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. Deadline
    Although helmer Curt Hahn champions the causes of racial justice and crusading journalism, he can't seem to find a tone that's consistent or that befits the gravity of his subject matter.
  2. Late Bloomers
    While the world could certainly use more films about characters entering their sunset years, a solution as toothless and saggy as Julie Gavras' Late Bloomers does little to help the cause.
  3. Life Happens
    The film is ultimately an untenable muddle.
  4. Hit So Hard
    Though stylistically incoherent at times, picture benefits from the percussionist's plainspokenness.
  5. Blue Like Jazz
    Remains as tame in its presentation as its target audience would expect. Students drink beers on occasion, but no one is shown having sex, taking mind-altering substances or using language that would jeopardize a PG-13 rating. On the plus side, the film also abstains from any overt message-mongering.
  6. Monsieur Lazhar
    Quietly intelligent and respectable.
  7. Lockout
    Tackles a nifty futuristic premise with bargain-basement efficiency and a deadpan, devil-may-care attitude. It's an initially invigorating tactic that proves slapdash and unsatisfying over the long haul, reducing a potentially rich sci-fier to the level of a halfway decent time-killer
  8. MIS Human Secret Weapon
    Junichi Suzuki's documentary ratchets up the sentiment when a cooler touch would have sufficed.
  9. Post Mortem
    Pablo Larrain's breathtaking visual command makes for enthralling viewing in Post Mortem, a rigorous, formally controlled yet emotionally gripping drama set during Chile's bloody 1973 military coup.
  10. Your Sister's Sister
    After putting male insecurity under a comic microscope in "Humpday," writer-director Lynn Shelton hands the fairer sex a more prominent role in Your Sister's Sister, another winning study of relational boundaries crossed and sexual dares gone awry.
  11. American Reunion
    While it's poignant seeing the whole gang again, the tired gross-out antics and limp romantic reprisals keep this hapless if heartfelt effort from qualifying as a decent comedy, let alone a generational classic.
  12. Surviving Progress
    Progress does a remarkable job weaving together these and many other big ideas in a crisp, coherent, easy-to-take fashion that somehow never becomes an informational overload.
  13. We the Party
    This South Los Angeles-set dramedy flirts with terminal stereotypes and high-school movie cliches right and left.
  14. We Have a Pope
    The results veer between occasional smiles and outright pretension, with only Piccoli's mastery transcending the material.
  15. Keyhole
    Maddin's singular humor and fabulous black-and-white mise-en-scene can't sustain this fever dream beyond its initial fascination, making for an intriguing transitional work unlikely to broaden his audience.
  16. Detention
    What starts as a bracing rush quickly devolves into a deadening assault of stimuli.
  17. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    Spurlock brings his usual good-humored approach to the subject, nicely balancing absurdity with genuine human interest.
  18. Iron Sky
    Much more amusing in theory than in execution.
  19. Damsels in Distress
    Stillman proves he still knows how to write crackling, articulate dialogue for quirky preppie characters whom he loves laughing at as much as with.
  20. Dark Tide
    It's a murky sea that surrounds Dark Tide. A soap opera with shark attacks, picture contains a few alarming sequences but loses its grip on its material -- and the viewer -- in a swirling vortex of visual confusion.
  21. Mirror Mirror
    Poised between revisionist fairy tale and smirking sendup, this gaudy, over-frosted cream puff of a movie half-heartedly positions its famous heroine as a dagger-wielding proto-feminist, yet ultimately suffers the same fatal flaw as Julia Roberts' evil queen: It doesn't really care about anything except how pretty it looks.
  22. Wrath of the Titans
    It's a mess too, but it's far more defensible as a lazy Sunday lark for those who have just recently outgrown action figures.
  23. Womb
    Its quietly unsettling storytelling, precision visuals and almost mythical isolated setting all feel Hungarian to the core.
  24. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    Although this family-friendly tale of feckless adventurers pursuing a prize is consistently funnier than "Arthur," in language, humor and attitude it's as endearingly British as Yorkshire pudding, soccer hooliganism and wonky teeth.
  25. Intruders
    A fitfully creepy, overly protracted chiller that plays more like a noncommittal sampler of horror techniques than the vivid nightmare it's clearly aiming for.
  26. Goon
    The picture has a first-rate team of actors who visibly enjoy their roles and the sharp dialogue by Baruchel and Goldberg.
  27. Bully
    Lee Hirsch's "The Bully Project" serves as a call to action against abuse of students by their peers as it follows, over the course of a year, five sobering case histories of unrelenting schoolyard persecution.
  28. The Island President
    In the face of rising sea levels, the Maldive Islands are the Alamo, and environmental crusader Mohamed Nasheed is their Davy Crockett. Boasting astonishing access, director Jon Shenk's The Island President documents a brave battle against overwhelming odds.
  29. Losing Control
    Some of Weiss' funniest material gets lost between episodes of outright silliness; to paraphrase Mark Twain's assessment of Richard Wagner, the film is smarter than it looks.
  30. The Trouble with Bliss
    One can guess how the elements here might have been alluring on the page, but helmer/co-scenarist Michael Knowles' third feature doesn't find the distinctive tone needed to make its eccentric characters less than irksome and its plot more than arbitrary.
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