Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. Turkey Bowl
    This ongoing improvisation, along with the completed passes and resulting chest-bumping celebrations or recriminations, serves to define these otherwise "ordinary" ciphers and lend shape and momentum to an otherwise plotless movie.
  2. The Lone Ranger
    Extravagant but exhausting...this over-the-top oater delivers all the energy and spectacle audiences have come to expect from a Jerry Bruckheimer production, but sucks out the fun in the process,
  3. Playing for Keeps
    A modestly affecting reconciliation drama wrapped in a so-so sports movie by way of a misogynistic romantic comedy, Playing for Keeps can't stop tripping all over itself.
  4. Man of Steel
    The humorless tone and relentlessly noisy (visually and sonically) aesthetics leave much to be desired.
  5. Act of Valor
    A mechanically efficient yet soulless dramatization of the U.S. Navy SEALs in action, Act of Valor ultimately misses its target: The hearts and minds of American audiences.
  6. The Family Tree
    Suffers from severe problems of tone, a surfeit of undeveloped plot points and characters, and bland direction.
  7. Pacific Rim
    Although assembled with consummate care and obsessive attention to visual detail, Pacific Rim manages only fitful engagement and little in the way of real wonderment, suspense or terror.
  8. W.E.
    Burdened with risible dialogue and weak performances, picture doesn't have much going for it apart from lavish production design and terrific, well-researched costumes -- and it's in focus, which is more than can be said for the script.
  9. Summer of Goliath
    Pereda moves into territory where atmosphere and tone are more important than story or character.
  10. Ironclad
    Ironclad might be the perfect actioner for gorehound fanboys gaga for medieval trappings, but all others may find this British-American-German co-production a bit of a drag.
  11. Septien
    Duly offbeat without ever being very compelling in content or aesthetic.
  12. The Undefeated
    Slickly produced and blatantly manipulative, Bannon's hagiographic tribute is a celebratory cavalcade of career highlights and glowing testimonials that doubtless will please Palin's devoted followers, appall her fiercest critics -- and, perhaps, occasionally surprise the undecided.
  13. Machine Gun Preacher
    While the result is yet another story of African suffering told from a white do-gooder's perspective, this particular do-gooder is intrinsically fascinating enough to warrant attention, albeit more nuanced attention than he receives here.
  14. Aarakshan
    While its questions of affirmative action and charter schools could theoretically resonate with American audiences, the picture's corny theatrics, talky, preachy approach and taxing 164-minute running time will not translate.
  15. Another Happy Day
    Mistaking over-the-top dysfunctional family cruelty for comedy and drama, Another Happy Day tries and fails to channel "Rachel Getting Married" in its protracted tale of a wedding-party weekend that turns predictably from scabrous to redemptive.
  16. 11-11-11
    One and one (and one and one and one and one) never quite add up to two in Darren Lynn Bousman's 11-11-11, a rather anemic entry in the biblical-prophecy horror subgenre.
  17. House of Boys
    Thesping is more engaging than accomplished, as Anderson's constant smile cracks around the edges and Northover's dourness is a bit overdone.
  18. True Adolescents
    The result is Sam (Mark Duplass, "The Puffy Chair" and "Humpday"), a 34-year-old unemployed rocker whose mediocre musicianship is matched only by his abysmal people skills; he's like Jack Black without any energy or confidence.
  19. Good Neighbors
    A romantic-comedy-cum-serial-killer-movie that bends genre to the point of snapping.
  20. Red Tails
    Apart from the occasional thrill provided by CG-enhanced aerial dogfights, this stuffy history lesson about the groundbreaking African-American fighter pilot division never quite takes off, weighed down by wooden characters and leaden screenwriting.
  21. The Big Wedding
    The film isn’t so much funny as it is merely amusing — a laundry list of inappropriate and potentially embarrassing moments that strive mightily, but never quite manage to land the laugh.
  22. The Last Circus
    Loud, tedious and unattractive in every sense, this barrage of blood set during the Franco regime combines the helmer's customary cartoonishness with horror and ups it a thousand notches.
  23. A Horrible Way to Die
    Where helmer Adam Wingard's prior "Pop Skull" used a jittery style to convey its delusional, possibly meth-addled protagonist's mindset, here, too much handheld camera wobble and wavering image focus only alienate the viewer from this somewhat sluggish tale.
  24. Pearl Jam Twenty
    Finding a pulse only in the band's late-reel performance of "Alive," a lusty passage that would've begun a pic intent on making a case for the group's greatness, "Twenty" simply counts the years from 1991 via sludgy backstage and onstage footage whose rarity can't forgive its inclusion. Crowe's critic mentor, the late Lester Bangs, would cringe.
  25. The Lucky One
    When a novel gives you soapsuds and washboard abs to work with, what other choice does a director have but to provide the most aesthetically pleasing actors, scenery and sets to disguise the thinness of the underlying material.
  26. Sarah Palin: You Betcha!
    Shovels enough dirt on the Tea Party guru and self-described hockey mom to satisfy her haters, but lacks sufficient humor and insight to make it a must-see for anyone outside the Brit muckraker's fan base.
  27. Fireflies in the Garden
    Clumsy melodrama, which looks and sounds no better than an average made-for-cabler.
  28. One Fall
    Clunky allegorical elements, however, remain unsatisfyingly ambiguous throughout the picture.
  29. A Bird of the Air
    Unable to establish a consistent tone, picture goes derivatively screwball one minute and stickily sentimental the next.
  30. In Search of God
    Poorly conceived 60-minute picture might have fared better as a more straightforward documentary.
  31. Parental Guidance
    The execution, alas, prevents this from being a genuine crowdpleaser, with the better moments (mostly of the schmaltzy variety) more than offset by the irritating and tedious ones.
  32. Cargo
    Its provocative subject matter, though seriously treated, qualifies it as a dark-horse candidate for latenight cable.
  33. Cherkess
    Despite much verbal huffing and puffing, rifle waving and scimitar rattling, Cherkess proceeds with an astounding lack of action.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Lie
    Thinly amusing tale with not-especially-appealing characters.
  35. Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    Watching TV feels fundamentally old-fashioned in its storytelling. Thesping is solid, particularly by O'Nan, Nam and Jacobs. But the conversations feel artificial, overly concerned with re-creating period detail or interjecting relevant philosophical life concepts.
  36. Letters from the Big Man
    Surely the least excitable beauty-meets-Bigfoot film ever made.
  37. Perfect Sense
    Mackenzie's second collaboration with Ewan McGregor (following 2003's "Young Adam") tritely tosses together two indifferently conceived characters against a backdrop of global panic that generates no urgency.
  38. I Am Singh
    Helmer Puneet Issar's righteous indignation is certainly well placed, but his cartoonish portrayals of police, racists and white Americans in general will prove off-putting, as will the generally inept construction of what might have been (say, eight or nine years ago) a very potent political story.
  39. The Viral Factor
    The helmer's blockbuster ambitions, striving to make every move a money shot, relegate human drama to the backseat.
  40. Miss Minoes
    Though conceived in whimsy, Minoes generally lacks imagination; once the premise is established, familiar plot conventions reign.
  41. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    The end of the world can't come fast enough in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a disastrously dull take on the disaster-movie formula.
  42. Detachment
    Scripter Lund, himself an ex-teacher, delivers a story that lacks nuance, and mixes badly with Kaye's impatient edits, Dutch angles and extreme close-ups.
  43. Paranormal Activity 4
    Less reliant on slow-burn suspense and larded with fake-out jump scares, this is the first sequel in the series that fails to advance the overall mythology in any meaningful way.
  44. ATM
    Seems assembled from autopilot thriller material, with most of the dull dialogue devoted to plugging potential plot holes rather than anything resembling logic.
  45. Silent House
    Pulling off the thespian equivalent of running a marathon, the hyperventilating Olsen works awfully hard in the service of a film that, in the end, does little or nothing to preserve her character's integrity.
  46. Brake
    Mannion's script goes a bit too far in terms of twists, capping the third-act suspense with a plot U-turn, and then another, that leaves audiences feeling played. Worse, the final development loses credibility in retrospect, reducing the film to the level of an exercise in paranoia, effects and one actor's ability to hold attention for nearly 90 minutes.
  47. The Moth Diaries
    The body count runs high at Brangwyn boarding school, but tension, surprise and viewer interest are the real casualties in The Moth Diaries.
  48. Musical Chairs
    This would-be inspirational picture has its heart in the right place, but with default-setting characters, loudly telegraphed emotional beats and lack of any real sizzle to enliven its maudlin moralizing, it all feels like a cursory run through a well-trodden routine.
  49. After Fall, Winter
    Uncomfortably confessional or wildly melodramatic plot twists work interestingly in the moment, but wobble in retrospect. Pic's overarching structure is further weakened by Schaeffer's half-hearted attempt to tie together loose ends.
  50. Buried Prayers
    Documentary's insistent inflation of buried gold jewelry and watches into symbols of heroic defiance and transcendental tragedy rings hollow in the wake of weightier Holocaust testimonials.
  51. Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    Some six or seven men (women conspicuously absent), including a mayor, an immigration lawyer, a congressman and a "coyote," offer views on immigration. Unfortunately, they all say the same thing -- and it's nothing new, affecting or articulate.
  52. Life Happens
    The film is ultimately an untenable muddle.
  53. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    Unfortunately, the documentary's impact is mitigated the benefactor's constant presence and paternalistic, infomercial-like exposition.
  54. The Trouble with Bliss
    One can guess how the elements here might have been alluring on the page, but helmer/co-scenarist Michael Knowles' third feature doesn't find the distinctive tone needed to make its eccentric characters less than irksome and its plot more than arbitrary.
  55. Fun Size
    Of course, questionable propriety would be a moot point if the film were consistently funny, but its hit-to-miss ratio is dire.
  56. We the Party
    This South Los Angeles-set dramedy flirts with terminal stereotypes and high-school movie cliches right and left.
  57. Elles
    A typically smart performance by Juliette Binoche isn't enough to keep Elles from drowning in pseudo-intellectual pretension and general banality.
  58. 360
    With a multilingual cast of mostly unfamiliar faces, plus a few stars, 360 feels too abstract, orchestrating break-ups and hook-ups in a passionless vacuum.
  59. Delicacy
    Tautou is fine but clearly typecast as another whimsical pixie with strong melancholy undercurrents.
  60. Bel Ami
    "I had no conception of the depths of your emptiness!" a character shrieks in Bel Ami, and her words take on an unintended resonance as addressed to Robert Pattinson in the lead role.
  61. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    Neither a particularly good movie nor the pop-cultural travesty that some were dreading.
  62. Losing Control
    Some of Weiss' funniest material gets lost between episodes of outright silliness; to paraphrase Mark Twain's assessment of Richard Wagner, the film is smarter than it looks.
  63. The Hangover Part III
    Ditching the hangovers, the backward structure, the fleshed-out characters and any sense of debauchery or fun, this installment instead just thrusts its long-suffering protagonists into a rote chase narrative, periodically pausing to trot out fan favorites for a curtain call.
  64. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    A ludicrous, borderline-nonsensical supernatural concoction with a slightly redeeming sense of its own silliness.
  65. Deadline
    Although helmer Curt Hahn champions the causes of racial justice and crusading journalism, he can't seem to find a tone that's consistent or that befits the gravity of his subject matter.
  66. Late Bloomers
    While the world could certainly use more films about characters entering their sunset years, a solution as toothless and saggy as Julie Gavras' Late Bloomers does little to help the cause.
  67. Mamitas
    Every bit as cliched as it sounds, picture offers a dramatically crude, overly familiar take on the bad-boy-turned-good story. At its best, it offers young thesps E.J. Bonilla and Veronica Diaz-Carranza a showcase for their range.
  68. Virginia
    A scattershot Southern melodrama that can't decide what it's supposed to be.
  69. 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.
  70. 30 Beats
    The jazz-scored picture relies heavily on quirkiness to round out shaky characterizations and inject interest into otherwise forgettable pairings.
  71. Paranoia
    Director Robert Luketic’s thriller Paranoia has a host of problems, but the biggest seems to be that no one in it is nearly paranoid enough.
  72. Red Lights
    Instead of adding to the experience, the picture's ill-conceived twists amount to a severe miscalculation on Cortes' part.
  73. Cellmates
    Director Baget clearly strives to replicate the ersatz Dixie flavors of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" right down to the vintage '30s music in a film set in the 1970s, but nailing the Coen brothers' precisely calibrated style is far harder than it looks.
  74. Branded
    This messy amalgam of mysticism, romance, satire, social criticism and cartoonish f/x seems destined for discount DVD bins.
  75. 2 Days in New York
    The French are smelly, vulgar, racist and oversexed, or so it would seem based on 2 Days in New York, a scattershot culture-clash comedy that goes down like yesterday's foie gras.
  76. Hello I Must Be Going
    As a director, Louiso operates within a narrow emotional range; while not as bleak as "Love Liza," the film feels similarly monotonous and desperately needs more dramatic fluctuation.
  77. Goats
    This monotonously deadpan coming-of-age comedy has little to recommend it beyond some beautiful widescreen cinematography and the momentary kick of seeing David Duchovny looking like a stoned Jesus as Goat Man.
  78. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    Has a whole new director, cast and crew, with slightly higher production polish and more familiar faces onscreen. Nonetheless, it's consistent with its predecessor as a somewhat awkward translation of Ayn Rand's 1957 novel to our current era, handled with bland telepic-style competency.
  79. Nitro Circus: The Movie
    Watching people take their lives into their hands shouldn't be as tedious as Nitro Circus: The Movie 3D, which could be described as "Jackass" with a death wish (or "Wipeout" without the water).
  80. Solomon Kane
    This muscular yet monotonous "Kane" just isn't much fun.
  81. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    A fine cast can only do so much with the script’s pileup of generational conflict and long-winded introspection, resulting in a willfully out-of-step picture.
  82. Runner Runner
    Runner Runner’s appeal increases dramatically whenever Affleck enters the frame.
  83. Burning Man
    Grief doesn't rate high among emotional states suited to high-octane presentation; hence the disconnect between excessive style and sober content in Burning Man, a feature-length montage posing as a serious drama about loss and anger.
  84. This Time
    The Sweet Inspirations ranked as one of the most important backup singing groups in record-industry history, having performed with Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Dionne Warwick, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, the Drifters, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield and Elvis Presley. Yet, aside from an occasional still photograph, not a single frame of archival footage from their illustrious careers shows up in This Time.
  85. Bachelorette
    After a promisingly funny first half, this tale of three coke-snorting gal-pals trying not to screw up their friend's nuptials all but drowns in its own catty cynicism, turning as stingy with emotion and insight as it is with real laughs.
  86. The First Time
    This teen romance proves perilously short on substance, insight and novelty, unless you count its characters being afflicted with a case of "Juno" mouth.
  87. Lay the Favorite
    Rebecca Hall's enjoyably bubbly lead performance lends the picture an occasional frisson of amusement.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Eye of the Storm
    Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis bookend a cast consisting of some of Oz's finest thesps, but Schepisi never gets a grip on a script with awkward literary tics.
  89. Penguins of Madagascar
    The graceful camerawork, precise editing and high-quality animation still can’t disguise the lack of imagination that went into the overall conception and the repetitive sameness that creeps into every bind the penguins find themselves in.
  90. Divergent
    By trying to cram in as many explanatory info dumps as possible, Burger neglects to tend to the elements of the film that could easily make up for any narrative deficiencies: namely, a sense of place and a feeling of urgency.
  91. My Uncle Rafael
    A behind-the-scenes comedy about the making of a reality TV show, My Uncle Rafael looks suspiciously like an outright sitcom itself, with the same careful dosage of sententiousness and one-liners.
  92. No Good Deed
    Ensuing action is tamely PG-13 in terms of graphic violence. Despite competent performances and packaging, dialogue and situations in Aimee Lagos’ script are too routine to create much excitement.
  93. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    That original was split between charms and minuses, suffering primarily from careless scripting. Here, those faults are indulged wholesale, with so little attention paid to overall narrative development or individual scene-shaping that the bloated pic often suggests a crowd-funded venture existing solely to pay back (and showcase) the crowd.
  94. The Family
    Curiously airless, weightless and tonally uncertain, the picture mixes mass murder, dismemberment and rape threats with sappy sentimentality, fish-out-of-water gags and groan-worthy meta-humor, yet very little of it manages to leave any impression.
  95. The Black Tulip
    Tulip has the conviction as well as the artlessness of a saber-rattling speech at a political fundraising dinner, one that preaches fire and brimstone to inflame the already converted. Those seeking a more nuanced portrayal of the challenges facing the country will be less satisfied.
  96. Ginger & Rosa
    Potter seems at a loss to communicate the ideas behind her agonizingly elliptical picture, leaving auds to marvel at the gorgeous cinematography and scarlet-red hair of its heroine, earnestly played by Elle Fanning in a project undeserving of her talents.
  97. 28 Hotel Rooms
    Lacking much dramatic or intellectual stimulation, it's ultimately a limp effort.
  98. Festival of Lights
    Complex story twists unfold to confusing effect, while characters angrily toss cliches at one another and revelations multiply rather than resolve murky plot developments.
  99. Coming Up Roses
    Standout perfs by Bernadette Peters as an aging diva and Rachel Brosnahan as her solicitous 15-year-old daughter are the only reasons to see Lisa Albright's Coming Up Roses, a tired '80s-set meller hobbled by lackluster helming and an unconvincing script.
  100. Certainty
    Valerie Harper essays a Catholic twist on her yakkety yenta "Rhoda" persona, while Giancarlo Esposito, as the wise, hip priest heading the retreat, is called upon to bring believability to a film low in that commodity.
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