Variety's Scores

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For 17,835 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 2.3 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: 9,166 out of 17835
  2. Mixed: 7,032 out of 17835
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17835
17835 movie reviews
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  1. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
    Using horror to satirize systemic racial failures in American society is a bold goal, but with its unbelievable final resolution, the film falters somewhat in execution.
  2. Begin Again
    A film that lays emotions on the line and then drives them home with music.
  3. The Year of the Yao
    Slickly entertaining documentary.
  4. The Dying Gaul
    Despite a reliable cast led by Scott, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard, the human impact is ultimately lost in a too calculated scenario.
  5. Shopgirl
    Martin hits all the right notes while subtly conveying both the appealing sophistication and the purposeful reserve of Ray. But he cannot entirely avoid being overshadowed by Dane's endearingly vulnerable, emotionally multifaceted and fearlessly open performance.
  6. Catch a Fire
    Stories of resistance to oppression will never become obsolete, but this feels like a picture that should have been made a long time ago.
  7. Saving Grace
    Harvests a bumper crop of laughs.
  8. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    At times there’s a genuine sense of daring to the film’s freewheeling anarchy, its refusal to stick to a central theme or impart any sort of lesson.
  9. Ocean's Thirteen
    As smooth as a good mojito, as stylish as an Armani suit and as meaningful in the grand scheme of things as yesterday's Las Vegas betting odds, Ocean's Thirteen"continues the breezy good times of the first two series entries without missing a beat.
  10. Brigham City
    The happiest marriage yet of the disparate propagandistic and narrative influences inherent in the subgenre of "religious" cinema.
  11. Made
    Fitfully amusing and two leads generate engaging chemistry.
  12. Cuba feliz
    Not quite a documentary, it's more like a musical travelogue that doesn't quite sustain feature length and seems ideally suited to a shorter TV version for music webs.
  13. What Alice Found
    By turns disarmingly amusing and dramatically blunt.
  14. Twilight: Los Angeles
    The camera's closer scrutiny doesn't flatter this unique theatrical reportage.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Human Factor
    Graham Greene's low-keyed, highly absorbing 1978 novel of an aging English double agent finding himself trapped into defecting to Moscow and leaving his family behind may have seemed like ideal material for Otto Preminger's style of dispassionate ambiguity, but helmer doesn't seem up to the occasion, bringing little atmosphere or feeling to the delicate ticks of the story.
  16. Amulet
    She hasn’t just created a stylish potboiler, but a densely textured piece that makes for a truly arresting viewing experience to a point. A shame then that the film succumbs somewhat to the more pretentious and silly aspects of Garai’s initially cryptic puzzle of a script.
  17. The Daughter
    Deeply involving and emotionally searing, The Daughter reps a confident and profoundly moving bigscreen debut for established theater director Simon Stone.
  18. The Valet
    Sweet-natured and good-humored.
  19. The Duchess
    A serviceable picture that offers all the sumptuous visual pleasures of a historical costume drama, yet little in the way of actual history.
  20. Stress Positions
    In real life, anyone would hate to spend even a few minutes in their company. Yet in Hammel’s hands, they become easy to enjoy and laugh at while completely understanding their full awful personalities.
  21. New Order
    Essentially picking up where “The Joker” left off, this ultra-provocative case of speculative fiction promises a view of what change might look like, only to succumb to a deep sense of cynicism as the scope of the film becomes unmanageable.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Patty Hearst
    Patty Hearst puts forth much less than its pretensions. Frequently wrapped in surrealistic stylization, film manages only to tell Hearst's side of her kidnapping ordeal.
  23. Abe
    It’s kind of a tradition among cooking-themed movies (from “Like Water for Chocolate” to “Chocolat”) for a bit of magical embellishment to sneak into the kitchen. Abe is stubbornly earthbound by contrast, but that’s OK. It’s more responsible this way, and young audiences will devour it with no less enthusiasm.
  24. Set It Up
    It’s the stars who have to work hardest to sell this kind of egg-white confection, and so they do. Having both charmed individually in previous vehicles, Deutch and Powell combine to winkingly wholesome effect, bringing just enough human self-awareness to their tidy back-and-forth banter to make it palatable.
  25. La Última Película
    A few droll and/or silly moments poke through the general boredom. But Martin and Peranson’s snarkfest doesn’t really offer any critique that Hopper didn’t already aim at himself, however incoherently, in the supremely self-conscious “Last Movie.”
  26. Junction 48
    Issues are overly simplified and scenes are often poorly constructed (not helped by uneven editing), though Nafar is a charismatic performer. Ditto Qupty, and the energetic hip-hop scenes are welcome distractions. Visuals are spirited.
  27. Mark, Mary & Some Other People
    Rosenfield and Law are such a likable duo — he clownish and earnest in equally uninhibited fashion, she brazen and fierce with an underlying sweetness — that the film remains amusing and spry even as it coasts along a path that will feel familiar to most rom-com fans.
  28. The Teacher
    What the characters can or cannot do in response, and the catharsis they’re prevented from attaining, are both key parts of their story, and of life in the West Bank at large — a reality Nabulsi conveys in stark, realistic hues, despite her first-feature growing pains.
  29. Beautiful Boy
    Beautiful Boy, made by the Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), from a script by Luke Davies, is scrupulous and tenderly wounding — a drama that seizes and holds you.
  30. Torremolinos 73
    Somewhat wacky tale, based on real events, is kept anchored in reality through attention to detail and by first-rate central perfs.
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