Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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 2.4 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. Strangerland
    Too much of Strangerland simply feels dodgy and overdetermined, veering between art-film pretensions and melodramatic gestures, and governed by ambitions that outstrip the filmmakers’ abilities.
  2. Safelight
    A handful of solid performances and some subtle ’70s period detailing are hardly enough to recommend this flat, predictable drama.
  3. Twinsters
    The overriding effect of Twinsters is a sense of pleasure at having borne witness to emotional epiphanies of the most affecting and intimate sort.
  4. A Hard Day
    It’s the nerve-racking situation that faces our hard-luck protag, with its heady black humor, social satire and a touch of surrealism, that keeps audiences on the edge of their seats.
  5. That Sugar Film
    Fast-paced, entertaining and informative.
  6. Stung
    In a movie that should have gone for funnier or scarier (ideally both), there’s way too much eventual emphasis on the leads’ uninspired evolving romance.
  7. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    A generous and briskly entertaining doc.
  8. The Suicide Theory
    An oddball male weepie whose curious mixture of sweetness and sadism is well anchored by two solid, character-rich lead performances.
  9. Jenny's Wedding
    While the fine cast teases out glimmers of nuance here and there, Mary Agnes Donoghue’s film plays like a series of hand-holding growth exercises for closed-minded conservatives, and relies too heavily on its tying-the-knot finale for both dramatic momentum and emotional closure.
  10. Lila & Eve
    Although Davis’ performance is so good here, it’s tough to know where the real world ends and the vendetta fantasy begins.
  11. Mala Mala
    Beginning as a colorful documentary about the Puerto Rican transgender community, candidly showcasing nine very different subjects, Mala Mala slowly morphs into a celebration of solidarity and collective activism without ever losing sight of its likable protagonists.
  12. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Even the less immediately engaging material here helps build an uncannily cohesive snapshot of a very specific time and place, and the past decades have only given it a bittersweet edge.
  13. Jellyfish Eyes
    By second-guessing what audiences want, Murakami falls into the same trap studios do when trying to appease mass tastes, delivering a film that features many of his familiar designs and characters but precious little in the way of personal vision.
  14. Stray Dog
    Though Stray Dog is slowly paced and at times a bit repetitive, Granik and her crew rarely risk losing their audience’s attention, and they uncover a wealth of images that are alternately striking, symbolic and singular.
  15. Partisan
    Casting Cassel as a ruthless villain might seem like a cliche, but Kleiman uses him counterintuitively, locating an avuncular, calming quality in the actor.
  16. Güeros
    The personalities here feel genuine, as if a group of friends had banded together to make a movie just a few degrees removed from their real lives — a la “Clerks” or “Swingers,” though not nearly as conceptual, plot-wise.
  17. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    While the story arc of Hippocrates is not especially remarkable, the film works best in its depiction of life in the bowels of the hospital, which the public never visits.
  18. The Gallows
    The Gallows isn’t without a certain amount of atmosphere, it simply feels borrowed wholesale. That would matter less with a better script, but the four main characters are paper-thin even by genre norms.
  19. Runoff
    The universal theme of personal principle vs. human necessity gets a workout in languid but inexorably powerful morality play, Runoff.
  20. Ant-Man
    Reed’s movie succeeds well enough as a genial diversion and sometimes a delightful one, predicated on the rarely heeded Hollywood wisdom that less really can be more.
  21. What We Did on Our Holiday
    Re-creating the show’s winning formula of three amiably precocious young children trading smarts with fondly exasperated parents, the pic swings for a much more eventful story arc, with mixed results.
  22. 10,000 km
    From first frame to last, the filmmaking exudes intelligence and control, with none of the chilly emotional distance those qualities can imply. Form and content are in near-perfect balance.
  23. Stations of the Cross
    The fixed gaze of each “station” is an appropriate choice for illustrating unbending dogma, and helmer Brueggemann always makes interesting use of the frame.
  24. Self/less
    Even the resourceful, likable Reynolds is at a loss to elevate this rather dreary piece of would-be escapism, which calls out for the wry, pulpy touch of a John Carpenter (or his acolyte David Twohy) and instead gets the strained self-seriousness of director Tarsem Singh.
  25. Paper Towns
    It may not subvert every cliche of the high-school romance genre, but director Jake Schreier’s coming-of-age dramedy nonetheless pulses with moving and melancholy moments.
  26. Zarafa
    While the gorgeous widescreen landscapes have a pencil-and-aquarelle quality, the characters themselves are literally rougher-edged, a clever reminder of the hand-drawn, sketchlike quality of traditional animation.
  27. Faith of Our Fathers
    A clumsily told story of friendship and wartime remembrance that has a tough time serving up a halfway believable moment, let alone a moving and powerful testimony about the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
  28. Closer to God
    The result is ultimately admirable more for what it resists — the usual sci-fi horror exploitation cliches — than for the watchable yet somewhat underwhelming impact of a narrative that feels perhaps a little too reined-in for its own good.
  29. The New Girlfriend
    This delectable entertainment is as surprising for its continually evolving (and involving) dynamics of desire as for its slow-building emotional power.
  30. Magic Mike XXL
    Written raggedly enough for the actors to bring their own chemistry to what aspirationally feels like one of Robert Altman’s backstage dramas (a la “Nashville” or “Ready to Wear”), Magic Mike XXL is most fun when it isn’t trying to justify itself, but just kicking back with the guys — or better yet, giving them a fresh excuse to show off their creativity.
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