Variety's Scores

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For 17,840 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: 9,167 out of 17840
  2. Mixed: 7,035 out of 17840
  3. Negative: 1,638 out of 17840
17840 movie reviews
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  1. Insidious
    A possession thriller less terrifying than fun.
  2. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.
  3. The Sun Is Also a Star
    Sure, Sagan’s scientific method dominates the universe. But here on earth, this crowd-pleaser convinces us to spend one day savoring an American Dream.
  4. Wasteland
    It’s an overlong Northern British heist caper with a wildly uneven tone and a needlessly scrambled narrative, but it suggests a higher intelligence beneath, waiting to flower down the road.
  5. Alone in Berlin
    Tastefully lit and art-directed throughout, with a somberly mellifluous Alexandre Desplat score to ease it along, this fact-based drama finally cushions its harshest emotional blows, though Brendan Gleeson’s deeply sad, stoic dignity in the lead cuts through some of the padding.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Grease 2
    Where this film has a decided edge on its predecessor is in the staging and cutting of the musical sequences. Choreographer and director Patricia Birch has come up with some unusual settings (a bowling alley, a bomb shelter) for some of the scenes, and employs some sharp montage to give most of the songs and dances a fair amount of punch.
  7. Chasing Madoff
    Chasing Madoff is a useful reminder that all is far from well with our financial institutions, which continue to lobby for less regulation rather than more. But the human element of the film is so weirdly distracting it often deflects from its primary target.
  8. The Iron Lady
    Fuzzy-headed biopic, which glosses over the former British prime minister's politics in favor of a glib, breakneck whirl around her career and marriage.
  9. Once in the Life
    A film that ultimately feels stagebound and excessively talky, but which showcases an exceptional performance.
  10. The Princess Diaries
    Exudes a pre-fab quality.
  11. Turkey Bowl
    This ongoing improvisation, along with the completed passes and resulting chest-bumping celebrations or recriminations, serves to define these otherwise "ordinary" ciphers and lend shape and momentum to an otherwise plotless movie.
  12. Madame Bovary
    Measured and absorbing rather than deeply compelling or vital, this latest adaptation of a rarely well-filmed novel makes a strong effort to capture the stiflingly provincial world that Flaubert was able to describe in such precise, painstaking detail on the page.
  13. Get Santa
    Midway through, the plot gets rather bogged down, unfolding on what seems like one of the longest December days for daylight hours ever witnessed in the Northern Hemisphere. However, Broadbent keeps the smiles coming in a wonderfully committed turn as the incarcerated toymaker.
  14. How He Fell in Love
    Mature and moving in its navigation of convoluted, conflicting desires, it’s an indie as assured in its silences as it is in its speeches.
  15. An Ordinary Man
    An incredibly precise actor who understands exactly how to play to the camera, conveying volumes via even the slightest microexpressions, Kingsley navigates the tricky mix of humor, horror, and deep-seated regret that make this man, if not exactly ordinary, then relatable, at least.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sudden Impact
    A brutally hard-hitting policier which casts Clint Eastwood as audiences like to see him, as the toughest guy in town.
  17. Materna
    The film is formally beautiful almost to a fault, giving it a schematic quality that’s at odds with its roiling emotions.
  18. México 86
    As a study of how the World Cup sausage is made, the film could go deeper and dirtier; as a crowdpleaser about the business of crowdpleasing, it’s more or less on point.
  19. After the Hunt
    After the Hunt has been made with a fair amount of craft and intrigue, but it’s also a weirdly muddled experience — a tale that’s tense and compelling at times, but dotted with contrivances and too many vague unanswered questions. That’s why, in the end, it’s a less than satisfying movie.
  20. Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
    Bogosian provides some much-needed comic relief to the slogging tale. He turns in solid work, as does Everett McGill as his head strongman, but they and others are saddled with pedestrian dialogue and motivation.
  21. The Longshots
    While The Longshots is by no means an unpleasant experience, it feels like a project carried out by people who began with the best of intentions but weren't quite able to sustain their initial enthusiasm.
  22. A Girl Missing
    The intriguing ambiguity suffusing Kôji Fukada’s “Harmonium” returns to a certain degree in A Girl Missing, but this time the writer-director neglects to reinforce onscreen relationships, resulting in a disappointing and unmoving drama.
  23. Sister Aimee
    Unfortunately, the invention on display is of a helter-skelter variety, as Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann’s film so madly lurches about in search of a tone that it feels like the first draft of a gonzo faux-biopic.
  24. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    What’s remarkable about Scott’s genuinely imposing Old Testament psychodrama is the degree to which he succeeds in conjuring a mighty and momentous spectacle — one that, for sheer astonishment, rivals any of the lavish visions of ancient times the director has given us — while turning his own skepticism into a potent source of moral and dramatic conflict.
  25. The Contractor
    Being a solid cut above average is good enough, given so much formulaic mediocrity among thrillers cluttering the streaming market.
  26. Starship Troopers
    A spectacularly gung-ho sci-fi epic that delivers two hours of good, nasty fun.
  27. The Devil's Double
    The life story of Latif Yahia, body double to Saddam Hussein's diabolically unhinged son Uday, makes for slick action-movie fodder in The Devil's Double, a rocket-powered thriller.
  28. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    Most of the surface pleasures of filmic Potterdom (the chiaroscuro tones, the overqualified character actors, the superb costuming, James Newton Howard’s warmly enveloping score) have survived intact, but real magic is in short supply.
  29. Hacia la oscuridad
    A convoluted bilingual thriller about a kidnapping in Colombia, Towards Darkness may be too clever for its own good. Frosh director Antonio Negret intertwines so many disparate characters, each with a flashback-studded backstory, that after a while the exhausted viewer, assaulted by sudden time-jumps, agitated handheld camerawork and tediously protracted suspense, ceases to care.
  30. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Part 2 has the bonus of a livelier Stewart performance than fans have been accustomed to. No longer a mopey, lower-lip-biting emo girl, this Bella is twitchy, feral, formidable and fully energized, a goddess even among her exalted bloodsucker brethren.
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