Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,794 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    Has a whole new director, cast and crew, with slightly higher production polish and more familiar faces onscreen. Nonetheless, it's consistent with its predecessor as a somewhat awkward translation of Ayn Rand's 1957 novel to our current era, handled with bland telepic-style competency.
  2. An Affair of the Heart
    While she creates an affectionate portrait of the charismatic musician, helmer Sylvia Caminer is really concerned with the meaning of fandom; anyone harboring an inexplicable or arcane passion could conceivably be interested.
  3. Café de Flore
    Modeled on his 2005 hit "C.R.A.Z.Y.," Vallee's fourth feature is another dense, decades-spanning tale that lets a cherry-picked soundtrack and impressive visual sequences do the heavy lifting.
  4. The Sessions
    A film of tenderness and humor married to the unlikeliest of subjects.
  5. A Whisper to a Roar
    A Whisper to a Roar traces a too-familiar step-by-step political pattern: the transformation of a liberator into a despot, his subsequent reign of tyranny and the popular uprising against it.
  6. Split: A Deeper Divide
    None of this will be news to informed viewers, and the documentary's broad theme necessitates quick, superficial treatment of myriad underlying causes. But it's a solid, fairly even-handed spur for discussion that will be particularly welcome in classroom settings.
  7. Excuse Me for Living
    A catchy but irrelevant title is the first of many problems with Excuse Me for Living, which throws together a lot of superficially flashy elements that never gel in any organic way.
  8. Simon & the Oaks
    Though it retains the narrative complexity of the Swedish bestseller on which it's based, WWII saga Simon and the Oaks never creates an emotional or intellectual throughline of its own.
  9. Least Among Saints
    The forced plotting and Lifetime movie-style tearjerking are a chore, and commercial prospects look narrow, but if this is indeed a good-faith effort to preach beyond the choir, it deserves plaudits.
  10. Smiley
    By-the-numbers slasher picture Smiley starts by borrowing the key concept of "Candyman," ends with a denouement heavily indebted to "Scream," and stuffs its middle with a dismayingly high quotient of lazy false scares.
  11. Madrid, 1987
    A perceptive, ultra-wordy stab at catching the zeitgeist at a time of change in Spain, David Trueba's two-hander nonetheless feels like a working-out of social and personal themes that hasn't quite achieved the full leap from page to film.
  12. Gayby
    Although it traffics freely in stereotypes and sitcom-style one-liners, Gayby is never less than likable.
  13. Here Comes the Boom
    Hands of stone meet heads of air in Here Comes the Boom, a sports story so daffy it may as well star Kevin James.
  14. Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
    According to "Caesar's Messiah," Jesus Christ is an entirely fictional character and the New Testament is nothing but pro-Roman, anti-Semitic propaganda. That's quite a provocative premise for such a didactic, monotonous and unconvincing documentary.
  15. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    That original was split between charms and minuses, suffering primarily from careless scripting. Here, those faults are indulged wholesale, with so little attention paid to overall narrative development or individual scene-shaping that the bloated pic often suggests a crowd-funded venture existing solely to pay back (and showcase) the crowd.
  16. Butter
    Butter might have been a dark comedy; here, the humor is twisted but the world is bright as can be. Conservatives and liberals alike take a licking, and yet the art of butter carving emerges unscathed.
  17. The Paperboy
    A risibly overheated, not unenjoyable slab of late-'60s Southern pulp trash, marked by a sticky, sweaty atmosphere of delirium and sexual frustration that only partly excuses the woozy ineptitude of the filmmaking.
  18. Bel Borba Aqui
    A vibrant catalogue of his outdoor pieces presented in context with an exhaustive portrait of Borba as a boundlessly energetic, iconoclastic creator, the documentary ties itself too tightly to its subject, mimicking forms and rhythms it never fully makes its own.
  19. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Lacking the outrage and wit of Michael Moore's "Sicko," which dealt with the different matter of health insurance, this documentary is stronger on finding viable solutions.
  20. Trade of Innocents
    Unfortunately, with its unconvincing action, preachy script and flat performances, the picture winds up less moving than most typical journeyman documentaries on the subject.
  21. The House I Live In
    A ballsy mix of interviews and editorializing that's daring enough to question a costly crackdown that has long had the public's support.
  22. Fat Kid Rules the World
    Affecting performances and effective storytelling are the hallmarks of Fat Kid Rules the World.
  23. My Life as Abraham Lincoln
    Luft grounds the film with an insistently believable performance, while other thesps float in and out of cliche.
  24. Bringing Up Bobby
    A technically competent but painfully broad dramedy about a larcenous mother-and-son duo in the Midwest. This gender-flipped, latter-day "Paper Moon" lacks that film's judicious restraint, among other things, alternating hick Americana cartoonishness with maudlin appeals to the tear ducts.
  25. American Autumn: an Occudoc
    This strong, well-crafted documentary preaches eloquently to the choir.
  26. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    Setting his fact-based tale on the eve of democratic elections in 1980 Peru, Vila tends to err on the side of melodrama whenever possible, and John Robinson's lead performance offers no end of privileged American naivete. But the characters are solid and the action sound.
  27. Hellbound?
    By narrowing its range of voices to Christian leaders, thinkers and writers, Kevin Miller's sober, stimulating documentary on the hot topic of eternal damnation necessarily limits its audience, but achieves a level of rhetorical eloquence that would theoretically appeal to open-minded viewers of any religious stripe.
  28. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    There's something perversely fascinating about helmer John Hyams' freewheeling yet deliberately paced mashup of noirish mystery, splatter-movie intensity, first-person-shooter vidgame and "Apocalypse Now"-style surrealism.
  29. Red Dawn
    Despite the considerable impediment of a premise arguably even sillier than that of the original "Red Dawn," helmer Dan Bradley's long-delayed remake of John Milius' 1984 kids-vs.-Commies adventure delivers enough thrilling action sequences and rock-'em, sock-'em fantasy-fulfillment to amp its B.O. potential.
  30. Life of Pi
    This exquisitely beautiful adaptation of Yann Martel's castaway saga has a sui generis quality that's never less than beguiling, even if its fable-like construction and impeccable artistry come up a bit short in terms of truly gripping, elemental drama.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »