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. Citizen Koch
    Some material in the docu feels repetitive or unnecessary. But the main problem is that “Citizen Koch” simply juggles too many themes and narratives to cohere. The result is largely compelling in the moment, but unsatisfying as a whole.
  2. Dinosaur 13
    [An] engrossing documentary.
  3. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    If necessity is the mother of invention, then DreamWorks’ desire to extend the Dragon franchise has propelled the creative team in the most admirable of directions, resulting in what just may be the mother of all animated sequels.
  4. Horses of God
    Ultimately, the training and suicide mission are less interesting to Ayouch than the initial forming of character, and the fundamentalist cell members are only stock figures; what’s important is the group’s sense of disenfranchisement and the lure of inner peace.
  5. Wolf Creek 2
    Neither as striking nor as fundamentally scary as its predecessor, this pumped-up, robustly crafted pic is still quite a ride.
  6. Cold Bloom
    Maintaining an unhurried tempo and an air of hushed reverence, the pic furtively hints at Shiori’s loneliness and despondency even as she soldiers on, until a series of revelations by Takumi culminates in a liberating finale.
  7. A People Uncounted
    This globe-trotting debut effort by helmer Aaron Yeger and his producing team offers a vivid mix of visual evidence, historical commentary and survivor testimonies. It’s less successful trying to integrate the struggles of today’s Roma, which merits a docu of its own.
  8. Breastmilk
    Ben-Ari seems just as invested, if not more so, in the social and psychological obstacles that can make breastfeeding problematic, and she explores them with impressive rigor, sensitivity and a refreshing lack of judgment, listening intently while prescribing little.
  9. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    If the characters’ quandaries at times feel overly circumscribed, they’re also advanced with a bracing emotional directness, devoid of either cynicism or sentimentalism, that touches genuine chords of feeling over the course of the film’s fleet 130-minute running time.
  10. Welcome to New York
    A bluntly powerful provocation that begins as a kind of tabloid melodrama and gradually evolves into a fraught study of addiction, narcissism and the lava flow of capitalist privilege. [Unrated Version]
  11. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    The grounding material here is with the elderly Vidal himself... Unfailingly witty and devastatingly insightful, he personifies that near-extinct species — the public intellectual.
  12. The Discoverers
    Schwarz lacks the writing chops to adequately embed the character’s predictable learning curve into a richer narrative fabric, but Dunne’s perf is pitch-perfect.
  13. Godzilla
    Edwards seems to have miscalculated our investment in his cast...simultaneously underestimating how satisfying some good old-fashioned monster-on-MUTO action can be.
  14. Harmontown
    The extent to which it’s hilarious and revelatory, however, may depend on viewers’ degree of prior intimacy with all things Harmonic.
  15. Stage Fright
    Most frustratingly, the film rarely manages to meld its two parent genres at all, with musical-theater pastiche dominating the early going, and straight slasher pastiche taking over around the halfway point, and rarely the twain do meet.
  16. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    “Oh, Toto, this doesn’t look like the Oz I remember,” Dorothy murmurs at one point. Truer words were never spoken.
  17. Still I Strive
    The power of performing arts to restore hope to damaged young lives is marvelously captured in Still I Strive.
  18. Farmland
    Though the perspective of farmers is well worth examining, this good-looking 77 minutes of propaganda is heavy on sugar-coating and light on nutritional value.
  19. Next Goal Wins
    No sports film is short on pep talks, bonding sessions and heartfelt analogies to family kinship, but the teammates’ easy acceptance of Saelua — and her robust performance on the pitch — give the proceedings an extra kick.
  20. Moms' Night Out
    There’s nothing wrong with Moms’ Night Out that couldn’t be fixed by a massive rewrite, preferably one that involves a lobotomy for the main character.
  21. The M Word
    The lively but wildly erratic result will surely please Jaglom’s winnowing fan base, while baffling most others and doing little to deter Jaglom himself.
  22. Walk of Shame
    Watching the redoubtable Elizabeth Banks try to breathe life into the stillborn farce Walk of Shame is like watching a team of paramedics perform CPR on the corpse of Ulysses S. Grant.
  23. More Than the Rainbow
    [A] loosely structured, always informative, sometimes illuminating portrait docu.
  24. Bad Johnson
    The film manages to be an often uncomfortable experience without fully embracing its own bad taste, starting with an inherently insane premise and somehow steering it through the most basic of romantic comedy paces.
  25. Buttwhistle
    The second feature from writer-director Tenney Fairchild (“The Good Humor Man”) actually attempts to be an emotionally resonant relationship tale, but lives down to its title by delivering nothing but inane comedy and insufferable drama.
  26. The Girl and Death
    The film’s emotional center rings coldly hollow, its star-crossed lovers coming off more like projected figures than flesh-and-blood players.
  27. Million Dollar Arm
    Sometimes a hard-hitting expose, sometimes a big-hearted crowdpleaser, Million Dollar Arm wants it both ways to be sure, but its instincts are mostly right on the money, as are its actors.
  28. All Cheerleaders Die
    It’s a fond, briskly diverting homage, but not a truly inspired one.
  29. Ida
    It’s one thing to set up a striking black-and-white composition and quite another to draw people into it, and dialing things back as much as this film does risks losing the vast majority of viewers along the way, offering an intellectual exercise in lieu of an emotional experience to all but the most rarefied cineastes.
  30. The One I Love
    Boasting spectacular performances from Duplass and Elisabeth Moss as a husband and wife on the brink of separation, this incredibly assured directorial debut of Charlie McDowell essentially turns the idea of a two-hander upside down and inside out.
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