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. Redwood Highway
    Redwood Highway delivers in high spirits and fine thesping what it lacks in dynamic tension and narrative consistency.
  2. Cooties
    Amusing as the Cooties script manages to be, one gets the distinct impression that its authors didn’t bother to visit a school at any point in the research or writing process, missing out on any number of jokes they could have made at public education’s expense.
  3. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Too formally well crafted to be dismissed, but too straightforward and uncurious to be particularly exciting or insightful.
  4. Brick Mansions
    Delamarre knows his way around an action scene and keeps the proceedings moving briskly enough, even if the picture clocks in at about 10 minutes longer than its taut, 81-minute predecessor.
  5. Beijing Love Story
    While there’s no great originality on display here, Beijing Love Story handles its full range of stylistic and tonal gambits with impressive assurance. A strong performance or a well-placed sober moment always brings things back to terra firma whenever they turn a bit over-the-top.
  6. Highway
    Tracing a journey of self-discovery through six North Indian states without a formal script, Ali’s actors, like his characters, effectively improvise in a meandering present tense, stripped of any viable destination.
  7. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The Lego Movie 2 ought to have raised the bar, and while it’s faster, denser, and jam-packed with all sorts of catchy new songs (including one, “Catchy Song,” that’s insidiously engineered to get stuck inside your head), all that energy only goes so far to cover for the wobblier foundation on which this film is built.
  8. Entourage
    Sometimes funny, often dumb, with equal doses of inside-baseball references and broad bro-ish boorishness, Entourage will be loved by fans and despised by detractors, possibly for the same reasons.
  9. Afflicted
    A low-budget horror-thriller that’s resourceful enough to wring a few fresh chills from a slender premise and a less-than-novel formal conceit.
  10. Guilty of Romance
    There are too many twists, insignificant literary references and drawn-out scenes of sex and violence to sustain either the pic’s running time or its ideas, with Sono’s message obscured in the final reels by an ambiguous treatment of his leading ladies.
  11. Himizu
    Because Sono tries to set the manga’s storyline, with its stylized violence, in the very real, post-earthquake/tsunami disaster area, Himizu struggles to find a coherent tone.
  12. Patrick: Evil Awakens
    Rich in gothic trappings and sporting a terrific central performance by Sharni Vinson (“You’re Next”) as a nurse in Patrick’s sinister sights, the pic has some wobbly dialogue and doesn’t deliver full-blown terror, but should satisfy audiences hankering for old-school genre entertainment.
  13. Suzanne
    Quillevere, co-scribe Mariette Desert and editor Thomas Marchand struggle to keep audiences fully involved in the story... Thankfully, the performances are all first-rate.
  14. Fort Tilden
    Its potent sense of place and underlying ideas never compensate for the tiresome millennial musings that constitute most of its runtime.
  15. Salvo
    After taking a couple of left turns following its thriller-like opening, Salvo unfortunately returns to a more conventional register in the closing reels, though the atmospheric picture does continuously fascinate on a visceral level.
  16. Queen
    The film could easily be a half-hour shorter; shot in a loose, handheld style that involved some improvisation, it feels unfocused and repetitive at times, to the point of aimlessness.
  17. Ida
    It’s one thing to set up a striking black-and-white composition and quite another to draw people into it, and dialing things back as much as this film does risks losing the vast majority of viewers along the way, offering an intellectual exercise in lieu of an emotional experience to all but the most rarefied cineastes.
  18. Proxy
    Skirting horror and black-comedy terrain without quite surrendering to either, the pic proves rather bracing even if it doesn’t hold up to much plot-logic scrutiny.
  19. Small Time
    The narrative becomes more tenuous the deeper it strays into drama.
  20. Half of a Yellow Sun
    The rare prestige pic that could actually stand to be longer.
  21. Magic Mike XXL
    Written raggedly enough for the actors to bring their own chemistry to what aspirationally feels like one of Robert Altman’s backstage dramas (a la “Nashville” or “Ready to Wear”), Magic Mike XXL is most fun when it isn’t trying to justify itself, but just kicking back with the guys — or better yet, giving them a fresh excuse to show off their creativity.
  22. R100
    If a dominatrix is one who takes total control of her passive partner, then R100 is the cinematic equivalent of a kinky femme fatale in black leather and stiletto heels, cracking a whip and a smile.
  23. The Case Against 8
    There are engaging, articulate personalities here that maintain interest through a mountain of strategizing sessions and court reversals, though helmers Ben Cotner and Ryan White strike a rote note of tele-friendly inspirational uplift while risking tedium with too much repetitious content.
  24. Anna
    A likable if overly familiar psychological thriller.
  25. DamNation
    The film’s haphazard focus muddies the waters without doing anything to clarify the overall stakes. Fortunately, the continual visual splendors make a rather striking argument of their own.
  26. Ricki and the Flash
    This is a shaggy, easily distractible film that consistently defies expectations to both charming and baffling effect.
  27. Cyber-Seniors
    Though there might have been some real drama to tap in following some seniors’ efforts to reconnect with their long-lost loves, Cassaday either doesn’t find any such intrigue, or didn’t bother looking for it.
  28. The Discoverers
    Schwarz lacks the writing chops to adequately embed the character’s predictable learning curve into a richer narrative fabric, but Dunne’s perf is pitch-perfect.
  29. The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
    The film all too eagerly allows itself to be taken in by Payne’s charms, trying to capture her human side via interviews with her two grown children, while all but ignoring the all-too-obvious cautionary aspect in favor of escapist entertainment.
  30. The Wonders
    An appealing yet oddly insubstantial work, like an early impressionist sketch in need of a little more focus, and perhaps a more suitable frame.
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