Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    The result is a well-meaning but somewhat granola, partly engaging yet disorganized documentary, one that searches for an imprecise story and struggles to keep its chief ambitions afloat.
  2. La Dosis
    It’s all more involving than it is frustrating. That’s thanks in large part to the nuanced performances of the leads, whose work ensures that at least the first half of the term “psychological thriller” feels well-realized here.
  3. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    It’s a functional piece of exploitation — an efficient little crime-porn snuff-thriller potboiler. It’s like a fast-food meal that makes you think, “Okay, that wasn’t good for me, but I got what I paid for.” A film like this one is a junk-franchise burger: tasty, processed, and basically fake.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Raising Cain
    In 1976’s Paul Schrader-scripted Obsession (also featuring Lithgow), DePalma proved he could handle honest sentiment without sending it up. Here he tips the balance toward self-satire.
  5. Bullet Train
    Bullet Train feels like it comes from the same brain as “Snatch,” wearing its pop style on its sleeve — a “Kill Bill”-like mix of martial arts, manga and gabby hitman movie influences, minus the vision or wit that implies.
  6. Clockwatchers
    What starts as a bright look at the dim lives of temps in a large company slides into unfortunate digressions and drabness in Clockwatchers.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Beast Within
    There does come a time when Clemens has to get out of his body and get on with being a bigtime monster. Thanks to Thomas R. Burman’s make-up effects, this sequence actually creates chills as the boy’s head bubbles and bursts and his skin pops and stretches.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Narrow Margin
    Spectacular stunt work and Canadian locations punch up the train thriller Narrow Margin, but feature remake is too cool and remote to grab the viewer.
  9. Between Two Worlds
    The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.
  10. Stuntman
    In the end, both documentary and the jump itself feel like ambitious vanity projects that are admirably accomplished, yet feel a little hollow in the raison d’être department.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deep Cover
    Convoluted and mostly unconvincing as a portrait of the drug underworld, Deep Cover [based on a story by Michael Tolkin] still carries some resonance due to its vivid portrait of societal decay and a heavyweight performance by Larry Fishburne.
  12. The Hand of God
    The Hand of God has some good scenes, but it’s the kind of portrait-of-an-artist drama where you watch the insults, the clashes, the assaultive attitude of it all and you think: Is this what it was actually like for the young Sorrentino growing up in Naples? Or does he simply have an aversion to scenes that don’t hit you over the head
  13. The Gateway
    The Gateway moves quickly enough to hold attention, if not to cover up its ill-matched individual elements, let alone meld them into a coherent vision.
  14. The Baby-Sitters Club
    The picture’s problem is that it is small in every way. It’s modestly budgeted, and boasts a simple, unflamboyant story. Its score is bland and nondescript, the performers are scrubbed, and everything is tied up in a neat, white bow.
  15. Limbo
    Limbo is half-priced Sayles. After a promising opening in which numerous interesting aspects of life in modern Alaska are laid out, the potentially fascinating social dynamics are dropped in favor of a thinly realized survival tale that falls flat dramatically and cinematically.
  16. Rose
    Though the storied actress’ personality offers moments of charm and occasional depth, a weak, cliché-riddled script reduces almost everyone to a maximum of two characteristics.
  17. The Wonder
    An evenhanded but ultimately preposterous adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, co-written by the author herself (with an assist from Alice Birch).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eating
    The ladies who lunch - and munch, breakfast, binge, dine, diet, starve and sample - are delicious in Eating, but writer-director Henry Jaglom labors over the stove too long, harming a tasty souffle.
  19. The Braves
    Without any modulation in the brazen, head-on-collision presentation, once the story takes a turn for the sappy, there is really nowhere for any subtlety or subtext to hide.
  20. Don't Worry Darling
    The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.
  21. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    On some level, every “Paranormal Activity” film is about monsters caught on camera, but in this one the demons remain scariest when they’re sight unseen
  22. Silent Night
    Distracted for long stretches with ribbons and bows, “Silent Night” never uncovers its harshest possibilities: It’s sober and well-behaved even when the party falls to pieces.
  23. Earwig
    Earwig teeters on the brink of ennui for most of its taxing two-hour running time, asking us to care about characters the film hasn’t really defined.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goodbye, Mr. Chips
    M-G-M's reproduction of Goodbye, Mr. Chips as a big-budget musical [music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse] with Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark is a sumptuous near-miss that trips on its own overproduction.
  25. Four Hours at the Capitol
    The imagery of destruction and assault is powerful on its own terms; it’s in building the story of the participants’ motives and actions that Four Hours at the Capitol falters, making what could have been a definitive document into a deeply flawed one.
  26. Madame X
    Madame X, on the joy scale, feels drained. The show is a concert that plays, at times, like a lecture — or maybe the world’s most extended Oscar/Grammy star-makes-a-statement speech. But I don’t say that because I begrudge Madonna’s message. It’s just that she didn’t use to be so deadly serious and, at times, almost punitive about it.
  27. Mother/Android
    Tomlin’s screenplay deserves credit for mixing things up, introducing new characters and narrative turnabouts. But nothing is again as bluntly compelling as the early going, and despite hardworking principal performances, these characters and their movie lack the emotional depth to pull off an earnestly teary, draggy finale.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Made in America
    Made in America has the distinction of being better than the last movie involving a sperm bank, Frozen Assets, though at times the humor - overplayed to nearly shrill levels - seems to come from the same test tube.
  29. Speer Goes to Hollywood
    A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants.
  30. Love and a .45
    What holds the film back, however, in addition to its less than compelling schema and central relationship, is its utter lack of visual style. At a time when most pictures feature form almost at the expense of content, this one has an utterly undesigned look that’s virtually distinctive in its blandness.
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