Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Den of Thieves
    Den of Thieves is better at set-up than follow-through. The movie is clever enough, until it cheats. It tries to fill in its characters, until reducing them to plot devices.
  2. Sundowners
    Pleasant in the blandest sense of the term, writer-director Pavan Moondi’s film likely won’t entice anyone outside die-hard fans of cult-comic co-star Tim Heidecker.
  3. Coneheads
    A sweet, funny anarchic pastiche that should find broad based popularity. Its sly combination of the outrageous and the mundane is a surprisingly appealing screen entertainment that transcends the one-joke territory it inhabited on television.
  4. Richie Rich
    Decently crafted but oddly charmless.
  5. Blush
    Admirably acted and powered by a loopy internal rhythm, the film nonetheless wears out its welcome long before it’s done inflicting indignities on its heroine, arriving at its main point early and then repeating it again and again.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fort Apache the Bronx
    Driving relentlessly to make points that are almost pointless, Fort Apache The Bronx is a very patchy picture, strong on dialog and acting and exceedingly weak on story.
  7. Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock & Roll
    While the film may feel at times like it was made under the auspices of an Asbury Park tourism board, it’s at least a theoretical tourism board that has a good awareness that a dystopia doesn’t shift back to utopia overnight, or even over a neat 50 years.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brigadoon
    In transferring Brigadoon, a click as a [1947] Broadway musical play, to the screen, Metro has medium success. It's a fairly entertaining tunefilm of mixed appeal.
  9. American Reunion
    While it's poignant seeing the whole gang again, the tired gross-out antics and limp romantic reprisals keep this hapless if heartfelt effort from qualifying as a decent comedy, let alone a generational classic.
  10. Krampus
    Krampus isn’t especially scary, but it generates goodwill nonetheless for treating its home-invasion-for-the-holidays setup with an appreciably straight face.
  11. Desert Dancer
    Desert Dancer traffics in the kind of spirited rebel-youth archetypes who’ve been endemic to dance movies for decades.
  12. The Best Offer
    Aiming for a Hitchcockian take on an eccentric auctioneer (well-handled by Geoffrey Rush) who becomes enamored of an heiress with severe agoraphobia, the pic ends up more in Dan Brown territory, with over-obvious setups and phony insight into the art establishment.
  13. The Sentinel
    A half-hearted exercise in political paranoia, The Sentinel unravels its wrong-man scenario with business-like efficiency and an impressively jittery visual scheme, but falls far short of providing visceral or emotional thrills.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Money Pit
    The Money Pit is simply the pits. There is really very little else to be said about this gruesomely unfunny comedy. Unofficial remake of the 1948 Cary Grant-Myrna Loy starrer Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House begins unpromisingly and slides irrevocably downward from there.
    • Variety
  15. Your Place or Mine
    Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction.
  16. The Gray Man
    What makes The Gray Man exciting — and let’s not beat around the bush: This is the most exciting original action property Netflix has delivered since “Bright” — are the shades the ensemble bring to their characters and the little ways in which the Russos come through where those other films fell short.
  17. New York, I Love You
    The results are, well, formulaic, hobbled by weak dialogue and absent any sense of texture.
  18. Big Sur
    Michael Polish’s Big Sur offers an elegantly muted take on the midlife ennui of Kerouac’s autobiographical 1962 novel.
  19. Apartment 7A
    The movie is largely entertaining, despite being pulled constantly in two directions: as a predecessor to an iconic work and as a distinct beast, with its own gripes against patriarchal norms.
  20. Porno
    Unfortunately, Porno gets more uneven as it goes on, with a somewhat slack midsection and a mix of earnestness, broad comedy, titillation, and moralizing that neither fully gels, nor makes something unpredictably wild out of those clashing elements.
  21. People Like Us
    If they never fully sell the situation, the actors nonetheless deliver strong, emotionally accessible work.
  22. Texas Killing Fields
    Script by former DEA officer Don Ferrarone isn't that bad in itself, but matters aren't helped by the mumbled performances and poor sound, which make it hard to hear what anyone's saying, while sloppy editing wreaks havoc on the story.
  23. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    Feels as schizophrenic as its eponymous heroine.
  24. Jane Got a Gun
    A solidly made and conventionally satisfying Western.
  25. Shoot 'Em Up
    Good taste is the first fatality in this gonzo thrill-seeker, sure to offend mainstream dispositions, yet too stylistically audacious to dismiss outright.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Marked for Death
    This dim-witted revenge yarn is the simplest of showcases for Steven Seagal - an extremely compelling action presence with his brutal martial arts fighting style, imposing size and nasty demeanor.
  27. Broken City
    Competent but juiceless New York melodrama, an unpersuasive marriage of head-slamming action and middling civic intrigue that treats issues like gay rights and public housing as red herrings rather than actual talking points.
  28. The Miracle Club
    The movie’s nothing special, but it’s worth checking out just for the cast.
  29. The Business of Fancydancing
    Stalled character development in the second half of the pic reduces the impact of the whole.
  30. Big Bad Love
    A flawed and overlong but ultimately affecting account of one man's struggle to regain control of his life.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »