Variety's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,164 out of 17832
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17832
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17832
17832 movie reviews
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  1. Exhibition
    With acute sensitivity, Brit writer-helmer Joanna Hogg’s third feature, Exhibition, explores the difficulty of telling inside from outside, intimacy from estrangement, and revelation from concealment.
  2. A Picture of You
    Competently written and skillfully acted, the film seems to be melodrama-bound, when a shocking discovery and the sudden arrival of friends instead send it careening into comedy.
  3. Spare Parts
    Even though it’s easy to identify all the recycled elements — bits and pieces of several inspirational-teacher scenarios, ranging from “To Sir, With Love” to “Stand and Deliver” — in this “based on a true story” concoction, there can be no denying the feel-good effect of the finished product.
  4. The Good Lie
    Falardeau actually spent time filming in Sudan for a completely different project back in 1994 before being forced to evacuate by the U.N., but he consciously decides not to rub our noses in tarted-up awfulness, opting for steady-footed lensing and subdued music, then trusting our imaginations to fill in the horrors.
  5. Selma
    DuVernay’s razor-sharp portrait of the Civil Rights movement — and Dr. King himself — at a critical crossroads is as politically astute as it is psychologically acute, giving us a human-scale King whose indomitable public face belies currents of weariness and self-doubt.
  6. Radio Free Albemuth
    The narrative delivers satisfying intrigue and suspense.
  7. Closed Curtain
    Less satisfying than his previous pic, yet still a bold, melancholy statement.
  8. Web Junkie
    With filmmakers Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia granted extraordinary access to one facility, they make for a bizarre and entertaining documentary.
  9. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
    A fast-paced valentine to Russell and his quixotic vision so rife with underdog victors and hairpin twists of fortune that, if it weren’t all true, no one would believe it.
  10. Pump
    For unabashed agitprop, Pump is quite entertaining.
  11. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    "Escobar” offers an odd mix of action movie, romantic melodrama and cautionary traveler’s tale, which works better than it should thanks to Del Toro’s fascinating performance and Di Stefano’s assured, muscular helming.
  12. The Almost Man
    A slender but polished dramedy.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    14 Blades
    An above-average martial-arts actioner that reinforces Donnie Yen’s “Man With No Name” ambience.
  14. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    Clifford the Big Red Dog becomes a rowdy chase film — as agreeable as Clifford himself, as simultaneously cute and in-your-face, and as genially random in its ability to create chaos.
  15. 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.
  16. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    At its core is a most affecting portrait of two people who love each other, but may no longer be able to live as one, and it is mostly a pleasure to spend two, or three, or five hours in their company.
  17. 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.
  18. 37: A Final Promise
    The film deserves more than just a passing grade, and is a good deal better than any plot synopsis might make it sound.
  19. Mr. X
    Alluring if not especially illuminating.
  20. Cheatin'
    The writer-director-producer’s pulsing, pencil-etched, pastel-hued animation style is a pleasure to behold as ever.
  21. Mission Blue
    The majesty and imperiled status of the world’s aquatic life are vividly captured in Mission Blue.
  22. Metro Manila
    The screenplay (co-written with Hollywood scribe Frank E. Flowers) boasts the stock characters and situations, sentimentality, foreshadowing and melodrama of soap opera. Yet by cleverly blending these ingredients with those of an action caper, the pic presents a fresher appeal.
  23. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau
    The richness of the tale told here makes this competently packaged feature a keeper nonetheless.
  24. Wetlands
    Wetlands might have landed with the thud of empty shock value were Helen not such an innately engaging character, or Juri so commanding in the role.
  25. Open Windows
    A fiendishly inventive thriller built around an audacious if unsustainable gimmick, Open Windows elevates Hitchcockian suspense to jittery new levels of mayhem and paranoia.
  26. Last Days in Vietnam
    The docu’s accomplished summary of tension-filled events as they transpired from minute to minute comes at the expense of wide-angle historical context.
  27. Lilting
    While the characters’ background details (including their occupations) are kept to a minimum, the emotions the story touches are vivid and accessible.
  28. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    Kundo: Age of the Rampant delivers a thoroughly entertaining if overlong gallop through the trusty old story of honorable bandits stealing from nasty rich people and distributing the proceeds to downtrodden peasants.
  29. Canopy
    The aural landscape here is key, as Wilson’s strategy is to create a visual theater of the mind in which the majority of the action is heard and not seen.
  30. Triple 9
    Well suited to Hillcoat’s gifts for low-boil suspense and brutal eruptions of violence in close, male-dominated quarters, the film has grit and atmosphere to burn but also a certain narrative sketchiness, as though unable to reconcile its sharp sociological portraiture with the pleasures of a more robustly plotted crime yarn.
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