  9. Day Shift
    At heart, though, it’s a knowingly eccentric goof of a movie, to the point that it’s hard, for a while, not to find it agreeable, even as you register what a preposterous piece of fluff it is. Unfortunately, it’s also an arduous piece of fluff. It’s full of blow-you-away action scenes, and it’s also full of rules — a satirical vampire cosmology that’s fun, until it starts to be just convoluted enough to give you a headache, especially when the rules are applied as inconsistently as they are here.
  10. Moscow Never Sleeps
    The various story currents move swiftly but don’t run particularly deep, so the film works better as a kind of best-foot-forward overview of modern urban Russia — “Moscow, I Love You” — than it does as a multi-stranded human drama.
  11. Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    In the lead, Gordon has the wide-eyed appeal of a young Matthew Broderick: He looks nothing like Kinney's crudely rendered cartoon character.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Campfire
    Juggles several storylines that include the personal and political, but is unable to get beyond soap-opera shtick.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bad Seed
    Taken from Maxwell Anderson's stage play, adapted from William March's novel, the film remains more of the theatre than of the motion picture field. Nonetheless, it is well done within that qualification.
  14. The Favor
    The direction and technical elements are obvious, bright and vapid, while the performers struggle against staggering odds to provide nuance.
  15. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
    The fleeting counterbalance of seriousness makes the funny business marginally yet appreciably funnier.
  16. The Night Listener
    Aiming for unsettling atmosphere over character definition, the dawdling mystery thriller manages to flatten two protagonists that had far more depth in the novel.
  17. The Rewrite
    It’s a rare pleasure to see Tomei in a lead role, and she fills out the short cuts in Lawrence’s characterization with wry warmth and a hint of swallowed disappointment.
  18. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Whereas most of the movie takes place in a grubby, blue-tinged murk — a blend of hokey day-for-night lensing and virtual set extensions that’s badly suited for home viewing, but might look frightening in darkened theaters — day breaks just in time for a big, Michael Bay-style climax. The film has clipped along at a reasonably brisk pace until this point, only to downshift into a laughably protracted slow-motion finale, full of gratuitous lens flares and overwrought strings.
  19. 21 Bridges
    Boseman’s role doesn’t offer nearly as much complexity as the screenwriters seem to think — which is why the movie needs an actor like him to distract us from its many plot holes and paradoxes.
  20. Lovelace
    Reducing an immensely disturbing, politically byzantine tale to a series of cartoonish vignettes, this celeb-studded biopic squanders a gutsy performance by Amanda Seyfried.
  21. Marry Me
    The bar for rom-coms is not high, and this one, ludicrous as it often is, inches over the bar. But I would no more call it a good movie than I’d pretend fast food is high in nutrients.
  22. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
    For all the purity of its pedigree, and as agreeable and lightly touching as it sometimes is, I wish that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile didn’t still seem, at heart, like a likable movie that had come out of the processor.
  23. Hardcore Henry
    Hardcore feels like umpteen post-“Star Wars” action blockbusters trash-compacted into one — and whether that fundamentally appeals or not, the ingenuity of effort is undeniably high.
  24. Parkland
    Granted, Landesman feels an obligation to history, but there’s something ponderously obvious about the way so many of these scenes are played.
  25. John Carter
    Stanton has been given the resources to create an expansive, expensive world, but lacks the instincts to direct live-action, a limitation that shows most in the performances. Bare of chest and fair of feature, Kitsch doesn't exhibit enough charisma to carry a project of this scale.
  26. Mulholland Falls
    Mulholland Falls is a "Chinatown" wannabe that comes up short in every department. Although loaded with talent on both sides of the camera, this sex-and-corruption-drenched mystery meller about a big official cover-up in postwar L.A. simply feels underachieved, as it lacks the heady atmosphere, tasty intrigue and dramatic punch the alluring premise would seem to promise.
  27. Taken
    Neeson growls his way through the functional dialogue as an unstoppable killing machine in impressive, cold-eyed style.
  28. My Sister's Keeper
    Unsubtle, uneven and undeniably effective, this take-no-prisoners cancer weepie poses a fascinating moral quandary.
  29. Step Brothers
    The film is funny at times but lapses into the reflexive vulgarity that seems to be the default mechanism of the Apatow machinery.
  30. Americano
    Though Demy's approach breaks no new ground, directorially speaking, Martin's personal journey finds a fresh angle on a universal piece of wisdom. Every mother's son believes he's the star of his own life; Americano captures that humbling moment where one realizes perhaps he has only been a bit player in his parents' story, not the star, as initially believed.
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