Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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  1. Maniac
    This merciless work of anti-entertainment is arguably admirable for being as disturbingly disgusting as it wants to be.
  2. White Elephant
    The lensing is flawless in White Elephant, but the same can't be said for the script, which tries to keep too many thematic balls in the air without privileging any one.
  3. The Wall
    Though complementary, the pic’s images and voiceover never quite fuse into a single whole.
  4. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
    The conflict at the core of the WikiLeaks saga is dramatically lacking.
  5. Murph: The Protector
    The serviceable documentary Murph: The Protector could hardly fail to be an emotionally potent experience.
  6. Nicky's Family
    A valuable albeit overproduced history lesson.
  7. Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    What keeps Ain’t in It for My Health from being a really satisfying portrait isn’t a lack of access, but a lack of intimacy.
  8. Thale
    A nutty Norwegian mashup of drollery, myth and jolts to the nervous system, Thale does a deft dance between grossout comedy and horror fantasy. Still, it’s too wordy by half, saying what it should be showing
  9. Pompeii
    While more coherent than much of Anderson’s recent work, the film proves less successful at combining destruction and damsel-in-distress storytelling within the same frame, serving up blurry images of Milo trying to rescue Cassia while the city crumbles around them.
  10. Fists of Legend
    Bloated but energetic, entertaining but interminable, tortured but strangely satisfying, Fists of Legend spends two-and-a-half hours unraveling the knotty saga of three middle-aged fighters, their shared dark past and their rocky road to redemption.
  11. Sun Don't Shine
    Seimetz takes advantage of the eccentric cultural/natural landscape of central Florida to vivid effect, gets impressive if seldom endearing work from her actors, and seems very much in charge of an assertive if not always explicable presentation.
  12. Computer Chess
    Computer Chess is ultimately too slack and scattershot to work consistently well as a comedy.
  13. What Richard Did
    In the end, the material feels a bit attenuated, like a short that’s been stretched to feature length, even if the characters are enjoyable, sympathetic enough company for the pic’s 84-minute running time.
  14. Heaven Is for Real
    Those willing to engage may be pleasantly surprised by some of its understated virtues.
  15. Redemption
    A debut effort that occasionally bogs down in its own symbolism.
  16. Frankenstein's Army
    Pic’s monotone edges towards monotony by the end of the third act, but as no-budget calling-card features go, Frankenstein’s Army remains a grisly cut above.
  17. The Other Woman
    As it winds its way toward an unexpectedly grisly final showdown, The Other Woman often feels stranded between gross-out comedy, romantic fantasy and distaff psychodrama in a way that compels fascination and impatience alike.
  18. Nancy, Please
    For Semans’ conceit of an obsessively narrow world to really work, he needed to have established an initially more expansive milieu.
  19. A Field in England
    Clearly, Wheatley is bored with the paint-by-numbers approach of his horror contemporaries, but has swung so far in the opposite direction here, the result feels almost amateurishly avant garde at times, guilty of the sort of indulgences one barely tolerates in student films.
  20. As I Lay Dying
    Franco offers up a competently acted, technically adequate Cliff Notes take on Faulkner’s narratively refracted tale of dirt-poor Mississippi folk in mourning.
  21. A Castle in Italy
    Bruni Tedeschi holds all of pic’s myriad tangents in a delicate balance, no single one ever rising to the fore, no pressure felt to wrap everything — or anything — up in a tidy package at the end.
  22. Grigris
    The film is easier to admire than it is to invest in emotionally, though its pulse quickens with a dramatic, and boldly untelegraphed, feminist twist in the rural-set final reel.
  23. Only Lovers Left Alive
    A sweet but slight love story about world-weary hipster bloodsuckers.
  24. A Touch of Sin
    There’s a certain pleasure to be had in seeing a revered auteur go off the disreputable deep end, and there’s no denying A Touch of Sin packs a visceral wallop.
  25. American Mary
    This tale of a violently disillusioned medical student’s wade into the weird world of extreme body modification doesn’t develop all its narrative and thematic ideas to the fullest. But the polished pic is still outre and entertaining enough to please most jaded horror fans.
  26. Non-Stop
    Even in the movie’s most ridiculous moments, Collet-Serra keeps the pacing brisk and knows how to divert our attention with a well-timed bit of comic relief.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Hopes
    Leigh builds a slight story intended to be a microcosm of today’s London.
  28. Kansas City
    For Altman, this is a major statement about American hypocrisy and society’s haves and have-nots, in line with many of his films, but issued in a kind of offhand way that delivers only glancing emotional impact.
  29. Grabbers
    A polished, watchable genre entertainment that nonetheless lacks the inspired dialogue and situations needed to make a memorable impression.
  30. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    A passable, tolerable, not unbearable, totally inoffensive adaptation of Judith Viorst’s beloved 1972 children’s book.
  31. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    It’s fine — and true enough to Marvel — to make a “Spider-Man” movie about a young adult, but Spider-Man: Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavor.
  32. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Glossy, well cast, and a consistent hoot until it becomes a serious drag, this neo-“9½ Weeks” is above all a slick exercise in carefully brand-managed titillation — edgier than most grown-up studio fare, but otherwise a fairly mild provocation in this porn-saturated day and age.
  33. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Sophisticated cutting brings out the story’s complex emotional undercurrents, though “Breakdown’s” less convincingly scripted second half sputters more often than it shines.
  34. Colossus
    Hendrickson shot “Colossus” from a partial script, leaving room for improvisation, and the movie’s loose, shapeless feel and scenes that go on far too long are the telltale signs of a filmmaker who fell so in love with his own material that he couldn’t bring himself to kill his darlings.
  35. When Comedy Went to School
    Ron Frank and Melvut Akkaya’s docu isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but as a brief history of the Catskill resorts, liberally laced with well-edited archival promos, songs, homemovies and extended excerpts from routines by Jewish comics who performed there, it consistently entertains.
  36. The Judge
    The Judge pivots on a simple yet inspired stroke of casting, pitting Duvall’s iconic gravitas against Downey’s razor-sharp wit, and then supplying no shortage of opportunities for both men to chew the scenery.
  37. Haunter
    Director Vincenzo Natali (“Splice”) is more effective at sustaining clammy suspense than hiding all the holes in Brian King’s script. But top-billed Abigail Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”) is effective enough to generate a rooting interest in the plucky protagonist of the piece, and to sustain interest when narrative logic turns fuzzy.
  38. The Happy Sad
    Full of warmth and refreshingly matter-of-fact sexuality, the film has its heart in the right place, yet it’s ultimately a bit blander than its subject matter ought to demand, and its chamber-piece intimacy and pileup of coincidences scan particularly awkwardly given its convincingly wide-open depiction of New York.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Seconds
    US suburbia boredom is treated in an original manner in this cross between a sci-fi opus, a thriller, a suspense pic and a parable on certain aspects of American middle-class life.
  40. Standing Up
    Director D.J. Caruso offers a practical solution to the issue of adolescent bullying, as its two young protags respond to a case of vicious hazing not with despair or retaliation, but through teamwork and character-building.
  41. Wampler's Ascent
    Resolutely sappy and sometimes amateurish, the briskly paced doc remains heartfelt and direct about the same admirable mission Wampler had in making the climb.
  42. Vikingdom
    A cheerfully silly action fantasy.
  43. Abigail Harm
    Though never dull, the result is a curiously distant meditation on intimacy.
  44. Generation Iron
    Those with just a casual interest will find it colorful if a bit undercooked in the human-interest department, with limited insight into what makes its subjects tick, and the occasional rivalries between them.
  45. Morning
    An initially intriguing but ultimately exhausting tale of grieving parents left quite literally dazed and confused in the wake of their young son’s death.
  46. The Railway Man
    There’s something decidedly old-fashioned — and also dull as ditchwater — about Jonathan Teplitzky’s retelling of events.
  47. Mr. Nobody
    Though a lot of it is well written and directed and, quite often, funny or poignant, the individual scenes rarely become part of a larger whole.
  48. The Double
    Undeniably impressive as a visual-psychological construct, The Double is ultimately a rigid, one-joke movie that feels hard pressed to sustain any sort of momentum over the course of its 92-minute running time.
  49. Joe
    A patiently observed, often unsettlingly violent drama that can’t help but feel overly familiar in some of its particulars, rich in rural texture but low on narrative momentum or surprise.
  50. Stray Dogs
    Tsai here seems to be stripping his ornately eccentric style down to formal fundamentals. A certain pictorial grace remains; his sense of humor, sadly, appears to have been largely tossed out with the bathwater.
  51. Under the Skin
    Glazer has always been longer on atmosphere and uncanny moods than on narrative, but the fatal flaw of Under the Skin isn’t that not much happens; it’s that what does happen isn’t all that interesting.
  52. Child of God
    The crazed intensity of Franco’s filmmaking, while duly evocative of Haze’s primitive state, is ultimately too hectic and unmodulated for anything to burrow deep and stay there.
  53. Great Expectations
    Working from a tightly compressed screenplay by David Nicholls, director Mike Newell strikes the beats of a deservedly oft-told tale with dour competence but little in the way of dramatic inspiration or visual flair.
  54. Dislecksia: The Movie
    The film conveys key information and makes important distinctions not generally known, and its effectiveness probably depends on the viewer’s tolerance for poorly executed kitsch and manic physical intrusions by the filmmaker.
  55. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
    It’s an affectionate, sometimes downright slobbery career salute with a soft, unexamined center — a moving experience for all involved, no doubt, but one of limited interest outside the celebrity bubble it depicts.
  56. A Wolf at the Door
    the pic gathers steam and displays considerable drive, even if it can’t quite shake the feel of a good TV movie.
  57. Pulling Strings
    A lightly engaging bilingual trifle that benefits greatly from the charm of lead player Jaime Camil, a Mexican TV and film star who evidences smooth self-assurance at the wheel of what could be his crossover vehicle.
  58. Spinning Plates
    Little in the way of a unified theme emerges to turn Joseph Levy’s feature into something more than a semi-random survey of restaurant life.
  59. Symphony of the Soil
    Koons Garcia has obviously opted for an upbeat approach: Choruses of scientists and farmers sing the praises of organic farming while John Chater’s camera visually devours the fruits, vegetables and livestock produced by healthy dirt.
  60. Toad Road
    Though it can be taken at first glance as an archetypal “nothing happening” movie, there’s just enough going on here to suggest repeat viewings might reward curiosity.
  61. Bettie Page Reveals All
    It has a somewhat routine midlevel-cable-production feel. But the content is engaging, and the use of old movie clips to illustrate biographical details... is amusing.
  62. The Human Scale
    If Dalsgaard’s advocacy of Gehl’s utopian vision largely ignores the socioeconomic forces arrayed against it, the film should nevertheless enthuse pedestrians, bike riders and public-space proponents everywhere.
  63. The Snitch Cartel
    A snazzy, fast-paced pic that’s nonetheless somewhat enslaved by the get-rich-quick and crime-doesn’t-pay cliches that finally trip up the lowlife protags.
  64. Lost for Words
    Sufficiently sweet to serve as a date movie for all ages, Lost for Words comes across as almost subversively retrograde in its old-fashioned approach to charting the slow blossoming of a cross-cultural romance.
  65. Peaches Does Herself
    This high-grade concert film will enthrall fans and amuse more open-minded newbies, though it suffers from the most dynamic material being largely clustered in the pic’s front section.
  66. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    The haunted house setpieces provide reliable doses of jolts, even if one can see the scaffolding of each scare being built from miles away, and director Landon has fun with some clever camera placement here and there.
  67. Musicwood
    Maxine Trump’s feature loses focus as it progresses, though its insights into guitar making, forestry harvesting and environmental shortages resonate strongly.
  68. Beyond Outrage
    The Japanese action aesthete plays it cool and smooth in a picture that exerts a steadily tightening grip, though not until after a first hour of near-impenetrable gangster gab that may leave the uninitiated feeling stranded.
  69. Go for Sisters
    Like too many of Sayles’ films, Go for Sisters seems bound to slip through the cracks, not quite memorable enough to make a lasting impression.
  70. Reaching for the Moon
    Attention is retained by the commendably unhistrionic leads, who convincingly etch the pair’s enduring devotion even when passions run dry.
  71. Contracted
    The ick factor is high in Contracted, a body-horror opus that will satisfy genre fans who like to be grossed out, but doesn’t have much to offer on any other count.
  72. Geography Club
    The idea here isn’t to titillate with tawdry teen hormones, but to offer an outlet for all that mental distress young people take on while trying to find their place in the world.
  73. Live by Night
    The film is sharply written and crafted, lavishly photographed, impeccably acted, with lots of twists and turns — yet for all that, it somehow lacks zing.
  74. Body Bags
    Scary moments are scattered throughout the teleplays by Billy Brown and Dan Angel, with a few jittery jolts to grab attention (particularly during the first episode), but the writing and stories are pedestrian.
  75. Cuban Fury
    Overall, it’s just enough to send the date-movie crowd home with a smile on their face and a tingle of joy in their heart.
  76. Commitment
    Tyro helmer Park Hong-soo handles wall-to-wall action, political intrigue and adolescent love with a relentless efficiency that befits his protagonist, even if the execution can feel as methodical as that of a killer checking off a hit list.
  77. Dhoom 3
    At their best, the lush yet punchy musical numbers that Acharya stages for Dhoom: 3 reach giddy heights of pop romanticism.
  78. Personal Tailor
    Over the course of its generally absorbing if overlong 117-minute running time, it offers a brief and appreciably sympathetic take on the lure of fantasy, the pleasures of role play and the thrill of commanding the multitudes — which is to say that it’s, among other things, a film about filmmaking.
  79. In Fear
    Jeremy Lovering’s tense debut might have worked better had it left more to the imagination. Still, crisp camerawork and amplified sound yield paranoia aplenty.
  80. Jerusalem
    Ferguson’s careful, painfully banal script keeps sidling up to the neverending conflict that splits this lovely city in two, then backing away into conciliatory but meaningless bromides about intercultural understanding. He probably should have stuck with the gorgeous vistas.
  81. Enemies Closer
    An unremarkable but entirely serviceable action quickie.
  82. This Is Where I Leave You
    If the movie never quite masters the feel of messy, grown-up life, it at least makes a few promising salvos in that direction... The actors help a lot.
  83. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    One of the best products to roll off the prolific multihyphenate’s Atlanta-based assembly line, largely absent the pandering humor and finger-wagging moralism that have bedeviled many of Perry’s earlier (if undeniably popular) efforts.
  84. Veronica Mars
    It plays less like a meaty mystery than an extended thank-you to the fans who breathed it into existence. Still, it’s smooth and engaging enough on its own compromised terms, clearly informed by Thomas’ genre-savvy storytelling and unpretentious craftsmanship, and not without a certain self-deprecating sense of humor about its own immodest origins.
  85. Cymbeline
    Having learned a thing or two from Baz Luhrmann, Almereyda substitutes guns for daggers and picks his locations carefully, creating a rich, sultry-looking environment within which to stage the drama.
  86. Journey to the West
    [A] mostly entertaining action-fantasy-comedy.
  87. Grand Piano
    [An] appealingly absurd thriller.
  88. Adult World
    The improvisational zeal with which Cusack approaches his role (absent from his miscast villainous turn in “The Paperboy”) is particularly fun to watch.
  89. Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    There’s no doubting Brook and the performers’ commitment to their craft, even if the end result is somewhat repetitive.
  90. Voyage of Time: Life's Journey
    Voyage of Time has too many spellbinding images to count, but as a movie it’s just okay.
  91. Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America
    The pic nicely straddles a line between Sosa’s private and public personas, never quite delving deep although Vila covers all the bases.
  92. Loves Her Gun
    Loves Her Gun ultimately doesn’t quite cohere as one part slackerish social observation in a nicely turned mumblecore mode, and one part cautionary psychological thriller about the dangers of treating fear with a loaded weapon.
  93. Dark Places
    As heroines go, it’s refreshing to get one as complex as this: When psychologically scarred female characters do turn up in thrillers, they’re usually little more than shivering victims who set a group of male cops in motion, but here, Libby does her own detective work, while Hendricks lends star power to the flashback scenes.
  94. Manglehorn
    Something about working with Pacino forces what could have been a breaks-the-mold character portrait into factory-made territory.
  95. Serena
    An arrestingly nihilistic Depression melodrama, marked by courageous performances and exquisite production values... The result is both problematic and fascinating, an unsympathetic spiral of human tragedy that plays a little like a hand-me-down folk ballad put to film.
  96. She's Funny That Way
    An enthusiastic but low-fizz romantic farce that gets by principally on the charms of a cast speckled with gifted funnymen (and, more particularly, funnywomen).
  97. A Walk in the Woods
    It’s pleasant enough cinematic comfort food, but even so, you may be hungry again soon afterward.
  98. Love & Air Sex
    This more broadly appealing project feels daringly frank on the subject of sex. But as is frequently the case with the most saturnalian comedies, it’s actually quite conservative when it comes to allowing its characters to follow through on their uninhibited talk.
  99. Generation War
    Overly melodramatic but fairly engrossing.
  100. Dear White People
    Bristling with arguments about the complexities of black identity in a supposedly post-racial America, this lively and articulate campus-set comedy proves better at rattling off ideas and presenting opposing viewpoints than it does squeezing them into a coherent narrative frame.
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