Variety's Scores

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For 17,849 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: 9,174 out of 17849
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17849
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17849
17849 movie reviews
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  1. Vanquish
    Vanquish isn’t bad so much as inert — nothing here is convincing, tense, kinetic, outrageous, or silly enough to give the movie even fleeting life. The script is so by-the-numbers, the performers can hardly hide their disinterest, a feeling soon to be shared by viewers
  2. Spark: A Space Tail
    It’s hard to imagine that even the least demanding of tykes will ask for a second sampling of this thoroughly second-rate animated feature, which has all the charm, and twice the volume, of a barking dog.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
    A virtual remake of the 1972 original, without that film's mounting suspense and excitement.
  4. Search Party
    As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th
    Lowbudget in the worst sense – with no apparent talent or intelligence to offset its technical inadequacies – Friday the 13th has nothing to exploit but its title.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Spies Like Us
    Spies is not very amusing. Though Chase and Aykroyd provide moments, the overall script thinly takes on eccentric espionage and nuclear madness, with nothing new to add.
  7. Max Steel
    [A] drearily lame time-waster.
  8. Redemption Day
    If Redemption Day were any more generic, the first thing you’d see on screen would be a bar code in place of the opening credits.
  9. Children of the Corn
    Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.
  10. Pokémon 3: The Movie
    The series' quest for different and challenging Pokemon reaches a nearly absurd endpoint this time.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Revolution
    Watching Revolution is a little like visiting a museum - it looks good without really being alive. The film doesn't tell a story so much as it uses characters to illustrate what the American Revolution has come to mean. Despite attempting to reduce big events to personal details, Revolution rarely works on a human scale.
  12. Black Christmas
    It's debatable whether the original 1974 "Black Christmas" is, as its most rabid fans claim, the mother of all slasher movies. But there can be no argument regarding the scant merits of its slapdash, soporifically routine remake, suitable only for the least discriminating of gore hounds.
  13. Twelve
    Can't decide if it's a cautionary tale or a lifestyle catalog.
  14. New Year's Eve
    Few of the plot strands connect to one another, much less resolve themselves with any degree of wit or daring.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Villain
    Rarely has so much talent been used to so little purpose.
  16. Postal
    This anything-goes exercise isn't dull -- one just wishes the outrageousness were more consistently funny.
  17. Home Sweet Hell
    Heigl’s performance as a coolly murderous model housewife is the only real reason to even consider watching Home Sweet Hell, an otherwise flailing and risible tale of adultery, extortion and suburban malaise that suggests a poor woman’s “Gone Girl” — one stripped of all tension, style and subtext, and instead rendered with a level of over-the-top gore that would give even David Fincher pause.
  18. What Goes Up
    A pointless and pretentious drama.
  19. Merci Docteur Rey
    A disastrous stab at contemporary farce.
  20. Passion Play
    Perversely eccentric and frequently inert, screenwriter Mitch Glazer's directorial debut, Passion Play, will benefit from some of the well-known names attached, but the near-painful hipness of the production will yield poisonous word of mouth.
  21. The Legend of Hercules
    Lutz’s acting muscles aren’t nearly as well developed as his pectorals and deltoids, and while the role may not call for a master thespian, it at least begs someone who can emote without looking like he’s straining to execute a dead lift.
  22. Getaway
    Easily one of the dopiest major studio releases since Elie Samaha got out of the business.
  23. Do You Believe?
    When all its threads are finally pulled into place, Do You Believe? proves about as spiritually enlightening as a Kmart throw rug.
  24. Killers Anonymous
    It doesn’t strike an assertively comic tone either, resulting in a superficially colorful but hollow pile of contrivances that are neither clever nor convincing enough to achieve more than time-passing diversion.
  25. Shark Night 3D
    Unlike his "Snakes on a Plane," director David R. Ellis' sharks-in-a-lake thriller displays little sense of its scenario's camp potential. Gore, too, is in short supply on account of the pic's PG-13 rating, which renders the attack scenes nearly toothless.
  26. Out Cold
    A few minutes of good snowboarding footage -- all in the first reel, alas -- after which it's strictly downhill, bunny-slope style.
  27. The Tax Collector
    Bloody, barely coherent and about as fun as having your face dragged across asphalt from a moving SUV.
  28. The Tiger and the Snow
    Like an Iraq-war mirror image of "Life Is Beautiful," actor-director Roberto Benigni's The Tiger and the Snow re-runs the successful structure and comic persona of the 1998 Oscar-winning film in a trippy fantasia about a poet who follows his love to hell and, in this happier ending, back.
  29. God's Not Dead 2
    Dramatically speaking, God’s Not Dead 2 operates at the level of your average middle-school play – except with far greater levels of upside-down logic and bald-faced intolerance for anyone not enraptured by the New Testament.
  30. The Babysitter: Killer Queen
    Fans of the original will no doubt tune expecting more high-grade guilty-pleasure fun, only to get way too much of a no-longer-very-good thing instead.
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