Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. The Nightmare
    Whether it is the movies that have shaped our dreams or our dreams that have shaped the movies, it’s safe to assume that The Nightmare will find its place in that eternally recurring cycle.
  2. Maya the Bee Movie
    All told, in giving parents nothing to object to, director Alexs Stadermann (who got his start making straight-to-video sequels for Disney) has also given them little to get excited about, apart from the idea of sharing Maya with another generation of preschoolers.
  3. Planetary
    Despite all the globe-encircling eye candy, there’s a certain monotony of pacing imposed by the nonstop spoken input of various elders whose wisdoms seldom come in anything chewier than (at most) paragraph-length soundbytes.
  4. Anesthesia
    The ensemble labors sincerely to bring Nelson’s dense, frequently didactic writing to life, though it can be a hard task.
  5. Marie's Story
    A quarter-century ago, such an assured, emotionally satisfying French offering as this could have done significant business in the States, the way films like “Jean de Florette” once did.
  6. Hyena
    What Hyena lacks in invention, however, it makes up for in technical bravado and geographical specificity.
  7. Gerontophilia
    Maybe if the actors had been coached to actually act, it would have come across better, but their painfully stilted delivery is leaden rather than campily artificial.
  8. Iris
    A joyous celebration of creativity and razor-sharp wit sustained into old age, as evinced by outspoken nonagenarian fashion icon Iris Apfel, Iris also offers proof of Albert Maysles’ continued vitality as a documentarian.
  9. Soul Boys of the Western World
    TV-style and desperately in need of cutting, “Soul Boys” does convincingly position its subjects as key trendsetters, and their most memorable tunes continue to be enjoyable.
  10. Animals
    Throughout the first half of Animals, there is a welcome amount of humor and some flashes of romantic warmth to alleviate the ever-present undercurrent of dread. As director Collin Schiffli gradually tightens the screws and builds suspense, however, the mood darkens.
  11. Tu Dors Nicole
    The actors, some of whom have worked with Lafleur before, are entirely in tune with his intentions and display a beguiling chemistry.
  12. Ride
    Where the film falters is in the writing of its central relationship: That Jackie and Angelo love each other fiercely doesn’t make their interactions any less hard to take, and Australian newcomer Thwaites (“Maleficent,” “Son of a Gun”), despite his ample charisma and pitch-perfect American accent, can’t quite get past his character’s callow, whiny affect.
  13. After the Ball
    This basic-cable-quality farce is as unobjectionable as it is unmemorable.
  14. The Forger
    Nothing feels fresh here — not even Christopher Plummer hamming it up as a crusty-coot grandpa — and Philip Martin’s routinely polished direction only underscores the cliche-composting of Richard D’Ovidio’s script.
  15. The Adderall Diaries
    Franco’s cultivated impenetrability makes for a pain-ridden but peculiarly passionless experience, with multiple clashing subplots — on such insufficiently explored themes as parental abuse, uxoricide and masochism — obstructing an already opaque character study.
  16. Maggie
    Though Henry Hobson’s hugely promising debut feature is generating buzz from the casting of a fine, low-key Arnold Schwarzenegger as the anguished father of a semi-zombified teen, it’s Abigail Breslin’s gutsy, nuanced turn as the reluctantly undead title character — at once a heroine to be protected and a mutant threat to be destroyed — that makes the film unique within its grisly canon.
  17. The Great Museum
    There are no interviews, thankfully no voiceovers, and no music; Holzhausen respects the viewer’s intelligence, just as he respects the museum staff.
  18. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    It’s all absorbing stuff, amply conveying the magnetism of a conflicted leader who drew fanatical adoration, yet who one suspects wasn’t easy company (especially in tandem with Love).
  19. The Little Death
    The actors are all game and well paired, but flashes of chemistry and an appreciable level of production finesse (courtesy of d.p. Simon Chapman and composer Michael Yezerski) aren’t enough to bring the requisite charge to this flimsy, pseudo-provocative material.
  20. Dirty Weekend
    Airless visual treatment and mannered performances compound the impression that LaBute might have been better off saving this material for the stage, though it’d be a pretty tame trifle in either context.
  21. Heaven Knows What
    Holmes may not have the polished technique of a formally trained actress, but she has an innate capacity for drama, and whether or not she can go on to play roles further removed from her own experience, she’s electrifying in this one.
  22. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    The new movie is a sleeker, faster, funnier piece of work — the sort of sequel (like “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” “Superman II” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” before it) that shrugs off the self-seriousness of its predecessor and fully embraces its inner Saturday-morning serial.
  23. Man Up
    The upshot of this loopy masquerade is more predictable than it is progressive, but considerably pleasurable thanks to Morris’s generous supply of pithy one-liners and the resourceful, ribald skills of Bell, as engaging and elastic a comic everywoman here as she was in her impressive directorial debut “In a World … ”
  24. Aloft
    In the end, everything fits together rather ingeniously, though it’s clear that in orchestrating her needlessly complicated nonlinear narrative, Llosa has mistaken confusion for suspense.
  25. The Age of Adaline
    A sensitively directed slab of romantic hokum that wrings an impressive amount of emotional conviction from a thoroughly ludicrous premise.
  26. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    Nothing aired by WikiLeaks could possibly be more destructive to Sony’s reputation than the release of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, the sort of movie that goes beyond mere mediocrity to offer possible evidence of a civilization in decline.
  27. The Squeeze
    Jastrow is a longtime helmer of PGA events, and as expert at choosing just the right camera angle for his shots on the course as he is apparently confounded over fashioning believable dialogue or characters.
  28. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Though the sequel features far more footage of the giant beasts, including a spectacular nighttime scene in which one of the bioluminescent creatures ejects phosphorescent spores into the desert sky, the story remains stubbornly focused on relatively uninteresting human concerns.
  29. Salad Days
    Those not particularly interested in the bands or era portrayed may find Salad Days a bit too much of a good thing. But they’re unlikely to be viewers anyway, and fans will find the documentary’s fast-paced but detail-oriented progress satisfying.
  30. Alex of Venice
    The pleasures of well-observed characters and small epiphanies are undeniable, and Alex of Venice, actor Chris Messina’s directing debut, is amply supplied with both, thanks to Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s extraordinary performance: Registering profound shocks with slight ripples rather than big emotions, she quietly commands attention.
  31. Mia Madre
    Moretti’s exploration of loss is unquestionably affecting, and My Mother has powerful moments, yet they’re not always well integrated with the broadly pitched moviemaking scenes, featuring a caricaturish John Turturro.
  32. Live From New York!
    Live From New York! registers as simultaneously too outsider and too insider — a perfect definition of mainstream media itself.
  33. Beyond the Reach
    A preposterously bad, grade-Z adventure yarn.
  34. The Dead Lands
    While the primal you-killed-my-family-now-I-kill-you story smacks of old Westerns (and newer Liam Neeson movies), the pic rises somewhat above formula due in large part to its being acted out in this particular historic cultural context. Depictions of pre-colonialist Maori life are rare enough onscreen, let alone in this kind of muscular genre effort.
  35. Félix And Meira
    Though set in present-day Montreal, this tender romance unfolds like an episode from another century, paying the sort of careful attention to social boundaries you’d expect to find in a classic forbidden-love novel.
  36. Closer to the Moon
    If Caranfil’s mix of comedy and tragedy seems too scattershot to fully achieve catharsis, it does boast a rather Jewish sense of humor, itself a curious testimonial to the past.
  37. Little Boy
    The problem here isn’t theological; even if it were in service of a different message entirely, the sheer gracelessness of Monteverde’s storytelling would be a massive turnoff.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Roar
    The noble intentions of director-writer-producer Noel Marshall and his actress-wife Tippi Hedren shine through the faults and short-comings of Roar, their 11-year, $17 million project – touted as the most disaster-plagued pic in Hollywood history.
  39. Child 44
    Part serial-killer thriller, part old-school anti-Soviet propaganda, Child 44 plays like a curious relic of an earlier Cold War mindset, when Western audiences took comfort that they were living on the right side of the Iron Curtain, and relied on movies to remind them as much.
  40. The Sisterhood of Night
    An alternately sensitive and heavy-handed small-town drama that turns the Salem witchcraft trials into a tenuous metaphor for the intense pressures brought to bear on today’s female youth.
  41. All Things Must Pass
    It is much to the credit of Hanks and his collaborators that All Things Must Pass makes this particular iteration of the oft-told tale come across as freshly compelling, even poignant.
  42. Racing Extinction
    Racing Extinction tends to be far more effective when presenting its enlightened activists as heroes.
  43. 7 Chinese Brothers
    “Brothers'” script hardly provides enough to hang a short on.
  44. Nightlight
    The relative restraint of keeping any supernatural creatures and most violence just offscreen works well to maintain suspense. It’s too bad Beck and Woods didn’t exercise equal caution in the dialogue department.
  45. A Girl Like Her
    A mix of found-footage thriller, mock-doc realism and public service announcement that rings true almost as often as it rings false.
  46. Living in the Age of Airplanes
    In its avoidance of all ambiguity, this giant-screen opus ultimately boils down to a rhapsodic endorsement of the tourism and shopping industries.
  47. Around The World In 50 Concerts
    A magnificent tapestry of sounds and images, this documentary interweaves multiple leitmotifs that flow through the film like familiar old friends, surging to the forefront only to be reabsorbed and casually encountered farther on.
  48. 3 Holes and a Smoking Gun
    No amount of industry-jargon blather and flashback-fractured plotting, however, can mask the wholesale phoniness and overpowering lethargy of this dreary drama.
  49. 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.
  50. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Think of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet as a gift: a work of essential spiritual enlightenment, elegantly interpreted by nine of the world’s leading independent animators, all tied up and wrapped in a family-friendly bow by “The Lion King” director Roger Allers.
  51. 6 Years
    Although shot and performed in a determinedly raw, naturalistic register, this emotionally roiling portrait of two twentysomething Texas sweethearts too often veers toward melodramatic overstatement, inspiring little empathy or understanding despite the committed performances of promising young leads Taissa Farmiga and Ben Rosenfield.
  52. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    A coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur that expands, not altogether convincingly, into a meditation on our collective over-reliance on our favorite handheld gadgets.
  53. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Despite some bumpy tonal shifts and inconsistencies of characterization, Hello, My Name Is Doris impresses as a humanely amusing and occasionally poignant dramedy.
  54. The Final Girls
    The concept carries The Final Girls cheerfully past some dry stretches, and the actors are clearly enjoying themselves, with Farmiga the only representative of humorlessness in what is admittedly the sole sincerity-load-bearing role.
  55. Unfriended
    Simultaneously clever and exasperating, the film puts a novel spin on the genre Roger Ebert dubbed “the Dead Teenager Movie.”
  56. I'll See You in My Dreams
    Danner makes an elegant, warmly sympathetic heroine in this sometimes broadly played but always tender and appealing effort.
  57. The Harvest
    Nothing about the circumstances revealed in The Harvest could be called normal, and yet it’s a credit to a fertile imagination that the film proves so terrifyingly relatable.
  58. In the Courtyard
    A wry, oh-so-gentle dual character study saved from sleepiness by the unexpected star pairing of Catherine Deneuve and Gustave Kervern.
  59. Song from the Forest
    A mesmerizing glimpse into Sarno’s search for a sub-Saharan Walden and the implications of that choice.
  60. La Sapienza
    The unresolvable tension between logic and feeling animates Eugene Green’s La Sapienza, an exquisite rumination on life, love and art that tickles the heart and mind in equal measure.
  61. Monkey Kingdom
    The eighth entry in Disney’s eco-minded Disneynature series, Monkey Kingdom may well be its cheekiest, funniest and most purely entertaining.
  62. Desert Dancer
    Desert Dancer traffics in the kind of spirited rebel-youth archetypes who’ve been endemic to dance movies for decades.
  63. Manos Sucias
    Although it sports a few fresh moments, the tonally all-over-the-place drama is hampered by script and assembly problems.
  64. Superfast!
    Superfast! takes aim at easy targets, and misses by miles.
  65. Black Souls
    Munzi focuses on incongruous leftovers from a benighted past, where kinship and blood feuds in a marginalized corner of rural Italy fester until entire communities are drawn into a whirlpool of intimidation and violence. This is the film’s strong suit.
  66. 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.
  67. The Girl Is in Trouble
    A textbook noir premise gets an overamped and undercompelling treatment in The Girl Is in Trouble.
  68. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Where Haupt succeeds is in conveying the passion felt by everyone who works on the Sagrada, from foremen to sculptors.
  69. Broken Horses
    Fails to convince on several crucial levels, including plotting and dialogue.
  70. The Longest Ride
    Appealing performances by a trio of second- and third-generation Hollywood kids keep this three-hankie twaddle more bearable than it deserves.
  71. Tangerines
    With nearly five-decade screen veteran Ulfsak setting the wry, soulful tenor, Tangerines balances humor and seriousness in deft fashion, its delicacy abetted by all thesps and design contributions.
  72. The Reconstruction of William Zero
    Cinematically speaking, this high-concept, low-budget sci-fi mind-bender falls into the same category as Shane Carruth’s shoestring marvel “Primer,” relying on creative ingenuity rather than elaborate effects to keep geek auds ensnared by its multi-layered mystery.
  73. Brand: A Second Coming
    Brand: A Second Coming is never dull, moving at a busy clip appropriate to its seemingly tireless globe-trotting protagonist.
  74. Cupcakes
    Momentarily abandoning the strain of imagining liberation within a realistically perceived Israel, Fox here settles for the ephemeral glow of an exuberant block party.
  75. Far from the Madding Crowd
    What does register at every turn is a vibrant sense of time and place that pulls us into Hardy’s bygone world even when the drama falters.
  76. Robot Overlords
    Even with such generic scripting, however, there’s a genial, palpably enthusiastic chemistry between the four young, capable stars that gives their hijinks a bit of bounce.
  77. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    Often poignant, occasionally pathetic, but never short of entertaining, Raiders! captures the obsessive hold movies have on young people’s imaginations.
  78. Krisha
    Shults’s approach craftily favors observation over exposition, and he proves as attentive to Krisha’s surroundings as he is to her inner life.
  79. Adult Beginners
    This sophomore directing effort for Ross Katz (“Taking Chance”) resolves itself a bit too tidily in the final stretch, but sustains affection most of the way with its well-observed moments and gently offbeat comic rhythms.
  80. Dior and I
    As carefully crafted as the clothes is Tcheng’s well-considered direction, privileging the creative process over stereotyped glamour or backstabbing.
  81. Last Knights
    Last Knights is a fairly ludicrous mystery and a so-so action movie, but it’s nonetheless been constructed with an earnest attention to detail that shouldn’t be taken for granted.
  82. Cut Bank
    Watching an estimable quintet of character actors do their thing is the chief pleasure of Cut Bank.
  83. Lambert & Stamp
    As much as the movie rocks, Lambert & Stamp drops the needle to reveal the deep pain barely hidden in the grooves.
  84. Man from Reno
    Boyle keeps the wheels churning nicely for the most part, and the climax ratchets up the pic’s sense of urgency without loosening its bearings.
  85. The Barber
    The Barber is a slick but ultimately underwhelming psychochiller.
  86. Experimenter
    Experimenter offers a heady brew of theories about the essence of human nature, and a Peter Sarsgaard performance that catches Milgram in all his seductive, megalomaniacal brilliance.
  87. 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.
  88. 52 Tuesdays
    The non-pro cast received their scenes one week at a time, and the choice lends their performances a compelling blend of discovery and authenticity.
  89. Backcountry
    MacDonald has seen enough horror movies of varying kinds to know what audiences expect, and one of the pleasures of Backcountry is how skillfully it toys with those expectations, setting us up for something like a Mumblecore “Straw Dogs” and ending up somewhere closer to a landlocked “Jaws.”
  90. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    This genuine curio gets surprising mileage from Houellebecq’s deft, self-effacing performance at the center of a lively comic ensemble.
  91. 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.
  92. She's Lost Control
    Marquardt never buries her symbolic subtext very deep, what with a woman who freezes her eggs and a man who ensures that his patients feel nothing.
  93. Spring
    Co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (“Resolution,” “V/H/S: Viral”), working from a script credited to Benson, do a clever job of entwining elements of budding romance, mounting dread and indolent vacation in their leisurely paced, handsomely produced indie feature.
  94. Zombeavers
    Zombeavers is not a total wash, and seen at night, under the right combination of low expectations and controlled substances, it may even seem better than it really is.
  95. Lost and Love
    Notwithstanding some sentimental beats, Peng achieves a delicate balance between bleak realities and a life-affirming attitude, capped by a predictable but necessary catharsis.
  96. Champs
    Director Bert Marcus’ Champs is the moviegoing opposite of a prize fight, a slick but not particularly stylish documentary that actually becomes more focused and energized in the late rounds.
  97. Amour Fou
    The Austrian writer-director gradually locates the emotional pulse in a picture that plays less like a doomed romance than a seriocomic anatomy of one, subjecting its characters and their bubble of high privilege to sharply critical yet quietly affecting scrutiny.
  98. Get Hard
    Whatever one makes of Get Hard’s contribution to our ongoing national debate about race, class and sexuality, there’s no denying that too much of it simply feels cheap, flailing and tired.
  99. Spy
    An uproarious blast of globe-trotting action-comedy delirium that doesn’t spoof the espionage-thriller genre so much as drop a series of banana peels in its path.
  100. Trainwreck
    A somewhat shaggy, frequently hilarious romantic comedy that, like much of Apatow’s best work, delicately balances irreverent raunch with candid insights into the give-and-take of grown-up relationships.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »