Variety's Scores

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For 17,828 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: 9,160 out of 17828
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17828
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17828
17828 movie reviews
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  1. Don't Leave Home
    The result is a diverting-to-a-point curio whose nice atmospherics and good performances ultimately don’t add up to quite enough to satisfy the constructs of horror, allegory, satire — or anything else.
  2. Fast Color
    Ultimately, Fast Color’s thesis is more inspirational than the film, which often seems like it, too, is struggling to swirl itself into something more solid. Instead, its magical sparks don’t quite congeal as the audience can’t help hoping a movie this empathetic and unusual reaches transcendence
  3. The New Romantic
    The film only feigns at analysis. It’s as naïve about love as Blake herself, who skips through the world like a temperamental child.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Marathon Man
    Film spends literally half of its length getting some basic plot pieces [from the novel by William Goldman] fitted and moving.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Three Days of the Condor
    The film is a perfect contemporary example of an old studio formula approach to filmmaking. Basically a B, it has been elevated in form – but not in substance – via four bigger names, location shooting and more production values. Sometimes the trick works, but not here.
  6. Mountain
    If you like your metaphors thuddingly literal (and literally thudding, with the whole final act unfolding to the grunting rhythm of a man bashing away at a cliff face with a mallet), the Iranian director’s “Monte” will prove a treat. The rest of us may find ourselves wondering, like the biblically unfortunate central character, just what we’ve done to deserve this. The film at least looks extraordinary.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death Becomes Her
    Central problem is that this treat for somewhat specialized tastes must be marketed to the widest possible public due to its clearly big-time budget, and general audiences are very unlikely to warm to this wickedly cold-hearted tale of jealousy, spite and revenge despite the abundance of eye-popping effects.
  8. SuperFly
    Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that’s less sensually stylish than you’d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Private Benjamin
    The trouble may be with the use of too many screenwriters who have been told to always keep their star’s image uppermost in their scribblings. But she’s not so gifted that she can carry a heavy load of indifferent material on her own two little shoulders, without considerable sagging.
  10. Dog Days
    Unfortunately, the behaviors on display have virtually nothing to do with real life, serving as empty escapism for the dog lover in all of us.
  11. Kin
    The results are, in artistic terms, a modest success. In commercial terms, it’s a dicier prospect — viewers expecting the kind of bigger-budget spectacle that typically ensues when a screen teenager stumbles into sci-fi situations may be befuddled by what’s primarily a medium-scaled road trip drama with thriller elements … and a very special ray gun.
  12. Little Women
    This contemporary adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s enduring classic is certainly admirable in its attempt to give the material a modern spin. However, what’s new only serves to frustrate and detract from the reasons why this material has been beloved for generations.
  13. Night School
    Night School has a handful of laughs, but it’s a bloated trifle that, at 111 minutes, overstays its welcome.
  14. Bad Times at the El Royale
    At two hours and 21 minutes, this 1969-set period thriller is taxingly slow and almost oppressively self-indulgent, constantly backtracking and replaying already-drawn-out scenes from multiple perspectives.
  15. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    The way a movie like “Goosebumps 2” works, even a weary adult will be grateful, by the time it finally kicks in, for all the brainless whirling distraction. I almost wrote fun, but that would be pushing it. To achieve that F-word, the film would have to ground its amusing effects in a story that was less skittery yet leaden.
  16. Overlord
    Even at its most suspenseful, when Jed Kurzel’s cello score stabs at the eardrums, Overlord feels familiar, a collage of cinematic nightmares checking off its influences.
  17. Kodachrome
    Thanks to some likable performances from Jason Sudeikis, Elizabeth Olsen and Ed Harris, it’s an entirely watchable if entirely by-the-numbers throwback to the sweet-and-sour Sundance-style indie films of yore. But there’s a blurry boundary between “vintage” and simply “passé,” and Kodachrome is too often caught on the wrong side of that line.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flight of the Navigator
    Instead of creating an eye-opening panorama, Flight of the Navigator looks through the small end of the telescope. Life on Earth is magnified but without an expansive vision.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gator
    This follow-up to White Lightning never takes itself seriously, veering as it does through many incompatible dramatic and violent moods for nearly two hours.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Pick-up Artist
    As long as this film sticks to what its title suggests, The Pick-Up Artist is a tolerably amusing comedy. But as soon as the compulsive skirt-chaser gets hooked on one girl, James Toback's long-gestating portrait of a one-track mind becomes bogged down in unconvincing plot mechanics.
  21. Upgrade
    The film isn’t a dud — it “delivers the goods” in a certain reductive, baseline action-fanboy way. Yet Upgrade is the sort of movie that thinks it’s more ingenious than it is, starting with the premise, which is a semi-catchy, semi-stupido hoot in a way that the movie couldn’t have completely intended.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Child's Play
    Child's Play is a near-miss at providing horrific thrills in a tale of a doll come to murderous life, told with a knowing tongue-in-cheek attitude. Fun withers in stretching the thin material to feature length.
  23. Anything
    Though the film’s heart is in the right place, writer Timothy McNeil’s directorial debut (an adaptation of his play) hits so many familiar notes that it undercuts its compassionate lead performances, in the process rendering it merely a superficial tale of unlikely amour.
  24. Bye Bye Germany
    There’s a storybook complacency to Garbarski’s filmmaking (indeed the literal translation of the German title is “Once Upon a Time in Germany”) that gives us the impression that all this is snow-globe history, put away behind glass on a shelf somewhere.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sword and the Sorcerer
    Combine beaucoup gore and an atrocity-a-minute action edited in fastpace style. Then, toss in a scantily clad cast of none-too- talented performers mouthing dimwitted dialog and garnish with a touch of medieval gibberish. The result would be something resembling The Sword and the Sorcerer.
  26. Hotel Artemis
    It boasts snappy dialogue, memorable characters, and a gorgeously designed central location but doesn’t quite know what to do with any of the above.
  27. A Kid Like Jake
    The movie doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere until it explodes, and the dazzling fireworks don’t quite offset its long, seemingly aimless fuse.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rambo: First Blood Part II
    The charade on the screen, which is not pulled off, is to accept that the underdog Rambo character, albeit with the help of an attractive machine-gun wielding Vietnamese girl (Julia Nickson), can waste hordes of Vietcong and Red Army contingents enroute to hauling POWs to a Thai air base in a smoking Russian chopper with only a facial scar (from a branding iron-knifepoint) marring his tough figure.
  29. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    While trying to save her from being considered as merely an inspiration to the great men around her, the script inadvertently reinforces this impression.
  30. Pick of the Litter
    “Pick” is brisk and pleasant, but not terribly involving or memorable.
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