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. Joyful Noise
    A routinely plotted competition drama in which Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton (playing her first bigscreen lead in 20 years) vie for control of a small-town Georgia church chorus.
  2. Rush Hour 3
    The latest picture to feature one of the movies’ oddest crime-fighting tandems nevertheless stays true to the franchise formula of East-West fusion action, broad cultural comedy and international intrigue, this time largely in Paris.
  3. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    Seth MacFarlane has delivered a flaccid all-star farce that’s handsomely dressed up with nowhere to go for most of its padded two-hour running time.
  4. Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    Too underground in feel.
  5. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    A partly smart, mostly dumb addition to the teen horror sweepstakes -- smart in how it neatly catches the petty, hurtful, sexy and druggy aspects of high school life, dumb in how it makes absolutely no sense once its resolution is known.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Three Men and a Cradle
    Coline Serreau's comedy about three hardened bachelors saddled with a newborn baby, produced on a modest budget and without bankable talent, is warm, hilarious and well-made. Serreau's direction is bright and confident, avoiding the saccharine pitfalls of the material.
  7. Bushwick
    Even if the low-budget execution is uneven at times, there’s enough snap to the filmmaking, and enough raw power in the premise, to make for solid B-movie excitement.
  8. How to Deter a Robber
    With low stakes and even lower energy, writer-director Maria Bissell’s feature debut isn’t sure if it’s a thriller with amusing elements or a comedy of criminal absurdity. What it winds up being, therefore, is neither, stuck in a dull middle ground that will please no one.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Warlock
    Warlock is an attempt to concoct a pic from a pinch of occult chiller, a dash of fantasy thriller and a splash of 'stalk 'n' slash'. But what could have been a heady brew falls short, despite some gusto thesping from Richard E. Grant and Lori Singer.
  10. The Love Punch
    A creaky heist-caper comedy that hopes to get by on sunny amiability.
  11. Last Man Standing
    Bruce Willis’ one-note performance and the monotonous plotting doom this New Line venture, despite the director’s typically virile staging of the numerous gun battles.
  12. Unicorn Store
    There’s a serious mismatch between the personality of Samantha McIntyre’s script (which seems to be written as a kooky, do-it-yourself comedy, à la “Being John Malkovich” or “Napoleon Dynamite”) and Larson’s directing style, which feels entirely incompatible with whimsy.
  13. Chaos Theory
    The lead performers, the brighter fillips in Daniel Taplitz’s screenplay and Marcos Siega’s (“Pretty Persuasion”) assured direction make this a pleasing item overall.
  14. The Closer You Get
    Another tale of out-of-it working-class men cooking up a harebrained scheme to improve their lot in life.
  15. The Code
    Gallic gangster actioner fuses many disparate generic and stylistic conventions, but, although script by co-star Samy Naceri's brother was purportedly pared down from several hundred pages, it still bears the weight of its pretensions.
  16. Brokedown Palace
    It's close to a no-win situation dramatically, culturally and politically, and Kaplan deals with it plausibly enough by concentrating on the performances and the interior conflicts they reveal.
  17. The Ninth Gate
    This is really a shaggy devil story whose giddy, ironic tone may throw viewers expecting a scary movie.
  18. Love & Sex
    Valerie Breiman’s exceedingly slick feature is one of those cutesy items in which the characters talk about nothing but relationships and themselves.
  19. Pearl Harbor
    Just compare their superficiality to the complex characters in "From Here to Eternity" and what's missing here becomes terribly clear.
  20. The Marksman
    The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate.
  21. The Jacket
    A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.
  22. Skills Like This
    Likable but lightweight slacker comedy.
  23. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    It is all aggressively stylized, abusively fast-paced and ear-bleedingly loud, relying so heavily on CGI that nothing — not one thing — seems to correspond to the real world.
  24. The Miracle Season
    Even if you see through the benign (manipulative) strategies of The Miracle Season, which isn’t hard to do, resistance is futile. You will surrender. You’ll feel the tear on your cheek, the lump in your throat, the reverent huggy glory of it all.
  25. Drive Angry 3D
    Despite amply funded f/x, including some spectacular muscle-car stunts, the movie motors to the grindhouse with squealing tires and guitars, gratuitous nudity and gore, and a scantily clad greasy-spoon waitress endearingly played by Amber Heard.
  26. Slap Her... She's French
    Scripters Robert Lee King and Lamar Damon leave no national cliche or double entendre unturned in this good-looking but relentlessly lowbrow outing which plays like "Clueless Does South Fork" with a side order of garlic.
  27. Carbon Nation
    Well intended but inert.
  28. Incident In a Ghostland
    It all seems slick, intense, and unpleasant in the same hollow way “Martyrs” did, because all the cruelty is so meaningless.
  29. A Sacrifice
    The result is a movie that ultimately falls short on both suspense and ideas, though it remains watchable enough.
  30. Then Came You
    Since the filmmakers’ hearts are clearly in the right place, it’s a shame its parts couldn’t knit together a bit more seamlessly. The narrative’s lifeblood is the sweet friendship that develops between Calvin and Skye — and the actors’ magnetic chemistry keeps that alive.
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