Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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 2.4 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. At First Light
    Apart from the uncommon notion that these mysterious visitors may actually mean us well, the film seems a little too comfortable with clichés, right down to the men in black who show up mid-movie to ruin everybody’s fun.
  2. Mobile Homes
    This is a dour and deeply unpleasant film that wears its gritty realism as a badge of honor, while failing to recognize the motivations that explain such behavior in reality, which makes him neither an attentive journalist nor a particularly good storyteller (at least not yet).
  3. REC
    Lazily scripted, without even a pretense of character development or psychological depth, it offers nothing new for genre fans and no reason for mainstream auds to bite.
  4. All Creatures Here Below
    It’s a decently acted and crafted drama that nonetheless seems built on a foundation of phony pathos, revolving around doomed lovers whose fate seems more a matter of contrived miserabilism than authenticity.
  5. Escape Room
    The first part of the film gets some airy momentum going. Then, however, we learn the secret of what the characters have in common, and it gives you that slightly sinking feeling of one contrivance too many.
  6. The Dark
    In trying to succeed as something both metaphorical and very literal-minded, the movie ends up being neither one nor the other — not psychologically deep enough to succeed as pure drama, and too earnest to offer the usual rewards of a genre film.
  7. In Harm's Way
    In the end, In Harm’s Way struggles to please so many theoretical audiences that it winds up feeling like a film for no one at all.
  8. Brightburn
    A watchable but super-silly mix of superheroics and evil-child horror that mashes together singularly uninspired ideas from both.
  9. All the Devil's Men
    Resourceful and energetic, All the Devil’s Men is better than it might have been. But it’s still not very good.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Oh, God! Book II
    Absence this time of John Denver, his chemistry with lead George Burns, and the original's solid comedy material lead to a bland, unstimulating film.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Villain
    Rarely has so much talent been used to so little purpose.
  12. Triple Frontier
    There’s a dullness at the core of Triple Frontier.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Return of Swamp Thing
    The Return of Swamp Thing is scientific hokum without the fun. Second attempt to film the DC Comics character will disappoint all but the youngest critters.
  14. American Hangman
    American Hangman belongs to that species of grade-Z movie that’s at once grisly and pretentious. It’s trash with a lot on its mind.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mission
    The script is based on a little-known but nonetheless intriguing historical incident in mid-18th century South America, pitting avaricious colonialists against the Jesuit order of priests. The fundamental problem is that the script is cardboard thin, pinning labels on its characters and arbitrarily shoving them into stances to make plot points.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Brewster's Millions
    It’s hard to believe a comedy starring Richard Pryor and John Candy is no funnier than this one is, but director Walter Hill has overwhelmed the intricate genius of each with constant background action, crowd confusions and other endless distractions.
  17. The Devil All the Time
    The Devil All the Time shows us a lot of bad behavior, but the movie isn’t really interested in what makes the sinners tick. And without that lurid curiosity, it’s just a series of Sunday School lessons: a noir that wants to scrub away the darkness.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nightbreed
    Writer-director Clive Barker's Nightbreed is a mess. Self-indulgent horror pic [from his novel Cabal] could be the Heaven's Gate of its genre, of obvious interest to diehard monster fans but a turnoff for mainstream audiences.
  19. Saint Judy
    Monaghan radiates a winning measure of defiant resilience and dignity, even when she and her illustrious co-stars are reduced to mouthpieces for political sentiments (as in Common’s censure of ICE) — which is depressingly often.
  20. Billboard
    Zelker’s three-ring circus of digital and social-media content needs a compelling main event, and this movie seems unlikely to inspire many to check out the supplementary materials.
  21. Berlin, I Love You
    By and large, the film feels aimless and uninspired.
  22. Tolkien
    The film – stately, well-acted, and ultimately unsubstantial – dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Marked for Death
    This dim-witted revenge yarn is the simplest of showcases for Steven Seagal - an extremely compelling action presence with his brutal martial arts fighting style, imposing size and nasty demeanor.
  24. After
    An innocuous teen pulp soap opera that flirts with “danger” but, in fact, keeps surprising you with how mild and safe and predictable it turns out to be.
  25. The Dirt
    It’s just a thinly written (by Rich Wilkes and Amanda Adelson), generically staged (by Jeff Tremaine, director of the “Jackass” films) VH1-style sketchbook of a movie — which is to say, it’s a Netflix film, with zero atmosphere, overly blunt lighting, and a threadbare post-psychological telegraphed quality that gives you nothing to read between the lines.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sliver
    Blame it on the editing and reediting, but even the sex scenes aren’t all that steamy, and the movie suffers from some choppy moments and highrise-size lapses in logic.
  27. The Glimmer Man
    For a rock'em, sock'em action thriller, The Glimmer Man is a hopelessly slow-moving, slow-witted shaggy-dog tale that delivers the jolts but lacks the juice necessary for high-voltage entertainment.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tora! Tora! Tora!
    Both overall director Richard Fleischer and his Japanese counterparts do a dull job, and the monotonously low-key tone of scene after scene almost suggests that each was filmed without a sense of ultimate slotting in the finished form.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Straight Time
    Straight Time is a most unlikeable film because Dustin Hoffman, starring as a paroled and longtime criminal, cannot overcome the essentially distasteful and increasingly unsympathetic elements in the character. Ulu Grosbard's sluggish direction doesn't help.
  30. The Sunlit Night
    Here, Wnendt suppresses his naturally provocative streak to deliver an aggressively cute existential comedy instead.
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