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. Mean Machine
    OK entertainment but nothing more.
  2. Indecent Proposal
    This is one of those high-concept pictures with a big windup and weak delivery.
  3. Planet Earth: Dreams
    Mendel's visuals consistently fall short of the strange oneiric quality of Foreman's strategically normal-seeming dialogue, with its subtly irregular pauses and repetitions, its austere ellipses and enigmatic insistences.
  4. Outlaw
    Both the pic's power and its problems stem from Love deliberately taking no moral position nor offering any solutions; he gives his audience what it wants at a gut level and doesn't wimp out at the end.
  5. Waiting for Lightning
    A slickly produced, unabashedly celebratory picture about professional skateboarder Danny Way.
  6. The Rooftop
    Like a school pageant with a Broadway-sized budget, this noisy production is a pileup of extravagant dance numbers, candy-colored sets and vintage props that, sans the requisite heart or hip factor, soon overstays its welcome.
  7. Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo
    As a narrative, “Evangelion 3.0″ may make you feel your brain is turning into goat cheese. As a showcase for pure visual ingenuity and splendor, though, it rocks.
  8. Secret in Their Eyes
    Roberts brings an acrid sense of bitterness and sorrow to this exceedingly sharp-witted sleuth, registering the cruel passage of time and the toll of unspeakable tragedy in every careworn feature and vocal quaver.... it’s a skillful and humane turn from an actress whose darkly penetrating gaze comes closest to fulfilling the mystery of the title.
  9. Preggoland
    An amusing, extravagantly implausible farce that nonetheless makes a pointed argument about the perceived marginalization of childless women in modern society.
  10. Prescription Thugs
    Engaging and enraging but also, alas, consistently superficial.
  11. Sky on Fire
    There’s really nothing new here. Still, it’s hard to deny the sporadically satisfying nostalgic appeal of this dash down memory lane.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cocoon: The Return
    Not altogether charmless, Cocoon: The Return still is far less enjoyable a senior folks' fantasy than Cocoon. An overdose of bathos weighs down the sprightliness of the characters, resulting in a more maudlin than magic effort.
  13. Sleeping Dogs
    Sleeping Dogs, starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it keeps you watching.
  14. Red Joan
    Tweedy, dreary, and unconvincing. ... It’s dismaying that so little drama is wrung out of the tale, and that what we get too often feels like a cliché-riddled romantic pulp.
  15. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    Engagingly intriguing throughout most of its slightly overlong running time, and perhaps the strangely mesmerizing mood Lynch has orchestrated for the entire "Twin Peaks" undertaking should not be underestimated at this juncture. But the feeling persists that, to a considerable degree, Lynch is marking time with this project, creating new riffs and variations on themes he had already largely worked out.
  16. Angel Has Fallen
    The plot — which is to say, the plot against the president — is, once again, a violently overwrought confection of “topical” comic-strip ludicrousness; that’s the DNA of the “Fallen” series. Yet when you’re watching a big-budget B-movie, there’s good preposterous and there’s bad preposterous.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lonely Guy
    Martin’s trademark wacky humor is fitfully in evidence, but seems much more repressed than usual in order to fit into the relatively realistic world of single working people.
  18. The Mother
    The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stella
    The semitragic Stella Dallas shows her years in this hopelessly dated and ill-advised remake.
  20. Country Strong
    That rare ensemble piece in which all four principals are not only compellingly drawn but handled with an astute sense of dramatic balance.
  21. Seance
    Seance proves a disappointingly boilerplate retro slasher that’s pedestrian on every level from concept to execution.
  22. Rampage
    Peyton delivers a unified-looking whole, in which the visual effects integrate well with stage and location work.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Outsiders
    Francis Coppola has made a well acted and crafted but highly conventional film out of S.E. Hinton's popular youth novel, The Outsiders.
  24. The Expendables
    A nearly incoherent all-stars-on-deck actioner that plays like "Grown Ups" on nitro or a brutish, blue-collar "Ocean's Eleven."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Adventures in Babysitting
    Chris Columbus weighs in adequately in his directorial debut, thanks to a fresh, solid lead performance from Elisabeth Shue. Yet the film can never rise above the leaden script.
  26. The Warrior's Way
    A visually inspired multi-genre amalgamation, a borderline-surreal folly that suggests a martial-arts action-adventure co-directed by Sergio Leone and Federico Fellini.
  27. No Turning Back
    Competently made but unconvincing melodrama.
  28. S.W.A.T.
    Coming in the wake of the physically astonishing "Bad Boys 2," S.W.A.T. seems square.
  29. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    This is the kind of movie that was doomed on the page, both by an inherently problematic premise and ill-conceived character motivations.
  30. The Raspberry Reich
    This ostensible spoof of "radical chic" is, like his previous works, at once amusingly outrageous and slightly dull.
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