Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. Billy Boy
    Billy Boy is the worst kind of grab for “indie cred”: It’s exasperatingly undercooked and arted-up, failing on basic levels of character definition and narrative coherence, too often feeling like a classic indulgence for pretty-boy actors playing tough.
  2. Billionaire Boys Club
    There are no billionaires here, just a lot of testosterone where the movie’s brains ought to be.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Highlander: The Final Dimension
    An unbelievably trashy meltdown of the tartan warrior franchise, Highlander III checks in as a breakneck, roller-coaster genre ride that’s brainless fodder for undiscriminating auds.
  4. Along Came the Devil
    The budget may be low, but the level of scares and imagination are lower still in Along Came the Devil, a feeble indie horror film that sometimes seems like a straight retread and other times feels like a movie aimed specifically at Christian audiences.
  5. The Little Mermaid
    Creaky visual effects, slapdash plotting and a script drunk on cliché: There’s pretty much nothing but cheap parlor trickery here.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Amityville 3-D
    There is hardly anything original about the picture. A new cast of characters and the addition of 3-D does little to pump new life, supernatural or otherwise, into this tired genre.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Critters
    Critters resemble oversize hairballs and roll like tumbleweeds when prodded into action, the perfect menace for this irritatingly insipid and lightweight film which unfolds with plodding predictability and leaves few cliches unturned.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Hellraiser: Bloodline
    Fourth installment of Hellraiser series proves to be so bad that the director of record is Alan Smithee, the name used under Directors Guild rules when the real helmer refuses credit. The director billed in early announcements was special effects whiz Kevin Yeager -- who retains credit in that category -- but who wisely realized the released film would not enhance his resume. Except for the most undiscriminating gorehound, pic is a pointless mess.
  9. Silencio
    This turgid fantasy thriller, boasting scant thrills or imagination, douses a mystic time-travel concept with soap operatic hand-wringing to mawkishly unconvincing effect.
  10. The Intruder
    The Intruder offers few surprises of any sort.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Silent Rage
    Silent Rage seems as if it were made with a demographics sampler entitled ’10 Sleazy Ways to Cash in on the Exploitation Market’. The result is a combination horror-kung fu-oater-woman in peril-mad scientist film with more unintentional laughs than possible in the space of 100 minutes.
  12. Overcomer
    Laced with white-savior undertones this vaguely “The Blind Side”-esque sports drama doesn’t bother investigating (if it recognizes them at all), Overcomer offers nothing in the way of nuance — even its title is awkward — and, also, no respite from its religious propagandizing.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Cruising
    Like any approach to the bizarre, it is fascinating for about 15 minutes. In many respects, Cruising [from the novel by Gerald Walker] resembles the worst of the ‘hippie’ films of the 1960s. Taking away the kissing, caressing and a few bloody killings, Friedkin has no story, though picture pretends to be a murder mystery combined with a study of Al Pacino’s psychological degradation.
  14. All Is True
    The result is a revisionist fiasco, too dense with Shakespeare allusions for casual moviegoers, and too fast and loose with the facts for those who know a thing or two about the man. In short, All Is True takes the English language’s most gifted dramatist and reduces his sunset years to a sloppy soap opera.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    House
    Filmmakers Sean S. Cunningham and Steve Miner scored hits with several simple Friday the 13th films but tackle a more complex story here with embarrassing results.
  16. Red Joan
    Tweedy, dreary, and unconvincing. ... It’s dismaying that so little drama is wrung out of the tale, and that what we get too often feels like a cliché-riddled romantic pulp.
  17. Coyote Lake
    While the movie doesn’t work, it isn’t idiosyncratic enough even to hold attention as a misfired oddity.
  18. Being Frank
    Being Frank isn’t very amusing, which normally would be the most damning thing one might say about an ostensible comedy. But that really isn’t the worst thing about it. There is something ineffably creepy about this contrived and mirthless farce.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Shanghai Surprise
    But centerstage is the completely illogical relationship between the hustler and missionary. Penn seems game and has energy while Madonna can’t for a moment disguise that her character makes no sense at all.
  20. Saturday Fiction
    [A] grandiloquently incoherent misfire
  21. Jacob's Ladder
    You can forge a decent drama out of elements this scrappy, but not necessarily a film like Jacob’s Ladder.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Unfortunately, the caricatures are so crude and the ‘revelations’ so unenlightening of the human condition, that the satire is about as socially incisive as a Police Academy entry.
  23. Synchronic
    Making underwhelming use of its not-bad ... conceit, Benson’s sci-fi-tinged script is not at all ingeniously plotted, insists we care about tritely sketched characters, and is never credible enough to transcend an air of escalating silliness.
  24. Color of Night
    Color of Night is a knuckleheaded thriller that means to get a rise out of audiences, but will merely make them see red. It's confounding and sad that director Richard Rush waited 14 years to make another film after his striking "The Stunt Man," only to choose a script as dismal as this.
  25. Followed
    At nearly 100 minutes — way too many for material this flimsy — Followed even has time for a couple clumsily maudlin bits, not excluding brief yet awesomely trite address of “the homeless issue” in downtown L.A. A movie like this doesn’t need to have a social conscience. It ought to have worried first about having a brain, period.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Men's Club
    Film is a distasteful piece of work that displays the worst in men. Leonard Michaels’ screenplay (from his novel) is all warts and no insight, full of self-loathing for the gender. In addition, film making is as tired as the material. Pic plays like a stageplay, so static is Peter Medak’s direction.
  27. The Last Days of American Crime
    It’s an offensive eyesore in which looting and anarchy are treated as window dressing, law and order come in the form of mind control, and police brutality is so pervasive as to warrant a trigger warning.
  28. Mighty Oak
    This is a fuzzy-headed, badly made cheeseball schlock fable for everyone!
  29. Love, Weddings & Other Disasters
    If Love, Actually had actually been as bad as its most vociferous detractors have long insisted, it would have looked and sounded a lot like this misfire.
  30. Cherry
    There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.
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