Variety's Scores

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For 17,831 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: 9,163 out of 17831
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17831
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17831
17831 movie reviews
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  1. What a Man
    The leads jell well but the film overcompensates to justify their union, surrounding them with broadly drawn secondary characters presented in an uncertain, inconsistent comic tone.
  2. Back to 1942
    Shifting between individual suffering (performed, not felt) and extended political and business deliberations, the picture displays its budget but not its heart.
  3. Ex-Girlfriends
    In the central role, first-time feature helmer Alexander Poe may trigger sheepish identification among the neurotic with the protag's vaguely ridiculous reactions. While his character registers as white-bread bland, strong performances from the two "exes" save this indie from a surfeit of self-deprecating charm.
  4. Silent Night
    Trouble is, apart from some modestly inventive carnage and an undeniably humorous hambone turn by Malcolm McDowell, there's really nothing here to make genre fans dash through the snow (or maneuver through traffic) to megaplexes before the low-budget, high-concept Canadian production's Dec. 4 homevid release.
  5. The Purge
    The film’s thudding shocks and predictability dull its edge.
  6. Like Someone in Love
    As it turns out, it's the first, not the last, word of the title that's key to this droll, elegant but faintly trying study in emotional artifice.
  7. The Art of Flight 3D
    Like most of the skiing and surfing documentaries that have come before it, the picture oversells its subject, the virtues of which are obvious. But armchair athletes will get a charge out the pure sensations here.
  8. Yelling to the Sky
    Strong on texture but taxingly light on narrative.
  9. Clandestine Childhood
    Designed to highlight the uneasy coexistence between everyday childhood experiences and the intense pressures of living with parents secretly fighting the junta, the picture has strong moments, but is bogged down by a script that regurgitates standard-issue ideas without finding anything interesting to say.
  10. $ellebrity
    A marketing tie-in with a line of soap wouldn't be the worst idea for $ellebrity, a documentary that's unafraid to get dirty digging into the subject of celebrity journalism, or to leave viewers feeling a little grimy after their immersion in tabloid culture.
  11. The Baytown Outlaws
    A boisterously Tarantinoesque mash-up of cliches, archetypes and bodacious craziness in the tradition of Southern-fried '60s and '70s drive-in fodder, The Baytown Outlaws is the sort of cartoonishly violent and swaggeringly non-PC concoction that defines guilty pleasure for many genre fans.
  12. I Am Not a Hipster
    A deeper glimpse of the San Diego indie-rock scene around him might have made Brook's self-absorbed resentment less overbearing.
  13. Wrong
    A curious tale about a man searching for his missing dog in a suburban bubble where everything is a little askew, has some laughs, but it doesn’t take long for the absurdist humor to pall among a pileup of nonsensical ideas that would be funnier if grounded in a less hazy concept.
  14. Tomorrowland
    The glaring failure of Tomorrowland is that its central premise — children are the future — is almost completely negated by the preachiness of the execution and the clumsiness of the storytelling.
  15. The Call
    There’s little to differentiate this high-pitched screamer from a particularly feverish “Law and Order” rerun.
  16. The End of Love
    Oddly overstuffed with cameos by bigscreen actors playing tongue-in-cheek versions of themselves, Webber's Los Angeles-set, microbudget dramedy delivers some rare and beautiful moments of daddy day-care, but its tone shifts more wildly than a preschooler's disposition and its narrative is stillborn.
  17. Jurassic World
    It’s fun enough while it lasts, but somehow, finally, all too much and not enough. The problem isn’t that dinosaurs have ceased to impress us, but that dinosaurs alone are not enough to sustain us
  18. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Stephen Vittoria's documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal -- unrepentant commie cop-killer to some, political martyr to others -- makes no bones about its allegiance.
  19. The Taste of Money
    A trite and tangled potboiler that, despite its polemical pretensions, is just a glorified Korean domestic drama with classier couture and shapelier champagne flutes.
  20. Jobs
    Ultimately, Jobs is a prosaic but not unaffecting tribute to the virtues of defiance, nonconformity, artistry, beauty, craftsmanship, imagination and innovation, qualities it only intermittently reflects as a piece of filmmaking.
  21. The Fifth Estate
    Both the kindest and most damning thing you can say about The Fifth Estate is that it primarily hobbles itself by trying to cram in more context-needy material than any single drama should have to bear.
  22. The Sorcerer and the White Snake
    Overblown saga of shape-shifting demons, butt-kicking clerics and the perils of interspecies romance occasionally dazzles but finally frazzles with its relentless visual assault, embedding Jet Li and his capable castmates in one screensaver-ready fantasy backdrop after another.
  23. The Lords of Salem
    The helmer’s narrative dead end here registers not as a lack of nerve so much as a lack of imagination.
  24. The Lost Medallion
    With its godly themes confined to an otherwise entirely superfluous framing device, this kiddie action-adventure works up just enough lukewarm swashbuckling energy to pass muster with bored young children and the Sunday school teachers entrusted with their care.
  25. The Boxtrolls
    The meticulously crafted world is stunning to behold, imagined to the minutest detail and photographed with the sort of dramatic lighting and dynamic camera movement rarely seen in stop-motion. Trouble is, it’s not a place most folks would care to spend any time.
  26. My Amityville Horror
    This documentary plays like an extended episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” deficient as it is in stylistic zeal, investigative spirit and plain old scares.
  27. Disconnect
    Well-meaning but dated and frequently risible issue-drama.
  28. Fruitvale Station
    Even if every word of Coogler’s account of the last day in Grant’s life held up under close scrutiny, the film would still ring false in its relentlessly positive portrayal of its subject.
  29. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    For all its failings, there is one thing about “Long Walk to Freedom” that can’t be denied: Idris Elba gives a towering performance, a Mandela for the ages.
  30. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
    A few individual scenes of hand-to-hand and foot-to-face combat are undeniably exciting, and Jovovich once again impresses with her kinetic athleticism. Overall, however, the repetitiveness and occasional incoherence of the nonstop action leave the audience exhausted for all the wrong reasons.
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