Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. What We Do in the Shadows
    Some genre fans who prefer the silly to the satiric may bite, but the anemic pic isn’t remotely weird or witty enough for cult immortality.
  2. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    As celebrated in Habicht’s warmly human documentary, Pulp has always been defiantly different.
  3. Bad Hair
    While Rondon’s focus is the struggle of wills between a boy awakening to homosexual feelings and his embittered mother, the helmer invests their collision with a powerful specificity.
  4. The Sleepwalker
    A consistently intriguing psychodrama that may nonetheless leave many viewers feeling that it’s all buildup and scant payoff.
  5. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    This tediously metatextual exercise conjures few inspired jolts of its own.
  6. The Culture High
    The film’s haphazard structure and freewheeling arguments only serve to reinforce tired pothead cliches — it’s paranoid, prone to starry-eyed dorm-room philosophizing, and it doesn’t know when to quit.
  7. Jessabelle
    Jessabelle serves up a murky and underwhelming cauldron of Southern-fried voodoo-horror claptrap.
  8. On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter
    An intoxicating blend of exotic travelogue, death-defying derring-do, and affecting profiles in courage and perseverance.
  9. The Rewrite
    It’s a rare pleasure to see Tomei in a lead role, and she fills out the short cuts in Lawrence’s characterization with wry warmth and a hint of swallowed disappointment.
  10. The Toy Soldiers
    The Toy Soldiers sports a basic competence in assembly that slightly elevates its material. The same can’t be said of the performers, though they try, some achieving a semblance of naturalism, others more inept or hammy.
  11. Always Woodstock
    Even by its genre’s comfort-food standards, this movie feels blandly circumscribed, almost child-proofed, as if any sharper reality or wit might be harmful to the intended audience.
  12. Merchants of Doubt
    An intelligent, solidly argued and almost too-polished takedown of America’s spin factory — that network of professional fabricators, obfuscators and pseudo-scientists who have lately attempted to muddle the scientific debate around global warming — this is a movie so intrigued by its designated villains that it almost conveys a perverse form of admiration, and the fascination proves contagious.
  13. Wolves
    There are certainly no fresh ideas risked in this first directorial feature by voice actor-turned-scenarist David Hayter (“X-Men,” “Watchmen”), but Wolves could be worse, being as fast-paced and polished on a “B” budget as it is forgettable.
  14. Point and Shoot
    Curry’s interest is in obsession, not Libya, yet surely a corrective is needed, and dressing up a nation’s collapse as if it were an American triumph smacks of the same willful delusion as George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished.”
  15. Actress
    Robert Greene's extraordinary collaboration with actress Brandy Burre is a playful, provocative examination of self-performance.
  16. Big Eyes
    Despite Amy Adams’ affecting performance as an artist and ’50s/’60s housewife complicit in her own captivity, this relatively straightforward dramatic outing for Tim Burton is too broadly conceived to penetrate the mystery at the heart of the Keanes’ unhappy marriage — the depiction of which is dominated by an outlandish, ogre-like turn from Christoph Waltz that increasingly seems to hold the movie hostage.
  17. Butter on the Latch
    There’s something deeper — and deeply original — going on in Decker’s film that demands either a second viewing or a willingness to push past easy dismissal (certainly by conventional standards, the film seems hopelessly amateurish).
  18. Dumb and Dumber To
    Sporadically very funny, mostly very tedious, and sometimes truly vile, this 18-years-too-late sequel nonetheless exhibits a certain puerile purity of purpose.
  19. Miss Meadows
    An eventual retreat into conventional thriller terrain isn’t managed with much panache or tension, and a limp happily-ever-after sequence underlines the pic’s failure to make very much of the twisted-fairy-tale aspect that is its most distinctive element.
  20. We Are the Giant
    A surfeit of harrowing on-the-ground footage during protest crackdowns, plus the protagonists’ testimonies, make for a frequently inspiring and exciting documentary. But helmer Greg Barker (“Ghosts of Rwanda”) also risks pretentiousness in various forms of stylistic and thematic overreach, while providing viewers scant explanatory info on the regional conflicts.
  21. Horrible Bosses 2
    This inane and incredibly tasteless sequel qualifies as an excuse to bring back those hard-working funnymen Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis for another round of amateur-criminal hijinks and semi-improvised vulgarity, jabbing away repeatedly at some elusive comic sweet spot where blatant nastiness and egregious stupidity collide — and very occasionally hitting the mark.
  22. Selma
    DuVernay’s razor-sharp portrait of the Civil Rights movement — and Dr. King himself — at a critical crossroads is as politically astute as it is psychologically acute, giving us a human-scale King whose indomitable public face belies currents of weariness and self-doubt.
  23. 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.
  24. American Sniper
    Just as “The Hurt Locker” found revelatory depths in Jeremy Renner, so American Sniper hinges on Cooper’s restrained yet deeply expressive lead performance, allowing many of the drama’s unspoken implications to be read plainly in the actor’s increasingly war-ravaged face.
  25. The Gambler
    A movie of slick, surface-level pleasures that’s unpersuasive at its core.
  26. Before I Disappear
    Piling on the misery-laden subplots in scene after angry, overamped scene, Before I Disappear is the sort of movie that can’t stop reminding you how cruel the world is and how messed up its people are, to the point where its bludgeoning cynicism feels no more authentic or lived-in than the glimmer of hope that suddenly breaks on the horizon.
  27. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    For all its obvious smarts and mildly provocative ideas, Mockingjay doesn’t seem to trust its audience quite as much as it clearly trusts its heroine.
  28. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Neither warm and fuzzy in the best holiday movie traditions, nor edgy and irreverent a la “Bad Santa” (coincidentally also co-starring Graham, to better effect), it’s something of a mystery what audience A Merry Friggin’ Christmas intends to serve.
  29. The Way He Looks
    The pic has genuine appeal, though in truth the script and direction are little more than average.
  30. The Better Angels
    Apart from the heavy debt it owes to Malick’s oeuvre, Edwards’ entrancing debut is radically non-generic, either as history film and coming-of-age piece.
  31. Elsa & Fred
    For a movie that’s ostensibly about casting off the shackles of old age and embracing excitement in life, there isn’t a single moment here that feels original or spontaneous.
  32. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    21 Years: Richard Linklater makes for a disappointingly hollow hagiography: gushy, superficial and strangely overdue — arriving significantly later than its title prescribes.
  33. A Most Violent Year
    In his third turn behind the camera, writer-director J.C. Chandor has delivered a tough, gritty, richly atmospheric thriller that lacks some of the formal razzle-dazzle of his solo seafaring epic, “All Is Lost,” but makes up for it with an impressively sustained low-boil tension and the skillful navigating of a complex plot (at least up until a wholly unnecessary last-minute twist).
  34. Missionary
    A luridly entertaining thriller that plays like “Fatal Attraction” for extreme religiophobes, or perhaps a very gory episode of “The Brigham Young and the Restless.”
  35. Comet
    Lapses in the screenplay are mitigated only slightly by the natural chemistry between Long and Rossum.
  36. Zero Motivation
    Beneath the strings of gags and wisecracks run parallel threads of ruthlessness and hysteria which bring “Motivation” a little closer to “Full Metal Jacket” than “Private Benjamin” as off-screen conflicts invade the closed-in encampment.
  37. Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show
    The producers, obviously, are good storytellers, and there is something to be said — touched on here — about their shifting roles as TV has embraced an auteur quality. Still, the resulting doc finally feels like less than the sum of its anecdotes.
  38. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    This crudely made thriller plays like a stilted Cantonese riff on organized-crime cliches, substituting blood and brutality for novelty or insight.
  39. Private Peaceful
    One more story about how the Great War’s casual disdain for human life planted the seeds for the social unrest that followed, the defiantly old-fashioned Private Peaceful nevertheless succeeds in hitting the right emotional notes, with a handy assist from Rachel Portman’s score.
  40. Interstellar
    An exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan’s vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human.
  41. Trash
    Trash works in large part thanks to the infectious energy and sheer pleasure in comradeship exuded by the three young teen boys.
  42. The Heart Machine
    Thoroughly modern without being ostentatious about it, and featuring excellent performances from Kate Lyn Sheil and John Gallagher Jr., the film boasts pleasures more formal than narrative.
  43. Happy Valley
    For a film that is very much about the need to continually question our heroes and hold them to a higher standard, Happy Valley offers an unapologetic tribute to one man’s painful honesty and a tacit rebuke to those who couldn’t muster anywhere near the same courage.
  44. 23 Blast
    A fairly predictable yarn that’s lighthearted and well-acted.
  45. Exists
    Sanchez’s thoroughly conventional approach here does little to elevate a dismally generic script from frequent collaborator Jamie Nash.
  46. Ouija
    This silly but straight-faced supernatural thriller manages to elicit an occasional shudder in between cheap jolts and false scares, emerging as a feat of competent direction (by debuting helmer Stiles White) over derivative scripting (by White and writing partner Juliet Snowden).
  47. Big Hero 6
    After establishing its fresh and relatable origin story, the movie gets bogged down with a relatively generic villain’s power-hungry schemes. Still, there’s enough that’s new and different about Big Hero 6 to get excited about, especially for those still too young for Marvel’s more intense live-action fare.
  48. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
    Glen Campbell … I’ll Be Me blends intimate and unflinching medical details, poignant performance footage and a survey of its subject’s place in musical history through well-chosen archival footage and interviews with other iconic performers.
  49. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Deftly sidestepping both melodrama and family-values messaging, Poppe imbues the film with enormous emotional resonance, brilliantly grounded by his leading lady.
  50. 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.
  51. E-Team
    A dynamic and immersive piece of you-are-there verite.
  52. V/H/S: Viral
    While the scares are in short supply, there’s a surfeit of macabre, tongue-in-cheek creativity to be found here.
  53. Love, Rosie
    As appealingly humanized by Collins and Claflin, Rosie and Alex are sufficiently flawed, three-dimensional beings for their continued attachment to each other to convince.
  54. The Duke of Burgundy
    An act of cinephilic homage that transcends pastiche to become its own uniquely sensuous cinematic object, Strickland’s densely layered, slyly funny portrayal of the sadomasochistic affair between two lesbian entomologists tips its hats to such masters of costumed erotica as Jess Franco, Tinto Brass and Jean Rollin, without ever cheapening its strange but affecting love story.
  55. ABCs of Death 2
    Far too many of the shorts prove instantly forgettable.
  56. Private Violence
    The obstacles against effectively protecting battered women and prosecuting their abusers are vividly illustrated in Private Violence.
  57. The Golden Era
    Seemingly caught between a daring impressionistic approach and a pedantic recital of dates and locations, this three-hour endurance test is marked by sincere adoration of its subject.
  58. The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
    Oreck spins a mesmerizing web that appropriates a wealth of disparate Eastern European images — of mushrooms, farmers, falling trees and war-destroyed buildings — to illustrate its lyrical discourse.
  59. John Wick
    If you can stomach the setup, then the rest is pure revenge-movie gold, as Reeves reminds what a compelling action star he can be, while the guy who served as his stunt double in “The Matrix” makes a remarkably satisfying directorial debut, delivering a clean, efficient and incredibly assured thriller.
  60. The Best of Me
    This tale of two former lovers reuniting after a 21-year separation also functions as a study of two terrific actors struggling to overcome the relentless mediocrity of their material.
  61. Housebound
    Separating Housebound from most films of its type is super-smart plotting and confident tonal control, as Johnstone’s screenplay throws one terrific curve ball after another and never allows its goofy humor to compromise its genuinely scary components.
  62. The Book of Life
    The Book of Life is undoubtedly stuffed with more business than its fleet, kid-friendly running time can properly handle. Yet Gutierrez’s confident delivery of the material remains so buoyant and passionately felt throughout that he almost gets away with it.
  63. Citizenfour
    Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways.
  64. Addicted
    The sudsy quality of the production ensures all the performers look terrific, but aren’t given particularly impressive material to work with.
  65. Fury
    Though colorfully embellished with authentic detail and logistically complex to bring to the screen, Ayer’s script is bland at the most basic story level, undermined by cardboard characterizations and a stirring yet transparently silly climactic showdown.
  66. Life Partners
    The movie belongs to thesps Jacobs and Meester. Jacobs fully inhabits her less-than-completely-sympathetic role with warmth and just the right touch of unconscious entitlement, while Meester luminously expands the film’s affective core.
  67. You're Not You
    While the film’s last two acts begin to deepen its characters in generally satisfying ways, You’re Not You throws down its initial gauntlet with an off-putting lack of subtlety.
  68. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    High-spirited but hobbled by lame dialogue and sheer overkill, Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead marks an instance where too much of a good thing means it just isn’t good anymore.
  69. Watchers of the Sky
    An impressive and artful cinematic thesis of palpable substance.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Innocents
    Catches an eerie, spine-chilling mood right at the start and never lets up on its grim, evil theme. Director Jack Clayton makes full use of camera angles, sharp cutting, shadows, ghost effects and a sinister soundtrack.
  71. Open Windows
    A fiendishly inventive thriller built around an audacious if unsustainable gimmick, Open Windows elevates Hitchcockian suspense to jittery new levels of mayhem and paranoia.
  72. The Supreme Price
    With beauty, brains and dignity to burn, Hafsat Abiola inherits her mother’s mantle and offers riveting insight into the contradictions of a dynasty of reformist aristocracy.
  73. Diplomacy
    To be sure, we are in that authorial fantasy by which historical figures become shrewder, sharper and wittier than they surely were in life — the domain of Peter Morgan and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” But when the actors and the dialogue are this good, one scarcely objects.
  74. Inherent Vice
    Anderson’s seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp that has less in common with “The Big Lebowski” than with the strain of fatalistic, ’70s-era California noirs (“Chinatown,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Night Moves”) in which the question of “whodunit?” inevitably leads to an existential vanishing point.
  75. Inner Demons
    The goofiness is redeemed somewhat by a wickedly violent climax — the exclamation point at the end of a rather simple sentence.
  76. Last Hijack
    Hulsing’s illustrations suggest a depth to pirate Mohamed Nura that remains hidden in the flesh.
  77. Annabelle
    When it comes to Annabelle’s five or six big stinger moments, Leonetti manages to deliver the jolts, and if audiences are sure to head home complaining about how dumb and predictable it all was, many may also find themselves nursing their significant others’ lightly bruised forearms.
  78. Drive Hard
    The fact that the film isn’t quite boring is about the most one can say for it.
  79. The Hero of Color City
    Cheerfully exhorting imagination, creativity and bravery in children while demonstrating none of those virtues itself, The Hero of Color City proves to be a dispiritingly colorless feature-length babysitter.
  80. For Those in Peril
    Wright’s strongest achievement here is an evocative depiction of place, where young teens flee from adult supervision and danger lies in wait. And while the story may feel claustrophobic, the visuals are free-flowing.
  81. The Pact 2
    The Pact 2 simply stretches out rather than elaborating on its predecessor’s already thin premise, creating holes that are poorly patched over with false scares and unconvincing character behavior.
  82. 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.
  83. 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.
  84. 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.
  85. Copenhagen
    Copenhagen remains more intriguing than compelling.
  86. 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.
  87. 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.
  88. 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.
  89. 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.
  90. Plastic
    A dismal My First Heist thriller that is all-too-aptly nailed by its own title.
  91. 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.
  92. 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.
  93. 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.
  94. Hellaware
    The cinematic equivalent of a modestly amusing shaggy-dog story that meanders toward a clever punchline.
  95. Fishing Without Nets
    Cutter Hodierne makes an accomplished feature debut with this very well-crafted, empathetic hijacking drama.
  96. 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.
  97. 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.
  98. Altina
    Altina makes for loose, exasperating but oddly endearing viewing.
  99. Two Night Stand
    Two Night Stand’s strength lies in the doubts and the ambivalence it expresses about the way we love now.
  100. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Unsatisfying on a musical level, it’s nonetheless a well-acted, sporadically impressive piece of filmmaking.
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