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. Punching Henry
    Phillips, who has the everyman look of a younger John Heard, is such a sympathetic sad sack throughout Punching Henry that it’s occasionally discomforting to watch what happens to him. But that is a major part of this low-key comedy’s charm.
  2. Adventures in Public School
    More antic and likable than it is laugh-out-loud funny, Adventures in Public School is handled with skill on modest means.
  3. Love in the Buff
    It’s the narrative non sequiturs and comic vignettes sprinkled throughout that give the freewheeling pic its playful charm.
  4. Take Me to the River
    The superlatively acted indie promises more than it delivers, but chillingly evokes sufficient primal dread.
  5. Bad News Bears
    The new Bad News Bears has adopted a somewhat raunchier tone but delivers enough laughs to go the distance.
  6. High-Rise
    What began as a self-contained allegory on open class warfare becomes a showcase for stylistic anarchy, wherein the ensuing orgy of sex and violence serves to justify a near-total breakdown of cinematic form.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Sherlock Holmes
    Young Sherlock Holmes is another Steven Spielberg film corresponding to those lamps made from driftwood and coffee tables from redwood burl and hatchcovers. It’s not art but they all serve their purpose and sell by the millions.
  8. Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
    An engaging and surprisingly playful documentary about the man who was arguably the most transgressive photographer to emerge from the 1960s and ’70s.
  9. The Wheel
    Pink, a veteran TV director who takes a rather self-important “a film by” credit on what feels like a first feature (it’s his fifth), shows almost no intuition for how to block or shoot a scene, inserting songs where silence would have been more effective. His clumsiness leaves the actors looking slightly amateurish, despite the strong, vulnerable performances they deliver.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Paper Chase
    The Paper Chase has some great performances, literate screenwriting, sensitive direction and handsome production. Timothy Bottoms is excellent as the puzzled law student, Lindsay Wagner is very good as his girl, and John Houseman, the veteran legit and film producer-director-writer, is outstanding as a hard-nosed but urbane law professor.
  11. The Living End
    As a portrait of late-millennial nihilism, The Living End rejects the sympathetic bent of every afflicted-by-AIDS portrayal before or since.
  12. Timecode
    If the satire feels familiar, and the dramatics often contrived, there's rarely a moment here when something funny, intense or cleverly interconnected doesn't keep one's synapses firing on overdrive.
  13. Paradise: Love
    Repulsive and sublimely beautiful, arguably celebratory and damning of its characters, it’s hideous and masterful all at once, “Salo” with sunburn.
  14. Good Night Oppy
    For large segments of its running time, Good Night Oppy is more than just a documentary; it’s an animated film as well — and a hugely entertaining one at that.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boys in the Band
    Boys in the Band drags. But despite its often tedious postulations of homosexual case histories instead of realistic dialog, and the stagey posturing of the actors, the too literately faithful adaptation of Mart Crowley's off-Broadway swish-set piece has bitchy, back-biting humor, fascinating character studies, melodrama and, most of all, perverse interest.
  16. Miss Americana
    Watching the movie, you know you’re getting a controlled and sanded-off confection of pop-diva image management, one that’s going to leave anything too dark or messy or random on the cutting-room floor. Yet what matters is that the things we do see ring true. In “Miss Americana,” the vision Taylor Swift presents of herself is just chancy and sincere enough to draw us in.
  17. Air Doll (2009)
    Japanese helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ongoing interest in love, loss and souls in limbo is stretched way too thin in Air Doll, a beautifully lensed (by Taiwanese ace Mark Lee) and charmingly played (by South Korean icon Bae Du-na) modern fairy tale about an inflatable doll who takes on a life of her own. Recut to a trim 90 minutes, this fragile yarn would work perfectly and have a chance of an afterlife as a specialty item. In its present form, pic may not get much farther than the fest netherworld.
  18. The Robber
    With no emotional or stylistic hooks, there's not much compelling viewers to engage with what's happening onscreen.
  19. Through the Fire
    Upbeat Urbanworld documentary prizewinner, full of strong personalities and crisply edited court action.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mortal Thoughts
    Played straight and for sympathy, tale of dark retaliation goes astray early on, despite the promise created at the outset by imaginative, energetic production and appealing performances.
  21. Wild Grass
    The picture is marked by superb performances and a dazzling technical display by the helmer and praiseworthy cinematographer Eric Gautier.
  22. Entertainment
    Take it or leave it, Alverson’s fourth feature is singular stuff, and it reconfirms the director as one of the truly bold voices in the all-too-homogenous U.S. indie film scene.
  23. Twisters
    Staring up at the tornadoes in Twisters, I felt like I’d already seen something exactly like them — and that when it comes to footage of actual tornadoes, I’d already seen something more incredible. Twisters, fun as parts of it are, is a movie where reality ultimately takes a lot of the wind out of its gales.
  24. Strange World
    Great as the people and places they explore may be, however, the relatively unimaginative story consigns this gorgeous toon to second-tier status — a notch below director Don Hall’s earlier “Big Hero 6” — instead of cracking the pantheon of Disney classics.
  25. Dan in Real Life
    Deftly interlaces heart and humor in a witty, warm and well-observed comedy about the unexpected and inconvenient blooming of romance at the weekend gathering of an extended family.
  26. Get Him to the Greek
    Barring a few lapses, the gags fly by in rapid-fire fashion, and enough of them connect -- thanks in part to the amusing mix of Hill's hang-dog demeanor with Brand's lanky, relentless hedonism.
  27. Oh, Canada
    Oh, Canada presents a dying artist’s final testimony as a multifaceted film-within-a-film, honoring Banks while also revealing so many of Schrader’s own thoughts on mortality.
  28. The Powerpuff Girls
    Small children who will accept it as rock-'em, sock-'em excitement with a touch of gender-specific empowerment, and hipper teens and grown-ups who can appreciate the whole thing as a semisatirical hoot.
  29. The Art of Self-Defense
    This singular black comedy balances off-kilter humor with an unexpectedly thriller-esque undercurrent, to the extent that audiences will find it tough to anticipate either the jokes or the dark, “Fight Club”-like turn things eventually take — all to strikingly original effect.
  30. Saving Face
    The film's appealing characters and amusing situations prevail over its general shortage of energy.
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