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. Himizu
    Because Sono tries to set the manga’s storyline, with its stylized violence, in the very real, post-earthquake/tsunami disaster area, Himizu struggles to find a coherent tone.
  2. Guilty of Romance
    There are too many twists, insignificant literary references and drawn-out scenes of sex and violence to sustain either the pic’s running time or its ideas, with Sono’s message obscured in the final reels by an ambiguous treatment of his leading ladies.
  3. Suzanne
    Quillevere, co-scribe Mariette Desert and editor Thomas Marchand struggle to keep audiences fully involved in the story... Thankfully, the performances are all first-rate.
  4. 20,000 Days on Earth
    An aptly intense and innovative study of pioneering rock poet Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth playfully disguises itself as fiction while more than fulfilling the requirements of a biographical documentary.
  5. Muppets Most Wanted
    Muppets Most Wanted looks and sounds eager to please but immediately feels like a more slapdash, aimless affair, trying — and mostly failing — to turn its stalled creativity into some sort of self-referential joke.
  6. Need For Speed
    Paul plays the part with the flinty, tightly wound charisma of a small man who makes up in moxie what he lacks in stature. There’s something of the young James Cagney in him, and he’s by far the best thing Need for Speed has going for it.
  7. Total Siyapaa (Total Chaos)
    Ethnically barbed hijinks ought to ensue, but jinks of any sort are in short supply, due to drowsy pacing and a string of distracting staging mistakes that suffocate just about every gag.
  8. 13 Sins
    Achieves a modest degree of tension and dark humor before tilting into gory overkill, while its diffuse central ideas — about materialism, the dangers of playing God and the latent human capacity for violence — never really take plausible shape.
  9. The Signal
    Exceedingly stylish and ultimately quite silly, The Signal is a sci-fi head trip better appreciated for the journey than the destination.
  10. War of the Worlds: Goliath
    Rote character writing, voicing and animation devalue the more impressive design elements of Joe Pearson’s long-aborning project.
  11. Oculus
    Cleverly complex, if not quite as scary or memorable as one might have hoped.
  12. Neighbors
    Lewder, weirder, louder, leaner, meaner and more winningly stupid than anything its director Nicholas Stoller and star Seth Rogen have ever been involved with before, frat comedy Neighbors boasts an almost oppressive volume of outrageous gags.
  13. Chef
    The final destination is entirely predictable — right down to the deus ex machina reappearance of an erstwhile antagonist — but the trip itself is never less than pleasant, and often extremely funny.
  14. Veronica Mars
    It plays less like a meaty mystery than an extended thank-you to the fans who breathed it into existence. Still, it’s smooth and engaging enough on its own compromised terms, clearly informed by Thomas’ genre-savvy storytelling and unpretentious craftsmanship, and not without a certain self-deprecating sense of humor about its own immodest origins.
  15. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    When does an exercise in style become a wearying ADD slog through blood-splattered pseudo-Freudian nonsense? When it’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.
  16. Journey to the West
    [A] mostly entertaining action-fantasy-comedy.
  17. Grand Piano
    [An] appealingly absurd thriller.
  18. Awful Nice
    Awful Nice carves out all the touchy-feely stuff that makes Judd Apatow movies run two reels too long in favor of a jump-cut style that eliminates the fat and keeps the jokes coming.
  19. The Bag Man
    It’s only the Brazilian-born Da Costa who seems to be trying to create a real character.
  20. Particle Fever
    For all their concentration on the human factor, the filmmakers by no means shortchange the aesthetic dimensions of LHC.
  21. The Face of Love
    This tale of a still-grieving widow (Bening) hypnotized by a dead ringer for her late husband verges on ludicrous, but ultimately succeeds at conveying one person’s complicated yet emotionally rational response to a highly irrational situation.
  22. 300: Rise of an Empire
    Anchored by Eva Green’s fearsome performance as a Persian naval commander whose vengeful bloodlust makes glowering King Xerxes seem a mere poseur, this highly entertaining time-filler lacks the mythic resonances that made “300” feel like an instant classic, but works surprisingly well on its own terms.
  23. HairBrained
    The film doesn’t quite have the verve or originality to capitalize on its spasmodic absurdist impulses, leaving the whole in a rather innocuous middle ground despite all efforts at quirkiness.
  24. Chlorine
    The results don’t feel disjointed so much as oddly undernourished and a bit toothless for what’s intended as a bold (mostly) comic expose.
  25. Bottled Up
    A terminally quirky indie dramedy, Bottled Up risks trivializing prescription drug abuse in service of a trite middle-age romance.
  26. Gunday
    The film has been skillfully realized as a commercial entertainment on a huge scale, and it is often surprisingly beautiful.
  27. Son of God
    A clumsily edited feature-length version of five episodes from History’s hugely popular 10-hour miniseries “The Bible,” this stiff, earnest production plays like a half-hearted throwback to the British-accented biblical dramas of yesteryear, its smallscreen genesis all too apparent in its Swiss-cheese construction and subpar production values.
  28. Non-Stop
    Even in the movie’s most ridiculous moments, Collet-Serra keeps the pacing brisk and knows how to divert our attention with a well-timed bit of comic relief.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fatal Assistance
    Fatal Assistance is a powerful indictment of the aid process, though Peck lets Haitian politicos off too lightly, and the voiceovers would be better on paper.
  30. Stalingrad
    Assaults are filmed in ubiquitous slow-mo to better register the way bodies are thrown into the air. It’s all rather confusing, actually, since the monochromatic tonalities and weak script, lacking in any comprehensible battle strategy, tend to meld the two sides together.
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