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. All the Light in the Sky
    [Swanberg's] latest work, All the Light in the Sky, displays a striking new willingness to meet his audience halfway, buttressing his signature style with clever pacing, solid technique and a deeply soulful lead performance from co-scripter Jane Adams.
  2. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    It’s one thing to declare sex a fact of life and insist that audiences confront their unease at seeing it depicted (or, equally constructive, their intense excitation at its mere mention), but quite another to fashion a fictional woman’s life around nothing but sex. As courageously depicted by Gainsbourg, Jo is ultimately a tragic character.
  3. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    Racy subject aside, the film provides a good-humored yet serious-minded look at sexual self-liberation, thick with references to art, music, religion and literature, even as it pushes the envelope with footage of acts previously relegated to the sphere of pornography.
  4. The Wolf of Wall Street
    A big, unruly bacchanal of a movie that huffs and puffs and nearly blows its own house down, but holds together by sheer virtue of its furious filmmaking energy and a Leonardo DiCaprio star turn so electric it could wake the dead.
  5. Shored Up
    Eschews hysteria, preachiness and self-importance in favor of calm, persuasive scientific arguments.
  6. Beatocello’s Umbrella
    More scenes of Richner’s admirable efforts in the hospital and fewer expressions of admiration by the doctors and nurses he trains would also have helped to anchor the film’s sincere but repetitive hosannas.
  7. Hours
    An ingeniously simple setup is cunningly exploited for maximum suspense in Hours, a slow-building, consistently engrossing drama.
  8. Desert Runners
    There’s an upbeat tenor to Desert Runners that develops real rooting value for the protags.
  9. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    A modestly less quotable but generously funny new adventure for scotch-and-mahogany-loving 1970s newsman Ron Burgundy.
  10. Wadjda
    With enormous sympathy for all, Al Mansour captures the isolation of Saudi women and their parallel lives of freedom at home and invisibility outside.
  11. Our Children
    At this finely tooled tragedy’s core towers Emilie Dequenne, no longer the feral young thing seen in 1999′s “Rosetta,” but a trapped animal pushed to devastating extremes.
  12. Journey to the South Pacific
    Structurally, the film is somewhat rambling and unfocused even within its tight 40-minute running time, cutting away periodically to address the ways in which overfishing and rising water levels have severely impacted the reef and its ability to support plant and animal life. The lessons are valuable and necessary, but they’re not particularly well integrated.
  13. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    An exceptionally poor piece of holiday cash-in product, rushed and ungainly even by the low standard set by Perry's seven previous Madea films, yet it should be every bit as profitable.
  14. Sweet Talk
    Hopelessly stagebound, despite halfhearted efforts to open up what’s basically a talky two-hander, and risibly pretentious in the manner of soft-core porn that’s no sexier than glossy ads for expensive perfume.
  15. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    [A] stunningly joke-free comedy-horror hybrid.
  16. White Reindeer
    This complex, compassionate film finds both wicked humor and, less expectedly, transcendent hope in America’s gaudy fixation with Christmas spirit.
  17. The Great Passage
    Director Yuya Ishii takes a considerable step forward in terms of budget and ambition with this simple, sometimes sentimental yet wise and full-bodied comedy-drama, which movingly testifies to the ways in which dedication, focus and an extreme attention to detail can achieve something of lasting value.
  18. Here Comes the Devil
    Promises much in an ominously atmospheric package that nods to 1970s genre stylings. But the payoff is on the meh side.
  19. What's in a Name?
    The directors have brought onboard the entire original cast. This makes their job much easier, as countless performances have perfected the timing and tone of each single line.
  20. The Sacrament
    It’s a film that purists might insist isn’t horror in the strictest sense, though this slow-burning investigation of unseemly goings-on at a rural Christian commune is frightening in any genre language.
  21. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    This off-putting pic requires open minds and iron nerves.
  22. R... Rajkumar
    The Whoopee Cushion hijinks here are punctuated with incongruous outbursts of bloody violence.
  23. Expecting
    Even when judged by the standards of broad farce, however, Expecting repeatedly strains credibility and defies logic in ways too glaring to ignore.
  24. Khumba
    The voice ensemble is game, if not especially well matched.
  25. Merry Christmas
    There doesn’t appear to be any purpose at all to the random exchanges and interactions that pass for a plot.
  26. The Unbelievers
    While every moment is captured with the reverence of a fawning fan, Holwerda’s star-struck approach neglects to shed new light on his subjects or even showcase their greatest hits.
  27. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    This robust, action-packed adventure benefits from a headier sense of forward momentum and a steady stream of 3D-enhanced thrills.
  28. UnHung Hero
    The film’s brisk progress is always genial and lively, hitting the expected off-color-humor marks without getting too juvenile.
  29. Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion
    An alternately enchanting and exhausting anime adventure in which cutesy characters and peppy vocal turns belie a darker, angst-ridden narrative.
  30. Live at the Foxes Den
    The pacing is tortured. Plot doesn’t so much twist as rupture and spill forth, and character arcs, as if part of a case being built by a cut-rate lawyer, frequently skip discovery and are forgotten before summation.
  31. Dear Mr. Watterson
    It is, in short, everything you’d expect from a crowd-sourced documentary, designed to celebrate its subject, while mostly just validating the aesthetic taste of its backers.
  32. Tracks
    Anchored by a fine and flinty performance from Mia Wasikowska, director John Curran’s gorgeously rendered adventure saga succeeds not only in capturing the harshness and wild beauty of Davidson’s journey, but also in mapping a delicate interior pathway into the heart of this most atypical explorer.
  33. American Hustle
    It’s a rich, glorious mess, and its underlying craftsmanship is apparent in the characters’ beautifully delineated relationships, each with its own jangly rhythm and distinct feel.
  34. Cousin Jules
    Yet even as the timelessness of the human activity on display seduces with its serenity, it evokes in modern viewers a definite impatience with the impracticality of traditional rites and rhythms, perhaps only enjoyable in 90-minute doses.
  35. Bullett Raja
    If it was more consistent, Bullett Raja would qualify as a solid piece of genre craftsmanship for director and co-writer Tigmanshu Dhulia (“Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster”), with action scenes that are crisply framed and edited for clarity.
  36. Ernest & Célestine
    A charming animated feature.
  37. The Punk Singer
    Dynamic performance footage and input from a variety of collaborators, colleagues and admirers, as well as Hanna herself, make the tightly edited Punk Singer a vivid watch even for those with no interest in or experience with the music itself.
  38. Levitated Mass
    Pray deftly maintains the integrity and momentum of his story’s various strands while moving backward and forward in time, and from one discreet subtopic to another, his segues as unpredictable as they are imperceptible.
  39. Oldboy
    Lee and Protosevich have made a picture that, although several shades edgier than the average Hollywood thriller, feels content to shadow its predecessor’s every move while falling short of its unhinged, balls-out delirium.
  40. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    For all its failings, there is one thing about “Long Walk to Freedom” that can’t be denied: Idris Elba gives a towering performance, a Mandela for the ages.
  41. Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case
    With the aid of Johnsen’s doc to overcome the obstacles China has put in his path, Ai’s voice carries louder than ever before.
  42. It's Better to Jump
    The three director-producers’ inability to come up with stronger narrative or thematic organization makes “It’s Better to Jump” play like the professionally polished side product of a vacation stay.
  43. Sugar
    Its compassion and careful sidestepping of exploitation tropes can’t make up for a fundamental lack of depth and urgency in the storytelling.
  44. Gori Tere Pyaar Mein
    The falseness of the exaggerated romantic comedy sequences here infect the aspects of the story that should be underplayed and gentle.
  45. Black Nativity
    Lemmons advances this story with straight-faced conviction, orchestrating narrative and spectacle with a grandiosity that proves easier to admire from a distance than it is to engage with onscreen.
  46. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    Gondry and his frisky hieroglyphs successfully convey Chomsky’s concept of language as the fleeting “meanings we impose on fragmentary experience.”
  47. Homefront
    What sounds like a veritable B-movie wet dream — with that master of the subzero scowl, Jason Statham, starring in a screenplay written by Sylvester Stallone — turns out to be considerably less than the sum of its parts.
  48. Lion Ark
    Overlong film quickly becomes tedious whenever the camera strays from the lions, who don’t have much personality but prove more compelling than the humans.
  49. Bettie Page Reveals All
    It has a somewhat routine midlevel-cable-production feel. But the content is engaging, and the use of old movie clips to illustrate biographical details... is amusing.
  50. Detroit Unleaded
    A lively slice-of-life that uses familiar romantic-comedy tropes and a vibrant cast of characters to humorously explore family relationships, cultural identity and love.
  51. In Fear
    Jeremy Lovering’s tense debut might have worked better had it left more to the imagination. Still, crisp camerawork and amplified sound yield paranoia aplenty.
  52. Narco Cultura
    Narco Cultura is as overwhelming as it is absorbing.
  53. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    Discerning Verhoeven’s hand in it all is difficult, though true to the helmer’s more intimate style, it largely revolves around sex, and has a few fun plot twists.
  54. Lenny Cooke
    A penetrating and ultimately heartbreaking inventory of hard lessons learned on and off the court.
  55. Ram-Leela
    Ram-Leela, a gorgeous, boisterous, ultimately ineffective new Bollywood adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet,” does accomplish one thing that is quite unusual: it manages to keep you in suspense about the outcome almost to the last frame.
  56. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    A trek across the Himalayas to raise climate-change awareness is respectfully packaged as inspirational comfort food in Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey.
  57. The Starving Games
    It seems even more slapdash and desperately unfunny than their earlier work.
  58. Five Dances
    The sensual movement of bodies through space creates a visual language whose infinite variations seduce and fascinate over the course of the film’s numerous rehearsals.
  59. Delivery Man
    The circumstances may be contrived, but the characters feel refreshingly genuine.
  60. Lone Survivor
    Berg’s blunt, pummeling style offers few nuances and makes no apologies, but his broad brushstrokes have clearly found an ideal canvas in this grimly heroic rendering of hell on earth.
  61. It's Me, It's Me
    Most of the comedy in It’s Me, It’s Me is behavioral, playing off the plausible notion that meeting exact copies of yourself would not be terrifying so much as socially awkward.
  62. The Best Man Holiday
    The cluttered, overlong narrative never really finds its footing.
  63. Everyday
    As the years go by and the kids grow — perhaps the only real benefit of Winterbottom’s approach — time begins to run together, making it all too easy for the mind to wander.
  64. Free Ride
    The script’s autobiographical roots tend to substitute for a well-constructed dramatic throughline, giving the film an open-endedness that feels more dismissive than ambivalent.
  65. We Will See Tomorrow
    Essentially a homemovie cobbled together with bland talking-head interviews, director Yuliya Tikhonova’s film offers little to interest jazz aficionados or those simply curious about the band’s lineup of veteran sidemen from the era of classic jazz.
  66. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    [Francis] Lawrence and his team have calibrated the entire experience for maximum engagement. And while its pleasures can’t touch the thrill of seeing the Death Star destroyed — not yet, at least — the film runs circles around George Lucas’ ability to weave complex political ideas into the very fabric of B-movie excitement.
  67. Contracted
    The ick factor is high in Contracted, a body-horror opus that will satisfy genre fans who like to be grossed out, but doesn’t have much to offer on any other count.
  68. The Motel Life
    So full of explanatory flashbacks and animated sequences visualizing the characters’ invented yarns that their real dramas are indeed almost obscured.
  69. Reaching for the Moon
    Attention is retained by the commendably unhistrionic leads, who convincingly etch the pair’s enduring devotion even when passions run dry.
  70. Out of the Furnace
    Cooper seems to make actors feel safe and willing to expose themselves in ways they ordinarily might not, and time and again he takes scenes to places of unexpected emotional power.
  71. Caucus
    [A] fascinating but only intermittently insightful film.
  72. Medora
    Filmmakers Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart uncover and illuminate a strain of stoic resilience that could be the last best defense against bottomless despair. Unfortunately, as Medora repeatedly suggests, that invaluable resource may not be inexhaustible.
  73. Sweet Dreams
    Sweet Dreams finds and sustains a delicate balance, seizing on small moments of hope in a place where the horrors of 1994 are in many ways still an open wound.
  74. Finding Mr. Right
    Unwieldy and exasperating, but not without a certain pushy, ingratiating charm.
  75. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    Moderately interesting as a once-over-lightly political history lesson best suited for home-screen consumption.
  76. Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen
    Once Mulholland has established that both men hark back to a bygone, Teddy Roosevelt-fostered image of laconic masculinity, his peculiar vantage point generates little insight into the psychology and accomplishments of either man, as “The True Gen” abandons biographical logic in favor of a catalogue of arbitrary differences and similarities.
  77. A Case of You
    A lot of interesting, funny performers aren’t very interesting or funny in director Kat Corio’s A Case of You.
  78. 12-12-12
    An impressive yet drama-less concoction that can’t totally disguise its slightly stale aftertaste.
  79. Paris Countdown
    This been-there-done-that story marks a pretty banal debut for writer-director Alain Marie, who seems far more interested in aping Refn and early-career Michael Mann than in finding his own style.
  80. Angels Sing
    Working from a script by Lou Berney, which in turn was adapted from a novel by Turk Pipkin, director Tim McCanlies maintains an even hand throughout, so that neither the moments of broad comedy nor the stretches of tearjerking sentimentality get out of hand.
  81. Krrish 3
    All credit to Krrish 3 for not being an audience-pummeling industrial product like most of Hollywood’s superhero films. It has the off-hand, anything-is-possible spirit of a children’s book or fairy tale.
  82. Musicwood
    Maxine Trump’s feature loses focus as it progresses, though its insights into guitar making, forestry harvesting and environmental shortages resonate strongly.
  83. Frozen
    This always enjoyable tale of mysterious magic, imperiled princesses and square-jawed men of action proves longer on striking visuals than on truly engaging or memorable characters.
  84. The Truth About Emanuel
    Played flatly head-on with some poetic pretensions, the concept never becomes particularly credible or appealing.
  85. Tim's Vermeer
    The result is just about the most fun you can have while learning, partly because it strips away any tangents beyond the task at hand, offering a lean, 80-minute account of how this crazy guy erected his own Everest and then proceeded to climb it.
  86. Swerve
    Packs enough pace, suspense and quality thesping to overcome some minor plot wobbles.
  87. Paradise: Hope
    Paradise: Hope has humor and warmth, and shows more genuine affection and kindness toward its characters than Seidl usually allows.
  88. Approved for Adoption
    It’s impossible not to be charmed on some level by Jung Henin and Laurent Boileau’s Approved for Adoption, though it’s best not to ask for too much.
  89. The Nun
    Nicloux is unable to instill the material with any tension.
  90. Faust
    [A] film with a maddeningly opaque narrative and a brutalizing cascade of nonstop verbiage.
  91. Go for Sisters
    Like too many of Sayles’ films, Go for Sisters seems bound to slip through the cracks, not quite memorable enough to make a lasting impression.
  92. Filth
    Powered by a vigorous, image-shedding lead turn from James McAvoy as a coked-up Edinburgh detective on the fast track to either promotion or self-implosion, this descent into Scotch-marinated madness begins as ugly comedy, segues almost imperceptibly into farcical tragedy, and inevitably — perhaps intentionally — loses control in the process.
  93. Aftermath
    The idea of framing Holocaust atrocities in contemporary genre terms, although intriguing, is not without its perils, and the secret, when revealed, looms too large to fit within the plot’s parameters, creating strange disconnects between form and content.
  94. Why We Ride
    The lovingly crafted documentary Why We Ride ultimately chokes on the fumes of bombastic self-seriousness.
  95. Golden Slumbers
    Golden Slumbers is an elegantly assembled and deeply moving remembrance of Cambodian cinema
  96. The Last Day of August
    Decently crafted but with not quite enough up its narrative sleeve to make a memorable impact, writer-director Craig DiFolco’s debut feature leaves one waiting for explosive revelations that never arrive.
  97. Free Birds
    A cute but disposable item were it not for the story’s weird racial undertow.
  98. Chinese Puzzle
    Bringing an appreciative outsider’s perspective to the sights, sounds and polyglot energy of New York, Klapisch and his collaborators ensure that the two hours whiz by decoratively and entertainingly.
  99. Dislecksia: The Movie
    The film conveys key information and makes important distinctions not generally known, and its effectiveness probably depends on the viewer’s tolerance for poorly executed kitsch and manic physical intrusions by the filmmaker.
  100. Immigrant
    The storyline develops so erratically that it lacks any internal momentum, with some scenes unfolding in exhaustive detail and others seemingly missing, as if whole chunks had been shot and later edited out.
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