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. Griff the Invisible
    The Melody-Griff evolution is the sweetest part of "Griff the Invisible," and has a certain charm. But anyone looking for a superhero movie is going to be disappointed.
  2. Mozart's Sister
    Feminist without the arrogance of 20-20 hindsight, vividly precise in its depiction of 18th-century pre-revolutionary France (the filmmakers were allowed to shoot inside Versailles), alive with exuberantly thesped personages and awash in the joy and power of music, the picture is a stunner.
  3. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Rather than trying to frighten adults, this entire R-rated exercise feels engineered to emotionally scar any younger audiences who should happen to see it -- much as the original did del Toro back in the day.
  4. Our Idiot Brother
    Picture needs every ounce of goodwill it can wring from Rudd's likable lead performance to offset a sour, borderline misogynistic streak for which scattered snickers offer only modest compensation.
  5. Flypaper
    Strenuous and just fitfully amusing.
  6. Amigo
    Good intentions can't breathe fresh life into cliches or dispel the overall impression of schematic didacticism.
  7. Damn!
    Even at 73 minutes, the film is, well, too damn long.
  8. Aarakshan
    While its questions of affirmative action and charter schools could theoretically resonate with American audiences, the picture's corny theatrics, talky, preachy approach and taxing 164-minute running time will not translate.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    You might leave Glee 3D feeling a little gooey all over, but that slushie does taste kind of sweet.
  10. Final Destination 5
    This latest entry in the 11-year-old horror series duly adheres to tradition by providing inventively grisly demises for various characters.
  11. Bad Posture
    Bad dialogue and bad acting might convince some of the authenticity behind Bad Posture, but there's no getting around the tedious navel-gazing of Malcolm Murray's fiction debut.
  12. Summer Pasture
    A remarkably intimate documentary woven out of tradition and change, and the endearing subjects who contend with both.
  13. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Though treating women's oppression as a political issue isn't exactly new, the clarity with which it's spelled out in Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story is both bold and brave.
  14. The Last Circus
    Loud, tedious and unattractive in every sense, this barrage of blood set during the Franco regime combines the helmer's customary cartoonishness with horror and ups it a thousand notches.
  15. Senna
    Footage from an onboard camera thrillingly places the viewer in Senna's lap, and soberingly includes the accident that claimed his life.
  16. Littlerock
    Well-crafted picture has a nice sense of place and rudderless youth, though in the end, simply too little happens for the story to have much resonance.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    Audiences get an eyeful of flesh, served with sadistic, spasmodic laughs.
  18. Habermann
    More soap opera than high drama, the film is confused and confusing, and tedious to boot.
  19. The Help
    A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white audiences, The Help personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963.
  20. 30 Minutes or Less
    "Less" has trouble framing simple action, yielding clumsy car chases that put the burden of generating excitement on the music and editing. As a result, pic looks cheap and feels clipped.
  21. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    Unfortunately, the unconvincing fictional storyline Rosenbaum weaves around this solid musical base hits every meller cliche in the "self-destructive rock star" playbook.
  22. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Thanks to stunning advances in performance capture technology, director Rupert Wyatt successfully ditches the cumbersome makeup appliances of past chapters, building the story around a cast of photoreal CG simians convincing enough to identify with as characters, rather than just special effects.
  23. The Change-Up
    If "Freaky Friday" had an impudent, foul-mouthed little brother, it would be The Change-Up, an often needlessly crass, bromance-oriented spin on the body-swap comedy.
  24. Mysteries of Lisbon
    A handsomely mounted adaptation of the like-titled Portuguese novel, Ruiz's 4 1/2-hour epic establishes the essential ambiguity of its chameleonic characters from the get-go and proceeds thereby, with riveting results and revelations that continue right to the end.
  25. Gun Hill Road
    Earnest and well cast, but less involving than it should be.
  26. Cold Fish
    Like most Sono pictures, too long. But its gleeful humor and dare-you-to-watch aesthetic will help it rack up kills at specialty fests.
  27. The Whistleblower
    This accomplished debut feature avoids most of the usual pitfalls, channeling its outrage into a tense, focused piece of storytelling with a powerful sense of empathy.
  28. Bellflower
    A likely cult hit among horror fans and a gleeful affront to more delicate sensibilities, Bellflower takes the young-adult romantic-comedy blueprint and subjects it to a kind of devilish origami, creating a disturbed and disturbing parable about young male fantasies, fears and avoidance of adulthood.
  29. The Harvest/La Cosecha
    The Harvest/La Cosecha, whose exec producers include actress Eva Longoria, has few artistic pretensions, but its observations are potent.
  30. Golf in the Kingdom
    In this shoestring outing, Susan Streitfeld ("Female Perversions") opts for an unsettling mix of low-tech cinematic tricks and temporal reshufflings to simulate the process of enlightenment to sometimes laudable, usually ludicrous effect.
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