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. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    What Erica Rivinoja, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s script lacks in lingering nutritional value, it compensates for with amusing food puns. If nothing else, the pic’s zany tone and manic pace are good for a quick-hit sugar high.
  2. Chavez: Cage of Glory
    There’s precious little glory — and not even that much cage fighting — in Chavez: Cage of Glory.
  3. The Square
    The Square is journalism, but Noujaim’s agenda is greater than mere reportage.
  4. Le Week-End
    Bittersweet, charming yet often very thorny.
  5. Man of Tai Chi
    There’s little in the way of drama, character depth or mise-en-scene to distract from Tiger Chen’s technically dazzling display of human combat in Keanu Reeves’ helming debut.
  6. Winter Nomads
    Von Stuerler’s debut showcases nature, but its real theme is its subjects’ engagement with their work.
  7. Price of Gold
    A scrappy portrait of half a dozen renegade gold-diggers.
  8. Enemy
    Ultimately, the enigmatic surface conflict — in which a man must contend with his own carbon copy as rival — proves to be the film’s own worst enemy, for its dark, David Lynchian allure proves almost too compelling, obscuring the material’s deeper themes.
  9. Sal
    While Sal means to honor its subject, it’s too clunky and amateurish to really illuminate him.
  10. Zero Charisma
    Affectionately captures the tail end of a culture in which specialized dice, character sheets and hand-painted figurines were the gateway to elaborate flights of imagination.
  11. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Sophisticated cutting brings out the story’s complex emotional undercurrents, though “Breakdown’s” less convincingly scripted second half sputters more often than it shines.
  12. The Colony
    Utterly routine futuristic horror-thriller The Colony substitutes the term “ferals” for plain old zombies (the modern, fast-moving kind), and that’s about it for originality.
  13. Shepard & Dark
    The ups and downs of a decades-long friendship are charted with warmth and sensitivity in Shepard and Dark.
  14. Metallica: Through the Never
    A definitive document for anyone who’s ever hoisted the devil-horn fingers in metalhead solidarity.
  15. Inequality for All
    Covering a broad swath of liberal economic theory in brisk, simply stated fashion, Inequality for All aims to do for income disparity what “An Inconvenient Truth” did for climate change.
  16. Big Sur
    Michael Polish’s Big Sur offers an elegantly muted take on the midlife ennui of Kerouac’s autobiographical 1962 novel.
  17. The Last Days on Mars
    While it earns high marks for Jon Henson’s production design, this murkily derivative sci-fi-horror entry sets its sights disappointingly low in terms of story and ideas.
  18. Great Expectations
    Working from a tightly compressed screenplay by David Nicholls, director Mike Newell strikes the beats of a deservedly oft-told tale with dour competence but little in the way of dramatic inspiration or visual flair.
  19. Baggage Claim
    Chemistry you can fake, but charm is far harder to pull off, and Baggage Claim never quite succeeds on that front.
  20. I Spit on Your Grave 2
    Gore and nastiness are plentiful, but they’re just wearyingly gratuitous rather than truly shocking.
  21. I Am Breathing
    Not so much harrowing as achingly reflective.
  22. My Lucky Star
    Wholesome, effortless entertainment that runs smoothly enough but seldom takes one’s breath away in the romance department.
  23. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    A thoughtful, detailed chronicle of the Fed’s origins, responsibilities and shifting monetary policies.
  24. Battle of the Year
    So fatally frontloaded with endless training montages, awfully written, indifferently acted drama, sports-film platitudes and jaw-dropping product placements that only the hardiest of viewers will make it through to the payoff.
  25. First Cousin Once Removed
    A fascinatingly fractured glimpse into a disengaged mind and a biopic-in-reverse of its subject, quite unlike any documentary seen before.
  26. The Unknown Known
    Ranging over familiar material, but made vivid by Morris’ fecund associations and invigorating stylistic flourishes.
  27. Locke
    This ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise.
  28. How I Live Now
    Wisely sticks to its protagonist’s p.o.v. while avoiding a longer view of the calamitous events around her, making up in emotional immediacy what it lacks in broad dramatic sweep.
  29. Child of God
    The crazed intensity of Franco’s filmmaking, while duly evocative of Haze’s primitive state, is ultimately too hectic and unmodulated for anything to burrow deep and stay there.
  30. The Armstrong Lie
    Director Alex Gibney delivers not just a detailed, full-access account of his subject, in all his defiance, hubris and tentative self-reckoning, but also a layered inquiry into the culture of competitiveness, celebrity, moral relativism and hypocrisy that helped enable and sustain his deception.
  31. Abuse of Weakness
    Of all living actresses, only Huppert could capture nuances that alternately elicit sympathy and fierce sexual attraction to a recent stroke victim.
  32. Miss Violence
    Avranas’ film employs an irony-free meter that certainly distinguishes his work from that of Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and lends the film’s most explicitly severe sequences of domestic and sexual abuse a kind of cumulative numbing power.
  33. Sacro GRA
    In keeping with Rosi’s style, there are no explanations and no interactions with the camera, and Sacro GRA suddenly ends without a sense of having come to any conclusions.
  34. Under the Skin
    Glazer has always been longer on atmosphere and uncanny moods than on narrative, but the fatal flaw of Under the Skin isn’t that not much happens; it’s that what does happen isn’t all that interesting.
  35. The Zero Theorem
    A sci-fi confection that, at best, momentarily recalls the dystopian whimsy of the director’s best-loved effort, “Brazil,” but ends up dissolving into a muddle of unfunny jokes and half-baked ideas, all served up with that painful, herky-jerky Gilliam rhythm.
  36. Are You Here
    One dead giveaway that the comedy isn’t working is the film’s score, which overcompensates throughout by attempting to bolster every second with bouncy energy.
  37. We Are the Best!
    It’s the rare film about adolescence that doesn’t seem exclusively targeted either to teens or to adults. Rarer still, it’s one that takes an interest in the nourishing qualities of female friendship.
  38. Stray Dogs
    Tsai here seems to be stripping his ornately eccentric style down to formal fundamentals. A certain pictorial grace remains; his sense of humor, sadly, appears to have been largely tossed out with the bathwater.
  39. Philomena
    It’s an undeniable whopper of a yarn and, coming after a string of middling efforts from Frears, easily the director’s most compulsively watchable picture since “The Queen."
  40. Life of Crime
    Flavorful yet brisk like the book, Life of Crime loses some of its source material’s character development as well as a few minor narrative pieces (the dialogue remains nearly all Leonard’s), but the excellent casting fills in any resulting gaps well enough.
  41. Parkland
    Granted, Landesman feels an obligation to history, but there’s something ponderously obvious about the way so many of these scenes are played.
  42. Palo Alto
    While Palo Alto doesn’t seem to be saying anything new exactly, it boasts a clear and confident voice of its own, and it will be exciting to see where the young Coppola goes from here.
  43. Night Moves
    Kelly Reichardt blends her lucid observational approach with a topical-thriller format to engrossing effect in Night Moves.
  44. Moebius
    A gloriously off-the-charts study in perversity.
  45. Joe
    A patiently observed, often unsettlingly violent drama that can’t help but feel overly familiar in some of its particulars, rich in rural texture but low on narrative momentum or surprise.
  46. The Invisible Woman
    So tastefully mounted and brilliantly acted that it wears down even the corset-phobic’s innate resistance to such things.
  47. The Fifth Estate
    Both the kindest and most damning thing you can say about The Fifth Estate is that it primarily hobbles itself by trying to cram in more context-needy material than any single drama should have to bear.
  48. Fading Gigolo
    John Turturro brings sensitivity and intelligence to a subject that could have gone terribly awry in Fading Gigolo.
  49. Stranger by the Lake
    This is essentially an absorbing and intelligent exploration of queer desire spiced up with thriller elements.
  50. What If
    Roughly three parts charming to one part cloying, The F Word attempts and largely succeeds at pulling off a smart, self-aware riff on romantic-comedy conventions while maintaining a core of earnest feeling.
  51. The Double
    Undeniably impressive as a visual-psychological construct, The Double is ultimately a rigid, one-joke movie that feels hard pressed to sustain any sort of momentum over the course of its 92-minute running time.
  52. Dom Hemingway
    Shepard balances a livelier-than-life script with striking, super-saturated images, which makes the film feel bigger than it is.
  53. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him
    It’s a measure of Benson’s sure, skillful hand with actors that all the relationships in the movie — husband and wife, parent and child — feel lived-in and true, even when the dialogue strains too hard for the meaningful and poetic.
  54. Devil's Knot
    Devil’s Knot only occasionally feels weightier than a high-end Lifetime original or “Law & Order” episode.
  55. Dallas Buyers Club
    The film manages to educate without ever feeling didactic, and to entertain in the face of what would, to any other character, seem like a grim life sentence.
  56. Begin Again
    A film that lays emotions on the line and then drives them home with music.
  57. Bad Words
    This exuberantly foul-mouthed and mean-spirited comedy goes somewhat soft in the final stretch but remains an often uproarious model of sharp scripting and spirited acting.
  58. Enough Said
    Enough Said may be her cleanest, most polished and broadly funny effort to date; its emotional generosity is undeniable, but so is its tendency to smooth over some of the hard, brittle edges that have been the more interesting hallmarks of Holofcener’s work.
  59. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    Much like a work of art, the film invites a range of reactions, though it’s far easier to process than the daubs, doodles and other weird works that now hang all over the country.
  60. Mr. Nobody
    Though a lot of it is well written and directed and, quite often, funny or poignant, the individual scenes rarely become part of a larger whole.
  61. August: Osage County
    This two-ton prestige pic won’t win the hearts of highbrow critics or those averse to door-slamming, plate-smashing, top-of-the-lungs histrionics, but as a faithful filmed record of Letts’ play, one could have scarcely hoped for better.
  62. The Railway Man
    There’s something decidedly old-fashioned — and also dull as ditchwater — about Jonathan Teplitzky’s retelling of events.
  63. The Family
    Curiously airless, weightless and tonally uncertain, the picture mixes mass murder, dismemberment and rape threats with sappy sentimentality, fish-out-of-water gags and groan-worthy meta-humor, yet very little of it manages to leave any impression.
  64. Insidious: Chapter 2
    A modestly scaled and highly pleasurable sequel to Wan’s low-budget 2011 smash that should have genre fans begging for thirds.
  65. The Wind Rises
    Miyazaki is at the peak of his visual craftsmanship here, alternating lush, boldly colored rural vistas with epic, crowded urban canvases, soaring aerial perspectives and test flights both majestic and ill-fated.
  66. Shuddh Desi Romance
    A beautifully made rocky-road-to-love comedy in which many obstacles intrude before the right people finally get together, although not in quite the way you might expect.
  67. Mother of George
    Simply relating the narrative of Andrew Dosunmu’s seductive immigrant drama Mother of George would do little to convey the film’s stark, poetic power, much less its extraordinary visual and sonic acumen.
  68. 36 Saints
    This confused and confusing pic delivers no thrills, chills or anything remotely surprising.
  69. Thérèse
    Serviceable but uninspired.
  70. Diana
    While mostly swerving past the pitfall of tastelessness, this sincerely intended account of the last two years of Princess Diana’s life risks an even more perilous roadblock: dullness.
  71. Concussion
    Acquitting herself capably in a lead role that strips her bare in more ways than one, Robin Weigert (HBO’s “Deadwood”) proves worthy of a future in features, whereas first-time writer-director Stacie Passon mainly exposes her background in commercials.
  72. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    The novelty of helmer Gardner’s approach to 9/11, her insider’s look at the almost unimaginable difficulties faced by Cantor Fitzgerald in the weeks following the attack, and the abundance of coverage spanning 10 years of inhouse interactions more than compensate for the docu’s occasional unevenness.
  73. Fire in the Blood
    Though the film comprehensively details the political and economic subtleties of what it declares “the crime of the century,” its narrative remains primarily a human-focused one, highlighting the stories of selected steadfast victims, as well as the heroic movers and shakers in the struggle.
  74. The Ultimate Life
    At least the narrative sloppiness and ineptly delivered themes in the script by Brian Bird and Lisa G. Shillingburg (freely adapted from the novel by Jim Stovall) feel of a piece with the entire production.
  75. TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer
    Charged by alternating currents of nostalgic bemusement and wistful melancholy, TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer evinces all the amiable enthusiasm and discursive rambling one might expect from a do-it-yourself labor of love.
  76. Kill Your Darlings
    Directed with an assured sense of style that pushes against the narrow confines of its admittedly fascinating story, John Krokidas’ first feature feels adventurous yet somewhat hemmed-in.
  77. Captain Phillips
    There is something too dry and austere about Greengrass and Ray’s telescoped vision, which touches only fleetingly on the pirates’ motives, the suffering of the Somali people and the collateral damage of global capitalism.
  78. Red Obsession
    The film’s rather simplistic cultural juxtapositions, pitting artistic appreciators against status-seeking philistines, work best when narrowly focused on the subject of wine.
  79. Abigail Harm
    Though never dull, the result is a curiously distant meditation on intimacy.
  80. The Last Christeros
    The final days of a band of 1930s Christian rebels in the central Mexican wilderness are depicted with majestic stoicism in Matias Meyer’s elegant ode to independence.
  81. I Declare War
    The concept is thought-provoking but the execution is flat-footed.
  82. Dark Tourist
    Character actor Michael Cudlitz’s first leading role is the sole selling point of Dark Tourist, a well-acted but rote and ultimately repellent character study of a psychologically disturbed loner.
  83. Instructions Not Included
    Instructions Not Included is a sporadically amusing but unduly protracted dramedy that slowly — very slowly — devolves into a shameless tearjerker during its third act.
  84. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    “Waka” refers to an ancient form of poetry still widely popular today, and helmers Haptas and Samuelson, through their serene lensing and fluid editing, propose a visual thread linking the past to the present “as the crow flies.”
  85. Ass Backwards
    Ass Backwards proves that no amount of comic talent can shine — or raise a chuckle — in the absence of even halfway decent material.
  86. Riddick
    An improbable but very enjoyable sequel that recaptures much of the stripped-down intensity of Diesel and director David Twohy’s franchise starter "Pitch Black."
  87. American Milkshake
    Milkshake sucks all the flavor out of a tasty premise.
  88. Winnie Mandela
    Decently acted despite screenplay shortcomings.
  89. Salinger
    It’s difficult to get past the film’s restless, ill-fittingly bombastic style.
  90. My Father and The Man In Black
    Holiff Sr.’s extensive audio diaries and taped phone conversations with Cash give authentic voice to the film’s otherwise stodgy re-creations of this true odd couple’s stormy relationship.
  91. La Maison de la Radio
    Two minor problems in the closing reels hold the film back from instant-classic status.
  92. Il Futuro
    Even though mood trumps character psychology, the entire cast provides mesmerizing, evocative performances.
  93. Labor Day
    To the extent that Adele’s hunger for affection resonates with audiences, what emerges is a powerful — if implausible — romance.
  94. Rush
    Not just one of the great racing movies of all time, but a virtuoso feat of filmmaking in its own right, elevated by two of the year’s most compelling performances.
  95. 12 Years a Slave
    Though the film brims with memorable characters, the show ultimately belongs to Ejiofor, who upholds the character’s dignity throughout.
  96. 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    A documentary as messy as the movement it tries to portray, 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film possesses energy, passion and about a dozen documentaries inside it yearning to breathe free.
  97. Prisoners
    A spellbinding, sensationally effective thriller with a complex moral center.
  98. We Are What We Are
    That We Are What We Are steers just shy of silliness even at its most outrageous is in large part thanks to a committed cast of non-disposable character actors.
  99. Getaway
    Easily one of the dopiest major studio releases since Elie Samaha got out of the business.
  100. Gravity
    The director’s long-overdue follow-up to “Children of Men” is at once a nervy experiment in blockbuster minimalism and a film of robust movie-movie thrills, restoring a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen.
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