Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. V/H/S/2
    This one is shorter and has fewer segments, but also earns a much higher batting average. In fact, there’s nary a dud among the four main tales (not including the titled bookends), which each whip elements of terror, macabre humor and the fantastical into a giddy frenzy.
  2. Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington
    Sebastian Junger’s docu Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? offers a moving requiem for his “Restrepo” co-director.
  3. A Hijacking
    Hostage thrillers are all-too-often shrill affairs, with clock-watching screenwriters wringing maximum melodrama from spiraling disorder. Not so Tobias Lindholm’s superb A Hijacking, which actually grows more chillingly subdued as its nightmare scenario unfolds.
  4. My Brother the Devil
    An energetic and imaginative tale of siblings at a criminal crossroads and a street movie that is imaginatively, even poetically, shot, the pic nonetheless remains rooted in the turmoil of an immigrant British demimonde.
  5. 20 Feet from Stardom
    For most of its running time, this personality-packed docu is nothing short of absorbing as it recaps the essential role African-American background singers played in shaping the sound of 20th-century pop music.
  6. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
    Producer Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Wise have corralled an enormous technical crew, and the result is state-of-the-art screen magic.
    • Variety
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    Star Trek II is a very satisfying space adventure, closer in spirit and format to the popular TV series than to its big-budget predecessor.
    • Variety
  8. Sightseers
    The satire is firmly seated in character, and no one understands how well a good homicide can elucidate character better than Wheatley.
  9. Pieta
    The final reel packs a genuine emotional wallop, even as it makes auds laugh with the vicious precision of its dramatic irony.
  10. This Ain't California
    “Dogtown and Z-Boys” meets “The Lives of Others” in This Ain’t California, a spirited not-quite-documentary portrait of the skateboarding subculture that flourished in East Germany in the early 1980s.
  11. Shadow Dancer
    Shadow Dancer is admittedly slow to gather force and momentum over its 101-minute running time, though by the third act, the deliberately paced drama has exerted a hypnotic grip.
  12. The Patience Stone
    Sensual and horrifying, The Patience Stone plays like a mesmerizing, modern take on the tales of Scheherazade and a parable on the suffering of Afghan women.
  13. Cutie and the Boxer
    Zachary Heinzerling's five-years-in-the-making portrait of Brooklyn-based artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara is a warts-and-all portrait of love, sacrifice and the creative spirit.
  14. G-Dog
    [Mock] has made a movie that vitally captures an extraordinary character in extraordinary circumstances.
  15. 22 Jump Street
    22 Jump Street hits far more often than it misses, and even when it misses by a mile, the effort is so delightfully zany that it’s hard not to give Lord and Miller an “A” for effort.
  16. You Will Be My Son
    There are no big surprises in store in terms of where this setup is headed...But the pic’s pleasures are nonetheless numerous, starting with its talented cast.
  17. The World Before Her
    While much of The World Before Her speaks to global womanhood, other aspects are more specific to India, but that’s what gives the film much of its life and spark.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Three Sisters
    An unquestionably eye-opening, deeply human, strikingly lensed look at an impoverished family whose rudimentary living conditions are a sharp riposte to the illusion of China’s economic boom.
  19. Augustine
    Anchored by two intense, intertwined perfs by veteran Vincent Lindon and relative newcomer Soko, a musician who also composed the pic’s growling, atmospheric score, this period drama offers a coolly febrile study of madness, Victorian sexual politics and power.
  20. This Is Martin Bonner
    A mood piece, a character study and an exercise in poetic gesture possessed of a sort of evanescent, secular spirituality.
  21. Old Dog
    A spare but stealthily powerful tale.
  22. Seduced and Abandoned
    Spirited, highly amusing and endearingly shambolic.
  23. Metallica: Through the Never
    A definitive document for anyone who’s ever hoisted the devil-horn fingers in metalhead solidarity.
  24. Bastards
    Even at its most opaque, Bastards always exerts a dreamlike pull rooted in Denis’ rhythmic layerings of image, sound and music.
  25. The Immigrant
    This rich, beautifully rendered film boasts an arrestingly soulful performance from Marion Cotillard.
  26. The Past
    An indelible tapestry of carefully engineered revelations and deeper human truths.
  27. Young & Beautiful
    A nuanced, emotionally temperate study of a precocious youth.
  28. Call Me Kuchu
    While a local filmmaker’s perspective may have brought more dimensions, the coverage of events here is impressive and on the mark.
  29. Naked
    Leigh’s gallery of haves and have-nots, of emotional anorexics and exploited deadbeats, carries a strong political charge that’s there for the taking. But the pic also plays simply as a black, offbeat comedy with a romantic undertow.
  30. The Last of the Mohicans
    [The Last of the Mohicans] blends pure adventure with a compelling central romance.
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