Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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 2.4 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. The Captive
    The deftness with which the helmer manipulated time in his earlier pics eludes him in this generic procedural context... leaving us with obfuscation but no genuine sense of mystery.
  2. Hollywood Seagull
    Despite retaining the basic narrative architecture of its classic source, Hollywood Seagull too often feels like a trite, sudsy take on privilege, ambition and angst among showbiz players and wannabes — one that seemingly exists mostly to showcase real-life C-listers, aspirants and pals in the tradition of Henry Jaglom’s films.
  3. Stalingrad
    Assaults are filmed in ubiquitous slow-mo to better register the way bodies are thrown into the air. It’s all rather confusing, actually, since the monochromatic tonalities and weak script, lacking in any comprehensible battle strategy, tend to meld the two sides together.
  4. The Interview
    An alleged satire that’s about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted.
  5. Black Coffee
    The timidly plotted proceedings never veer from romantic-comedy formula. There’s a whole lot of talk and very little action here, and not just because the squeaky-clean pic wears its PG rating like a badge of honor.
  6. Freezer
    Freezer is a mediocre work built on a flimsy, nonsensical premise that squanders its modest potential with a cornucopia of bad plot twists.
  7. The Longest Ride
    Appealing performances by a trio of second- and third-generation Hollywood kids keep this three-hankie twaddle more bearable than it deserves.
  8. God's Pocket
    John Slattery makes a wobbly transition into feature filmmaking with this drab and uninvolving dark comedy.
  9. Wish I Was Here
    The result is unquestionably an auteur film, but one festooned with so many bad and unnecessary ideas that one can’t help wondering if a more modest, hemmed-in version of the same project might not have proved more effective.
  10. Somewhere Slow
    This tonally all-over-the-place drama fails to convince.
  11. Shirin in Love
    When not serving up sentimental contrivance, Shirin in Love is just tepidly cute, with wan comic situations and lines that provide little opportunity for a game-enough cast.
  12. Maladies
    It’s hard for the audience to invest in a protagonist this solipsistic.
  13. Better Living Through Chemistry
    There isn’t a pharmaceutical cocktail powerful enough to improve the dreadful comedy of Better Living Through Chemistry.
  14. Bad Johnson
    The film manages to be an often uncomfortable experience without fully embracing its own bad taste, starting with an inherently insane premise and somehow steering it through the most basic of romantic comedy paces.
  15. Down and Dangerous
    Relying on a synthesized score, over-saturated cinematography and frustratingly cliched dialogue, this is an extremely generic, truly empty tale of a drug smuggler involved with cops and criminals alike.
  16. Get Hard
    Whatever one makes of Get Hard’s contribution to our ongoing national debate about race, class and sexuality, there’s no denying that too much of it simply feels cheap, flailing and tired.
  17. Tasting Menu
    Bringing together some of the least compelling dinner guests in recent memory at a world-class restaurant that’s about to permanently close its doors, this blandly seriocomic misfire from Spanish co-writer/director Roger Gual is too lazy to rise to the level of farce, too banal and insincere to work as drama.
  18. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    When does an exercise in style become a wearying ADD slog through blood-splattered pseudo-Freudian nonsense? When it’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.
  19. Total Siyapaa (Total Chaos)
    Ethnically barbed hijinks ought to ensue, but jinks of any sort are in short supply, due to drowsy pacing and a string of distracting staging mistakes that suffocate just about every gag.
  20. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Any message about the need for open-mindedness in life and love, however, is muddled by a slapdash plot that ultimately cares less about taking a stand in favor of progressive values than it does in superficially employing such feel-good ideas for unimaginative, hyperactive adolescent slapstick.
  21. Blumenthal
    A limp facsimile of a Woody Allen ensembler set in a familiar world of New York Jewish intellectuals — minus only the wit, and the intellect.
  22. Locker 13
    Only those scared of being bored to death need fear Locker 13, an omnibus of horror stories that could hardly be more tame, talky and tepid, both individually and as a whole.
  23. Into the Storm
    Into the Storm can make it rain like nobody’s business, but when it tries to be smart, it comes out all wet.
  24. A Promise
    Led by a trio of lackluster performances from Alan Rickman, Rebecca Hall and “Game of Thrones” thesp Richard Madden, this awkward, passionless drama conveys neither the sensuality nor the drawn-out sense of longing required by its period tale of a young secretary who falls in love with his employer’s wife.
  25. Burning Blue
    Bearing a distinctly musty odor confirmed by its 2011 copyright date, this day-and-date Lionsgate pickup never achieves dramatic liftoff.
  26. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    Though much of the script borders on unbearable, compounded by “Juno” composer Mateo Messina’s tell-you-how-to-feel score, writer Daniel Taplitz manages to sneak in some poignant self-help aphorisms here and there.
  27. The Hero of Color City
    Cheerfully exhorting imagination, creativity and bravery in children while demonstrating none of those virtues itself, The Hero of Color City proves to be a dispiritingly colorless feature-length babysitter.
  28. The November Man
    Runs through spy-movie cliches with such dogged obligation that it often plays like a YouTube compilation of scenes from older, better thrillers, generating little overall tension and only occasionally approaching basic coherence.
  29. Mortdecai
    There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.
  30. London Has Fallen
    For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.
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