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
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eyes of Laura Mars
    Eyes of Laura Mars is a very stylish thriller [from a story by John Carpenter] in search of a better ending.
  2. Bullet Train
    Bullet Train feels like it comes from the same brain as “Snatch,” wearing its pop style on its sleeve — a “Kill Bill”-like mix of martial arts, manga and gabby hitman movie influences, minus the vision or wit that implies.
  3. Four Brothers
    With equal measures of rock-the-house vigor and in-your-face attitude, Four Brothers proves usually potent and consistently enjoyable as an old school approach to what might best be described as the urban-Western genre of slam-bang, balls-out action-revenger.
  4. Propeller One-Way Night Coach
    If Propeller One-Way Night Coach lets you know anything genuine, it’s that Travolta, at an early age, looked around at his life and thought it was magical. That, in its way, is a gift, one that in movie after movie he has reflected back to his fans.
  5. Y2K
    It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.
  6. Sleuth
    The results will be received with a large, loud yawn by all but the most loyal fans of Pinter and hard-working co-stars Michael Caine and Jude Law.
  7. Daniela Forever
    Heady almost to a fault, Daniela Forever is all concept, all the time. Vigalondo’s screenplay is much too schematic and analytical for its own good.
  8. Amsterdam
    The result has all the red flags of a flop, but takes a strong enough anti-establishment stand — and does so with wit and originality — to earn a cult following. There’s too much ambition here to write the movie off, even if Amsterdam, like the history it depicts, winds up taking years to be rediscovered and understood.
  9. Inventing the Abbotts
    An emotionally powerful but extremely old-fashioned coming-of-age saga.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ricochet
    Screenplay [from a story by Fred Dekker and Menno Meyjes] offers unusually good dialog for the smooth-talking Washington and a number of scenes to savor. Pic threatens to become truly absorbing as Lithgow’s brilliant revenge scheme unfolds, but Ricochet soon abandons cleverness in favor of spectacle.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mars Needs Moms
    A modestly enjoyable performance-capture creation bearing the unmistakable imprint of producer Robert Zemeckis.
  12. Django
    The film — while not an especially compelling or well-told biopic unto itself — shines much-needed attention on the plight of the Roma people at the hands of German (and French) officials.
  13. Flannel Pajamas
    Visually, the film is without flair or ambition, conveying no sense of atmosphere or mood. But the performances put it over.
  14. Frankenstein's Army
    Pic’s monotone edges towards monotony by the end of the third act, but as no-budget calling-card features go, Frankenstein’s Army remains a grisly cut above.
  15. Kalifornia
    Though somewhat overplayed and coy about its destination, the film packs a helluva wallop.
  16. Downhill
    The story worked brilliantly before. In Downhill, it works…well enough. The new movie is a teasing trifle with something real on its mind.
  17. The Man Who Copied
    Intermittently amusing.
  18. Harrison's Flowers
    Provides powerful drama thanks to its trenchant core story and harrowing re-creation of the brutal chaos of war.
  19. China: The Panda Adventure
    This wobbly docu-drama ends up being caught in between the impulse to make theatrical a true story and the usual Imax mission of imparting information about the natural world in an entertaining way for families.
  20. Harvard Man
    Wildly uneven yet perversely coherent ode to the lure of sexual and chemical experimentation, the precariousness of sanity and the sheer suggestible power of paranoia.
  21. Bedazzled
    The 2000 version is louder, broader and much, much bigger.
  22. Words and Pictures
    Both the words and the pictures are surprisingly flaccid, largely due to Gerald DiPego’s literate but hopelessly contrived screenplay and direction that lacks Schepisi’s usual snap.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poltergeist II: The Other Side
    This time around, co-scripters Mark Victor and Michael Grais (who wrote the first Poltergeist with Steven Spielberg) have the focus of evil in human form, in the perfectly cast, since deceased, Julian Beck.
  24. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
    Far from the definitive version of the tale, this lavish but overwrought melodrama is in many ways less compelling than even a recent made-for-cable movie and a 1973 miniseries starring Michael Sarrazin that was less faithful to the source material.
  25. Mobile Homes
    This is a dour and deeply unpleasant film that wears its gritty realism as a badge of honor, while failing to recognize the motivations that explain such behavior in reality, which makes him neither an attentive journalist nor a particularly good storyteller (at least not yet).
  26. The Cellar
    Writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s latest lacks the thick atmospherics that might have punched across a sketchy screenplay, which falls short in expanding the premise of his 2004 short “The Ten Steps.”
  27. Adult Life Skills
    For the most part, the film is similarly content to repeat the past, all the way through to its predictable liberating-feel-good wrap-up.
  28. The Catcher Was a Spy
    There’s a curious lack of credibility and urgency in this big-screen adaptation, the kind of respectable near-miss that can happen when worthy talent apply themselves to a project they’re just not ideally suited for.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Vanishing
    Some last-reel thrills and cathartic violence provide commercial oomph to the otherwise tedious thriller The Vanishing. This is one remake that sacrifices much of what made the original work so well.
  30. Little
    Consistently funny if all-around a bit too familiar.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »