Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. One Fall
    Clunky allegorical elements, however, remain unsatisfyingly ambiguous throughout the picture.
  2. Position Among the Stars
    As with his previous pics about the brood, Dutch-Indonesian helmer Leonard Retel Helmrich deploys an expressionistic, quasi-soap-opera approach to produce striking results, thanks especially to use of Steadicam. But the protagonists seem to be playing to the cameras more this time round, making "Stars" a less charming effort than earlier installments.
  3. Silent Souls
    Beautifully assembled, but emotionally inert despite its focus on bereavement and love's endurance, Russian art film Silent Souls reps at the very least a significant step up for its helmer, Aleksei Fedorchenko.
  4. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Alternately hilarious and discomfiting, and finally rather poignant.
  5. Happy, Happy
    Picture ultimately pulls off a fairly ambitious narrative agenda with a wrap both credible and crowdpleasing.
  6. Berlin 36
    The picture sports a strong lead cast but is diminished by TV-style helming and production qualities.
  7. Straw Dogs
    Though competently crafted, Rod Lurie's wholly unnecessary 2011 remake is a film with few notions of its own, and representative of its time only in the commercial sense that home-invasion thrillers are now more prevalent at the multiplex.
  8. The Weird World of Blowfly
    Hanging out with a 1970s cult figure of raunchy R&B "party records" is less fun than one would expect in The Weird World of Blowfly.
  9. Restless
    At once delicate and clumsy, tender and twee, Restless wraps the pain of grief and impending mortality in the balm of a teenage love story.
  10. Jane's Journey
    A worshipful tribute to the life and work of Jane Goodall.
  11. The Mill and the Cross
    Neither conventional costume drama nor abstract objet d'art, this visually ravishing, surprisingly beguiling gamble won't fit any standard arthouse niche. Still it could prove the Polish helmer's belated international breakthrough.
  12. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Sarah Jessica Parker's myriad fans will doubtless appreciate her frazzled warmth in a part she energetically inhabits, but the picture at times feels out of step with contemporary reality and humorless in its adaptation of a comic bestseller.
  13. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    One of the most astonishingly unfunny films of this or any other year.
  14. Mere Brother Ki Dulhan
    Engaging leads, high-end production values, wedding preparations, energetic musical numbers and a familiar story should ensure healthy biz for Mere brother ki dulhan, a lightweight, unambitious three-way romantic comedy whose utter predictability may be its greatest asset.
  15. The Ides of March
    Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.
  16. Moneyball
    While a hopelessly awkward-looking Hill provides fish-out-of-water laughs, Pitt gives a genuinely soul-searching performance.
  17. Killer Elite
    A macho, adrenaline-fix suspenser that plays like the bigscreen equivalent of those pulpy spy novels that once clogged grocery-store checkouts.
  18. Inside Out
    Veering crazily in tone, Inside Out might fail to catapult its star into wider acceptability, but should delight fans of lightly absurd actioners.
  19. A Kiss and a Promise
    Philip Guzman's film offers plenty of intriguing elements, even if the central characters eventually feel too underexplored to fully satisfy.
  20. Brother's Justice
    It's an easy watch that nonetheless consistently feels like a grazing blow rather than a knockout.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shaolin
    Well-mounted Chinese-Hong Kong martial-arts co-production Shaolin elevates enlightenment above brute strength, but weak helming undercuts the pic's punch.
  22. Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    For most of its running time, Fordson wanders far from the gridiron to offer overall impressions of a close-knit community of Arab-Americans who, in the wake of 9/11, often have found themselves targeted and stereotyped as militant Islamists or worse.
  23. Grave Encounters
    The picture's creepiness factor is sufficient to rate this a notch above genre average.
  24. Echotone
    There's a potentially fascinating and appreciably more concise 60-minute documentary to be found somewhere amid the uneven and unfocused 88-minute hodgepodge that is Echotone.
  25. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Assembly is brisk and high-grade, allowing for the variable quality of archival materials.
  26. Where Soldiers Come From
    Covering their lives with intimate access from before boot camp to the difficult return home, Heather Courtney's documentary packs a savage but understated punch.
  27. We Were Here
    We Were Here concentrates on the impressive way a collective of disenfranchised individuals came together to support one another in this time of crisis. In that respect, the title has dual meanings, referring to both the film's "Shoah"-like survivors' testimony and the fact that the gay community was there for one another at a time that government and medicine were slow to respond.
  28. Tanner Hall
    Refigured from a never-made TV pilot, this shallow boarding school-set coming-of-ager traverses familiar territory without offering anything fresh.
  29. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Like any mixtape, it offers some truly transcendent moments alongside a smattering of filler, and never quite assembles its pieces into a cohesive whole.
  30. Drive
    Starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stuntman/getaway driver, Drive takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process.
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