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. Hipsters
    Although a massive hit at home, taking approximately $16 million at the wickets, this great-looking but tonally uneven pic won't jive with audiences quite so well anywhere else.
  2. Meanwhile on Earth
    This sophomore directorial effort proves Clapin’s adept hand for soulful, existentialist tales with an offbeat touch, regardless of the medium he’s creating in.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Russia House
    John le Carre's glasnost-era espionage novel has been turned into intelligent adult entertainment, but somber tone, utter lack of action and sex, and complexity of plot tilts this mainly to upscale audience.
  4. Solaris
    Despite its undeniably pure and earnest intent, Solaris is equally undeniably an arid, dull affair that imposes and maintains a huge distance between the viewer and what happens onscreen.
  5. As Good as It Gets
    A sporadically funny romantic comedy with all the dramatic plausibility and tonal consistency of a TV variety show.
  6. The Goebbles Experiment
    A man whose name has become a byword for pure evil gets a disarming makeover in The Goebbels Experiment. Far from being the horror show expected from its title, Lutz Hachmeister's cool, almost anti-dramatic docu paints a portrait of an insecure manic-depressive solely through extracts from Joseph Goebbels' own voluminous diaries.
  7. Run
    Between this and “Searching” (with its Asian American leads), Chaganty is actively expanding audiences’ ideas of what movie heroes can be. In the end, the character’s disability feels like an extension of the approach taken in his debut. Once again, perceived limitations become opportunities for more creative solutions, and differences disappear unless audiences decide to obsess over them.
  8. No Man of God
    Individual moments are gripping, and Kirby’s performance puts its queasy hooks in you, but the film, overall, has a scattershot momentum until the last act, set in 1989, when Bundy is about to be executed.
  9. Rudo y Cursi
    Picture scores a solid goal for its national cinema and the cause of comedy.
  10. Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything
    Outside those charged moments of hands-on connection, however, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything is something of a slog, hampered by escalating dramatic obviousness and thin characterization
  11. Another Body
    A groundbreaking, creepy, fascinating, and important documentary.
  12. Power Ballad
    What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.
  13. Deep Cover
    It’s busier than it is funny, more frenetic than dynamic, but watchable enough.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trust
    Long Island filmaker Hal Hartley progresses from his debut feature, The Unbelievable Truth to this bleak, off-center comedy about dysfunctional families in working class suburbia.
  15. Nancy
    Instead of exploring her actions, and the people they affect, Nancy‘s restraint keeps the film closed-off and grim, as muddy gray as the life she’s aching to ditch.
  16. Fight Club
    Bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie.
  17. Outrage
    Focusing on the absurdly ultraviolent tit-for-tat tussles among a trio of Tokyo crime families, the film is a beautifully staged marvel that confidently reasserts Kitano's considerable cinematic gifts.
  18. R
    More pathetic than sympathetic, the young protags are not romanticized or made heroic. While this suits the style of the picture, which never conforms to the melodramatic conventions and stock characters of the prison genre, it also works against audience identification.
  19. Some Freaks
    All the performances are very nicely turned in a movie that deliberately excludes any significant adult presence in order to immerse us fully in an adolescent world.
  20. The Final Year
    The Final Year clings to a precooked thesis about the Obama Doctrine that misses the behind-the-scenes drama and candor of superior political documentaries like “The War Room” or “Weiner.”
  21. Price Check
    After a strong start, the picture itself has trouble checking out, but it provides a terrific showcase for indie princess Posey, leading a topnotch cast.
  22. Fitting In
    While imperfect, Bloody Hell does entertainingly offer food for thought via an important overall point made in non-preachy form: Nature indeed does have room for variation in gender and sexual norms, no matter how loudly political or religious conservatives these days protest otherwise.
  23. Wild Canaries
    Levine’s script does a clever job of keeping numerous balls in the air over the taut 99-minute running time, and the writer is especially good at using the information he feeds us in unexpectedly resourceful, double-edged ways.
  24. Sublet
    With two screenwriters (including the director) and three script editors credited, it may be a classic “too many cooks” situation, as the whole structure is as risk-free and standardized as a TV film, though newcomer Niv Nissem provides a freshness that papers over the conventionality of it all.
  25. Seasons
    While it features some of the most breathtaking nature photography this side of BBC’s “Planet Earth” miniseries, this gorgeously cinematic docu ties said footage to a leaden all-purpose eco-consciousness message that nearly spoils the otherwise timeless experience.
  26. Love Life
    Koji Fukada’s Love Life unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving.
  27. This Is It
    There’s an incredible amount to enjoy here, and the star’s fans will be in rapture.
  28. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    Porumboiu so carefully intellectualizes every outwardly inconsequential exchange that the picture has no room to breathe, forcing audiences to work hard to catch the sly playfulness and cunning within.
  29. Be with Me
    A curate's egg of a movie that starts intriguingly but becomes increasingly frustrating.
  30. The Way We Get By
    Although the trio's work as "troop greeters" is the film's ostensible subject, their renewed and somewhat tenuous sense of purpose gives the doc its bite.
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