Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. The Cordillera of Dreams
    Taken as a completed project, Guzmán’s late-career trinity is a stunning achievement in the cinema of the hidden pattern and the startling, unexpected connection.
  2. Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
    As someone who’s absorbed bits and pieces of the Miles Davis story over the years but never felt like I had the big picture, I found “Birth of the Cool” to be intensely gratifying. Nelson is a filmmaker with a sixth sense for how to nudge history into the present.
  3. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    For a film bursting with so many ideas, only a fraction of them seem to work. And yet, as an artistic statement, “Tigers” proves as fearless as its kid characters, and an indicator of incredible things to come from its creator.
  4. Jacob's Ladder
    You can forge a decent drama out of elements this scrappy, but not necessarily a film like Jacob’s Ladder.
  5. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    An entertaining if hardly exhaustive overview of how the unlikely success came to be. The story it tells might easily have filled an engrossing documentary twice the length of this competent, not-particularly-inspired one.
  6. Burn
    The problem is that writer-director Mike Gan’s first feature, though competently handled in most departments, doesn’t commit enough to any approach to fulfill its potential.
  7. Vita & Virginia
    As Vita & Virginia loses its girlishness, drawn like the tides to the solemn maturity of Debicki’s performance. With her as the lodestar, this is a stranger and more intriguing film than it really has a right to be, one that becomes less about a clandestine courtship between famous women, and more about Woolf’s relationship with her writing, and with the workings of her own beautiful, restless mind.
  8. No Place Like Home (2006)
    A watchable mess with ultra-laid-back Me Decade vibe.
  9. Overcomer
    Laced with white-savior undertones this vaguely “The Blind Side”-esque sports drama doesn’t bother investigating (if it recognizes them at all), Overcomer offers nothing in the way of nuance — even its title is awkward — and, also, no respite from its religious propagandizing.
  10. Angel Has Fallen
    The plot — which is to say, the plot against the president — is, once again, a violently overwrought confection of “topical” comic-strip ludicrousness; that’s the DNA of the “Fallen” series. Yet when you’re watching a big-budget B-movie, there’s good preposterous and there’s bad preposterous.
  11. ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas
    Though it’s far from the last word on ZZ Top, “That Little Ol’ Band From Texas” fills in the nuts and bolts, giving you enough of a glimpse of how it all happened to make it seem like a down-home rock ‘n’ roll mirage come true.
  12. The Bromley Boys
    Steve Kelly’s lightweight film spins allegedly true events into the stuff of pure sitcom: affable enough, but so glibly inauthentic as to make “Bend It Like Beckham” look like cinéma vérité by comparison. It’s curious how the world’s most popular sport maintains such a thin roster of truly classic movies in its honor; that is unchanged here.
  13. Dying to Survive
    Director and co-writer Wen Muye’s feature debut is a classy crowd-pleaser and an interesting example of a Chinese film that shows public protests and casts officialdom in a frequently unflattering light yet still received the stamp of approval from state censors.
  14. The Divine Fury
    Kim’s film is a slick concoction that affords moderate guilty-pleasure fun for a while, though it goes on too long to diminishing effect.
  15. Kingdom
    A dose of 21st century attitude mixes nicely with other winning ingredients in Kingdom, a thoroughly entertaining adaptation of Yasuhisa Hara’s hugely popular manga set in China, 245 B.C.
  16. Mission Mangal
    Chronic cynics and inveterate snarkers would do themselves — and everyone else — a great big favor by steering clear of Mission Mangal, an entertaining and ingratiating feel-good movie about the 2013 launch of the Mangalyann space probe, an against-all-odds triumph of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
  17. Sextuplets
    What was novel when Eddie Murphy did it for “The Nutty Professor,” however, feels lazy by comparison here, with hardly enough story to support them, and even though the transformations are impressive, there’s an alarming clumsiness when it comes to Wayans acting against himself.
  18. Driven
    Against the film’s own boisterous inclinations, Pace gives it something like a heart, albeit a closed, melancholic one: that’s some acting, and it’s maybe more than these agreeably derivative proceedings deserve. Like its less interesting chancer of a protagonist, however, Driven will take what brushes with greatness it can get.
  19. Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles
    Though undeniably charming, Buñuel can be a difficult character to like here, but that’s the point: The movie dares to imagine the exact moment when Buñuel the callow prankster became Buñuel, engaged anthropologist of the human condition, whose later Mexico City masterpiece “Los Olvidados” was clearly informed by what he witnessed in Las Hurdes.
  20. Aquarela
    A feast of HD imagery so crisp as to be almost disorienting, this is immersive experiential cinema with no firm storytelling trajectory, though viewers can read what environmental warnings they may into its rushing spectacle.
  21. Low Low
    While the narrative occasionally falters, the visceral way in which the writer-director captures his subjects’ triumphs and travails provides an unflinching portrait of modern teens on the fringes of society.
  22. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    Linklater, as brilliant a filmmaker as he is, is a kind of Zen rationalist; his shot language and essential humanity invite us to look at Bernadette and think, “You need help.” But that stops the character, even in her baroquely witty lashing out, from becoming a projection of a larger passion.
  23. Ready or Not
    The violence here is so over-the-top that it can lapse into comedy, prompting shocked laughter when certain characters are unexpectedly killed, and again when it comes time to dispose of their bodies, none of which can adequately prepare you for the film’s explosively funny finale.
  24. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
    It takes a lot of chops to shoot the majority of a movie underwater, and Johannes Roberts is a skillful crafter of images ... But he’s a throw-what-he-can-at-the-audience director, and there’s little in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged that really sticks. The shocks, however, are consistently well-timed, and for the audience that seeks out a movie like this one that’s probably enough.
  25. Los Reyes
    You don’t have to be a “dog person” to find these two irresistible, although those with a soft spot for animals may be surprised by how deeply attached they get over the course of the film.
  26. ECCO
    There’s more repetition and ponderousness than compelling intrigue in the end result here.
  27. Ode to Joy
    Mostly known for his behind-the-camera TV credits on shows like “Modern Family” and “1600 Penn,” Winer doesn’t bring much finesse into the generic visuals of Ode to Joy. In fairness to him, no amount of directorial elegance could have saved the artificial beats of a narrative that fails to create believable sexual tension between its “romantic” leads and amounts only to an utterly shallow showdown between brothers with long-standing scores to settle.
  28. Nekrotronic
    The fact that none of this usually-surefire mindless stimulus is remotely inspired — let alone that the plot feels like a barely-there afterthought — turns so much cheerful sound and fury into near-senseless din.
  29. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
    The emotions of the stories have been lost. We could be watching the standard ghoulish CGI effects that take place in any horror movie of the week.
  30. The Kitchen
    We see, in Melissa McCarthy’s increasingly fierce performance, a hint of what the movie might have been: the tale of a new kind of feminine mystique — a methodical fury that weds the imperatives of a mother to the style of a gangster. But that movie needed a better script.
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