Variety's Scores

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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
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  1. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    Sprinkles in charming moments but ultimately doesn't evoke enough wonderment to overcome its tongue-twisting title and completely win over adults along with kids.
  2. The Perfect Host
    Just when the picture seems to be settling into torture porn, it begins pulling a series of clever twists -- although they lose some punch when you realize the script depends on one whopping coincidence.
  3. Step Up
    Fresh cast, a formulaic but engaging storyline, and a smoking soundtrack from rap and hip-hop luminaries.
  4. Dirty Laundry
    Taking control of what would otherwise be a trite and preachy fable about the need for African American families to accept their gay brethren, Devine builds a jolly and touching character from the stock figure of a Georgia mom coming to terms with her disaffected gay son.
  5. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    This low-key and deeply felt indie is unsentimentally blunt while addressing the humiliating debilitations that often define geriatric life. At the same time, however, it scrupulously eschews excessive grimness and shameless heart-tugging, and elicits more than a few laughs in the bargain, while focusing more often on how the title characters deal with last chances and unfinished business.
  6. Penelope
    The whimsical ugly-duckling fable becomes more uneven as it proceeds, straining too hard to manufacture its quirky charms.
  7. Porto
    This narratively slender item is unapologetically a mood piece: a film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.
  8. The Twits
    There’s humor in every detail, much of it skewing to the sordid, if not downright scatological, end of the spectrum, from exploding buttocks to anthropomorphic hairballs.
  9. Admission
    The comedy feels forced as Fey works overtime to insert unnecessary zingers at the tail of every scene. If the cast weren’t so endearing, her actions could easily sour an audience on the whole experience, and Admission digs itself a hole only an ensemble this appealing can escape.
  10. Freud's Last Session
    So many movies are either mindless or completely disinterested with engaging the intellect of their audiences that Freud’s Last Session offers a welcome bit of brain stimulation — but does far less for the soul.
  11. Womb
    Its quietly unsettling storytelling, precision visuals and almost mythical isolated setting all feel Hungarian to the core.
  12. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    The problem for “As It Was” is that this modest turnaround in lifestyle and attitude comes a third of the way into the movie, leaving an hour still to come that will be devoted almost strictly to how well the comeback is going.
  13. 3 Needles
    3 Needles is a great discussion tool for World AIDS Awareness Day that never achieves coherent shape as a three-paneled drama.
  14. Paradise Road
    Though carefully rendered from a historical perspective, this powerful account of female friendship and bonding under the most cruel conditions lacks the narrative focus and dramatic shapeliness to generate emotional excitement.
  15. Particles of Truth
    A believable romantic comedy.
  16. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    As a rich, gum-chewing matron who tools around in her canary-yellow Rolls-Royce, Flanagan is the picture's real scene-stealer.
  17. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    “Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.
  18. King of Thieves
    As the film slackens its pace and shifts awkwardly from caper mode to sober moral deliberations, its one-note characters can’t quite carry it.
  19. Murder at 1600
    What makes the film involving and enjoyable in its first hour is a thick, multilayered plot, a rare sight in mainstream movies nowadays.
  20. Mooz-lum
    Evan Ross impresses with an implosive performance as Tariq Mahdi, a moody young African-American.
  21. Somewhere Slow
    This tonally all-over-the-place drama fails to convince.
  22. Patrick: Evil Awakens
    Rich in gothic trappings and sporting a terrific central performance by Sharni Vinson (“You’re Next”) as a nurse in Patrick’s sinister sights, the pic has some wobbly dialogue and doesn’t deliver full-blown terror, but should satisfy audiences hankering for old-school genre entertainment.
  23. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    “Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Airplane II: The Sequel
    It can’t be said that Airplane II is no better or worse than its predecessor. It is far worse, but might seem funnier had there been no original.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Doom Generation
    A nihilistic comedy about a trio of alienated youngsters, pic is bold not only in its art design, but also in its narrative and tone, a mixture of satire and horror with heavy dosage of steamy sex and macabre violence.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Film has a basic storyline, character elements and dialog for what might have been a superior drama and possibly a great western. But Andrew McLaglen's direction, seems to consist of splicing together cliches, static camera work and Central Casting of the bit parts.
  27. The Scary of Sixty-First
    A brash, gutsy, morbidly funny first feature from actor-filmmaker-podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, it runs on a premise that could have been written as a dare, or a prank.
  28. Jolt
    Once again displaying the kinetic grace, authoritative physicality and heavy-duty footwear that have made her a cult favorite for fans of the “Underworld” franchise, Beckinsale is fun to watch in both the real and fantasy fight sequences that take up much of the briskly paced Jolt.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Invisible Man Returns
    Story and script are workmanlike efforts, with Joe May’s direction holding a steady and suspenseful pace with few dull moments.
  30. The Call of the Wild
    For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.
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