Variety's Scores

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For 17,810 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: 9,150 out of 17810
  2. Mixed: 7,023 out of 17810
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17810
17810 movie reviews
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  1. Third Person
    Though virtually every twist on this emotional roller coaster feels preordained by its architect, the director leaves certain mysteries for the audience to interpret, making for a more open-ended and mature work all around.
  2. Miss Lovely
    Like “Boogie Nights,” Miss Lovely offers a visually stunning evocation of a disreputable subculture, although it lacks that pic’s rooting dramatic interest.
  3. The Last Sentence
    This biographical drama, shot in crisp black-and-white, offers a potentially intriguing study in high-minded political/moral obstinacy, but feels too claustrophobic — and, finally, tediously like a one-man window on great events — to fully come to dramatic life.
  4. Code Black
    At 81 minutes, Code Black feels like a brisk, vital report from the frontlines of emergency medicine, forged and rooted in the most intense sort of personal and professional experience.
  5. Video Games: The Movie
    Video Games: The Movie is content to celebrate without much insight.
  6. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    This dual focus on the need to end the ineffective, destructive “war on drugs” and broader questions of political compromise gives director Riley Morton’s film particular resonance.
  7. Le Chef
    Poking fun at the restaurant world, French helmer Daniel Cohen’s genial, broadly played comedy The Chef dishes up easily digestible laughs.
  8. The Only Real Game
    Banks allows the exhilaration of the game and the exigencies of realpolitik to determine the ups and downs of her film’s sentimental journey.
  9. Think Like a Man Too
    Although funnier and mercifully shorter than its 2012 battle-of-the-sexes predecessor, this third collaboration between manic comedian Kevin Hart and director Tim Story (hot on the heels of their January hit “Ride Along”) is an exceedingly formulaic and ultimately exhausting thing to experience.
  10. 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.
  11. The Human Race
    Real suspense and shocks are MIA in a movie that’s eventful but lacks the atmospherics needed to be scary.
  12. A Coffee In Berlin
    This day-in-the-life indie says something profound about an entire generation simply by watching a feckless young man try to figure it out.
  13. Ivory Tower
    Although stronger on breadth than focus, it’s an appropriately stimulating take on a far-from-sustainable system.
  14. Jersey Boys
    As handsome as his compositions are, Eastwood’s filmmaking simply doesn’t have the snap or the feel for rhythm that the script’s rapid-fire theatrical patter requires, and the relative dearth of prominent musical performances turns what could have been a dancing-in-the-aisles romp into a bit of a slog.
  15. I Am I
    This potentially intriguing concept is given disappointingly bland, flat treatment in the Kickstarter-funded project, in which Towne brings professionalism but little personality to both her on- and offcamera roles.
  16. This Is Not a Ball
    Muniz uncovers a raft of intriguing people and stories, with subjects ranging from sports to astrophysics, gender politics, history and developmental psychology, but he never sits still with them long enough to ask any probing questions, and the film never arrives at any real point.
  17. Master of the Universe
    Less a portrait of an individual than of an unchecked culture where the lure of staggering profits eliminates ethics, Universe subtly exposes the pernicious effects of deregulation and does so in an ingeniously cinematic manner.
  18. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    A brave, challenging picture that makes the viewer complicit in the action, it is also perhaps the first film since the declaration of the Islamic Republic to confront so directly the brutality of the feared security apparatus.
  19. Jealousy
    More tightly scripted than Garrel’s usual rambles, the comedy-drama also has an unexpected emotional warmth.
  20. Burning Blue
    Bearing a distinctly musty odor confirmed by its 2011 copyright date, this day-and-date Lionsgate pickup never achieves dramatic liftoff.
  21. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
    It’s an affectionate, sometimes downright slobbery career salute with a soft, unexamined center — a moving experience for all involved, no doubt, but one of limited interest outside the celebrity bubble it depicts.
  22. Lullaby
    Much of the early action, with Jonathan telling off his father, feels awkwardly staged, even tortured, a quality exacerbated by Levitas’ weakness with dialogue.
  23. Ping Pong Summer
    A sweetly amusing ode to the underdog sports movies that proliferated during that widely derided decade.
  24. Trust Me
    Mixing comedy, drama, satire and noir, the Marvel actor’s second outing behind the camera plays for the same kind of uncomfortable laughs that his 2008 dramedy “Choke” did, but this one gazes so deeply into Hollywood’s navel that, with the affable Gregg in practically every scene, it ultimately can’t escape the whiff of a vanity project.
  25. Return to Homs
    What the film lacks in context it gains in visceral eyewitness value.
  26. Earth to Echo
    Earth to Echo reaches for the stars with its gentle sci-fi shenanigans, but the rote result remains decidedly earthbound.
  27. Made in America
    The pic is less than fully satisfying as a conventional performance cavalcade, but sustains considerable interest as a behind-the-scenes overview of a musically and culturally diverse event.
  28. Very Good Girls
    The screenplay is so vapid and cliched, and the casting so terrible, that viewers may wind up entertaining themselves with other thoughts.
  29. The Moment
    The film continually resists coherence or synthesis, with puzzles left unresolved amid multiplying possibilities and highly repetitive flashbacks, yielding a mystery that wearies rather than intrigues.
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