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. Personal Tailor
    Over the course of its generally absorbing if overlong 117-minute running time, it offers a brief and appreciably sympathetic take on the lure of fantasy, the pleasures of role play and the thrill of commanding the multitudes — which is to say that it’s, among other things, a film about filmmaking.
  2. Big Bad Wolves
    The filmmakers’ undeniable chops and bizarre tonal shifts fail to transform the material into anything more than a stylishly gruesome exercise.
  3. Blue Ruin
    A lean and suspenseful genre piece that follows a bloody trail of vengeance to its cruel, absurd and logical conclusion.
  4. Walking with Dinosaurs
    Visually, “Walking With Dinosaurs” dazzles with its combination of Animal Logic-animated CG creatures...and beautiful practical backgrounds... Less dazzling is the constant stream of jokey banter, which thwarts the pic’s educational potential and caps its target age awfully low.
  5. Wrong Cops
    A monstrously unfunny “Police Academy”/“Reno 911” knockoff directed with just enough winking self-awareness to seem both insipid and pretentious.
  6. All the Light in the Sky
    [Swanberg's] latest work, All the Light in the Sky, displays a striking new willingness to meet his audience halfway, buttressing his signature style with clever pacing, solid technique and a deeply soulful lead performance from co-scripter Jane Adams.
  7. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    It’s one thing to declare sex a fact of life and insist that audiences confront their unease at seeing it depicted (or, equally constructive, their intense excitation at its mere mention), but quite another to fashion a fictional woman’s life around nothing but sex. As courageously depicted by Gainsbourg, Jo is ultimately a tragic character.
  8. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    Racy subject aside, the film provides a good-humored yet serious-minded look at sexual self-liberation, thick with references to art, music, religion and literature, even as it pushes the envelope with footage of acts previously relegated to the sphere of pornography.
  9. The Wolf of Wall Street
    A big, unruly bacchanal of a movie that huffs and puffs and nearly blows its own house down, but holds together by sheer virtue of its furious filmmaking energy and a Leonardo DiCaprio star turn so electric it could wake the dead.
  10. Shored Up
    Eschews hysteria, preachiness and self-importance in favor of calm, persuasive scientific arguments.
  11. Beatocello’s Umbrella
    More scenes of Richner’s admirable efforts in the hospital and fewer expressions of admiration by the doctors and nurses he trains would also have helped to anchor the film’s sincere but repetitive hosannas.
  12. Hours
    An ingeniously simple setup is cunningly exploited for maximum suspense in Hours, a slow-building, consistently engrossing drama.
  13. Desert Runners
    There’s an upbeat tenor to Desert Runners that develops real rooting value for the protags.
  14. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    A modestly less quotable but generously funny new adventure for scotch-and-mahogany-loving 1970s newsman Ron Burgundy.
  15. Wadjda
    With enormous sympathy for all, Al Mansour captures the isolation of Saudi women and their parallel lives of freedom at home and invisibility outside.
  16. Our Children
    At this finely tooled tragedy’s core towers Emilie Dequenne, no longer the feral young thing seen in 1999′s “Rosetta,” but a trapped animal pushed to devastating extremes.
  17. Journey to the South Pacific
    Structurally, the film is somewhat rambling and unfocused even within its tight 40-minute running time, cutting away periodically to address the ways in which overfishing and rising water levels have severely impacted the reef and its ability to support plant and animal life. The lessons are valuable and necessary, but they’re not particularly well integrated.
  18. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    An exceptionally poor piece of holiday cash-in product, rushed and ungainly even by the low standard set by Perry's seven previous Madea films, yet it should be every bit as profitable.
  19. Sweet Talk
    Hopelessly stagebound, despite halfhearted efforts to open up what’s basically a talky two-hander, and risibly pretentious in the manner of soft-core porn that’s no sexier than glossy ads for expensive perfume.
  20. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    [A] stunningly joke-free comedy-horror hybrid.
  21. White Reindeer
    This complex, compassionate film finds both wicked humor and, less expectedly, transcendent hope in America’s gaudy fixation with Christmas spirit.
  22. The Great Passage
    Director Yuya Ishii takes a considerable step forward in terms of budget and ambition with this simple, sometimes sentimental yet wise and full-bodied comedy-drama, which movingly testifies to the ways in which dedication, focus and an extreme attention to detail can achieve something of lasting value.
  23. Here Comes the Devil
    Promises much in an ominously atmospheric package that nods to 1970s genre stylings. But the payoff is on the meh side.
  24. What's in a Name?
    The directors have brought onboard the entire original cast. This makes their job much easier, as countless performances have perfected the timing and tone of each single line.
  25. The Sacrament
    It’s a film that purists might insist isn’t horror in the strictest sense, though this slow-burning investigation of unseemly goings-on at a rural Christian commune is frightening in any genre language.
  26. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    This off-putting pic requires open minds and iron nerves.
  27. R... Rajkumar
    The Whoopee Cushion hijinks here are punctuated with incongruous outbursts of bloody violence.
  28. Expecting
    Even when judged by the standards of broad farce, however, Expecting repeatedly strains credibility and defies logic in ways too glaring to ignore.
  29. Khumba
    The voice ensemble is game, if not especially well matched.
  30. Merry Christmas
    There doesn’t appear to be any purpose at all to the random exchanges and interactions that pass for a plot.
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