Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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  1. The Hollars
    Krasinki’s film remains resolutely resistant to surprise in style or story terms.
  2. Other People
    While Chris Kelly’s semi-autobiographical writing-directing debut gets off to a painfully broad start, it does intermittently find its footing as it progresses, gathering enough well-observed moments and details to counterbalance its otherwise flailing stabs at humor and pathos.
  3. Equity
    While the severity of the film’s environment convinces, the specifics of Amy Fox’s screenplay — tangled up in tech IPOs, post-Snowden security paranoia and venal investment banking practice — are less consistently persuasive.
  4. Pandemic
    This is a solid if not quite memorable entry in the ever-expanding canon of survivalist undead cinema.
  5. Innocence of Memories
    It’s an occupational hazard of rambling psychogeography that the unwary traveller will find themselves irritated as often as they are enthralled: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Gee negotiates this hurdle with variable success.
  6. Glassland
    Rather than presenting a nuanced ending that’s open to interpretation, Barrett simply leaves us scratching our heads as to what just happened.
  7. The Light Between Oceans
    The Light Between Oceans winds up taking one too many self-serious twists and turns. The film earns its darkness, but it might have been even more affecting if it didn’t shrink from the light.
  8. A Hologram for the King
    A Hologram for the King arrives at its feel-good conclusion honestly enough, but its cultural engagement feels tentative, even secondhand: The movie conjures no shortage of potent images, but push a bit deeper and your fist closes on empty air.
  9. Transformers: The Last Knight
    For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.
  10. Funny or Die Presents: Donald Trump's the Art of the Deal: The Movie
    Other than skewering Trump, both personally and politically, this is obviously a rather slim construct. And while Depp throws his all into perhaps his hammiest role since Jack Sparrow, it probably would have benefited from a bit less length and a tighter focus.
  11. Becoming Mike Nichols
    If the material feels inadequate for a freestanding doc, that’s no fault of Nichols, who’s on playful, perspicacious form.
  12. Barney Thomson
    Thompson elevates and enervates every scene she’s in.
  13. Hands of Stone
    Gets the job done, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re watching a routinely conceived, rather generic boxing flick. It’s utterly competent, yet it makes Duran’s story seem a little so-what?
  14. Sweet Bean
    Just as An itself seems on the verge of flying away, however, Kawase rewards her audience with an unapologetically contrived but effectively eye-moistening surge of feeling.
  15. Valley of Love
    There are gentle rewards to be gained from the initially brittle, gradually tender rapport between two actors of contrasting greatness.
  16. Going in Style
    Going in Style coasts along on the testy spiky charms of its leading men, who have 246 years of life on earth between them (Caine is 84, Freeman 79, and Arkin 83), but it’s nothing more than an amiable connect-the-dots movie.
  17. The Monkey King 2
    Certainly less of a dud than the director’s inane original, this follow-up is even more tyke-oriented, but at least it’s a livelier yarn and boasts a slick upgrade in visual effects.
  18. The First Monday in May
    Detailing the eight-month build-up to the show’s debut, First Monday in May is most compelling when simply taking up residence alongside Bolton, Wintour and Wong as they oversee the myriad aspects of their production.
  19. 13 Cameras
    Zarcoff does a good job building tension.
  20. In a Valley of Violence
    We never get more than a glimmer of personality within these well-worn character types, and West never digs beneath them to offer any sort of commentary or criticism.
  21. Thank You for Playing
    Even the flaws of Thank You for Playing have the effect of underscoring its humanity; the movie may immortalize a creative endeavor, but it never loses sight of the fact that it’s also honoring a life.
  22. Lights Out
    Very obviously a first feature, Lights Out is full of camp (most of it clearly intentional, some perhaps not), and its underlying mythology is confused and often ridiculous. But there’s an invigorating leanness — and a giddy, almost innocent energy — to the filmmaking.
  23. I Went Down
    Though McDonald and Gleeson pair off well as the unlikely fellow travelers, and have some funny moments of physical shtick, the picture mostly springs to life when either Caffrey, as Grogan, or the excellent Doyle, as French, are onscreen.
  24. Café Society
    The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it’s a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.
  25. Our Kind of Traitor
    The shattering of one’s noble ideals is a delicate thing to capture on film, and White plays the moment of rupture with a banality that threatens to undermine our faith in her as storyteller more than in the system itself.
  26. Cloro
    A well-crafted if incompletely satisfying drama whose character study intrigues but ultimately feels somewhat frustratingly underdeveloped.
  27. Chongqing Hot Pot
    “Hot Pot” loses focus with sloppy sentimentality and heavy-duty violence that dilutes the story’s early charm. The end result is entertaining enough if not particularly memorable.
  28. Mad Tiger
    This aptly colorful documentary doesn’t provide all that much insight into the act’s history, and the human conflicts aren’t fully illuminated, either. But it’s fun entering these performers’ universe even with a less than all-access pass.
  29. Sworn Virgin
    [A] sensitive, deliberate debut feature.
  30. The Take
    It’s Watkins’ lean, keen instinct for choreographing and cutting action set pieces that keeps Bastille Day afloat.
  31. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    Benefiting enormously from its evocative Sicilian setting, this widescreen experience makes bewitching use of space, time and sound, creating an almost meditative atmosphere in which patient-minded auds might respond to its themes.
  32. Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands
    Students of the astonishing body of films won’t find much that enhances their understanding, yet Thomsen’s footage offers more than mere scraps from a great career, and deserves inclusion in the corpus.
  33. Paterson
    Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.
  34. Personal Shopper
    This reunion between Kristen Stewart and the director who gave her one of her best-ever roles in 2014’s “Clouds of Sils Maria” is a broken, but never boring mix of spine-tingling horror story, dreary workplace drama and elliptical identity search, likely to go down as one of the most divisive films of Stewart’s career.
  35. Blood Father
    Blood Father is trash, but it does capture what an accomplished and winning actor Mel Gibson can be. Just because he lost his bearings, and his career, doesn’t mean that he lost his talent.
  36. Incarnate
    Offers a relatively fresh take on standard-issue exorcism-melodrama tropes, along with a performance by Aaron Eckhart that is more than persuasive enough to encourage the investment of a rooting interest.
  37. Rules Don't Apply
    Beatty tries hard to re-create the look and feel of late-’50s Hollywood as it existed both on-screen and off, aided by DP Caleb Deschanel and terrific costume and set contributions. And yet, it actually comes off too conservative for its own time, with stiff performances from Collins and Ehrenreich.
  38. Mimosas
    Those familiar with the ethnographic works of Ben Rivers (who gets a thanks in the closing credits) and the films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”) will find much to admire in the movie’s combination of spiritual musings and stunning landscapes.
  39. The Blackout Experiments
    The result is interesting enough, but feels a bit overextended at feature length considering the limited insight afforded.
  40. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    The docu’s hyperactive editing and visuals eventually grow a tad monotonous, undercutting some of this life story’s poignancy.
  41. Len and Company
    Amid the film’s narrative lulls and lapses, it’s the actors who hold our attention.
  42. Seoul Searching
    Lee’s movie at once examines and embodies the complicated riddle of cultural identity: Beneath its boozy antics and largely predictable narrative developments, it offers warmly perceptive insights into how difficult it can be for so many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants to define themselves.
  43. The Dog Lover
    It’s a prosaic piece of muckraking, shot in a functional flat visual style, but it grazes a nerve.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sugarland Express
    Unfortunately, the film degenerates in final reels to heavy-handed social polemic and sound-and-fury shootout.
  45. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.
  46. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    As the hours roll slowly past, it’s hard not to feel that this epic achievement in monotonous misery might have retained its impact at a fraction of the length, and that even our grimmest truth-tellers might well find themselves capable of saying more with less.
  47. Phantom Boy
    Though Felicioli and Gagnol’s visuals suggest colorful kidlit illustrations come to life, their labor-intensive style isn’t for everyone.
  48. Atomic Blonde
    Virtuosic kick-ass filmmaking can be its own reward, but to paraphrase “Idiocracy,” you still need to care about whose ass it is, and why it’s being kicked.
  49. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    It’s not that “My Love” feels inherently dubious; it’s that its execution is just a little too smiling-through-tears slick to be swallowed whole.
  50. Paint It Black
    As directorial debuts go, Amber Tamblyn’s Paint It Black is kind of a mess, but then, so are its characters, which makes the film’s raw, off-kilter style somehow right for the material.
  51. Tracktown
    What the film lacks in originality, it makes up for via its star’s naturally glamor-resistant sensibility, giving us an unpolished glimpse into the personal life of a professional runner.
  52. The Discovery
    Though The Discovery starts out with a great premise, its mystery dissipates over a somewhat tepid course as the concept ultimately heads in a direction we’ve seen many times before, and depends overmuch on chemistry that fails to materialize between stars Jason Segel and Rooney Mara.
  53. All Eyez on Me
    Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.
  54. Raman Raghav 2.0
    Psycho Raman often entertains most with its most lurid formal, musical and narrative gambits.
  55. The Foreigner
    The Foreigner amounts to an above-average but largely by-the-numbers action movie in which Chan does battle with generic thugs and shadowy political forces.
  56. The Love Witch
    The fact that the films that serve as her models often sported the same flaws doesn’t excuse this fairly poker-faced spoof’s sometimes borderline-torpid pace and disappointing fade-out.
  57. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    Though relatively conservative in its approach, Lars Kraume’s teleplay-style treatment of a still-touchy subject has the nerve to name names.
  58. Demon
    Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.
  59. Sea Fog
    This directing debut by helmer-scribe Shim Sung-bo echoes Bong’s trademark cynical vision of human nature, but the characters lack dimensionality and psychological depth.
  60. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    This revamp (which ignores several interim direct-to-video sequels Van Damme did not participate in) is a bit shorter, a tad more stylish, and utilizes the same clichés a little less ponderously.
  61. The Violators
    This study of adolescent desire and alienation across class lines takes its time nurturing a tensely ambiguous relationship between its two young female leads — alertly played by newcomers Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis — only to squander a measure of that intrigue on a blunt third-act twist.
  62. The Commune
    For Vinterberg, this uneven but nonetheless absorbing pic at least marks a return to characteristically bristly territory.
  63. Women He's Undressed
    The film overstays its welcome by punctuating his story with ill-advised dramatic fantasy sequences that are meant to illustrate the anguish of a gay man in mid-century America, but come across as heavy-handed and mean-spirited.
  64. Ithaca
    By turns poignant and plodding, affecting and affected, Ithaca is the sort of frustrating movie that’s just good enough to make you wish it were a lot better.
  65. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    It comes as little surprise that Howard, a nimble and proficient storyteller in non-fiction and fiction like, hasn’t a natural documentarian’s drive for information: This diverting, brightly assembled boomer nostalgia trip won’t open the eyes of any existing Fab Four fans, however much it pleases their ears.
  66. The Bad Batch
    Though there’s much to savor in the pic’s lavishly distressed visuals and soundscape, its narrative feels increasingly stretched and desultory.
  67. T2 Trainspotting
    Where “Trainspotting’s” dive into the void was targeted, bristling with snarky anger at a Conservative system that provided few lifelines, “T2” — despite landing in a Britain once more under divisive Tory rule — is mostly content to let its characters alternately indulge and excoriate themselves.
  68. The Eagle Huntress
    Like Disney’s “True-Life Adventures” of yore, it educates while deploying some likely sleight-of-hand, and doesn’t really invite the kind of methodological scrutiny a more verite-style documentary would.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Viva
    Viva...is faithful to those cult-adored obscurities in nearly every detail, including their soporific pace. Here, however, sly in-jokes come often enough to make said pacing funny in itself. Performances are slightly stilted or over-the-top in ways true to the original genre.
  70. Priceless
    The screenplay by Chris Dowling and Tyler Poelle is, at best, predictable pulp with a smidgen of religion. Indeed, the characters are so thinly written that they are defined entirely by the actors portraying them. But director Ben Smallbone (brother of the movie’s lead player) is adept at generating suspense.
  71. The Model
    The screenplay by Matthiessen and co-writers Martin Pieter Zandvliet and Anders Frithiof August is compelling up until the melodramatic, credulity-straining final act, although the characters, apart from Emma, feel underdeveloped.
  72. AWOL
    Deb Shoval’s uneven first feature demonstrates greater assurance in conveying a sense of place (the filmmaker’s native northeastern Pennsylvania) than it does with narrative and character development.
  73. Zoom
    Morelli and tyro scribe Matt Hansen unpack this Charlie Kaufman-lite premise with more cleverness than wit, struggling particularly to find the right racy tone for various erotic interludes — but the part-toon pic’s neatly collapsing structure and pop-art flourishes ensure it’s never dull.
  74. Miss Stevens
    A tougher, wiser film might still have extended the characters a measure of compassion, but it might also have left the audience with a deeper curiosity about where life’s challenges could take them next.
  75. A Dog's Purpose
    Viewed in a vacuum, it’s hard to fault the movie’s earnestness; Hallström’s canine cinema pedigree (which includes the superior “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale”) shows through; and Rachel Portman’s score is understandably sentimental without going completely saccharine.
  76. In Dubious Battle
    The movie gives us bits and pieces of drama, but in a larger way it doesn’t invite us in.
  77. Fences
    Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.
  78. Maudie
    What little dimension Maudie offers is a direct result of Hawkins’ contributions, which draw from her character’s past to add texture to her performance.
  79. 20th Century Women
    20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.
  80. The Apostate
    Gonzalo’s dalliances add up to precious little, but Veiroj’s comic tone finds purchase in his absurd run-ins with the bishop and a church so unwilling to lose a member from the rolls that they’ll stick him in a bureaucratic roundabout until he gives up.
  81. Rat Film
    Artfully assembled and often entertaining, the diverse whole nonetheless doesn’t quite gel, with the film finally coming off as somewhat pretentious and heavy-handed.
  82. Blair Witch
    Setting up a number of promising kinks in the now-standard found-footage formula, as the seemingly spooked forest begins to close in its hapless victims, Blair Witch disappointingly casts most of them aside for a finale that does little to advance the series’ existing mythos.
  83. Eternity
    Éternité is a meditative, gorgeous-looking film imbued with such gentle sensitivity that it’s difficult to dislike. Yet the experience of watching it is much like sitting in an opulent garden café on a glorious spring morning, waiting for a meal that never arrives.
  84. Catfight
    That it succeeds more often than not is due in no small part to Heche and Oh, who are wonderfully unafraid to make their characters deplorable people, and also able to invest their downfalls with sincere pathos, complicating any schadenfreude one might be expecting to find.
  85. Never Ever
    It’s Roy, having written herself a part for which many actresses would patiently wait, who does the heavy lifting here: Playing a woman who’s either losing her mind or playing dangerously at it, with as much attention paid to body language as befits her character’s artistic calling, she makes a revelatory, slightly otherworldly impression.
  86. The Untamed
    While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.
  87. Wakefield
    Cranston humanizes his sociopathic character, which is essential, considering that Wakefield is essentially a one-man show whose star grows increasingly creepy as his beard fills in and his fingernails lengthen and turn back.
  88. Rats
    Rats is that rare breed of nature doc, one designed not to foster greater empathy for a misunderstood species, but rather to exploit our preexisting fears of the filthy critters in question.
  89. A Street Cat Named Bob
    Unpretentiously touching on the page, this material feels stretched a bit thin on film, with televisual production values and a samey song score doing little to enrich matters: Still, it’s sweetly hopeful .
  90. Belle Épine
    Unfolding with the disjointed logic of a bad dream, the pic never catches emotional fire — though not for lack of trying by fast-rising young star Lea Seydoux, who shows her range in a defiantly unglamorous performance.
  91. Don't Look Down
    A solid, and solidly engaging film that nevertheless feels like an extended promo for the Branson brand.
  92. 150 Milligrams
    Televisually presented and arduously overlong at 127 minutes, 150 Milligrams can’t always separate the compelling personal stakes of its narrative from its surfeit of informational minutiae.
  93. Mulan
    Storyboarded to within an inch of its life, then translated to screen with stunning energy and attention to detail, the film represents Hollywood’s most enthusiastic embrace of blockbuster Asian cinema tropes since “The Matrix” trilogy.
  94. XX
    Even at their least individually striking, each of these mismatched tasters stirs an appetite for a fuller, meatier meal from its maker — cooked as bloodily rare as possible, please.
  95. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.
  96. SiREN
    Siren is lively if occasionally rough around the edges, packing a satisfying amount of action and a couple of amusingly nasty surprises into its short running time.
  97. Gifted
    Gifted wants to be an “honest” tearjerker, but it’s as plotted out as an equation on a blackboard. It’s the undergirding of formula that roots the movie in the commercial marketplace, but that may ultimately limit its appeal.
  98. The Last Word
    Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.
  99. Sky on Fire
    There’s really nothing new here. Still, it’s hard to deny the sporadically satisfying nostalgic appeal of this dash down memory lane.
  100. Beyond the Gates
    This fun if unmemorable occult thriller sports — all too faithfully at times — both the typical pleasures and shortcomings of the movies it pays homage to.
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