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. Jamie Marks Is Dead
    The potentially ludicrous story is handled artfully enough here to cast an eerie but not off-putting spell throughout, though the ultimate point is more than a tad murky, and the desired poignancy doesn’t fully come across.
  2. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    A triumph on every creative level, from casting to execution.
  3. Canopy
    The aural landscape here is key, as Wilson’s strategy is to create a visual theater of the mind in which the majority of the action is heard and not seen.
  4. Septic Man
    Jack’s predicament is both revolting and claustrophobic, but he never emerges as any kind of hero or villain, just a passive victim, which makes the pic’s most off-putting quality its endless tedium.
  5. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Happiness means steering clear of Hector and the Search for Happiness.
  6. Weaving the Past: Journey of Discovery
    The love and dedication that the filmmakers (including Dominguez’s wife and exec producer, Shelley Morrison) have poured into this project are more than evident onscreen; what it needs now is the sort of strong, supple cinematic vision that could tie its disparate strands together.
  7. The Inbetweeners 2
    The Inbetweeners works by balancing its lascivious nonsense with a disarming sweetness.
  8. War Story
    Anchored by Keener’s understated, psychologically acute performance, director Mark Jackson’s spare, quietly powerful sophomore feature demonstrates an impressive control of mood and tone and the ability to tell a story largely without words.
  9. Behaving Badly
    [A] ruthlessly unfunny misfire.
  10. 4 Minute Mile
    Engaging performances by the principal players, including Richard Jenkins as a legendary coach beset by personal demons, are almost enough to win the day, but in the end, the cliched narrative is too slight to put the picture over the finish line.
  11. As Above, So Below
    It all makes for clumsy-fun escapism, not bad as end-of-summer chillers go.
  12. Last Days in Vietnam
    The docu’s accomplished summary of tension-filled events as they transpired from minute to minute comes at the expense of wide-angle historical context.
  13. Memphis
    A digressive, daringly experimental study of a flailing musician, magnetically played by accomplished bluesman and poet Willis Earl Beal.
  14. Lilting
    While the characters’ background details (including their occupations) are kept to a minimum, the emotions the story touches are vivid and accessible.
  15. Cam2Cam
    [A] rather sleazy time-killer.
  16. Jersey Shore Massacre
    As willfully lowbrow dumb fun goes, it’s pretty painless.
  17. The Possession of Michael King
    That Jung and his collaborators haven’t found any new angles to explore in this endlessly overworked religio-horror claptrap would matter far less if they had a firmer grasp of form and technique.
  18. The Prince
    The action sequences are competently directed, but exhibit virtually no flair or invention.
  19. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a visionary tour de force, morphing from a childlike gambol into a sophisticated allegory on the folly of materialism and the evanescence of beauty.
  20. Wetlands
    Wetlands might have landed with the thud of empty shock value were Helen not such an innately engaging character, or Juri so commanding in the role.
  21. Kelly & Cal
    This disarming pic navigates tricky emotional territory to emerge as an impressive feature debut for helmer Jen McGowan and scribe Amy Lowe Starbin.
  22. Salvo
    After taking a couple of left turns following its thriller-like opening, Salvo unfortunately returns to a more conventional register in the closing reels, though the atmospheric picture does continuously fascinate on a visceral level.
  23. May in the Summer
    This warmly conceived but largely formulaic picture is by turns sensitive and shrill, culturally perceptive and overly broad in its dysfunctional-family melodramatics.
  24. Kink
    The consistently celebratory stance of “Kink” is commendable, but also feels somewhat limiting.
  25. When the Game Stands Tall
    An inspirational sports drama that goes long on rectitudinous sermonizing but comes up short on gridiron thrills or genuine love for the game.
  26. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    It takes at least a sliver of human interest to make a noir pastiche more than the sum of its influences, and anything resembling authentic feeling has been neatly airbrushed away from this movie’s synthetic surface.
  27. Another Me
    Stunningly unsuccessful on all levels, this gothic dud wants to play on the real and metaphoric anxieties of post-adolescents discovering who they are, but the ham-fisted script is incapable of a multilayered approach, while the helming and editing are at the level of mediocre TV.
  28. To Be Takei
    A unique blend of camp and conviction, To Be Takei deftly showcases George Takei’s eclectic personality and wildly disparate achievements.
  29. If I Stay
    The overall execution is so pedestrian that it’s possible to feel more moved by the filmmakers’ good intentions than by the actual emotional content onscreen.
  30. Metro Manila
    The screenplay (co-written with Hollywood scribe Frank E. Flowers) boasts the stock characters and situations, sentimentality, foreshadowing and melodrama of soap opera. Yet by cleverly blending these ingredients with those of an action caper, the pic presents a fresher appeal.
  31. Expedition to the End of the World
    With a mood and setting worthy of a murder story by Jack London, this audience-friendly, atmospheric work could be remade as a thriller, although that’s really what it is already.
  32. Rudderless
    Crudup does a lot to keep things watchable, playing with a slightly acidic wryness that suggests the character’s humor has only been heightened by his grieving hopelessness.
  33. Found
    Although not entirely successful, this intriguing, above-average genre effort still reps an ambitious and resourceful debut for helmer/co-writer Scott Schirmer.
  34. Mr. X
    Alluring if not especially illuminating.
  35. Mission Blue
    The majesty and imperiled status of the world’s aquatic life are vividly captured in Mission Blue.
  36. Fort McCoy
    Connor and co-director Michael Worth allow Fort McCoy to proceed at an unhurried pace, giving Stoltz ample opportunity to subtly convey undercurrents of guilt and anger percolating beneath his character’s affable exterior.
  37. The November Man
    Runs through spy-movie cliches with such dogged obligation that it often plays like a YouTube compilation of scenes from older, better thrillers, generating little overall tension and only occasionally approaching basic coherence.
  38. Cheatin'
    The writer-director-producer’s pulsing, pencil-etched, pastel-hued animation style is a pleasure to behold as ever.
  39. Coldwater
    Suitable for teens — lies somewhere between indignant expose and unusually tasteful exploitation picture, with shower scenes and sweaty young delinquents aplenty.
  40. Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart
    Zagar’s thesis — that overpowering media exploitation determined its legal outcome early on — is introduced in the very first shot, then hammered home harder the longer the pic goes on.
  41. Let's Be Cops
    The mix of raucous buffoonery and violent mayhem isn’t exactly seamless, and the laugh-out-loud moments come with conspicuously less frequency during a third act that suggests a rough draft for “Bad Boys 3.”
  42. The Giver
    The Giver reaches the screen in a version that captures the essence of Lowry’s affecting allegory but little of its mythic pull.
  43. 37: A Final Promise
    The film deserves more than just a passing grade, and is a good deal better than any plot synopsis might make it sound.
  44. About Alex
    Neither the script’s up-to-the-minute signifiers nor its cheekily self-aware humor can entirely dispel a formulaic feel.
  45. The Dog
    A spunky yet surprisingly sad portrait of a sexually liberated man held captive by his past, forever chasing and trying to rewrite his own legend.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Though shy on background info, the docu offers a fascinating portrait.
  47. Into the Storm
    Into the Storm can make it rain like nobody’s business, but when it tries to be smart, it comes out all wet.
  48. The Maid's Room
    After a seductively moody intro, Michael Walker's domestic thriller devolves into a cartoonish attack on the filthy rich.
  49. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    Even at its most purplish and highfalutin (mostly in the “Her” section), “Eleanor Rigby” always aims for something sincere, and when Benson pulls back a bit — and stops trying to show us how much Freud he’s read and how many Bergman films he’s seen — the movie becomes vastly more engaging.
  50. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    At its core is a most affecting portrait of two people who love each other, but may no longer be able to live as one, and it is mostly a pleasure to spend two, or three, or five hours in their company.
  51. The Expendables 3
    This is the sort of numbskull non-entertainment that considers it worthwhile to fly in a martial-arts superstar like Jet Li and have him sit around firing a machine gun, pausing every so often to deliver the most awkward line readings of his career.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    14 Blades
    An above-average martial-arts actioner that reinforces Donnie Yen’s “Man With No Name” ambience.
  53. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    Neither a particularly good movie nor the pop-cultural travesty that some were dreading.
  54. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    Fittingly, though, given the uniformly regurgitated feel, the projectile-vomit effects are superb.
  55. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    It’s the trench imagery itself that’s the primary attraction here, and it proves more than worth the wait.
  56. The Strange Little Cat
    Despite all that it withholds, The Strange Little Cat ultimately proves a far more revealing form of family portrait.
  57. Drunktown's Finest
    Unfortunately, Drunktown’s Finest too often suffers from stilted performances and scripting.
  58. The Almost Man
    A slender but polished dramedy.
  59. Get On Up
    Boseman is an empathic presence, and nothing he does smacks of mimicry. He feels Brown from the inside out, the way Brown felt his own distinctive rhythms, and even when the movie itself seems to be on autopilot, Boseman never leaves the captain’s chair.
  60. The Killer Inside Me
    A film that should but doesn't get under your skin and give you the creeps.
  61. The Fluffy Movie
    An enjoyable if never electrifying record of his Unity Through Laughter stand-up tour.
  62. Young Ones
    The sophomore effort from Jake Paltrow (“The Good Night”) gets so bogged down in its primal tale of murder and revenge that the most intriguing elements become little more than futuristic window dressing.
  63. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    Scrumptious as it all is, it hurts to watch chefs so committed to excellence in a movie so content to settle for attractive mediocrity.
  64. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Director James Gunn’s presumptive franchise-starter is overlong, overstuffed and sometimes too eager to please, but the cheeky comic tone keeps things buoyant — as does Chris Pratt’s winning performance as the most blissfully spaced-out space crusader this side of Buckaroo Banzai.
  65. My Man Is a Loser
    A dismally stupid and sexist romantic comedy.
  66. Ironclad: Battle for Blood
    Writer-director Jonathan English’s dank-looking film delivers enough amputations, decapitations and other instances of rusty-bladed gore to distract undiscerning genre fans stuck between seasons of “Game of Thrones,” but serves no other obvious purpose.
  67. Finding Fela!
    While the filmed stage performances are among the pic’s most galvanizing sequences, their inclusion underscores how flat Gibney’s combination of archival footage and talking-head interviews otherwise plays.
  68. A Master Builder
    The adaptation lacks a strong enough sense of modulated construction, making for a tedious sit. One of the biggest problems, though, is the performances.
  69. Hercules
    It’s a grandly staged, solidly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure movie that does something no other Hercules movie has quite done before: it cuts the mythical son of Zeus down to human size (or as human as you can get while still being played by Dwayne Johnson).
  70. Lucy
    Giddily recycling everything from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Matrix” to yakuza actioners and National Geographic documentaries, it’s a garish, trippy, wildly uneven and finally quite disarming piece of work, graced by a moment-to-moment unpredictability.
  71. Aftermath
    As an exercise in sustained claustrophobia, the movie is not without its grisly accomplishments. Its effectiveness lies not in those moments when its characters are struck down without warning, but rather in the lingering sense that death has slowly, quietly taken up residence among them.
  72. Tiny Times 3.0
    The film’s vacuous characters and inherent vanity have become awfully grating
  73. A Letter to Momo
    The story distinguishes itself from other anime offerings through its attention to both visual and emotional realism.
  74. A Five Star Life
    Maria Sole Tognazzi’s ultra-sedate romantic comedy A Five Star Life is full of aesthetic sophistication and luxurious ambiance, but its pleasures are all secondhand, and the whole endeavor is too starved of incident to really stick in the memory.
  75. Among Ravens
    Nicely shot, atrociously written, shoutingly acted and intrusively scored (to classical selections and the heavy synth accompaniment of Fall on Your Sword), this roundelay of misery drowns itself in cliche after cliche.
  76. Kite
    At the very least, Kite could have given Jackson some scenery to chew.
  77. Persecuted
    At a time when the world offers us no shortage of examples of what actual religious persecution looks like, for a film to indulge in this particular brand of self-righteous fearmongering isn’t just clueless or reckless; it’s an act of contemptible irresponsibility.
  78. Magic in the Moonlight
    Whenever Firth and Stone are onscreen together, the movie sings; the rest of the time it’s never less than a breezy divertissement.
  79. The Purge: Anarchy
    For all the philosophical and metaphorical shortcomings of his script, however, DeMonaco is an efficient orchestrator of action.
  80. Step Up: All In
    With even less plot than in previous installments to get in the way of its inventive 3D dance scenes, this fifth pic delivers on spectacle... but lacks in chemistry.
  81. Sex Tape
    Sex Tape is an unaccountable drag — strained, toothless and far too tame to achieve the sort of outrageous, raunchy-titillating effect it’s aiming for.
  82. Horns
    This overly devout adaptation of Joe Hill’s sacrilegious text benefits from the helmer’s twisted sensibility, but suffers from a case of overall silliness.
  83. The Tribe
    Sans dialogue or translation, each interaction effectively becomes a puzzle to be solved, and Slaboshpytskiy is brilliant at using ambiguity to heighten rather than dull the viewer’s perceptions. Even when the meaning of a particular exchange eludes us, a greater sense of narrative comprehension begins to take hold.
  84. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step
    Hentoff presides over a film rich in the sounds and occasional sights of legendary cultural figures, from Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X to Bob Dylan and Coleman Hawkins.
  85. Affluenza
    A splashy-looking yet depressingly empty exercise that is never more shallow than the times when it tries to go deep.
  86. Honour
    Earnest issue drama and pulpy B-thriller mechanics make awkward but not uncompelling bedfellows in Honour.
  87. Rage
    Proficiently made but fatally unpersuasive in its portrayal of internecine gang warfare, this thuggish melodrama piles on the foreign accents and paint-by-numbers brutality, all served up with a grim, operatic self-seriousness that gives Cage’s antihero little room to maneuver.
  88. And So It Goes
    For all of its 93 minutes, you never feel anything significant is at stake for anyone — save for a paycheck.
  89. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
    A fast-paced valentine to Russell and his quixotic vision so rife with underdog victors and hairpin twists of fortune that, if it weren’t all true, no one would believe it.
  90. The Empty Hours
    Fernandez (“Used Parts”) has a masterful handle on narrative, structure and character, skillfully blending them all in a tale with atmosphere to spare.
  91. Closed Curtain
    Less satisfying than his previous pic, yet still a bold, melancholy statement.
  92. Heatstroke
    An underwhelming survival thriller.
  93. The Green Prince
    An extraordinarily engrossing tale becomes an extremely uncinematic experience in the hands of Israeli documentarian Nadav Schirman.
  94. Web Junkie
    With filmmakers Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia granted extraordinary access to one facility, they make for a bizarre and entertaining documentary.
  95. Cannibal
    The film’s slow deliberation and aesthetic rigor act as a form of seduction, luring the viewer into unwilling identification with Carlos.
  96. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    Planes: Fire & Rescue is a slight but improbably successful example of a movie that, despite its profusion of chrome and steel, somehow succeeds in touching something human.
  97. Han Gong-ju
    For some time, the pic holds interest while constantly frustrating curiosity with the way it parses out information, but soon after the midway point the game becomes tedious, and attention slackens considerably even as Gong-ju’s ordeal becomes clear.
  98. Premature
    Premature winds up resembling nothing so much as the coarsely smutty teen-sex comedies that abounded throughout the ’80s in the wake of “Porky’s.”
  99. Deliver Us From Evil
    Deliver Us From Evil is a professionally assembled genre mashup that’s too silly to be scary, and a bit too dull to be a midnight-movie guilty pleasure.
  100. A Picture of You
    Competently written and skillfully acted, the film seems to be melodrama-bound, when a shocking discovery and the sudden arrival of friends instead send it careening into comedy.
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