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. Dhoom 3
    At their best, the lush yet punchy musical numbers that Acharya stages for Dhoom: 3 reach giddy heights of pop romanticism.
  2. Personal Tailor
    Over the course of its generally absorbing if overlong 117-minute running time, it offers a brief and appreciably sympathetic take on the lure of fantasy, the pleasures of role play and the thrill of commanding the multitudes — which is to say that it’s, among other things, a film about filmmaking.
  3. In Fear
    Jeremy Lovering’s tense debut might have worked better had it left more to the imagination. Still, crisp camerawork and amplified sound yield paranoia aplenty.
  4. Jerusalem
    Ferguson’s careful, painfully banal script keeps sidling up to the neverending conflict that splits this lovely city in two, then backing away into conciliatory but meaningless bromides about intercultural understanding. He probably should have stuck with the gorgeous vistas.
  5. Enemies Closer
    An unremarkable but entirely serviceable action quickie.
  6. This Is Where I Leave You
    If the movie never quite masters the feel of messy, grown-up life, it at least makes a few promising salvos in that direction... The actors help a lot.
  7. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    One of the best products to roll off the prolific multihyphenate’s Atlanta-based assembly line, largely absent the pandering humor and finger-wagging moralism that have bedeviled many of Perry’s earlier (if undeniably popular) efforts.
  8. Veronica Mars
    It plays less like a meaty mystery than an extended thank-you to the fans who breathed it into existence. Still, it’s smooth and engaging enough on its own compromised terms, clearly informed by Thomas’ genre-savvy storytelling and unpretentious craftsmanship, and not without a certain self-deprecating sense of humor about its own immodest origins.
  9. Cymbeline
    Having learned a thing or two from Baz Luhrmann, Almereyda substitutes guns for daggers and picks his locations carefully, creating a rich, sultry-looking environment within which to stage the drama.
  10. Journey to the West
    [A] mostly entertaining action-fantasy-comedy.
  11. Grand Piano
    [An] appealingly absurd thriller.
  12. Adult World
    The improvisational zeal with which Cusack approaches his role (absent from his miscast villainous turn in “The Paperboy”) is particularly fun to watch.
  13. Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    There’s no doubting Brook and the performers’ commitment to their craft, even if the end result is somewhat repetitive.
  14. Voyage of Time: Life's Journey
    Voyage of Time has too many spellbinding images to count, but as a movie it’s just okay.
  15. Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America
    The pic nicely straddles a line between Sosa’s private and public personas, never quite delving deep although Vila covers all the bases.
  16. Loves Her Gun
    Loves Her Gun ultimately doesn’t quite cohere as one part slackerish social observation in a nicely turned mumblecore mode, and one part cautionary psychological thriller about the dangers of treating fear with a loaded weapon.
  17. Dark Places
    As heroines go, it’s refreshing to get one as complex as this: When psychologically scarred female characters do turn up in thrillers, they’re usually little more than shivering victims who set a group of male cops in motion, but here, Libby does her own detective work, while Hendricks lends star power to the flashback scenes.
  18. Manglehorn
    Something about working with Pacino forces what could have been a breaks-the-mold character portrait into factory-made territory.
  19. Serena
    An arrestingly nihilistic Depression melodrama, marked by courageous performances and exquisite production values... The result is both problematic and fascinating, an unsympathetic spiral of human tragedy that plays a little like a hand-me-down folk ballad put to film.
  20. She's Funny That Way
    An enthusiastic but low-fizz romantic farce that gets by principally on the charms of a cast speckled with gifted funnymen (and, more particularly, funnywomen).
  21. A Walk in the Woods
    It’s pleasant enough cinematic comfort food, but even so, you may be hungry again soon afterward.
  22. Love & Air Sex
    This more broadly appealing project feels daringly frank on the subject of sex. But as is frequently the case with the most saturnalian comedies, it’s actually quite conservative when it comes to allowing its characters to follow through on their uninhibited talk.
  23. Generation War
    Overly melodramatic but fairly engrossing.
  24. Dear White People
    Bristling with arguments about the complexities of black identity in a supposedly post-racial America, this lively and articulate campus-set comedy proves better at rattling off ideas and presenting opposing viewpoints than it does squeezing them into a coherent narrative frame.
  25. 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.
  26. The Voices
    In tapping Satrapi to interpret this project, the producers have done about as well as one could expect with such material. Still, a bit more consistency in style would have gone a long way.
  27. The Sleepwalker
    A consistently intriguing psychodrama that may nonetheless leave many viewers feeling that it’s all buildup and scant payoff.
  28. Hellion
    More sensitive than sensational, Candler’s debut doesn’t add much in the way of insight to the juvenile delinquency genre, but boasts a stunning breakthrough performance from newcomer Josh Wiggins as the troublemaker in question.
  29. Brightest Star
    Brightest Star, has all the trappings of a contemporary romantic comedy, but also the good sense to strive for a deeper examination of a young man’s search for his place in the universe.
  30. Island of Lemurs: Madagascar
    A pleasant if fairly pedestrian viewing experience, one that more or less gets the job done in terms of balancing the requisite ooh-ahh moments with another unsurprising reminder of man’s capacity for selfishness and destruction.
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