Variety's Scores

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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
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  1. Left Behind
    With a “Sharknado”-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order.
  2. Dracula Untold
    Dracula Untold opts for the stately, staid approach, and even at a mere 85 minutes (sans credits) it’s something of a bore — neither scary nor romantic nor exciting in any of the ways it seems to intend.
  3. Copenhagen
    Copenhagen remains more intriguing than compelling.
  4. Pride
    While some broad strokes won’t be to everybody’s taste... overall the film is so warmhearted, its themes of friendship and mutual respect so resonant, that few will begrudge it such heightened moments.
  5. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
    Rather than linger on the project’s shortcomings, which only disappoint relative to the story’s incredible creative potential, it should be said that in partnership with Berla, Malzieu has created a fully realized, wildly imaginative storybook world and populated it with eccentric characters.
  6. Good People
    Both stars are in agreeable if uncharacteristically muted form, doing little to distinguish Genz’s pic from any amount of formula-following filler in the same B-movie ballpark.
  7. Filmage: The Story of Descendents/ALL
    There’s plenty of archival interview and concert footage here, in addition to that shot by the directing duo, edited together into a package as tight and ingratiating as the music itself — of which there is, naturally, a ton soundtracked.
  8. Plastic
    A dismal My First Heist thriller that is all-too-aptly nailed by its own title.
  9. The Song
    A well-crooned country tune can invest even the hoariest cliches with honest feeling, and in much the same fashion, The Song takes a familiar tale of love, marriage, betrayal and redemption, and delivers a largely satisfying rendition.
  10. Kill the Messenger
    The film taps into far deeper, richer veins of material than it has the time to properly mine. It’s nonetheless a flinty, brainy, continually engrossing work that straddles the lines between biopic, political thriller and journalistic cautionary tale, driven by Jeremy Renner’s most complete performance since The Hurt Locker.
  11. At the Devil's Door
    At the Devil’s Door (which premiered at SXSW last spring under the title “Home”) ends up too tentative and underdeveloped, playing like an attenuated prologue for a bigger film.
  12. Hellaware
    The cinematic equivalent of a modestly amusing shaggy-dog story that meanders toward a clever punchline.
  13. Fishing Without Nets
    Cutter Hodierne makes an accomplished feature debut with this very well-crafted, empathetic hijacking drama.
  14. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    Kundo: Age of the Rampant delivers a thoroughly entertaining if overlong gallop through the trusty old story of honorable bandits stealing from nasty rich people and distributing the proceeds to downtrodden peasants.
  15. Autómata
    Even for sci-fi, some logic has to enter the plot, which also needs to be devoid of major holes if it’s not to fall into ridiculousness, and that, unfortunately, is where Automata lies.
  16. Altina
    Altina makes for loose, exasperating but oddly endearing viewing.
  17. Two Night Stand
    Two Night Stand’s strength lies in the doubts and the ambivalence it expresses about the way we love now.
  18. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Unsatisfying on a musical level, it’s nonetheless a well-acted, sporadically impressive piece of filmmaking.
  19. Björk: Biophilia Live
    Bjork’s charm has always hinged on her ability to be guileless and unknowable at once; “Biophilia Live” is no exception.
  20. Jauja
    In Jauja, Alsonso saves his most dazzling trick for last: a sudden plunge down a Lynchian rabbit hole that should, by all means, rupture the film’s hypnotizing atmosphere, but instead pulls the viewer in even deeper.
  21. The Scribbler
    Despite a game lead performance from smallscreen star Katie Cassidy (“Arrow”) as a young woman with multiple personality disorder and an incorrigible punk attitude, this latest low-budget outing from helmer John Suits simply doesn’t have the imagination or resources necessary to pull off its clumsy stabs at visual pizzazz.
  22. Gone Girl
    Surgically precise, grimly funny and entirely mesmerizing over the course of its swift 149-minute running time, this taut yet expansive psychological thriller represents an exceptional pairing of filmmaker and material.
  23. Red Army
    The strength of Red Army lies in its deep appreciation for the many ironies of the situation, the bone-deep complexities of national identity, and the fact that, on some level, home will always be home.
  24. Fort Bliss
    Fort Bliss is a flawed little gem of a movie, but Monaghan’s flawless performance is its own quiet call to arms.
  25. Swim Little Fish Swim
    [A] slight, predictable debut.
  26. Reclaim
    Alan White’s polished but pedestrian pic mines little real suspense and few surprises from a formulaic script.
  27. Life's a Breeze
    It takes a special kind of imagination to recognize the entertainment potential trapped in such a mundane scenario, and an incredibly resourceful filmmaker to spin it into as much fun as Daly does here.
  28. Pump
    For unabashed agitprop, Pump is quite entertaining.
  29. The Remaining
    La Scala is able to maintain interest and sustain narrative momentum throughout his fantastical narrative, even while he covers overly familiar territory. In this, he gets immeasurable aid from the sincere performances by his game cast.
  30. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Too formally well crafted to be dismissed, but too straightforward and uncurious to be particularly exciting or insightful.
  31. Art and Craft
    All sorts of interesting questions swirl beneath the surface.
  32. Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
    It’s hard to imagine anyone, however, having a “Eureka!” experience watching these lame movies, this latest least of all.
  33. While We're Young
    Though While We’re Young is primarily a comedy — and a very funny one at that, managing to be both blisteringly of-the-moment and classically zany in the same breath — Baumbach has bitten off several serious topics, for which laughter serves as the most agreeable way to engage.
  34. Top Five
    Rock is enormously appealing here, balancing his patented comic abrasiveness with a real tenderness, the faint bewilderment of an ordinary man blindsided by his own success. And Dawson makes an excellent foil.
  35. The Theory of Everything
    What’s onscreen is less a cerebral experience than a stirring and bittersweet love story, inflected with tasteful good humor, that can’t help but recall earlier disability dramas like “My Left Foot” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
  36. Still Alice
    Julianne Moore guides us through the tragic arc of how it must feel to disappear before one’s own eyes, accomplishing one of her most powerful performances by underplaying the scenario.
  37. The Riot Club
    Scherfig approaches the milieu with shrewd anthropological wit, amplifying Wade’s research with her own keen outsider insights — this on top of an expert grasp of tension and tone as the club’s initial allure turns to anxiety and disgust.
  38. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    The film is a master class in comic timing, employing pacing and repetition with the skill of a practiced concert pianist.
  39. Pawn Sacrifice
    Absent the ability to really get the audience’s heads in the game, the film succeeds better at presenting chess as a subtle metaphor for the psychological warfare being waged behind the scenes.
  40. Pasolini
    Ferrara finds himself imitating rather than innovating.
  41. Stop the Pounding Heart
    Where “Heart” excels, however, is simply in capturing the rhythm of life.
  42. Beloved Sisters
    An enthralling, gorgeously mounted depiction of the complicated relationship between the post-Enlightenment writer and philosopher Friedrich Schiller and the sisters Charlotte von Lengefeld (who would become his wife) and Caroline von Beulwitz (his eventual biographer).
  43. The Postman's White Nights
    Some stunning shots and a likable protag can’t cover up the story’s shallowness.
  44. Nightcrawler
    Touches of apocalyptic comedy run throughout Nightcrawler, but the movie’s overriding tone is one of strident, finger-wagging self-seriousness.
  45. Ned Rifle
    Though lacking the emotional depth and almost epic scope that made “Henry Fool” loom so large after Hartley’s anecdotal, idiosyncratic early features, Ned Rifle is a far more satisfactory extension of its memorable characters than the misbegotten “Fay Grim.”
  46. Men, Women & Children
    This painfully well-meaning but largely unpersuasive bid for cross-generational understanding feels at once of-the-moment and too obvious by half, like a less overblown version of “Crash” for the information superhighway.
  47. Madame Bovary
    Measured and absorbing rather than deeply compelling or vital, this latest adaptation of a rarely well-filmed novel makes a strong effort to capture the stiflingly provincial world that Flaubert was able to describe in such precise, painstaking detail on the page.
  48. Love & Mercy
    A wonderfully innervating cure for the common musical biopic, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy vibrantly illuminates two major breakthroughs — one artistic, one personal — in the life of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.
  49. The Last Five Years
    Beyond scrappy, The Last 5 Years lacks a unifying aesthetic, as if this were merely the run-through, grabbed on the fly without lights, costumes or location permits. This approach does improve upon the stage show in one key respect, however, allowing us to see all those crooned-over emotions writ large on the faces of its two terrific lead performers.
  50. A Little Chaos
    Too often, helmer Rickman galumphs through what’s meant to be a witty romp, underlining the script’s most obvious, rigged qualities.
  51. The Keeping Room
    A potentially gripping story of empowerment through armed resistance is almost totally undermined by studied, self-conscious storytelling.
  52. Jackie & Ryan
    Mellow, digestibly sweet and embellished with lovely folk tunes, this modest bit of Americana reveals pleasing new sides of both leads.
  53. Hungry Hearts
    It’s as if the director can’t decide what he wants: to chronicle the disintegration of a family, or to take a magnifying glass to a woman whose mania overwhelms all rational thought.
  54. Goodnight Mommy
    Shooting in sleek 35mm, Franz and Fiala have dreamt up a home-invasion scenario where the aggressors lived there all along.
  55. Good Kill
    Just as Niccol’s narrative structure is at once fraught and immaculate in its escalation of ideas and character friction, so his arguments remain ever-so-slightly oblique despite the tidiness of their presentation.
  56. Far From Men
    Despite his movie-star reputation and looks, Mortensen remains a remarkably humble screen presence, a trait that’s perfect for a part that demands considerable empathy from whoever’s playing it.
  57. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    "Escobar” offers an odd mix of action movie, romantic melodrama and cautionary traveler’s tale, which works better than it should thanks to Del Toro’s fascinating performance and Di Stefano’s assured, muscular helming.
  58. Eden
    Hansen-Love, who co-wrote the script along with her former-DJ brother Sven, zeroes in on the signature experiences of ’90s club life with expert precision.
  59. The Cut
    The script, co-written by vet Mardik Martin, is pedestrian, and the mise-en-scene, striving hard for a classic Hollywood look, lacks grandeur, notwithstanding impressive location work.
  60. The Cobbler
    The result is a slow-motion zeppelin crash that starts as a dull-edged fable, and then spirals further and further out of control without ever growing more exciting or interesting.
  61. Cake
    To be sure, Aniston leads with her scowl here, in the sort of performance that often gets called “brave” but is, in fact, more accurately described as a well-executed change of pace.
  62. The Hole
    Cool it may be, but scary (or even mildly shudder-inducing) it ain’t, even in 3-D.
  63. Burying the Ex
    Strained, sexist schlock, which raises zero jolts and only fitful chuckles with its gamely performed tale.
  64. 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.
  65. Black or White
    The good news is that Kevin Costner does some of the finest, most deeply felt work of his career as a widower lawyer fighting for custody of his biracial granddaughter in Mike Binder’s Black and White. The bad news is that this well-intentioned family drama never quite shakes free from its didactic, movie-of-the-week dramaturgy and a hand-holding approach to race-relations.
  66. Felony
    Thanks to Saville’s tightly controlled direction and a superlative cast, the mere exchange of glances builds as much suspense as the kinetic action sequence that opens the pic.
  67. Take Me to the River
    Take Me to the River compensates for a lack of originality and depth with no shortage of joyful celebration.
  68. The Good Lie
    Falardeau actually spent time filming in Sudan for a completely different project back in 1994 before being forced to evacuate by the U.N., but he consciously decides not to rub our noses in tarted-up awfulness, opting for steady-footed lensing and subdued music, then trusting our imaginations to fill in the horrors.
  69. Tusk
    An utterly bizarre, weirdly compelling story of manimal love that stakes out its own brazen path somewhere between “The Fly” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
  70. 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.
  71. Beyond the Lights
    Beyond the Lights is a strange beast, a music-industry romance that alternates freely between wisdom and mawkishness, caustic entertainment-biz critique and naive wish fulfillment, heartfelt flourishes and soap-opera shenanigans.
  72. Dolphin Tale 2
    Blissfully swimming against the hyperactive kidpic tide, Dolphin Tale 2 gently peddles inspirational life lessons while respecting both its characters and its audience.
  73. The Maze Runner
    As world-creation YA pictures go, The Maze Runner feels refreshingly low-tech and properly story-driven.
  74. Born to Fly
    Born to Fly teasingly suggests that some displays of avant-garde virtuosity could be enjoyed equally by venturesome aesthetes, dance enthusiasts and devotees of World Wrestling Entertainment.
  75. I Am Eleven
    Genevieve Bailey displays a terrific knack for connecting with her subjects on topics ranging from religion to romance and the environment.
  76. No No: A Dockumentary
    While the film’s sense of chronology is at times strained and its tale of redemption hardly unique, its subject is certainly one of a kind.
  77. St. Vincent
    With St. Vincent, the chief pleasure is comedy, which typically arises from waiting to discover what Bill Murray might do next.
  78. The Equalizer
    Ponderously overlong and not even half as much fun as it should have been, The Equalizer still gets a lot of mileage out of Washington’s unassailable star presence.
  79. My Old Lady
    Its translation from stage to screen looks to have been a bit rocky, and the film never manages to transcend its actors-workshop aura and develop into something deeper.
  80. The Drop
    The Drop is at once upfront and highly effective in its manipulations, tugging at our heartstrings even as it flicks away at our nerves.
  81. 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.
  82. The Humbling
    Fronted by a vibrant, deeply committed Al Pacino performance and very fine support from Greta Gerwig, this uneven but captivating film deserves to find its own audience, though doing so will surely prove to be an uphill climb.
  83. 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.
  84. The Identical
    All things considered, The Identical might have worked better as a TV miniseries, a format that would allowed the filmmakers to give equal time to Hemsley’s story.
  85. Thunder and the House of Magic
    It’s a thin premise that cues much cheery knockabout comedy, with ample scope for impressively whooshy 3D tracking shots.
  86. Rocks in My Pockets
    Boasting a narrative of extraordinary complexity and density, stuffed with irony, humor and tales-within-tales, the imaginative animated memoir Rocks in My Pockets merges a mini-history of 20th-century Latvia with that of helmer Signe Baumane and her forebears.
  87. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    “Veronica” is accomplished in aesthetics if not thematic weight, with a handsome look and some attractive soundtrack choices.
  88. Wild
    While Wild will surely be praised in the coming months for having a strong, well-written, flesh-and-blood female at its center, it’s to the film’s credit that it wears this badge of honor with a lightness that in no way undermines its sincerity.
  89. 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).
  90. Before I Go to Sleep
    There’s perilously little playfulness to be found either in the script or its otherwise handsomely ashen cinematic treatment.
  91. 99 Homes
    This dynamically acted, unapologetically contrived pic reps the filmmaker’s best chance to date of connecting with a wider audience — one likely to share the helmer’s bristling anger over corruptly maintained class divides in modern-day America.
  92. The Imitation Game
    So innately compelling is Turing’s story — to say nothing of Benedict Cumberbatch’s masterful performance — it’s hard not to get caught up in this well-told tale and its skillful manipulations.
  93. Manglehorn
    Something about working with Pacino forces what could have been a breaks-the-mold character portrait into factory-made territory.
  94. The Boxtrolls
    The meticulously crafted world is stunning to behold, imagined to the minutest detail and photographed with the sort of dramatic lighting and dynamic camera movement rarely seen in stop-motion. Trouble is, it’s not a place most folks would care to spend any time.
  95. The Notebook
    Unfortunately, the glowering, non-pro Gyemant twins, who seem to have only one facial expression (and oddly anachronistic haircuts), continually break the spell woven by the other performers.
  96. Last Weekend
    Its eventual reach for warm-and-fuzzy emotional catharsis rings hollow among characters that never become more than disagreeably shallow products of unexamined privilege.
  97. The Last of Robin Hood
    The script represents a too-tame middle ground, which gives the unfortunate impression that perhaps the filmmakers want us to empathize with this icky romance.
  98. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Though a tad uneven, as a whole the documentary cannily juggles an overview of African-American history in general with the specifics of its photographic representation and talents.
  99. Rosewater
    Stewart’s confident, superbly acted debut feature works as both a stirring account of human endurance and a topical reminder of the risks faced by journalists in pursuit of the truth.
  100. The Look of Silence
    So involving is the raw content of The Look of Silence that some might view its formal elegance as mere luxury, yet the film reveals Oppenheimer to be a documentary stylist of evolving grace and sophistication.
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