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. Frank
    Helmer Lenny Abrahamson (“Garage,” “Adam & Paul”) puts the pic’s eccentricity to good use, luring in skeptics with jokey surrealism and delivering them to a profoundly moving place.
  2. Gimme Shelter
    The film is hamstrung by its fidelity to real-life inspirational models.
  3. Calvary
    Grounded by a performance of monumental soul from Gleeson as a tough-minded Irish priest marked for death by one of his parishioners, the film offers a mordantly funny survey of small-town iniquity that morphs, almost imperceptibly, into a deeply felt lament for a fallen world.
  4. God Help the Girl
    It will be up to viewers to decide whether God Help the Girl is ingratiatingly naive art, gratingly inept art, or a bit of both.
  5. The Raid 2
    It’s hard to shake a nagging feeling of more is less; with its convoluted plot mechanics clearly cribbed from past thriller templates, the film never quite generates or sustains its predecessor’s pure sense of menace.
  6. I, Frankenstein
    Utterly witless, listless, sparkless and senseless, this supernatural actioner makes one long for the comparative sophistication of the conceptually identical “Underworld” franchise (with which it shares producers and a writer).
  7. Enemies Closer
    An unremarkable but entirely serviceable action quickie.
  8. Freezer
    Freezer is a mediocre work built on a flimsy, nonsensical premise that squanders its modest potential with a cornucopia of bad plot twists.
  9. Indigo Children
    Eric Chaney’s debut feature, Indigo Children, doesn’t so much copy Terrence Malick as swallow the filmmaker’s stylistic tics whole and vomit them out onscreen in an ungainly if mercifully brief mess.
  10. A Most Wanted Man
    Corbijn succeeds here in large part because his attention to nuance and detail so fully complements that of the German operatives at the story’s core.
  11. Whiplash
    Chazelle proves an exceptional builder of scenes, crafting loaded, need-to-succeed moments that grab our attention and hold it tight.
  12. McCanick
    If the drably derivative, infuriatingly improbable police drama McCanick is remembered for anything, it will be for its uniformly overqualified cast.
  13. Maladies
    It’s hard for the audience to invest in a protagonist this solipsistic.
  14. Finding Vivian Maier
    [An] initially playful, ultimately haunting documentary.
  15. U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
    Salaciously watchable but finally hokey.
  16. Kids for Cash
    The film represents a scathing critique of America’s juvenile justice system, the privatization of penal institutions, and the whole notion of “zero tolerance.”
  17. Odd Thomas
    Sommers attempts to glue it all together with a raffish all-in-fun tone (despite some gory moments and unpleasant conceits), but the pic is neither witty nor macabre enough to pull off Koontz’s balance of elements in cinematic terms.
  18. The Lunchbox
    Batra adeptly plays on the tension of will they or won’t they meet, making good decisions based on character and situation rather than the need to uplift an audience.
  19. Run & Jump
    With remarkable warmth and immediacy, Green and co-scripter Keogan have managed to capture the beauty of an obviously flawed family, one neither too perfect nor too demographically balanced to ring true, and imbue it with a sense of plenitude that seems to flow as much from the sun-drenched land itself as from the quirkily particular personalities involved.
  20. Towheads
    Works better as a series of well-conceived, impeccably timed and executed physical gags, with light dustings of pathos, than as the story of a woman sacrificing her artistic identity on the altar of motherhood.
  21. Devil's Due
    The film expends plenty of effort crafting a few memorable freakout setpieces and nailing down the logistics of its found-footage camera placement, yet it offers precious little in the way of real scares or engaging characters, and even less in original ideas.
  22. Dedh Ishqiya
    Dedh Ishqiya ends on a note of sadder-but-wiser resignation that recalls its predecessor, but its high romantic cultural allusions convey a deeper sense of what’s at stake.
  23. Band of Sisters
    Mary Fishman’s admiring docu is more a general survey than a detailed history or portrait of individual personalities and causes, and as a result, it holds interest without achieving any real narrative arc, offering inspirational content in a merely workmanlike package.
  24. Omar
    Deliberately ambiguous in how it approaches the inexorable nexus of violence, Omar will trouble those looking for condemnation rather than the messiness of humanity.
  25. Generation War
    Overly melodramatic but fairly engrossing.
  26. Ride Along
    A lazy and listless buddy-cop action-comedy that fades from memory as quickly as its generic title.
  27. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    Crisp, efficient and appreciably modest in scale...this conspicuous attempt to breathe new life into a long-dormant action franchise gets at least a few things right, chiefly the shrewd casting of Chris Pine.
  28. Divorce Corp
    Divorce Corp. is reasonably cogent when it comes to explaining divorce-court terminology and statistics, even if it comes up somewhat short in terms of actual facts and figures. The filmmakers are far less successful when they start dragging in outrageous examples of official misconduct.
  29. Reasonable Doubt
    This utterly unmemorable, uninspired and unnecessary genre exercise should fade from view so fast they might just as soon have called it “Without a Trace.”
  30. Chander Pahar (Mountains Of The Moon)
    It’s a tale that was once thrilling, but the thrills seem to have evaporated.
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