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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    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prom Night
    Director Paul Lynch seems to capture the spirit of the genre here, but spends a little too much time setting up each murder, thus eliminating some suspense.
    • Variety
  2. Flower
    As icky a comedy as you’re likely to see this year, Flower comes from an angry place — one that is clearly more concerned about sounding provocative and clever than having anything meaningful to say.
  3. Driver's Ed
    Not that this is the fault of an appealing young cast gamely doing their best to inject energy and personality into inert, exposition-heavy, joke-light dialogue that could not sound less like the way modern teenagers talk if every second word was “rad.”
  4. Loverboy
    A classic case of "Better if you didn't read the book" cinema, Loverboy emerges an OK character study of an abnormally possessive mother.
  5. Step Up: All In
    With even less plot than in previous installments to get in the way of its inventive 3D dance scenes, this fifth pic delivers on spectacle... but lacks in chemistry.
  6. The Invitation
    The predictability of events during the film’s first hour of gothic-thriller setup is all the more annoying because of the plodding pace. Evie finally stands up for herself during some modestly clever third-act turnabouts, but, really, that’s not quite enough to regenerate a rooting interest in the character.
  7. Elizabethtown
    Although rich in screwball silliness and sharp one-liners, film lacks the narrative drive one finds in the classic comedies of Preston Sturges, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, whom Crowe always seems to try to emulate.
  8. Strange Fits of Passion
    Technically raw, and amusing only in hit-and-miss fashion, the no-budget independent production recalls too many other entries about erudite young adults wrestling with questions of love and sex.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Home Fries
    While plot elements don't add up, film's energy level remains high, and oddball ensemble brings to mind a classic of this type, Jonathan Demme's "Citizens Band."
  10. The Statement
    Lackluster pic fails both as suspense and as character study.
  11. Vanilla Sky
    The picture has vitality, a fine cast and excellent craft
  12. Freak Weather
    Fiction writer and debuting helmer Mary Kuryla is clearly after a Big Statement on abuse and strength of character, but falls short by creating a self-destructive monster in lieu of a sympathetic protagonist.
  13. The Situation
    Undeniably topical but the lack of emotional investment in its characters renders it more intelligent than engaging.
  14. The Prodigy
    While it lacks gripping, nail-biting tension, the unnerving horror that underscores the family drama brings it to life.
  15. Pixie
    A decent cast and fast pace make Pixie easy enough to take as disposable entertainment. Yet it also has that annoying edge unique to films that strike an attitude of rakish sophistication while actually serving up lowbrow quips about prison rape, fat people and menstruation.
  16. Craigslist Joe
    He's a nondescript protagonist, his benefactors, and he's never truly in need; as is made clear at the start, he has a comfortable life to return to whenever he chooses. So the picture becomes simply the moderately diverting record of an offbeat vacation.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
    Though Turtles II suffers from a lack of novelty and an aimless screenplay, the bottom line is that the pic won't disappoint its core subteen audience.
  18. The 15:17 to Paris
    The oddity of the movie — and this is baked into the way Eastwood conceived it, sticking to the facts and not over-hyping anything — is that this vision of real-life heroism is so much less charged than the Hollywood version might be that it often feels as if a dramatic spark plug is missing.
  19. Two Night Stand
    Two Night Stand’s strength lies in the doubts and the ambivalence it expresses about the way we love now.
  20. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt substantial audiences, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in fact a moderately entertaining film, not deficient in old-fashioned costume drama when it pleases, nor in the power of being clever where it chooses, but awkward and unsatisfying.
  21. Surrogates
    Mostow's smart speculative suspenser imagines a time when people can live through ideal versions of themselves while they sit wired up at home.
  22. South of the Border
    The documentary offers little genuine information and no investigative research, adopting a style even more polemical than Stone's earlier docus on Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Running Man
    Format works only on a pure action level, with some exciting, but overly repetitious, roller-coaster style sequences of runners hurtling into the game through tunnels on futuristic sleds. Schwarzenegger sadistically dispatches the baddies, enunciating typical wisecrack remarks (many repeated from his previous films), but it’s all too easy, despite the casting of such powerful presences as Jim Brown and former wrestlers Jesse Ventura and Prof. Toru Tanaka.
  24. Murder at Yellowstone City
    Director Richard Gray’s well-crafted and handsomely mounted indie is as much a solidly constructed mystery as it is it a conventionally satisfying oater, with much to recommend to fans of either genre who rarely get to sample such a mix.
  25. Hold Your Breath
    The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments.
  26. Cut Sleeve Boys
    No amount of Botox or false eyelashes can rejuvenate helmer Ray Yeung's Cut Sleeve Boys, which recycles way too many gay cliches.
  27. Fanboys
    End result feels like an uneven cross between an amateur "Project Greenlight" pic and such recent comedies as "Superbad" and "Pineapple Express," in which indie directors brought a certain edge to material that might once have felt more at home under the National Lampoon label.
  28. The Rhythm Section
    This isn’t an easy role, but Lively aces it.
  29. The Burning Plain
    Many of the weaknesses and few of the strengths of Guillermo Arriaga as a scripter are evident in his directing debut, The Burning Plain.
  30. England Is Mine
    England Is Mine is fussy and prudish — about erotic longing, and about the rock ‘n’ roll that gives form to it.
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