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. 21 and Over
    Promising crude straight-boy humor, but delivering sensitive buddy moments and tons of male nudity, this by-the-numbers gut-buster looks slick, moves fast and packs enough laughs to enliven spring-break receipts and earn its helmers more work.
  2. The Time of Their Lives
    A likably lame rattletrap of a road movie that gets what limited spark it has from the “Dynasty” diva’s still-lascivious on-screen charisma.
  3. Radioflash
    Ultimately it seems a message movie not quite willing to deliver any clear message, as well as a genre film shy about admitting as much. It’s too melodramatic to be taken as gritty realism, yet not suspenseful enough to work as a straight thriller.
  4. Broken Diamonds
    It strikes not a single authentic chord, and that also goes for the lead performance of Ben Platt, whose overdone theater-kid turn further dooms the material’s stabs at humor and pathos.
  5. Safe Haven
    Safe Haven offers an unsurprising but not unsatisfying tour through recognizable Sparkville terrain.
  6. Ice Age: Collision Course
    It may be a slight entertainment in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been made with a busy, nattering joy that is positively infectious
    • 34 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1941
    Billed as a comedy spectacle, Steven Spielberg’s 1941 is long on spectacle, but short on comedy. The Universal-Columbia Pictures co-production is an exceedingly entertaining, fast-moving revision of 1940s war hysteria in Los Angeles spawned by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and boasts Hollywood’s finest miniature and special effects work seen to date.
  8. The Real Cancun
    Unabashedly tasteless, wholly trashy and, also, hugely entertaining.
  9. Spice World
    The movie essentially mirrors the non-diva, down-to-earth personalities on which their act is based, and which include a sizable amount of self-parody.
  10. It's Better to Jump
    The three director-producers’ inability to come up with stronger narrative or thematic organization makes “It’s Better to Jump” play like the professionally polished side product of a vacation stay.
  11. Boys of Abu Ghraib
    The film has a very good idea in using a single soldier’s perspective to explore how tension and boredom can lead to such extreme misconduct, but it doesn’t go far enough, in the end leaving a disgraceful chapter just dimly illuminated in psychological terms.
  12. Point Break
    The sense of living dangerously is somewhat lacking as Kurt Wimmer’s emotionally vacant screenplay fails to make audiences care enough about the characters to sweat over their physical exertions.
  13. Undead
    Precociously inventive horror pic that combines brain-eating zombies with outer space aliens.
  14. The Crush
    In fact, with its basic shortage of gore and only brief glimpses of nudity, it’s hard to imagine what in the film prompted an R rating, unless it stands for “ridiculous.”
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kill Me Later
    An edgy, energetic romantic thriller in the tradition of "Run Lola Run," "A Life Less Ordinary" and "Out of Sight."
  16. Town & Country
    A lot of talent on both sides of the camera operating in low gear.
  17. Eulogy
    Nine very good actors are wasted, if not embarrassed, by the thoroughly unconvincing shenanigans perpetrated by first-time writer-director Michael Clancy, while a tenth -- Zooey Deschanel -- somehow manages to float ethereally above it all with her dignity intact.
  18. Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
    In sartorial terms, the fabric is to die for, but helmer Whitney Sudler-Smith's documentary follows a banal pattern, while the finishing lacks finesse.
  19. Elektra
    Elektra proves no more than fitfully satisfying, a character-driven superhero yarn whose flurry of last-minute rewriting shows in a disjointed plot.
  20. American Son
    The overly finished language and theatrical intensity levels that might be potently effective onstage lose any pretense of naturalism under the camera’s unblinking gaze.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mr. Destiny
    A heavy-handed, by-the-numbers fantasy about an ordinary Joe who thinks his life would have been different if he'd connected with that all-important pitch in a high school baseball game.
  22. The Mummy
    The Mummy is a literal-minded, bumptious monster mash of a movie. It keeps throwing things at you, and the more you learn about the ersatz intricacy of its “universe,” the less compelling it becomes.
  23. Dead & Breakfast
    Offers plenty of splat with its slapstick. But this strenuous zombie yukfest is no more sophisticated than its nail-on-head title -- making it a joke no smarter than the movies it riffs on.
  24. Two Gates of Sleep
    Starts off promisingly but peters out as the story, told practically sans dialogue, heads nowhere consistent.
  25. Nesting
    The script unfortunately suffers from its own case of arrested development, barely getting out of the gate before stalling, and never building enough laughs or narrative impetus to justify feature length.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The People That Time Forgot
    Special effects add to the suspense as the group encounter all manner of hair-raising beasties and erupting fire in braving the dangers of the cavemen in an attempt to find their quarry.
  27. Vacation
    Key to the success of the Vacation movies was their underlying sweetness — the sense that, for all their foibles, the Griswolds were a surprisingly functional lot. Families looked up at the screen and saw a version of themselves reflected back. Look at the new Vacation and all that stares back is a great comic void.
  28. Love Hurts
    Most audiences want action to feel like action, whereas Eusebio makes it look too much like choreography: No matter how dynamic, every fight scene seems rehearsed to within an inch of its life.
  29. Fatal Affair
    Ultimately, this movie isn’t “Us,” or any other shrewd riff on contemporary culture. You won’t make a fatal — or even near-fatal — error if you stream it. Sometimes a second-rate thriller is just a second-rate thriller.
  30. The Lifeguard
    Lambert brings a forlorn dimension to his seductive young role, but Bell never really convinces as the older woman. Despite flirting with controversy, the actress seems reluctant to plunge fully into potential unlikability, nor does the film quite give her the chance.
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