Variety's Scores

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For 17,832 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: 9,164 out of 17832
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17832
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17832
17832 movie reviews
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  1. Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
    Kind of a drag when it resorts to frantic slapstick and tired action-comedy tropes, but modestly engaging during stretches that suggest the project would have worked better as an exuberant musical.
  2. The Chaperone
    Nothing here -- technologically, linguistically or visually -- would not be more at home decades ago, when director Stephen Herek helmed "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "The Mighty Ducks."
  3. Immigration Tango
    Though the actors don't flesh out or particularly fit their roles, they seem perfectly at ease with them and with each other.
  4. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    All the more disappointing, then, that a story so pregnant with dramatic possibilities should wind up feeling like such an unconsummated opportunity. Drawn from Stephenie Meyer's polarizing, weirdly compelling fourth novel, the film is rich in surface pleasures but lacks any palpable sense of darkness or danger.
  5. Captain America: The First Avenger
    As Marvel heroes go, Captain America must be the most vanilla of the lot.
  6. The Beaver
    The troubled actor delivers a performance very few could pull off as a depressed father who begins communicating through a hand puppet, but Foster doesn't know how to manage it or navigate the script's seismic tonal shifts, and ends up producing a film that's deeply strange, yet incapable of leaving an impression.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Super 8
    A relatively standard monster movie.
  8. The Smurfs
    Adorable and annoying, patently unnecessary yet kinda sweet, it's a calculated commercial enterprise with little soul but an appreciable amount of heart.
  9. The Conspirator
    This methodical courtroom drama is charged with impassioned performances and an unimpeachable liberal message. But its stodgy emphasis on telling over showing will limit its reach to Civil War buffs and self-selecting older viewers.
  10. Bad Teacher
    What's singularly lacking here is any sense of how to use the underage characters, who, apart from one or two, are a barely distinguishable gaggle.
  11. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    The result may still be a big, bloated spectacle, but it's a big, bloated spectacle you can just about follow.
  12. The Darkest Hour
    The Darkest Hour turns out to be a modestly inventive and involving variation on a standard-issue sci-fi doomsday scenario.
  13. The Sitter
    This ostensibly wild-and-crazy romp plays things too close to the book to feel genuinely wild or crazy.
  14. 30 Minutes or Less
    "Less" has trouble framing simple action, yielding clumsy car chases that put the burden of generating excitement on the music and editing. As a result, pic looks cheap and feels clipped.
  15. Conan the Barbarian
    The well-executed picture solves the biggest challenge facing those hoping to breathe new life -- however nasty, brutish and short -- into the 79-year-old franchise by finding an actor capable of filling Ah-nuld's shoes.
  16. Contagion
    Without fully rounded characters, it's hard to care who lives or dies in what amounts to an extended procedural on how disease prevention organizations might respond to such a scenario.
  17. The Ides of March
    Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.
  18. We Bought a Zoo
    We Bought a Zoo is an odd bird, warm-blooded but largely lifeless.
  19. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    As impressive as the CG elements are in "Chipwrecked," they're a mixed blessing: The more lifelike the techies make the critters -- Alvin (voiced by Justin Long), Theodore (Jesse McCartney) and Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler) -- the more we're reminded they're rodents.
  20. Happy Feet Two
    Though it retains the buoyant musical stylings and splendid visuals that made its predecessor so distinctive, this chatterbox of a sequel loses its way with a raft of annoying side characters for which the slender narrative framework provides far too indulgent a showcase.
  21. Straw Dogs
    Though competently crafted, Rod Lurie's wholly unnecessary 2011 remake is a film with few notions of its own, and representative of its time only in the commercial sense that home-invasion thrillers are now more prevalent at the multiplex.
  22. The Thing
    Far less chilling than versions from 1951 and 1982, Universal's latest take on The Thing at least has a strong lead thesp in Mary Elizabeth Winstead, recruited for the studio's bid to turn a tale of ice-cold macho paranoia into a beauty-vs.-beast shocker a la "Alien."
  23. The Three Musketeers
    A very 2011 take on Alexandre Dumas' classic that feels weirdly dated already. Although adequately entertaining thanks to lavish production values and game supporting perfs, this anodyne adaptation lacks a killer hook that would help it cross over to a demographic beyond action buffs and fanboys.
  24. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    Rarely do five minutes elapse between some sort of laugh-out-loud absurdity, and the distinction between the film’s intentional and unintentional comedy grows hazier as it goes.
  25. Win Win
    A disappointing domestic comedy in which all but the audience get what they want.
  26. The Possession
    A ho-hum exorcism chiller that tries to spice up a formulaic screenplay by converting a predominantly Catholic-fixated horror subgenre to Judaism.
  27. Abduction
    Aside from such dutiful fan service, the film is a haggardly slapdash "Bourne Identity" knockoff, never rising above the level of basic competence.
  28. Brighton Rock
    Joffe's first feature never shakes off the feel of a telepic with above-average production values, and its unsteady lead performances and often garish stylistic touches make a muddle of the source material's psychological acuity.
  29. London Boulevard
    The result is a superficially handsome crime thriller that doesn't tick, although it's got a pretty, jeweled face, and some clever scripting by William Monahan (scribe of "The Departed"), making his directorial debut here.
  30. The Big Year
    Director David Frankel's picture delivers sweet and (more rarely) amusing moments, but this odd duck never completely gets off the ground.
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