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. Virginia
    A scattershot Southern melodrama that can't decide what it's supposed to be.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Helmer Kirk Jones does a solid job negotiating the material and managing the few tonal shifts when an occasional dark moment emerges.
  3. The Dictator
    Typically, political correctness couldn't be farther from the filmmakers' mind, and yet, what the picture most sorely lacks is the sort of humanist appeal Chaplin delivered at the close of "The Great Dictator."
  4. The Road
    This low-budget shocker eventually pays off, displaying just enough narrative ingenuity to compensate for a cinematically crude and logistically sketchy deployment of the requisite blood-and-guts mayhem.
  5. Girl in Progress
    Never finds its own groove, alternating between high-school dramedy and overworked-single-mom narratives without ever really becoming a mother-and-daughter story until the closing scenes.
  6. Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    A subversive and strange little film noir.
  7. Nesting
    The script unfortunately suffers from its own case of arrested development, barely getting out of the gate before stalling, and never building enough laughs or narrative impetus to justify feature length.
  8. Bonsái
    By turns gentle, deadpan, droll and sarcastic, Jimenez's film reflects on Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" to track a sweet but doomed love affair between literary -- and pleasurably randy -- college students.
  9. Dark Shadows
    This bizarre but weirdly bloodless retro-camp exercise is neither funny nor eerie enough to seduce the uninitiated, and will court bemused reactions at best from the series' still-estimable fan following.
  10. Patience (After Sebald)
    Gee follows Sebald's path with only occasional detours, while intermittently glimpsed talking heads fade in and out of artful black-and-white landscapes.
  11. Under African Skies
    Under African Skies is appreciably smarter than most celebrity musician documentaries.
  12. Sleepless Night
    There's no mistaking Jardin's playful mastery of the Hollywood-style action aesthetic; his movie starts in high gear and accelerates steadily from there.
  13. Portrait of Wally
    Turning over rocks in and around the New York art world, helmer Andrew Shea finds a lot of ugly stuff while chronicling what amounts to a 60-year hostage drama centered around the Egon Schiele oil painting that gives the film its title.
  14. A Bag of Hammers
    First-time feature helmer Brian Crano maneuvers some tricky tonal shifts with impressive ease in A Bag of Hammers, a droll, quirky comedy with a pleasant amount of heart.
  15. Meeting Evil
    The picture could provide modest amusement for indulgent viewers with a taste for tales of loquacious killers and not-so-innocent bystanders.
  16. God Bless America
    While it starts out well, Bobcat Goldthwait's black comedy struggles to maintain focus as it turns into a road trip of diminishing rewards in satirical and narrative terms.
  17. I Wish
    This tale of two elementary-school brothers plotting to end the physical separation their parents' divorce has forced on them effortlessly pulls off the naturalism and charm desired from material that might have easily curdled into calculated preciousness.
  18. Tonight You're Mine
    Picture may not be Scots helmer David Mackenzie's best effort, but it's easily his most lighthearted, a cheery trifle that reps a contrast to his recent pictures, the apocalyptic "Perfect Sense" and U.S.-set comic misfire "Spread."
  19. Chronicling a Crisis
    Just marginally a documentary, Chronicling a Crisis turns out to be one of Amos Kollek's more affecting films.
  20. Mother's Day
    Undistinguished apart from Rebecca De Mornay's performance as an unhinged mama.
  21. Last Call at the Oasis
    Whether the glass is half full or half empty isn't the point of the effervescent Last Call at the Oasis: It's whether there'll be anything in the glass at all.
  22. Dolphin Boy
    A natural fit for nature-film audiences and the edu-tainment market.
  23. The Perfect Family
    Watching a consummate pro like Turner navigate an uneven script, veering from farcical determination, her cheeks puffed like those of a demented chipmunk, to utter devastation, can be immensely entertaining, particularly when she's backed by an able cast, as she is here.
  24. First Position
    The picture combines the built-in drama, tension and suspense of documentaries such as "Spellbound" with exciting, beautifully lensed variations performed by the virtuosos of the future.
  25. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The powerhouse cast is so capable, the actors just about manage to play the picture as if it were a "Midsummer Night's Dream"-style frothy farce, with marigold garlands and picturesque poverty.
  26. A Little Bit of Heaven
    An only fitfully convincing Hudson leads a strong-on-paper cast, but most of the actors look uncomfortable here, particularly Gael Garcia Bernal as her love interest.
  27. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Helmer-writer Lee Kirk's deliberately offbeat romance, a vehicle for wife Fischer, will undoubtedly win friends through its cockeyed-optimistic view of romance.
  28. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Toby Perl Freilich's thought-provoking documentary Inventing Our Life sketches the history of the radically socialist, more-than-100-year-old kibbutz movement.
  29. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    This wildly ambitious rumble-in-the-jungle battle epic arrives bearing so heavy a burden of industry expectations, one wishes the results were less kitschy and more coherent; still, the filmmaking has a raw physicality and crazy conviction it's hard not to admire.
  30. 96 Minutes
    Despite the over-familiarity of its once-trendy time-tripping plot structure, 96 Minutes maintains a brisk pace and generates a satisfying degree of suspense with its credibly contrived tale of disparate lives forever changed by a violent carjacking.
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