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. Little Feet
    Here, as in his 1992 breakthrough feature, “In the Soup,” Rockwell conveys his characters’ peculiar suppositions and perceptions using a variety of cinematic approaches, many recalling the untrammeled exuberance of early cinema.
  2. Son of a Gun
    At least three entertaining films are jostling for position in Australian writer-director Julius Avery’s messily propulsive debut feature, Son of a Gun — and if none ultimately emerges dominant, the red-blooded tussle between them is never dull to watch.
  3. About Elly (2009)
    While not equaling the depth of characterization of Farhadi’s previous films, About Elly takes the complexity of his storytelling to a fascinating level. However, the variable quality of the thesping also prevents the pic from being his best work.
  4. Reach Me
    A misbegotten venture that constantly ups its own ante on histrionic overacting, ludicrous plot twists and insipid empowerment mantras.
  5. Extraterrestrial
    Good-looking and entertaining, if unmemorable.
  6. Paddington
    Affectionately honoring the everyday quirks of Bond’s stories, while subtly updating their middle-class London milieu, King’s film may divide loyal Paddingtophiles with its high-stakes caper plot, but their enraptured kids won’t care a whit.
  7. Night Will Fall
    Night not only conveys the almost unbelievable atrocities captured by the Russian, American and British camera teams and photographers, but also highlights the dedication of the team determined to document and disseminate this evidence and the changing policies of those in charge of postwar reconstruction.
  8. Monk With a Camera
    Clearly regarded with great affection by his mentors (as well as supporters like Richard Gere), Vreeland makes very pleasant company... The directors adopt a similarly unpretentious, bemused tone in following him around.
  9. What We Do in the Shadows
    Some genre fans who prefer the silly to the satiric may bite, but the anemic pic isn’t remotely weird or witty enough for cult immortality.
  10. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    As celebrated in Habicht’s warmly human documentary, Pulp has always been defiantly different.
  11. Bad Hair
    While Rondon’s focus is the struggle of wills between a boy awakening to homosexual feelings and his embittered mother, the helmer invests their collision with a powerful specificity.
  12. The Sleepwalker
    A consistently intriguing psychodrama that may nonetheless leave many viewers feeling that it’s all buildup and scant payoff.
  13. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    This tediously metatextual exercise conjures few inspired jolts of its own.
  14. The Culture High
    The film’s haphazard structure and freewheeling arguments only serve to reinforce tired pothead cliches — it’s paranoid, prone to starry-eyed dorm-room philosophizing, and it doesn’t know when to quit.
  15. Jessabelle
    Jessabelle serves up a murky and underwhelming cauldron of Southern-fried voodoo-horror claptrap.
  16. On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter
    An intoxicating blend of exotic travelogue, death-defying derring-do, and affecting profiles in courage and perseverance.
  17. The Rewrite
    It’s a rare pleasure to see Tomei in a lead role, and she fills out the short cuts in Lawrence’s characterization with wry warmth and a hint of swallowed disappointment.
  18. The Toy Soldiers
    The Toy Soldiers sports a basic competence in assembly that slightly elevates its material. The same can’t be said of the performers, though they try, some achieving a semblance of naturalism, others more inept or hammy.
  19. Always Woodstock
    Even by its genre’s comfort-food standards, this movie feels blandly circumscribed, almost child-proofed, as if any sharper reality or wit might be harmful to the intended audience.
  20. Merchants of Doubt
    An intelligent, solidly argued and almost too-polished takedown of America’s spin factory — that network of professional fabricators, obfuscators and pseudo-scientists who have lately attempted to muddle the scientific debate around global warming — this is a movie so intrigued by its designated villains that it almost conveys a perverse form of admiration, and the fascination proves contagious.
  21. Wolves
    There are certainly no fresh ideas risked in this first directorial feature by voice actor-turned-scenarist David Hayter (“X-Men,” “Watchmen”), but Wolves could be worse, being as fast-paced and polished on a “B” budget as it is forgettable.
  22. Point and Shoot
    Curry’s interest is in obsession, not Libya, yet surely a corrective is needed, and dressing up a nation’s collapse as if it were an American triumph smacks of the same willful delusion as George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished.”
  23. Actress
    Robert Greene's extraordinary collaboration with actress Brandy Burre is a playful, provocative examination of self-performance.
  24. Big Eyes
    Despite Amy Adams’ affecting performance as an artist and ’50s/’60s housewife complicit in her own captivity, this relatively straightforward dramatic outing for Tim Burton is too broadly conceived to penetrate the mystery at the heart of the Keanes’ unhappy marriage — the depiction of which is dominated by an outlandish, ogre-like turn from Christoph Waltz that increasingly seems to hold the movie hostage.
  25. Butter on the Latch
    There’s something deeper — and deeply original — going on in Decker’s film that demands either a second viewing or a willingness to push past easy dismissal (certainly by conventional standards, the film seems hopelessly amateurish).
  26. Dumb and Dumber To
    Sporadically very funny, mostly very tedious, and sometimes truly vile, this 18-years-too-late sequel nonetheless exhibits a certain puerile purity of purpose.
  27. Miss Meadows
    An eventual retreat into conventional thriller terrain isn’t managed with much panache or tension, and a limp happily-ever-after sequence underlines the pic’s failure to make very much of the twisted-fairy-tale aspect that is its most distinctive element.
  28. We Are the Giant
    A surfeit of harrowing on-the-ground footage during protest crackdowns, plus the protagonists’ testimonies, make for a frequently inspiring and exciting documentary. But helmer Greg Barker (“Ghosts of Rwanda”) also risks pretentiousness in various forms of stylistic and thematic overreach, while providing viewers scant explanatory info on the regional conflicts.
  29. Horrible Bosses 2
    This inane and incredibly tasteless sequel qualifies as an excuse to bring back those hard-working funnymen Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis for another round of amateur-criminal hijinks and semi-improvised vulgarity, jabbing away repeatedly at some elusive comic sweet spot where blatant nastiness and egregious stupidity collide — and very occasionally hitting the mark.
  30. Selma
    DuVernay’s razor-sharp portrait of the Civil Rights movement — and Dr. King himself — at a critical crossroads is as politically astute as it is psychologically acute, giving us a human-scale King whose indomitable public face belies currents of weariness and self-doubt.
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