Variety's Scores

For 17,832 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:
17832 movie reviews
  1. A sturdy runaway-train thriller that flaunts its influences but chugs up a decent amount of suspense.
  2. You’re Next is fairly light on psychological and narrative complexity, but it’s still a good cut above the slasher norm, with a firm grasp on visceral action and the wisdom to place tongue slightly in cheek when things go further over the top.
  3. At 99 minutes, A Woman’s Life is brisk and concentrated, but it never feels glibly selective with regard to its protagonist, permitting us access to Gabrielle at her most impressive, her most unbearable and her most disarmingly ordinary.
  4. This is an inside joke of a film, but it’s also one that wants you to be in on it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Weighed down by a midsection even flabbier than the long-in-the-tooth cast, director Nicholas Meyer still delivers enough of what Trek auds hunger for to justify the trek to the local multiplex.
    • Variety
  5. “In Viaggio” captures the Pope, and by extension the whole Church, in an uncomfortable limbo state between defensiveness and progressiveness, though it keeps its own critique tacit and un-narrated, hinging on what the viewer brings to its hand-picked footage.
  6. A history of verse is laid alongside that of warfare, and the ways in which they are braided together proves fascinating.
  7. Hope Springs is an altogether pleasant surprise: a mainstream dramedy that frankly and intelligently addresses the challenges facing a couple after 31 years of marriage.
  8. It’s a highly entertaining movie that manages to pack in more or less every important thing you’d want to know about Tom Wolfe.
  9. Though editor Zac Stuart-Pontier assembles the sprawling personal journey into swift and suspenseful shape, it helps immensely that Nev is such a charming screen presence.
  10. Remarkably eerie yet annoyingly larded with cheap horror-film shock effects, I Am Legend stands as an effective but also irksome adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic 1954 sci-fi novel.
  11. Plays out in quite a different offscreen context than did last year's similarly themed sleeper "Startup.com."
  12. An engrossingly detailed if perhaps inevitably enigmatic portrait of the elusive, outrageous provocateur.
  13. A lively, cogent documentary, Tying the Knot fortuitously examines same-sex marriage at precisely the moment the issue is making headlines all over.
  14. Moppet appeal of the present feature rests in three can't-miss concepts -- cool gadgets, the desire to see grownups disappear and space travel. Pic delivers on all three points and doesn't have to do a whole lot more.
  15. Holding the film together are simple but strong B&W visuals of offbeat types sitting around a table smoking and drinking java while they talk.
  16. They Call Us Monsters, alas, is so taken with its access to kids facing such legal circumstances that it forgets to form a compelling argument about them.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The trouble with The Missouri Breaks is that one is seriously drawn to it on its upfront elements, but leaves with a depressing sense of waste. As a film achievement it’s corned beef and ham hash.
  17. The third American bigscreen rendition of Victor Hugo's classic novel, Bille August's Les Miserables is without a doubt the most emotionally powerful and handsomely mounted production of the story yet.
  18. Genetically-modified (or GM) fruits and vegetables are a topic of raging debate in scientific and ecological circles, so it's a shame writer-director Deborah Koons Garcia opts to show only one side of the argument.
  19. Should stand with the likes of "Fata Morgana" and "Lessons of Darkness" as one of helmer's best efforts at smudging the lines between docu and fiction.
  20. A tougher, wiser film might still have extended the characters a measure of compassion, but it might also have left the audience with a deeper curiosity about where life’s challenges could take them next.
  21. As writer and director, Schnabel should be commended for avoiding Hollywood's biopic cliches about artists, as Basquiat's meteoric rise to fame and tragic death at the age of 27 would have fit perfectly the timeworn formula.
  22. Overall, Maddin’s first effort with seasoned performers is extremely promising, and he continues to grow as a visual craftsman. But he’s in need of better material to develop the unique film voice his past films promised.
  23. The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.
  24. “Search for SquarePants,” while it has amusing moments, is mostly SpongeBob treading water.
  25. A slender, morally simplified fable that makes up for its tonal and narrative imprecisions with considerable visual energy, musical pizzazz, and a panoply of colorful characters.
  26. Director Gareth Edwards has finally made the first “Star Wars” movie for grown-ups.
  27. The movie has dug a hole for itself with the disingenuous framing device, and the last act feels like a cheat, revealing Alex’s “crime” to be anything but. While the midsection of the film proves to be the most charming — a kind of extended montage in which the young men tentatively test the limits of their relationship — it’s the final stretch that situates Summer of 85 squarely within Ozon’s oeuvre.
  28. Widow Clicquot certainly makes a virtue of its milieu and rolling landscape, richly shot throughout in dusky earth tones, and more substantively, of the rather romantic lore surrounding the widow in question.

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