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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Skeleton Twins
    Sibling bonds are fertile territory for indie dramedies, but The Skeleton Twins distinguishes itself from the pack with a pair of knockout performances from “Saturday Night Live” veterans Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig.
  2. The Overnighters
    Lensed with a complete absence of frills that perfectly suits its honest, unvarnished tone, The Overnighters presents an indelible snapshot of a despairing moment in American history, as men abandon homes, families and dreams to stake their claim in an ever-shrinking land of opportunity.
  3. Low Down
    It’s a familiar story of music-world success, failure and addiction, admirably but unevenly told by first-time feature director Jeff Preiss, who certainly knows the music and the milieu, but proves less adept at shaping the material into a consistently compelling narrative.
  4. Love Is Strange
    Love Is Strange never feels anything less than authentic, like a true story shared by close friends.
  5. Life Itself
    James cuts — as in all of his best work — straight to the human heart of the matter, celebrating both the writer and the man, the one inseparable from the other, largely in Ebert’s own words.
  6. Land Ho!
    What gives the story its moment-to-moment buoyancy is the pleasure of watching two actors working brilliantly in tandem.
  7. Laggies
    If the narrative progression feels too tidy and circumscribed, Shelton’s talent for bringing out the best in her actors remains satisfyingly intact.
  8. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    At every turn, we can sense what’s going on behind Kumiko’s doleful, downcast eyes; Kikuchi pulls us deeply into her world.
  9. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Forbes brings a marvelous warmth and specificity to this story of a mixed-race family struggling to survive, aided considerably by one of Mark Ruffalo’s richest, most appealing performances.
  10. Imperial Dreams
    Even in moments that don’t ring entirely true, Boyega’s grounded performance keeps the film headed in the right direction.
  11. 12 O'Clock Boys
    Using Baltimore’s dirt-bike groups as its entry point, the film offers a remarkable grassroots look at how the system is broken at the inner-city level.
  12. I Origins
    The film amounts to a lousy sort of magic show, schematically pulling strings to prove its own points.
  13. Camp X-Ray
    Camp X-Ray is most commendable for believably depicting the U.S. military from a female’s point of view.
  14. Boyhood
    With Boyhood, Linklater has created an uncanny time capsule, inviting auds to relive their own upbringing through a series of artificial memories pressed like flowers between the pages of a family photo album.
  15. Frank
    Helmer Lenny Abrahamson (“Garage,” “Adam & Paul”) puts the pic’s eccentricity to good use, luring in skeptics with jokey surrealism and delivering them to a profoundly moving place.
  16. Gimme Shelter
    The film is hamstrung by its fidelity to real-life inspirational models.
  17. Calvary
    Grounded by a performance of monumental soul from Gleeson as a tough-minded Irish priest marked for death by one of his parishioners, the film offers a mordantly funny survey of small-town iniquity that morphs, almost imperceptibly, into a deeply felt lament for a fallen world.
  18. God Help the Girl
    It will be up to viewers to decide whether God Help the Girl is ingratiatingly naive art, gratingly inept art, or a bit of both.
  19. The Raid 2
    It’s hard to shake a nagging feeling of more is less; with its convoluted plot mechanics clearly cribbed from past thriller templates, the film never quite generates or sustains its predecessor’s pure sense of menace.
  20. I, Frankenstein
    Utterly witless, listless, sparkless and senseless, this supernatural actioner makes one long for the comparative sophistication of the conceptually identical “Underworld” franchise (with which it shares producers and a writer).
  21. Enemies Closer
    An unremarkable but entirely serviceable action quickie.
  22. Freezer
    Freezer is a mediocre work built on a flimsy, nonsensical premise that squanders its modest potential with a cornucopia of bad plot twists.
  23. Indigo Children
    Eric Chaney’s debut feature, Indigo Children, doesn’t so much copy Terrence Malick as swallow the filmmaker’s stylistic tics whole and vomit them out onscreen in an ungainly if mercifully brief mess.
  24. A Most Wanted Man
    Corbijn succeeds here in large part because his attention to nuance and detail so fully complements that of the German operatives at the story’s core.
  25. Whiplash
    Chazelle proves an exceptional builder of scenes, crafting loaded, need-to-succeed moments that grab our attention and hold it tight.
  26. McCanick
    If the drably derivative, infuriatingly improbable police drama McCanick is remembered for anything, it will be for its uniformly overqualified cast.
  27. Maladies
    It’s hard for the audience to invest in a protagonist this solipsistic.
  28. Finding Vivian Maier
    [An] initially playful, ultimately haunting documentary.
  29. U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
    Salaciously watchable but finally hokey.
  30. Kids for Cash
    The film represents a scathing critique of America’s juvenile justice system, the privatization of penal institutions, and the whole notion of “zero tolerance.”
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