Variety's Scores

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For 17,831 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: 9,163 out of 17831
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17831
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17831
17831 movie reviews
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  1. Mr. X
    Alluring if not especially illuminating.
  2. The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young
    Annika Iltis and Timothy Kane’s debut feature documentary finds plenty of rooting interest and colorful characters in a competition whose willful perversity brings an inevitable, generous side helping of gallows humor.
  3. Better Watch Out
    What starts out looking like a prank run amuck gradually grows more sinister, with director Chris Peckover (“Undocumented”) nicely handling the swerves toward dramatic peril and fatal consequences while still maintaining a confectionary “family entertainment” veneer of antic doings in a glossy suburban setting.
  4. The King of Staten Island
    If there were any lingering doubts that Pete Davidson has what it takes to be a terrific actor, this movie should dispel them. In “The King of Staten Island,” he holds the screen with his blinkered, scurrilous, and oddly innocent I did-what? personality, and for the first time he makes the sociopathic goofball he’s playing a fully dimensional presence.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackboard Jungle
    Glenn Ford, Morrow and Poitier are so real in their performances under the probing direction by Brooks that the picture alternatingly has the viewer pleading, indignant and frightened before the conclusion.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horror of Dracula
    Both director Terence Fisher as well as the cast have taken a serious approach to the macabre theme that adds up to lotsa tension and suspense.
  7. Drop Dead City
    Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.
  8. Sovereign
    The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.
  9. The Ides of March
    Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.
  10. Shortcomings
    For all the film’s chatty insights into modern dating mores and its casually pointed discussions of racial identity, the formula to which Shortcomings mostly adheres is a familiar one, as though someone has given one of the Apatow-esque man-child comedies of the aughts an Asian makeover.
  11. Guinevere
    Wonderfully acted and slickly mad. Acutely written with an eye to the motivations and ambiguities involved on both sides in such a relationship.
  12. Tesla
    Almereyda lays tracks to take Tesla in a dozen wild directions. . . . Yet, having ordered the audience onboard, Almereyda doesn’t go anywhere with the gambit.
  13. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    Writer-director Montiel creates a movie of many parts that don't always congeal. Mix this with the many meaty scenes and a roster of often exceptional actors and the effect is one of a fabulous acting showcase more than a wholly finished work.
  14. Enemy of the State
    Sporadically entertaining, though it lacks the kind of political urgency and emotional resonance so crucial to many similarly themed '70s movies.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poison
    Haynes has composed three distinctive stories that constitute case studies of antisocial aberrations, shot them in three strikingly different styles and intercut them in surprisingly successful ways.
  16. The Great Hack
    Privacy issues aside (and I’m second to none in my concern about them), the movie, in its ham-fisted fashion, is trying to come up with some way to regulate what it despises.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    FernGully: The Last Rainforest
    Drawn in brilliantly verdant colors immediately inviting the viewer into a special world, FernGully is certainly simple enough for any youngster to understand, yet is sufficiently hip around the edges to contain the sap.
  18. Watermarks
    Snappy, affecting documentary.
  19. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    Though Ritchie’s screenplay scores a 10 for sheer complexity and cleverness, it rates much lower down the scale for comprehensibility and audience involvement.
    • Variety
  20. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    First-time writer-director Stephen Chbosky adapts his young-adult bestseller with far more passion than skill, which suits familiar scenes of adolescent awkwardness aptly enough.
  21. In the Aisles
    In the Aisles is unusual in its compassion and respect for its blue-collared characters.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Cincinnati Kid
    Adapted from Richard Jessup's realistically-written novel, it emerges a tenseful examination of the gambling fraternity.
  23. The History of Future Folk
    Close encounters of the charming kind infuse The History of Future Folk, which will likely be remembered as the first neo-hipster Brooklyn sci-fi movie.
  24. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    In the end, the couple’s chemistry is off the charts, and that’s all that matters — though there’s still a too-tasteful David Hamilton-like quality to it all.
  25. Tom at the Farm
    It’s an improbably exciting match of knife-edge storytelling and a florid vintage aesthetic best represented by Gabriel Yared’s glorious orchestral score.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Last Starfighter
    With The Last Starfighter, director Nick Castle and writer Jonathan Betuel have done something so simple it's almost awe-inspiring: they've taken a very human story and accented it with sci-fi special effects, rather than the other way around.
  27. Jesus, You Know
    Visually glorious and sometimes moving, but comes coated with a thick hoarfrost of irony.
  28. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    "Southwest of Salem” proves a portrait of individual tragedy, and an indictment of a system willing to let prejudice cloud its judgment — and, also, to avoid admitting its own wrongdoing.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
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