Variety's Scores

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For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
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  1. Central Intelligence
    It delivers — on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. It’s an action-comedy utensil, like “Rush Hour” crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
  2. American Renegades
    While not particularly inspired, memorable or suspenseful, the action here is impressively scaled, from a tank plunging off a bridge to helicopter stunts and all that diving activity. It may have been a bad investment, but technically first-rate American Renegades does put its considerable budgetary resources right up there onscreen.
  3. The Barber
    The Barber is a slick but ultimately underwhelming psychochiller.
  4. Manos Sucias
    Although it sports a few fresh moments, the tonally all-over-the-place drama is hampered by script and assembly problems.
  5. Eddie the Eagle
    The pic gets quite a lot of mileage out of several note-perfect musical choices...and Fletcher includes just enough odd angles and quirky compositions to suggest a slightly stranger, loopier vision for this film lurking somewhere beneath.
  6. The Sisterhood of Night
    An alternately sensitive and heavy-handed small-town drama that turns the Salem witchcraft trials into a tenuous metaphor for the intense pressures brought to bear on today’s female youth.
  7. The Magnificent Seven
    Fuqua is trying for John Ford meets Sergio Leone: a funky classical sweep, with room for delirious shootouts. The trouble is that he mimics the trademarks of those directors without their élan, and the plot that was once catchy is now rote.
  8. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt substantial audiences, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in fact a moderately entertaining film, not deficient in old-fashioned costume drama when it pleases, nor in the power of being clever where it chooses, but awkward and unsatisfying.
  9. Live From New York!
    Live From New York! registers as simultaneously too outsider and too insider — a perfect definition of mainstream media itself.
  10. Ardor
    Fendrik seems more interested in the rich jungle surroundings than in the generic human struggle in the foreground, alternating between clunky setpieces (such as the sitting-duck rowboat shootout) and long stretches where the characters say nothing.
  11. Reset
    Reset strings together a series of hit-and-miss ideas that never deliver an “aha!” payoff.
  12. Soul Boys of the Western World
    TV-style and desperately in need of cutting, “Soul Boys” does convincingly position its subjects as key trendsetters, and their most memorable tunes continue to be enjoyable.
  13. 6 Years
    Although shot and performed in a determinedly raw, naturalistic register, this emotionally roiling portrait of two twentysomething Texas sweethearts too often veers toward melodramatic overstatement, inspiring little empathy or understanding despite the committed performances of promising young leads Taissa Farmiga and Ben Rosenfield.
  14. Learning to Drive
    It’s no stretch for Kingsley to project stiff dignity and forthrightness, but that familiarity works against him here, despite his every effort to give the character a human pulse. Clarkson, expert at bringing authenticity to the most inauthentic material, gets to show far more range.
  15. Aloft
    In the end, everything fits together rather ingeniously, though it’s clear that in orchestrating her needlessly complicated nonlinear narrative, Llosa has mistaken confusion for suspense.
  16. The Little Death
    The actors are all game and well paired, but flashes of chemistry and an appreciable level of production finesse (courtesy of d.p. Simon Chapman and composer Michael Yezerski) aren’t enough to bring the requisite charge to this flimsy, pseudo-provocative material.
  17. Ride
    Where the film falters is in the writing of its central relationship: That Jackie and Angelo love each other fiercely doesn’t make their interactions any less hard to take, and Australian newcomer Thwaites (“Maleficent,” “Son of a Gun”), despite his ample charisma and pitch-perfect American accent, can’t quite get past his character’s callow, whiny affect.
  18. Dirty Weekend
    Airless visual treatment and mannered performances compound the impression that LaBute might have been better off saving this material for the stage, though it’d be a pretty tame trifle in either context.
  19. Storks
    In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.
  20. Set Fire to the Stars
    Its appreciation of Thomas’ work remains superficial, while the polished filmmaking never quite finds its own poetry.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Celebration
    A propulsively inventive but uneven family comedy-cum-melodrama.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Far from the Madding Crowd
    Julie Christie, Peter Finch, Terence Stamp and Alan Bates are variedly handsome and have their many effective moments, but there is little they can ultimately and lastingly do to overcome the basic banality of their characters and, to a certain degree, their lines.
  23. Maya the Bee Movie
    All told, in giving parents nothing to object to, director Alexs Stadermann (who got his start making straight-to-video sequels for Disney) has also given them little to get excited about, apart from the idea of sharing Maya with another generation of preschoolers.
  24. Anesthesia
    The ensemble labors sincerely to bring Nelson’s dense, frequently didactic writing to life, though it can be a hard task.
  25. American Ultra
    Too often plays like an earnest yet unsatisfying adaptation of a cult graphic novel, with most of the charm lost in translation.
  26. We Are Your Friends
    We Are Your Friends” has its heart in the right place, and it’s shrewd and cuddly enough to get a few likes. But it would be an infinitely better movie if it sustained the sort of trancelike sonic ecstasy that turns fans into fanatics.
  27. Wild Horses
    Tonally dissonant and narratively disjointed, Wild Horses plays like a patchwork quilt of scenes excerpted from a much longer movie, or maybe even a miniseries.
  28. By the Sea
    By the Sea always offers something to tickle the eye and ear, even as it leaves the heart and mind coolly unstirred.
  29. Dark Was the Night
    Solid performances help the dramatic aspects achieve at least some of the gravity aimed for, which in turn helps elevate the proceedings a notch above standard horror suspense until the final reel’s requisite violent payoff.
  30. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    [Portman's] drearily empathetic film lacks whatever universality has made “Tale” such an international phenomenon.
  31. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    It longs to be a close-to-the-bone lampoon in the scathing spirit of Christopher Guest, and it has a few amusing moments, but it’s really a predigested one-joke comedy. It’s less an honest satire than an overscaled satirical package.
  32. What We Did on Our Holiday
    Re-creating the show’s winning formula of three amiably precocious young children trading smarts with fondly exasperated parents, the pic swings for a much more eventful story arc, with mixed results.
  33. Lila & Eve
    Although Davis’ performance is so good here, it’s tough to know where the real world ends and the vendetta fantasy begins.
  34. The Program
    In the film’s richest performance, Plemons beautifully teases out the ambiguities and potential hypocrisies of Landis’ own moral position, tracing Armstrong’s slippery downward spiral almost in spite of himself.
  35. The Midnight Swim
    For much of the running time, The Midnight Swim is effectively ambiguous, but Smith’s decision to play coy with the sisters’ backstories eventually frustrates.
  36. Stung
    In a movie that should have gone for funnier or scarier (ideally both), there’s way too much eventual emphasis on the leads’ uninspired evolving romance.
  37. Closer to God
    The result is ultimately admirable more for what it resists — the usual sci-fi horror exploitation cliches — than for the watchable yet somewhat underwhelming impact of a narrative that feels perhaps a little too reined-in for its own good.
  38. 10 Cent Pistol
    Martin’s screenplay is so tricky in the plot-twist and scrambled-chronology departments, there’s little attention left to limn the character depths that might make us more invested in sussing out so many double- and triple-crosses.
  39. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    It’s a nail-biter and a head-scratcher rolled into one: The mind may initially race to keep up with logistics, but eventually one acknowledges the futility of trying to make sense of a situation that Bay himself hasn’t managed to clarify.
  40. Jenny's Wedding
    While the fine cast teases out glimmers of nuance here and there, Mary Agnes Donoghue’s film plays like a series of hand-holding growth exercises for closed-minded conservatives, and relies too heavily on its tying-the-knot finale for both dramatic momentum and emotional closure.
  41. 90 Minutes in Heaven
    Christensen underplays throughout 90 Minutes in Heaven, even in scenes when Piper isn’t operating under the influence of painkillers, and his earnestness often comes off as monotonous. Still, he generates interest and sympathy, almost in spite of himself, and Bosworth lends capable support as a loyal spouse.
  42. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    The first “Jurassic World” was, quite simply, not a good ride. “Fallen Kingdom” is an improvement, but it’s the first “Jurassic” film to come close to pretending it isn’t a ride at all, and as a result it ends up being just a passable ride.
  43. Cub
    Jonas Govaerts’ first feature is a pastiche of familiar horror elements that’s well crafted throughout, but falls prey to the common dilemma of finding a payoff worthy of the buildup.
  44. Final Girl
    A mildly intriguing thriller of comeuppance that leaves you wanting more — not more archly stylized violence or repetitive revenge fantasy, perhaps, but more insight into the connection between the eponymous assassin (Abigail Breslin) and her highly skilled mentor (Wes Bentley).
  45. War Room
    It’s easy to laugh at the arrant contrivances and heavy-handed dialogue in the script penned by Alex and Stephen Kendrick. But it’s even easier to admire the persuasive sincerity and emotional potency of the lead performances by Shirer and Stallings, who do not transcend their material so much as imbue it with conviction.
  46. Dad's Army
    Amiable to a fault, with gags both broad and gentle, Oliver Parker’s pic prompts sporadic chuckles rather than guffaws.
  47. The 5th Wave
    Enough of Yancey’s ambitious narrative has made the final cut to reflect an arrestingly original spin on trendy genre tropes.
  48. Leatherface
    This “origin story” is a somewhat mixed bag. But it’s also an earnest and well-crafted attempt at course-correction, straying from stock slasher recyclage to provide a different story that actually connects a few dots in the very tangled cinematic “Chainsaw” universe to date.
  49. Wolf Totem
    Despite its magnificent natural vistas and some pulse-pounding action in stunning 3D, Wolf Totem boils down to a familiar environmentalist allegory that doesn’t move or provoke too deeply.
  50. High-Rise
    What began as a self-contained allegory on open class warfare becomes a showcase for stylistic anarchy, wherein the ensuing orgy of sex and violence serves to justify a near-total breakdown of cinematic form.
  51. A Christmas Horror Story
    None is particularly original (though there is one good final twist), but they’re all reasonably entertaining.
  52. The Childhood of a Leader
    A overweening, maddening but not inconsiderable directorial debut for actor Brady Corbet
  53. Into the Forest
    Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood are both superb in the lead roles, but Rozema’s emphasis on the primacy of family and nature exposes a deficit of visual and narrative imagination.
  54. Sunset Song
    In full anamorphic 65mm splendor, the resulting landscapes are lovely, as is the face of relative newcomer Agyness Deyn in the role of hardy Scottish heroine Chris Guthrie, although the underlying feelings are all but lost, rendered in a difficult-to-fathom Scottish dialect and withheld by Davies’ overly genteel directorial approach.
  55. Lolo
    Well cast and funny just often enough to recommend.
  56. Remember
    Crafted in utilitarian fashion by Egoyan, Remember does little to earn the poignancy of Plummer’s stricken performance.
  57. Endgame
    Certainly the director’s heart is in the right place here; it’s in moving her pawns around that flummoxes her.
  58. The Whispering Star
    In trying to make sense of an android’s point-of-view, Sono has sensibly turned repetition and routine into a narrative strategy, but the unrelieved tedium of The Whispering Star takes a toll. If anything, Sono’s past work has suffered from a an overabundance of jokes, digressions, and crazed visual flourishes, but their near-total absence here becomes a problem of another kind.
  59. The Forest
    First-time director Jason Zada does generate an intermittently spooky sense of mystery that not even the muddled scripting can fully demolish.
  60. The Virgin Psychics
    Watching Sion Sono’s unruly telepathic sex comedy The Virgin Psychics is a bit like having a dog hump your leg for the better part of two hours; it’s filthy and monotonous and fairly interminable, but after a while you’ve been so thoroughly numbed that you have to admit it’s kind of sweet.
  61. Ratchet & Clank
    Whether or not they’re familiar with the source property, kids are unlikely to be bothered: There’s just enough blaring sound and color to this knowingly silly tale of interplanetary derring-do to adequately offset its impersonal corporate sheen.
  62. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    The arguments between Ramanujan and Hardy form easily the most absorbing aspect of The Man Who Knew Infinity, as their eloquent clash of wills is shown to be not just intellectual but ideological in nature.
  63. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    It is all aggressively stylized, abusively fast-paced and ear-bleedingly loud, relying so heavily on CGI that nothing — not one thing — seems to correspond to the real world.
  64. The Wannabe
    Since Thomas’ character is incapable of change or variation, and the film’s only engaging supporting players occupy a small fraction of the running time, it falls squarely upon Arquette to carry the film.
  65. Criminal Activities
    There’s nothing remotely fresh about this revival, but tight pacing and an overqualified cast keep things zipping along nicely.
  66. Hard Labor
    Hard Labor teeters uncertainly between horror and social commentary. It feels as if the helmers tried to imagine what Bunuel would have done if he had made a horror film.
  67. Snatched
    The movie’s mother-daughter jokes are like firecrackers with damp fuses.
  68. Christmas Eve
    Christmas Eve isn’t likely to make anyone feel exceptionally merry. Still, it remains modestly diverting from scene to scene.
  69. Prescription Thugs
    Engaging and enraging but also, alas, consistently superficial.
  70. It's Only the End of the World
    Here, in cinema’s most unpleasant genre (the dysfunctional family gathering), Dolan has found a way to exasperate and exhaust his audience, but he has also achieved a completely unexpected catharsis at the end of an agonizing hour and a half.
  71. Hyena Road
    This is the kind of movie where a major development in a character’s personal life instantly telegraphs his ultimate fate in the trenches.
  72. The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
    With its sultry two-tone, blue-and-bronze design, Sfar’s version certainly looks stunning, but it’s remarkably empty-headed.
  73. Ip Man 3
    Less offensively nationalistic than the second installment but falling short of the glowing humanity, genial Cantonese humor and visual flair of the first, the pic is somewhat tarnished by its pedestrian plot and limp characterization.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rocky IV
    Beyond its visceral appeal, Rocky IV is truly the worst of the lot, though Stallone himself is more personable in this one and that helps.
  75. Bolshoi Babylon
    “Babylon” actually provides little more than a lot of vague insinuations. Exasperatingly, it doesn’t even offer more detail on the Dmitrichenko affair.
  76. The Ones Below
    Farr delves into the sticky issue of parental ambivalence, but he only goes deep enough to carve a small pit in the viewer’s stomach.
  77. Safe
    The audaciousness that marked Todd Haynes’ earlier work has been supplanted by self-important preachiness in Safe.
  78. Diablo
    On the surface, Diablo would seem to have all of the proper ingredients for a rollicking retro Western, yet its sights are set a bit higher, which inspires both admiration for its moxie and disappointment that its script and direction aren’t up to the challenge.
  79. The Bye Bye Man
    Even when it seems to be making things up as it goes along, its slapdash hallucinatory quality is a token gesture toward placing you inside the characters’ heads.
  80. Synchronicity
    Synchronicity is best approached as a sort of Rubik’s cube, a series of shiny, sliding, interlocking surfaces that require dexterity to move and figure out, but contain nothing beneath of pressing value.
  81. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    Most of the surface pleasures of filmic Potterdom (the chiaroscuro tones, the overqualified character actors, the superb costuming, James Newton Howard’s warmly enveloping score) have survived intact, but real magic is in short supply.
  82. Misconduct
    A flagrantly derivative but modestly diverting drama.
  83. Embers
    Embers offers a series of compelling premises and never follows through on them, content to drift along on its characters’ dull malaise and allow self-conscious visual poetry to stand in for real emotion.
  84. Naz & Maalik
    The intense focus on the two lead characters emerges as both a strength and a weakness. There’s a lot of walking and talking, and what begins as rather charming ultimately turns tedious, even with a fleet 80-minute running time before closing credits factor in.
  85. Kevin Hart: What Now?
    He leaps so quickly into exaggeration that he bypasses reality, and the result isn’t very funny.
  86. Goat
    To pretend that the pledges (who voluntarily submit to such harassment) are somehow the victims in an institution of exclusion, objectification and underage substance abuse goes far beyond disingenuous, and the resulting film falls far short of actually surprising those who already know a thing or two about fraternities.
  87. The Bounce Back
    The Bounce Back was co-written, directed, and edited by Youseff Delara, and for a while he creates some lively screwball tension.
  88. Baywatch
    The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.
  89. JeruZalem
    The movie’s occasional stabs at political commentary never quite pay off. Nor can the writer-directors, brothers Yoav and Doron Paz, fully sustain the film’s novelty into the second half, when the script reverts to timeless, tired monster-movie tropes.
  90. River of Grass
    River of Grass works much better as a jokey , theoretical piece of genre revisionism than as a real movie.
  91. Joshy
    Joshy offers a strange mix of elements that never quite add up.
  92. How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town
    How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town emerges as surprisingly tame fluff, a modestly amusing trifle scarcely saucier than those wink-wink naughty farces that were staples of the ’70s dinner-theater circuit.
  93. Collateral Beauty
    By the end of Collateral Beauty, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.
  94. F9: The Fast Saga
    Considering that F9 is Lin’s fifth “F and F” film and his first one in eight years, it goes through the motions with more energy than intoxication.
  95. Five Nights in Maine
    Attempting to naturalistically capture the hugely internal process of mourning, but rarely managing to offer much of an opening into that process, Curran’s tasteful, challenging yet ultimately inscrutable debut feature never quite lives up to the caliber of her fine cast.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Born in Flames
    It is impertinent, audacious, abounding in fresh ideas, considerably untraditional ideas. On the other hand, it is disjointed, with no real characters, preachy, the script unsufficiently developed and the acting often amateurish.
  97. White Girl
    As much as White Girl has to offer in raw immediacy, it lacks the distance to offer much in the way of meaningful commentary, distinguishing itself (for the worse) from such earth-shaking social critics as Bret Easton Ellis and Harmony Korine.
  98. Snowtime!
    Covering the emotional spectrum between dog farts on one end and tragedy on the other reps a tonal challenge that Showtime! can’t pull off, despite a gentler touch than most kiddie fare of its kind.
  99. Too Late
    As a spiritually “lost” man searching for a more literally lost woman, Hawkes has just the offhand gravitas required for a noir hero. Yet in a movie where character backstory and plot coherence hardly figure, any emotional realism the actor provides is wholly his invention.
  100. Lion
    Fortunately for Davis, he’s got a terrific cast, chief among them the pair of charismatic actors who split the lead role.
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