Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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 2.4 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. 360
    With a multilingual cast of mostly unfamiliar faces, plus a few stars, 360 feels too abstract, orchestrating break-ups and hook-ups in a passionless vacuum.
  2. 30 Beats
    The jazz-scored picture relies heavily on quirkiness to round out shaky characterizations and inject interest into otherwise forgettable pairings.
  3. Killer Joe
    The family that slays together pays together in Killer Joe, a nasty little Texas noir that transfers Tracy Letts' 1993 play from page to screen with generally gripping results before devolving into an over-the-top splatterfest.
  4. Shut Up and Play the Hits
    Much like the band's self-conscious synth-pop itself, "Shut Up" is initially satiric but ultimately disarming in its emotional resonance.
  5. Wagner's Dream
    Tension flows organically from every phase of this dangerous endeavor, making for a highly entertaining outing for operaphiles and operaphobes alike.
  6. The Well Digger's Daughter
    The humanist spirit of Gallic novelist-director Marcel Pagnol is alive and well in the old-fashionedly sincere The Well-Digger's Daughter, a competent remake of Pagnol's eponymous 1940 melodrama about a working-class girl impregnated by a young pilot who's sent off to war.
  7. The Dark Knight Rises
    While The Dark Knight Rises raises the dramatic stakes considerably, at least in terms of its potential body count, it doesn't have its predecessor's breathless sense of menace or its demonic showmanship, and with the exception of one audacious sleight-of-hand twist, the story can at times seem more complicated than intricate.
  8. Compliance
    In taut, gripping and deeply disturbing fashion, writer-director Craig Zobel measures the depths to which rational individuals will sink to obey a self-anointed authority figure in Compliance.
  9. Grassroots
    Registers like a quaint display of local color.
  10. Ruby Sparks
    There's little doubt that Kazan has written a sly, amusing portrait of male self-absorption and artistic tyranny.
  11. Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    Though the picture meanders somewhat in the absence of a clear throughline, the focus on Scott's music and electronic experimentation remains strong throughout, thanks to an eclectic roster of musicians and scholars and a generous sampling of his compositions.
  12. The Queen of Versailles
    This timely and involving documentary elicits both sympathy and schadenfreude, as Greenfield regards her all-too-vilifiable subjects with a complexity that should impress viewers of all economic and political persuasions.
  13. Farewell, My Queen
    A well-observed but emotionally muted costume drama that might well have been titled "My Week With Marie Antoinette."
  14. The Imposter
    The Imposter makes slick work of its wily subject, using atmospheric reenactments and stark, soul-baring interviews to explore a mind-boggling case of false identity.
  15. Alps
    The cumulative force of the screenplay and Yorgos Mavropsaridis' editing is not as hypnotic as in "Dogtooth," perhaps in part because those familiar with Lanthimos' m.o. will know what to expect.
  16. Easy Money
    Maria Karlsson's multilayered screenplay makes the film much more than just a crime thriller, beautifully incorporating themes of parents and children, misplaced values, and greed and corruption.
  17. Red Lights
    Instead of adding to the experience, the picture's ill-conceived twists amount to a severe miscalculation on Cortes' part.
  18. China Heavyweight
    As he did in his Three Gorges Dam documentary "Up the Yangtze," Chang examines how a particular strain of Western culture promises opportunity and prosperity for Chinese youth, even as it remains a continual source of intergenerational tension.
  19. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
    If the AIDS crisis has crested, it's due in large part to the radical advocacy group so intelligently portrayed in United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a documentary that could have been a lot angrier but aims to educate rather than agitate.
  20. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Seemingly composed in a laboratory from stray bits of Betty Boop, Sailor Moon and Daphne from "Scooby-Doo," pop princess Katy Perry is the closest thing to a human cartoon the music business has produced since Kiss. This is an impression that concert-tour documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me looks to round out and humanize, and it's successful in a number of strange, seemingly accidental ways.
  21. Crazy Eyes
    These two non-lovers have real chemistry, and it's hard not to be intoxicated by the strange cocktail of watching them together, even as the story appears to be going nowhere.
  22. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    A delightfully scrappy backburner passion project from Jay and Mark Duplass.
  23. Madea's Witness Protection
    The interaction among opposites inspires an abundance of predictable race-based jokes, many of which have the saving grace of actually being funny.
  24. Savages
    Savages never quite captures the novel's diamond-hard sarcasm, it offers other satisfactions in its visceral immediacy, its overriding sense of danger and a clutch of performances that, whatever one's reservations about the characters, can't help but court the viewer's emotional investment.
  25. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Now, the action takes to the sea, where pirates, original songs and a minx-like Jennifer Lopez character make for harmless diversion.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Ride
    Depicting a father-son relationship that's as tough as the Outback, engrossing road movie Last Ride reclaims the Australian landscape from the cartoonish cuteness of Baz Luhrmann's "Australia."
  27. Searching for Sugar Man
    A winning musical detective story about a failed, forgotten early '70s rocker.
  28. The Amazing Spider-Man
    A mostly slick, entertaining and emotionally involving recombination of fresh and familiar elements.
  29. Magic Mike
    Ladies are gonna love Magic Mike, a lively male-stripper meller inspired by Channing Tatum's late-teen, pre-screen stint as an exotic dancer.
  30. Take This Waltz
    Despite a few tonal and structural missteps, this intelligent, perceptive drama proves as intimately and gratifyingly femme-focused as Polley's 2006 debut, "Away From Her."
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