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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    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Windmill
    All principal players are well cast, but the production fizzles in its final half-hour because the story premise gets clobbered by clumsy and ineffective resolution and execution.
  2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    It establishes its own identity, occasionally improving upon its cinematic predecessor enough to make it a worthwhile watch.
  3. For Colored Girls
    The result falls squarely in familiar territory, better acted and better lit, perhaps, but more inauthentically melodramatic than ever.
  4. They Will Kill You
    The twists of its premise soon end up souring it conceptually, resulting in rapidly-diminishing returns, with derivative formal flourishes that largely recall other, better films. It is, by the time its credits roll, completely exhausting.
  5. 101 Dalmatians
    Where the film misses its biggest bet, however, is in depriving the animals of the voices they had in the animated version.
  6. Spare Parts
    Even though it’s easy to identify all the recycled elements — bits and pieces of several inspirational-teacher scenarios, ranging from “To Sir, With Love” to “Stand and Deliver” — in this “based on a true story” concoction, there can be no denying the feel-good effect of the finished product.
  7. Armored
    A so-so heist-gone-awry thriller, light on the thrills, Armored doesn't exactly take its audience captive.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Honkytonk Man
    Honkytonk Man is one of those well-intentioned efforts that doesn't quite work. It seems that Clint Eastwood took great pains in telling this story of an aging, struggling country singer but he is done in by the predictability of the script [from Clancy Carlile's own novel] and his own limitations as a warbler.
  9. Now and Then
    The adults do little more than provide marquee allure in brief bookending scenes that add little to rest of the pic. For the most part, Now and Then is a showcase for four fine actresses in their early teens.
  10. Red State
    This sloppily constructed horror-thriller lacks the satirical bite and action chops to skewer extreme-right-wing zealots with the gusto Smith clearly feels they deserve, instead evincing the verbal incontinence and slack tension that have long dogged the writer-director's work.
  11. Hit and Run
    Above all, real-life couple Shepard and Bell bring genuine chemistry to this high-energy excursion.
  12. Bel Canto
    Between its minimal setup and frantic denouement, the middle stretch of this pleasingly multilingual movie sags shapelessly, as the hostages and even their captors gradually bond across cultural and linguistic barriers, with music — of course — as the language that binds them.
  13. Freeheld
    Despite a credible and moving love story driven by strong performances from Julianne Moore and Ellen Page, director Peter Sollett’s film is an oppressively worthy and self-satisfied inspirational vehicle that views its story primarily as a series of teachable moments.
  14. Eat Pray Love
    Director Ryan Murphy's superficial take on Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful memoir is an exotic junk-food buffet that offers few lasting pleasures or surprises, let alone epiphanies.
  15. Miss Minoes
    Though conceived in whimsy, Minoes generally lacks imagination; once the premise is established, familiar plot conventions reign.
  16. Brothers
    While the entire ensemble comes across fully committed to roles that are well beneath them, it’s not at all clear what the point was in presenting the Moke and Jady characters as twins.
  17. Elektra Luxx
    Despite the fine thesping seen in this innocuous piece of fluff, the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.
  18. Shaft
    Samuel L. Jackson instantly takes the mantle from Mr. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, and runs with it on pure style and charisma.
  19. Everybody Says I'm Fine!
    Too stylistically scattered to appeal to all tastes…but its unique combo of slick art direction, sweet romance, supercharged eros, low comedy and out-there melodrama –--
  20. Planet of the Apes
    Largely listless and witless, this extensive reworking of the 1968 sci-fi favorite simply isn't very exciting or imaginative; most surprisingly, given the material, it's also Burton's most conventional and literal-minded film, the one most lacking in his trademark poetic weirdness and bracing flights of fancy.
  21. The Rules of Attraction
    Gets an ambitious, sometimes inspired but ultimately less than satisfying screen treatment from Roger Avary.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Smokey and the Bandit
    There is a parade of roadside set pieces involving may different ways to crash cars. Overlaid is citizens band radio jabber (hence, the title) which is loaded with downhome gags. Field is the hottest element in the film.
    • Variety
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    Reeves, with his beguilingly blank face and loose-limbed, happy-go-lucky physical vocabulary, and Winter, with his golden curls, gleefully good vibes and 'bodacious' vocabulary, propel this adventure as long as they can.
  24. Constantine
    This adaptation of the graphic novel "Hellblazer" blazes few new trails and bogs down in a confusing narrative muddle.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hoffa
    This grimly ambitious biopic goes no deeper than that, offering hardly a trace of psychology, motivation or inner life.
  26. A Good Person
    It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it.
  27. Jurassic World Rebirth
    The movie offers an updated version of the same basic ride Spielberg offered 32 years earlier, and yet, it hardly feels essential to the series’ overall mythology, nor does it signal where the franchise could be headed.
  28. The Hunt
    The Hunt turns out to be a good deal smarter — and no more extreme — than most studio horror films, while its political angle at least encourages debate, suggesting that there’s more to this hot potato than mere provocation.
  29. Little White Lies
    With its bloated running time and tonal shifts, the story tends to steer off course, though strong performances help keep it in tow.
  30. War on Everyone
    While his American competition practices the right to remain silent, McDonagh writes his clever, coal-black heart out, delivering another firecracker script.
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