Variety's Scores

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For 17,839 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 17839
  2. Mixed: 7,035 out of 17839
  3. Negative: 1,638 out of 17839
17839 movie reviews
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  1. Pedro Páramo
    Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.
  2. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
  3. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    A classic about the Irish "troubles." Despite the unavoidably convoluted facts of the real-life story, pic boasts plausibly written, solidly acted characters and a conflict that pushes the viewer's righteous-indignation buttons.
  4. Chemical Hearts
    For all its serious-faced surface grit, Chemical Hearts never quite rings true.
  5. The Broken Hearts Gallery
    The Broken Hearts Gallery pushes all the rom-com buttons but does it knowingly, with a spirit that embraces killer cynicism and then comes out the other side.
  6. Army of the Dead
    It has a pleasing brawn and sweep, and you get caught up in it. As meat-and-potatoes escapism, it’s good diner food served with extra ketchup.
  7. How I Live Now
    Wisely sticks to its protagonist’s p.o.v. while avoiding a longer view of the calamitous events around her, making up in emotional immediacy what it lacks in broad dramatic sweep.
  8. Kinky Boots
    A London drag queen and a bunch of Midlands working stiffs find common ground and, uh, mutual respect in Kinky Boots, a slick, cross-tracks Britcom whose stride is hampered by its desire not to offend.
  9. Sushi: The Global Catch
    Sushi: The Global Catch offers an intriguing mix of history, process and state-of-the-fish reports, advocating a reversal of the world's assault on bluefin tuna fisheries and a short course on the alternatives.
  10. Our Kind of Traitor
    The shattering of one’s noble ideals is a delicate thing to capture on film, and White plays the moment of rupture with a banality that threatens to undermine our faith in her as storyteller more than in the system itself.
  11. How to Live Forever
    The prospects, advisability and potential methods of prolonging human life are examined in an engagingly multifaceted manner in How to Live Forever.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Just One of the Guys
    Key male part of quiet outsider whom Hyser brings to life is essayed by another film newcomer, Clayton Rohner, but Rohner looks too old to be a high school kid.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brainstorm
    Producer-director Douglas Trumbull’s effects wizardry – and the concept behind it – is the movie...On the downside, majority of players, including stars Christopher Walken and Wood as a married couple in a research environment, seem merely along for the ride.
  14. Arcadian
    Unfortunately, Brewer and screenwriter Mike Nilon ignored an essential rule: Conceiving an original monster isn’t nearly as important as coming up with compelling human characters
  15. Smart People
    Dysfunctional family seriocomedy is well cast, but characters and conflicts lack the sharper definition of similar recent exercises like "Little Miss Sunshine," "The Upside of Anger" and Noah Baumbach's films.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    200 Motels
    The film is a series of surrealistic sequences allegedly inspired by the experiences of a rock group on the road. The incidents are often outrageously irreverent. The comedy is fast and furious, both sophisticated and sophomoric.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Candy
    Life, love and addiction make a mostly bitter, but occasionally sweet, concoction in Oz drama Candy, which is sometimes hard to swallow.
  18. 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.
  19. Natural Selection
    This filmed-in-Texas road movie finds a smooth groove between self-conscious quirkiness and broadly played farce.
  20. Uncle Drew
    Uncle Drew may be tired, but it shows that one’s fundamental love for the game never gets old.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fourth War
    Tightly directed by Frankenheimer with an eye for comic relief as well as tension maintenance, The Fourth War holds the fascination of eyeball-to-eyeball conflict.
  22. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Seemingly composed in a laboratory from stray bits of Betty Boop, Sailor Moon and Daphne from "Scooby-Doo," pop princess Katy Perry is the closest thing to a human cartoon the music business has produced since Kiss. This is an impression that concert-tour documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me looks to round out and humanize, and it's successful in a number of strange, seemingly accidental ways.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Victory
    Script spends so much effort extolling man’s basic goodness and the values of selflessness, teamwork and fair play, that it frequently softens the action. Fortunately, director John Huston has such a firm grip on the dramatic line that does exist – and works some very good performances from the cast, particularly Caine – that the pic survives intact.
  24. The Look of Love
    Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan's fourth feature collaboration is a vivid period whirlwind that impressively showcases the comic thesp's more dramatic side.
  25. The Newton Boys
    An extremely handsome production that meticulously evokes the 1920s, and a likable male-dominated cast, headed by Matthew McConaughey in his best screen performance to date, only partially compensate for a story that's too diffuse and lacks a discernible point of view that would make it dramatically engaging.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Safe in Hell
    A sad and unsatisfactory finish is obviously an attempt to lend credence to an impossible yarn. It doesn't help, for as long as the story is thoroughly unbelievable up to the finish, no ending could change that impression. [22 Dec 1931, p.15]
    • Variety
  27. The Grand
    Safer, more conventional and closer to broad TV sketch humor than Christopher Guest's comedies of manners, The Grand never quite recoups in laughs what it loses in spontaneity.
  28. I, Olga Hepnarová
    Unforgivingly rigorous to its final, exactingly composed monochrome frame, I, Olga Hepnarova shows us scarcely a flickering moment of light or joy in its anti-heroine’s short, loveless life, depicted on screen from adolescence upwards.
  29. Crumb Catcher
    If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale.
  30. The Forbidden Kingdom
    On its own terms, it's a handsome albeit unexceptional juvenile adventure shot on some magnificent Chinese locations.
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