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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    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hellraiser
    Hellraiser is a well-paced si-fi cum horror fantasy. Pic is well made, well acted, and the visual effects are generally handled with skill.
  2. Ne Zha
    Ne Zha has something vital to teach the American animation industry — about the glories of letting the dark side rip — but it’s also clear that Chinese animators, working under more restrictions than we have, have absorbed a great many of the breakneck freedoms of American pop culture. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful symbiosis.
  3. Planet of the Humans
    There’s nothing particularly elegant about the way Planet of the Humans arrives at that downbeat thesis. Though well-shot and edited, the material here is simply too sprawling to avoid feeling crammed into one ungainly package even narrator Gibbs admits “might seem overwhelming.”
  4. The Other Tom
    The film’s intimate scenes of mother-son discord are remarkable, played with raw, nerve-pushing testiness by two first-time actors.
  5. Animale
    The filmmaking is at its most successful when it moves away from dialogue-driven sequences and into the more visual, visceral aspects of Nejma’s chosen line of work.
  6. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Cavill and Hammer have each toplined major tentpoles before, so it’s something of a mystery why neither makes much of an impression here, but there’s a curious vacuum at the center of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that almost certainly owes to its casting.
  7. The Brave One
    Foster’s pistol-packing turn as an avenging dark angel nearly sustains director Neil Jordan’s grim vigilante drama through a string of implausibilities and occasionally trite psychological framing devices, with deft support from Terrence Howard as a sympathetic cop.
  8. Wolf Creek
    Essentially a worst-case-scenario white-knuckler executed with terrifically focused skill and realism.
  9. 39 Pounds of Love
    Dani Menkin's documentary tracks his odyssey, which by nature is hard to be cynical about. Still, the feature feels padded even at 70 minutes.
  10. Miss Julie
    The three thesps are impressive, with Chastain and Farrell delivering fevered performances that might have been knockouts on the boards, but in this respectfully flat approach feel a bit overscaled — you can see their virtuoso technique at work.
  11. Minions
    Stronger on concept than story, Brian Lynch’s Minions script emphasizes scale over quantity.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Wall Street
    Watching Oliver Stone's Wall Street is about as wordy and dreary as reading the financial papers accounts of the rise and fall of an Ivan Boesky-type arbitrageur.
  13. Real Steel
    The uncanny thing about Real Steel is just how gripping the fight scenes are; Sugar Ray Leonard served as a consultant to the motion-capture performers responsible for pantomiming the machines' moves.
  14. War Machine
    Everyone has a different idea of what’s funny, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being amused by War Machine, a colossally miscalculated satire.
  15. The Fence
    Many things are simple in The Fence, an unusually sharp-cornered and rhetorical work from this typically elliptical and sensuous filmmaker, but the rage swelling beneath its still, mannered surface is not.
  16. Spoken Word
    Spoken Word benefits from an improbably perfect storm of production circumstances: The muscular, balanced script, the brainchild of an unusual alliance between professional poet Joe Ray Sandoval and TV writer William T. Conway, consistently plays to Nunez's strengths.
  17. For No Good Reason
    While the effort is admirable, the result is a bit unwieldy, casting too wide a net to really plumb its subject’s depths, and defanging some of Steadman’s acid wit with an overly busy, hit-and-miss aesthetic approach.
  18. Unknown
    Beyond the occasional plot frissons and juicy supporting turns, it's an emotionally and psychologically threadbare exercise.
  19. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    Filmmakers underline the immediate relevance of their conclusion: In matters of war and peace, who we elect president is crucial.
  20. The Rum Diary
    Temperance of a different sort, a willful abstention from trippy stylistic excess, is what makes this 1960-set Caribbean picaresque easily the most lucid screen adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's work, even if it's still several drafts shy of a fully developed yarn.
  21. Take Me
    From one wild mood swing to the next, it keeps us interested with aplomb, with Mike Makowsky’s script never lingering too long on any one element, the better to keep the pace brisk, and unpredictable.
  22. Ramona and Beezus
    It's not the personal, distinctive portrait of misfit girlhood it could have been.
  23. Frank & Lola
    It’s poised between reality and paranoid daydream, it’s about the dangerous ways that love can go wrong, and it does the thing that noir was invented to do: It sucks you in.
  24. Filth
    Powered by a vigorous, image-shedding lead turn from James McAvoy as a coked-up Edinburgh detective on the fast track to either promotion or self-implosion, this descent into Scotch-marinated madness begins as ugly comedy, segues almost imperceptibly into farcical tragedy, and inevitably — perhaps intentionally — loses control in the process.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    Norman Jewison's sensational futuristic drama about a world of Corporate States stars James Caan in an excellent performance as a famed athlete who fights for his identity and free will.
  26. Breaking and Entering
    Entirely respectable in every way, it nonetheless has a very cool body temperature and thus likely will inspire polite admiration rather than excitement among viewers.
  27. Christmas in the Clouds
    Combo of gorgeously shot Western settings (mostly in snowbound Idaho), memorably mismatched characters, and light-touch social commentary.
  28. Bamboozled
    Occasionally biting but excessively melodramatic.
  29. Stella Days
    Although Martin Sheen often goes full cherub in his depiction of the film's central Catholic priest, the pictue is also a frank assessment of a cleric's crisis of faith and the church's rather ruthless efforts to maintain medieval control in the face of modernization.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Doc Hollywood
    Has no real taste of its own, but, in its mildness and predictability, offers the reassurance of a fast-food or motel chain.
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