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. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him
    It’s a measure of Benson’s sure, skillful hand with actors that all the relationships in the movie — husband and wife, parent and child — feel lived-in and true, even when the dialogue strains too hard for the meaningful and poetic.
  2. Devil's Knot
    Devil’s Knot only occasionally feels weightier than a high-end Lifetime original or “Law & Order” episode.
  3. Dallas Buyers Club
    The film manages to educate without ever feeling didactic, and to entertain in the face of what would, to any other character, seem like a grim life sentence.
  4. Begin Again
    A film that lays emotions on the line and then drives them home with music.
  5. Bad Words
    This exuberantly foul-mouthed and mean-spirited comedy goes somewhat soft in the final stretch but remains an often uproarious model of sharp scripting and spirited acting.
  6. Enough Said
    Enough Said may be her cleanest, most polished and broadly funny effort to date; its emotional generosity is undeniable, but so is its tendency to smooth over some of the hard, brittle edges that have been the more interesting hallmarks of Holofcener’s work.
  7. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    Much like a work of art, the film invites a range of reactions, though it’s far easier to process than the daubs, doodles and other weird works that now hang all over the country.
  8. Mr. Nobody
    Though a lot of it is well written and directed and, quite often, funny or poignant, the individual scenes rarely become part of a larger whole.
  9. August: Osage County
    This two-ton prestige pic won’t win the hearts of highbrow critics or those averse to door-slamming, plate-smashing, top-of-the-lungs histrionics, but as a faithful filmed record of Letts’ play, one could have scarcely hoped for better.
  10. The Railway Man
    There’s something decidedly old-fashioned — and also dull as ditchwater — about Jonathan Teplitzky’s retelling of events.
  11. The Family
    Curiously airless, weightless and tonally uncertain, the picture mixes mass murder, dismemberment and rape threats with sappy sentimentality, fish-out-of-water gags and groan-worthy meta-humor, yet very little of it manages to leave any impression.
  12. Insidious: Chapter 2
    A modestly scaled and highly pleasurable sequel to Wan’s low-budget 2011 smash that should have genre fans begging for thirds.
  13. The Wind Rises
    Miyazaki is at the peak of his visual craftsmanship here, alternating lush, boldly colored rural vistas with epic, crowded urban canvases, soaring aerial perspectives and test flights both majestic and ill-fated.
  14. Shuddh Desi Romance
    A beautifully made rocky-road-to-love comedy in which many obstacles intrude before the right people finally get together, although not in quite the way you might expect.
  15. Mother of George
    Simply relating the narrative of Andrew Dosunmu’s seductive immigrant drama Mother of George would do little to convey the film’s stark, poetic power, much less its extraordinary visual and sonic acumen.
  16. 36 Saints
    This confused and confusing pic delivers no thrills, chills or anything remotely surprising.
  17. Thérèse
    Serviceable but uninspired.
  18. Diana
    While mostly swerving past the pitfall of tastelessness, this sincerely intended account of the last two years of Princess Diana’s life risks an even more perilous roadblock: dullness.
  19. Concussion
    Acquitting herself capably in a lead role that strips her bare in more ways than one, Robin Weigert (HBO’s “Deadwood”) proves worthy of a future in features, whereas first-time writer-director Stacie Passon mainly exposes her background in commercials.
  20. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    The novelty of helmer Gardner’s approach to 9/11, her insider’s look at the almost unimaginable difficulties faced by Cantor Fitzgerald in the weeks following the attack, and the abundance of coverage spanning 10 years of inhouse interactions more than compensate for the docu’s occasional unevenness.
  21. Fire in the Blood
    Though the film comprehensively details the political and economic subtleties of what it declares “the crime of the century,” its narrative remains primarily a human-focused one, highlighting the stories of selected steadfast victims, as well as the heroic movers and shakers in the struggle.
  22. The Ultimate Life
    At least the narrative sloppiness and ineptly delivered themes in the script by Brian Bird and Lisa G. Shillingburg (freely adapted from the novel by Jim Stovall) feel of a piece with the entire production.
  23. TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer
    Charged by alternating currents of nostalgic bemusement and wistful melancholy, TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer evinces all the amiable enthusiasm and discursive rambling one might expect from a do-it-yourself labor of love.
  24. Kill Your Darlings
    Directed with an assured sense of style that pushes against the narrow confines of its admittedly fascinating story, John Krokidas’ first feature feels adventurous yet somewhat hemmed-in.
  25. Captain Phillips
    There is something too dry and austere about Greengrass and Ray’s telescoped vision, which touches only fleetingly on the pirates’ motives, the suffering of the Somali people and the collateral damage of global capitalism.
  26. Red Obsession
    The film’s rather simplistic cultural juxtapositions, pitting artistic appreciators against status-seeking philistines, work best when narrowly focused on the subject of wine.
  27. Abigail Harm
    Though never dull, the result is a curiously distant meditation on intimacy.
  28. The Last Christeros
    The final days of a band of 1930s Christian rebels in the central Mexican wilderness are depicted with majestic stoicism in Matias Meyer’s elegant ode to independence.
  29. I Declare War
    The concept is thought-provoking but the execution is flat-footed.
  30. Dark Tourist
    Character actor Michael Cudlitz’s first leading role is the sole selling point of Dark Tourist, a well-acted but rote and ultimately repellent character study of a psychologically disturbed loner.
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