Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Stories We Tell
    The alternately playful and elegiac Stories We Tell is wholly of a piece with her fiction work, and just as rewarding.
  2. Violet & Daisy
    Violet & Daisy feels radically disconnected from recognizable human behavior.
  3. Star Trek Into Darkness
    Markedly grander in scale, although never at the expense of its richly human (and half-human) characters, “Into Darkness” may not boldly go where no “Trek” adventure has gone before, but getting there is such a well-crafted, immensely pleasurable ride that it would be positively Vulcan to nitpick.
  4. Generation Um...
    This scrappy, draggy study in soul-crushing failure and disappointment is noteworthy primarily as a showcase for its lead actor’s most quintessentially Keanu performance in years.
  5. Dead Man's Burden
    The unknown cast is aces, and Moshe inscribes his loquacious film in the Western tradition without overdoing the references to the classics.
  6. Memories Look at Me
    A gossamer debut feature that compensates for its lo-fi look with glimpses of profound humanism.
  7. Tai Chi Hero
    A sporadically engaging martial-arts extravaganza that looks even better compared with its predecessor, last year’s borderline-insufferable “Tai Chi Zero.”
  8. Wuss
    An impressively crafted drama laced with darkly comic humor.
  9. Graceland
    While some of the sting goes out of the movie’s hitherto well-executed crime-thriller mechanics, the resolution and aftermath of the hostage crisis still pack a huge emotional wallop.
  10. The Numbers Station
    Sentencing a sad-looking John Cusack and a hard-working Malin Akerman to roughly 90 minutes of solitary confinement in a poorly lit underground bunker, this glum, juiceless spy thriller is a by-the-numbers affair indeed, unlikely to find an audience on any frequency.
  11. 1st Night
    Many of the actors give performances in line with their low profile here.
  12. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    Although the pacing is more laidback than in “Au revoir Taipei,” the humor more rooted in believable (if bizarre) real-life situations than in slapstick shenanigans, the comic timing remains spot-on and the jokes fetchingly offbeat in an utterly Taiwanese way.
  13. G-Dog
    [Mock] has made a movie that vitally captures an extraordinary character in extraordinary circumstances.
  14. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    Mira Nair’s latest immigrant saga saddles itself with a laborious narrative structure and half-baked thriller elements in a misguided attempt to open up what should be an intimate, introspective story.
  15. The East
    This clever, involving spy drama builds to a terrific level of intrigue before losing some steam in its second half.
  16. The Big Wedding
    The film isn’t so much funny as it is merely amusing — a laundry list of inappropriate and potentially embarrassing moments that strive mightily, but never quite manage to land the laugh.
  17. What Richard Did
    In the end, the material feels a bit attenuated, like a short that’s been stretched to feature length, even if the characters are enjoyable, sympathetic enough company for the pic’s 84-minute running time.
  18. Iron Man 3
    Iron Man 3 is more perfunctory and workmanlike than its two predecessors, but this solid production still delivers more than enough of what fans expect.
  19. Sun Don't Shine
    Seimetz takes advantage of the eccentric cultural/natural landscape of central Florida to vivid effect, gets impressive if seldom endearing work from her actors, and seems very much in charge of an assertive if not always explicable presentation.
  20. In a World...
    To call Lake Bell a magnetic, intelligent, blithely screwball leading lady in the Carole Lombard tradition might be selling her short. With In a World… , a rollicking laffer about the cutthroat voiceover biz in Los Angeles, she proves herself a comedy screenwriter to be reckoned with.
  21. Lovelace
    Reducing an immensely disturbing, politically byzantine tale to a series of cartoonish vignettes, this celeb-studded biopic squanders a gutsy performance by Amanda Seyfried.
  22. Drinking Buddies
    Relative to the major brands, the intimate, handcrafted approach should yield more flavor. Instead, Drinking Buddies offers mostly froth.
  23. Passion
    Clearly, Passion means to be a hoot, a wet-dream thriller for cinephiles. But by the time it reaches its overwrought final act, the picture has generated neither the tension of its forebears nor the audacity that would allow it to transcend its silliness.
  24. Paradise: Love
    Repulsive and sublimely beautiful, arguably celebratory and damning of its characters, it’s hideous and masterful all at once, “Salo” with sunburn.
  25. Pain & Gain
    Bay can be a master of exuberant chaos, but here the violence mostly lands with a sickening thud, which is fitting, one supposes, but also ultimately numbing.
  26. Computer Chess
    Computer Chess is ultimately too slack and scattershot to work consistently well as a comedy.
  27. Arthur Newman
    Firth and Blunt make a strange couple, and Ariola a musicvideo helmer making his feature debut, should have devoted more time to making the chemistry work than to sustaining the melancholy mood.
  28. Cutie and the Boxer
    Zachary Heinzerling's five-years-in-the-making portrait of Brooklyn-based artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara is a warts-and-all portrait of love, sacrifice and the creative spirit.
  29. In the House
    More inspired by than adapted from Juan Mayorga’s play “The Boy in the Last Row,” this low-key thriller feels like a return to form for Ozon, whose pictures lost their psychosexual edge after the helmer stopped collaborating with Emmanuele Bernheim (“Swimming Pool”).
  30. This Ain't California
    “Dogtown and Z-Boys” meets “The Lives of Others” in This Ain’t California, a spirited not-quite-documentary portrait of the skateboarding subculture that flourished in East Germany in the early 1980s.
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