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. Coherence
    Coherence devolves into a noisy, cluttered portrait of dysfunction, all clenched fists and shouted expletives. The twists may be novel, but the talk, and the upshot, are all too dispiritingly familiar.
  2. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    The Internet’s Own Boy is a beautifully crafted film that opens a window on a world not everyone has entered yet, and exposes ways in which both the legal system and the U.S. government is lagging hopelessly behind technology.
  3. Life After Beth
    Blending smart fantasy elements, broad comedy, tender romance and an atypically slow-burning apocalypse, the directorial debut of “I Heart Huckabees” co-writer Jeff Baena is charming, thoughtful and laugh-out-loud funny.
  4. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is at once too much and yet somehow not enough. On the one hand, it’s exciting to see the always envelope-pushing Lee working without a studio- or distributor-imposed safety net... But while the film never lacks for ambition, it fails to satisfy emotionally or intellectually in the ways Lee intends.
  5. Radio Free Albemuth
    The narrative delivers satisfying intrigue and suspense.
  6. Me and You
    Ultimately, such a stir-crazy two-hander can only be as interesting as its actors.
  7. Being Ginger
    Pleasant but slim in running time and substance, this very first-person documentary raises some interesting issues it doesn’t pursue very far.
  8. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    Skillfully made first feature by writer-director Katrin Gebbe has some undeniably striking passages and performances, but ultimately spirals toward a gruesome third act that is no less monotonous for supposedly being based on true events.
  9. Under the Electric Sky
    The pic provides lots of sexy, neon-hued eye-candy but not many images of deeper resonance.
  10. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    It’s the robots — endowed here with character-rich physicality and almost human-scaled facial features — who give the film its emotional heft.
  11. Dear White People
    Bristling with arguments about the complexities of black identity in a supposedly post-racial America, this lively and articulate campus-set comedy proves better at rattling off ideas and presenting opposing viewpoints than it does squeezing them into a coherent narrative frame.
  12. A Summer's Tale
    The thoughts may not be profound, but they are profoundly true to life,and the writer-director’s approach to young people’s concerns is remarkably universal and timeless.
  13. Third Person
    Though virtually every twist on this emotional roller coaster feels preordained by its architect, the director leaves certain mysteries for the audience to interpret, making for a more open-ended and mature work all around.
  14. Miss Lovely
    Like “Boogie Nights,” Miss Lovely offers a visually stunning evocation of a disreputable subculture, although it lacks that pic’s rooting dramatic interest.
  15. The Last Sentence
    This biographical drama, shot in crisp black-and-white, offers a potentially intriguing study in high-minded political/moral obstinacy, but feels too claustrophobic — and, finally, tediously like a one-man window on great events — to fully come to dramatic life.
  16. Code Black
    At 81 minutes, Code Black feels like a brisk, vital report from the frontlines of emergency medicine, forged and rooted in the most intense sort of personal and professional experience.
  17. Video Games: The Movie
    Video Games: The Movie is content to celebrate without much insight.
  18. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    This dual focus on the need to end the ineffective, destructive “war on drugs” and broader questions of political compromise gives director Riley Morton’s film particular resonance.
  19. Le Chef
    Poking fun at the restaurant world, French helmer Daniel Cohen’s genial, broadly played comedy The Chef dishes up easily digestible laughs.
  20. The Only Real Game
    Banks allows the exhilaration of the game and the exigencies of realpolitik to determine the ups and downs of her film’s sentimental journey.
  21. Think Like a Man Too
    Although funnier and mercifully shorter than its 2012 battle-of-the-sexes predecessor, this third collaboration between manic comedian Kevin Hart and director Tim Story (hot on the heels of their January hit “Ride Along”) is an exceedingly formulaic and ultimately exhausting thing to experience.
  22. Exhibition
    With acute sensitivity, Brit writer-helmer Joanna Hogg’s third feature, Exhibition, explores the difficulty of telling inside from outside, intimacy from estrangement, and revelation from concealment.
  23. The Human Race
    Real suspense and shocks are MIA in a movie that’s eventful but lacks the atmospherics needed to be scary.
  24. A Coffee In Berlin
    This day-in-the-life indie says something profound about an entire generation simply by watching a feckless young man try to figure it out.
  25. Ivory Tower
    Although stronger on breadth than focus, it’s an appropriately stimulating take on a far-from-sustainable system.
  26. Jersey Boys
    As handsome as his compositions are, Eastwood’s filmmaking simply doesn’t have the snap or the feel for rhythm that the script’s rapid-fire theatrical patter requires, and the relative dearth of prominent musical performances turns what could have been a dancing-in-the-aisles romp into a bit of a slog.
  27. I Am I
    This potentially intriguing concept is given disappointingly bland, flat treatment in the Kickstarter-funded project, in which Towne brings professionalism but little personality to both her on- and offcamera roles.
  28. This Is Not a Ball
    Muniz uncovers a raft of intriguing people and stories, with subjects ranging from sports to astrophysics, gender politics, history and developmental psychology, but he never sits still with them long enough to ask any probing questions, and the film never arrives at any real point.
  29. Master of the Universe
    Less a portrait of an individual than of an unchecked culture where the lure of staggering profits eliminates ethics, Universe subtly exposes the pernicious effects of deregulation and does so in an ingeniously cinematic manner.
  30. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    A brave, challenging picture that makes the viewer complicit in the action, it is also perhaps the first film since the declaration of the Islamic Republic to confront so directly the brutality of the feared security apparatus.
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