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. The Trust
    Cage supplies a stream of tension-defusing laughs while the script steadily applies the screws, but this disposable exercise in comic nihilism offers only a modest payoff at best.
  2. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum.
  3. A Cure for Wellness
    The movie deprives us of either a tragic villain or a sympathetic lead, hoping that its grab bag of squirm-inducing details — dental drills, stillborn livestock, flesh-eating eels — will suffice, when in fact, they reveal how a shorter, tighter treatment ought to have done the trick.
  4. The Shallows
    At times, it’s hard to tell whether The Shallows is trying to sell a tropical vacation, that Sony Xperia phone or a fantasy date with Lively herself, but in any case, the film looks virtually indistinguishable from a slick, high-end commercial.
  5. Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
    The lack of a single clear character with whom to identify ultimately proves problematic.
  6. Unlocking the Cage
    Wise is plenty eloquent on the complex legal issue, but remains vague about how the status he seeks will practically impact animals (could animal weddings be far behind?) or why he’s the “person” best qualified to represent them in court.
  7. Julieta
    While Julieta represents a welcome return to the female-centric storytelling that has earned Almodovar his greatest acclaim, it is far from this reformed renegade’s strongest or most entertaining work.
  8. The Neon Demon
    The Neon Demon is a tease. It starts off as a relatively scannable, user-friendly thriller, but it turns out to be a movie made by a macabre surrealist gross-out prankster.
  9. How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change
    An environmental documentary that consists of roughly one-third doom-and-gloom to two-thirds wide-eyed optimism, and that is more potent in individual scenes than it is as a sprawling whole.
  10. It
    As spine-tingling as a number of individual scenes are, the film struggles to find a proper rhythm. Scene-to-scene transitions are static and disjointed, settling into a cycle of “…and then this happened” without deepening the overall dread or steadily uncovering pieces of a central mystery. Curiously, It grows less intense as it goes.
  11. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    It’s a unique, associative blend of sounds and images that aims to convey details as well as underlying truths about Frank’s life. Unfortunately, it also often leaves one feeling aesthetically pummeled to the point of exhaustion.
  12. Divine Access
    None of Jack’s relationships are handled with enough conviction to make them stick, and that carries over to a religious message that’s squishy in the extreme. “Agreeable” is a good quality, but it should never be the best quality a film possesses.
  13. Slack Bay
    None of it seems to make much sense, though it’s clear that the absurdity is no accident.
  14. Insidious: The Last Key
    Despite the indomitable Shaye’s best efforts, however, new director Adam Robitel is rarely successful in shaking the cobwebs off this increasingly creaky franchise: The Last Key is wildly uneven, confused and confusing, and it appears to leave the “Insidious” saga written into a corner yet again.
  15. The Meg
    If there’s a disappointment to The Meg, it’s not just that the movie isn’t good enough. It’s that it’s not bad enough.
  16. The Land
    The Land feels a few drafts away from succeeding on its own terms. Still, there’s enough on screen, beyond Lendeborg’s confident star turn, to label Caple as a filmmaker to watch.
  17. The Phenom
    It’s not necessary, of course, for The Phenom to be an all-out sports drama, but writer-director Noah Buschel sets up the rare opportunity to explore what makes a jock tick, then doesn’t follow through.
  18. Morgan
    It’s little more than a schlock replay of “Ex Machina.” It toys around with some of the same situations, but it doesn’t know where to take them. Instead of developing its themes, it uses them as grist for an overload of “commercial” action.
  19. Buddymoon
    This is the kind of buddy comedy where you have to take a giant leap of faith just to believe these two characters would ever be friends.
  20. Anthropoid
    The trouble is that for all the narrative intrigue and excitement such an endeavor might suggest, director Sean Ellis’ less-than-dramatic recreation of this daring act of defiance proves surprisingly stiff...barely redeemed by an even more surprisingly intense finale.
  21. The President
    An allegorical lesson about dictatorships and the cycle of violence they breed, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The President unfortunately offers a simplified and simplistic reduction, akin to an ancient morality tale without the ancients’ brevity – rather than sophistication cloaked in innocence, the pic feels like didacticism submerged in naivete.
  22. The Shack
    The strangest thing about The Shack, and the reason it’s finally a so-so movie, is that all the rage and terror and dark-side vengeance that Mack has to learn to transcend is something we’re told about, but we never actually see him mired in it.
  23. Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes
    Norgaard wants to keep viewers guessing the whys and wherefores, but putting two and two together is so easy here that only the narratively challenged will be surprised by the culprit’s motivations.
  24. Denial
    For all the powerful relevance of its subject, Denial, directed by Mick Jackson from a script by David Hare, never finds its grip. It’s a curiously awkward and slipshod movie that winds up being about nothing so much as the perverse, confounding eccentricities of the British legal system.
  25. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    Those expecting insight into Robbins’ life or career, let alone the overall self-help industry, will be disappointed by this atypically non-investigative Joe Berlinger documentary.
  26. The Mind's Eye
    The film has the visceral kick of brainiacs willing each other into bloody oblivion, but struggles to justify its own stock mayhem, much less plumb Cronenbergian depths.
  27. River
    Dagg’s thriller is slow to get going and hampered by an inexpressive leading man.
  28. Cold War 2
    Slow to heat up yet quick to burn out, police procedural-thriller Cold War 2 dramatizes internal strife and conspiracy among Hong Kong’s police force and ruling elite, adding some new twists in a narrative framework that ultimately can’t support the film.
  29. Nerdland
    With a scuzzy style to match its sleazeball vision of spotlight desperation and depravity, this Tinseltown satire — led by voice work from Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt — revels in the foulness of 21st-century pop culture, albeit to a degree that’s ultimately both exhausting and redundant.
  30. London Road
    There’s an over-compensatory fussiness to its most elaborate formal conceits, with the gradual shifting of the pic’s palette from desaturated December grays to iridescent oil-pastel tones a crude symbolic device.
  31. As the Gods Will
    There’s a confused sci-fi element and a perfunctory nod to society’s benumbed attitude toward violence, but really, the pic is just an excuse for more splatter from a director who, as always, knows his target audience.
  32. Lace Crater
    First-time director Harrison Atkins never quite finds his own distinct voice. He dabbles in horror and deadpan comedy, experiments in discordant jags on the soundtrack, and suggests a more fluid boundary between the living and the dead, but the film remains stubbornly hazy and obscure in its intentions.
  33. All I See Is You
    Look past the gimmick, and all that remains is an overly arty study of a lopsided marriage in which super-attentive husband James (Jason Clarke) actually seems to prefer when his wife Gina (Blake Lively) can’t see — and another opportunity for Lively to prove that she’s more than just a pretty face.
  34. Brimstone
    The film has gruesomely effective moments, and one at times gets caught up in the gears of its big interlocked narrative, but it also has serious longueurs.
  35. Mascots
    It lopes along, merrily but a bit slack, always reminding you of the earlier Guest films, and then it works up a bit of a fizz in the competition.
  36. Salt and Fire
    This most defiantly rule-resistant of filmmakers certainly hasn’t lost his capacity to surprise. Salt and Fire’s punchline, however, only enhances the sense of a shaggy-dog tale dashed off on the back of a postcard — it’s the scenery on the other side that holds our attention.
  37. A United Kingdom
    These two are meant to be together, as the film’s clever title suggests, though all the truly interesting things they accomplished happen only after that reunion.
  38. Finding Altamira
    [Banderas] acquits himself admirably with his restrained yet subtly detailed portrayal of an intelligent man subjected to the stings of intolerant attitudes and professional jealousies.
  39. I.T.
    Brosnan is very effective at playing Regan as a wary technophobe who has become too comfortable with his power and success.
  40. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    “Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.
  41. Mohenjo Daro
    The prosaic script feels far too derivative, and only the impressive rain-lashed finale succeeds in delivering that tingly thrill one expects from historical action epics.
  42. Generation Startup
    Generation Startup is too blurry about the grass-roots wheeling and dealing it shows.
  43. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    The trouble isn’t that Greenwald is preaching to the choir; a good documentary can increase the passion of the choir. It’s that he isn’t adding in any meaningful way to the choir’s knowledge.
  44. First Girl I Loved
    This watchable but middling drama tackles a worthy, relatable subject without quite figuring out what to say about it.
  45. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
    Swinton’s warm, unassuming direction generates an intimacy that does much to compensate for the overarching project’s wispiness — although even her clear affection for Berger can’t ultimately make “The Seasons in Quincy” more than a for-aficionados-only companion piece to his pre-existing paintings and writing.
  46. Come What May
    Director Christian Carion’s first feature since 2009’s “Farewell” is bolstered by a sweeping Ennio Morricone score, yet his narrative is too episodic, and his characters too one-dimensional, to carry the weight of grand historical tragedy, resulting in a picturesque, middle-of-the-road effort.
  47. The Human Surge
    If the slender paradox at the heart of the film is that the thing that connects us most is the difficulty of connection, The Human Surge is a victim of its own effectiveness: It’s rigorous, rarefied, and utterly remote.
  48. Scarred Hearts
    Emanuel’s likeability (more apparent in the film than in Blecher’s novel) unquestionably helps bridge the extended running time, and Solange is a fascinating character, liberated yet still drawn to the scene of her hospitalization. The film also has a sense of humor...but the project never quite comes together.
  49. Carrie Pilby
    Limply cute, with underdeveloped subplots and secondary characters, this sitcomish dramedy shares the source material’s primary fault: For a story about a supposed genius, it’s not all that clever or complicated.
  50. Colossal
    Colossal takes diminishing advantage of an amusing premise, one that seems made for satirical treatment yet is executed with an increasingly awkward semi-seriousness the characters aren’t depthed (or likable) enough to ballast.
  51. Frantz
    Frantz plays like classic melodrama, and has certain charms.
  52. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
    Intriguing as the resulting ambiance is, it alone can’t sustain the film.
  53. Katie Says Goodbye
    Even if first-time writer-director Wayne Roberts is sympathetic to the plight he’s chosen for the protagonist, his film never burrows deep enough under her skin to make the string of miserable scenarios connect in a meaningful way.
  54. A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery
    A major disappointment from a major filmmaker, Diaz’s latest super-sized tapestry of historical fact, folklore and cine-poetry is typically ambitious in its expressionism — but sees the helmer venturing into the kind of declamatory, didactic rhetoric that his recent stunners “Norte, the End of History” and “From What Is Before” so elegantly avoided.
  55. Rock Dog
    Rock Dog is cluttered with incompatible subplots that never quite seem to belong in the same film.
  56. Mute
    What is Jones trying to say with Mute? One would hardly guess this over-congested generic exercise came from the same mind as the elegant, almost minimalistic “Moon,” which made far better use of all that went unsaid.
  57. Phantasm: Ravager
    Even dedicated Phantasm fanatics may be hard-pressed to discern anything resembling a unifying narrative thread. But the latter group — the film’s target audience — likely will be willing to eschew coherence for the opportunity to savor this chaotic reprise of familiar characters and concepts in the cinematic equivalent of a greatest hits album.
  58. Operation Mekong
    How straightforward your enjoyment of the film will be largely depends on your ability to read “based on” as “very loosely inspired by” and to immediately forget that some of these archetypes and stock genre characters have real-life (and real-death) counterparts.
  59. The Hollow Point
    There are sporadic compensations for your investment of time: Ian McShane’s robust overplaying of an unapologetically scuzzy small-town lawman, John Leguizamo’s dead-serious villainy as a scarily resilient hit man, evocative lensing by David Jose Montero, and a few modestly inventive twists in the otherwise predictable plot.
  60. Courted
    Vincent’s calm, almost strenuously low-key film never gathers enough emotional momentum to become a fully dimensional romance — which might be its poignant intention.
  61. The Comedian
    Even with a bona fide icon at its center, The Comedian doesn’t dig deep enough to add anything substantial to the subgenre.
  62. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    The dialogue is very clear-cut, devoid of all contractions so that people speak in unnatural ways, though perhaps it makes the conversations clearer, especially to audiences whose native language might not be English. More problematic are the never-ending platitudes, all tied to spreading the message of equality.
  63. Mirzya
    The life-and-death stakes are there, but the people involved — while uniformly ravishing to gaze upon — are too wanly sketched for this melodrama to pump much blood.
  64. 100 Streets
    While the film initially exercises commendable restraint in braiding its separate narratives, its second half grows increasingly reliant on pat connections and coincidences.
  65. Always Shine
    With her confident second feature, director Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs itself nearly to death.
  66. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone
    Jenkins and Nasfell refrain from hard-selling anything, so that Gavin never really comes off as an obnoxious jerk, his chaste relationship with Kelly — so chaste, they never even kiss — progresses at a credible pace, and the movie’s religious elements, while respectfully given due dramatic weight, are scarcely more conspicuous here than in many more secular entertainments.
  67. Wilson
    In Wilson, Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated.
  68. All We Had
    Katie Holmes makes an undistinguished helming debut with All We Had, a middlebrow drama with no pretensions but also no depth.
  69. The Frontier
    An appreciably moody but dramatically stilted crime drama that exudes a certain retro appeal before collapsing into a series of empty neo-noir poses.
  70. A Wrinkle in Time
    A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless, and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes.
  71. The Zookeeper's Wife
    There’s no nice way to put it in this case, but The Zookeeper’s Wife has the unfortunate failing of rendering its human drama less interesting than what happens to the animals — and for a subject as damaging to our species as the Holocaust, that no small shortcoming.
  72. Abattoir
    Though it’s handsome enough to look at, Abattoir can’t quite seem to decide just how supernatural it wants to be or how meta its horror content should play
  73. Sleight
    Perhaps Dillard is too young or green to escape the recycled clichés that constitute the bulk of his script (co-written with Alex Theurer), and yet, charitably speaking, Sleight shows potential.
  74. They Call Us Monsters
    They Call Us Monsters, alas, is so taken with its access to kids facing such legal circumstances that it forgets to form a compelling argument about them.
  75. Unforgettable
    It’s tawdry “Sleeping With the Enemy”-style fun while it lasts, boasting a better cast and splashier production values than the next closest Lifetime movie, while being so ridiculous at times that audiences can’t help but talk back to the screen.
  76. The House That Jack Built
    The House That Jack Built, however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive.
  77. Cézanne et Moi
    The cinematic equivalent of calendar art.
  78. The Possession of Hannah Grace
    Viewers hooked on the spectacle of demonic possession tend to like their satanic tropes served neat. The Possession of Hannah Grace serves them sloppy, if not without a certain random soupçon of grisly style.
  79. Murder on the Orient Express
    Though he succeeds in creating the most memorable incarnation of Poirot ever seen on-screen (upstaging even Johnny Depp’s competing cameo), the movie is a failure overall, juggling too many characters to keep straight, and botching the last act so badly that those who go in blind may well walk out not having understood its infamous twist ending.
  80. Reset
    Reset is so gorgeously shot that it almost distracts attention away from the sheer inertia of its material.
  81. My Name Is Emily
    the film thrums with an urgency that’s both asset and liability, at once invested with deep feeling and undone by a barrage of flashbacks, allusions, and counterintuitive bits of wisdom.
  82. Dean
    Martin stays within his comfort zone as a New York-based illustrator still processing his mother’s death, but the tyro helmer struggles to square his distinct minimalist charm with the second-hand influence of standard-bearers like Woody Allen and Wes Anderson.
  83. Newness
    The trouble with Newness — and the reason it’s shot in such a clinical vérité fashion — is that it’s a thesis movie, heady and ambitious yet overly thought out.
  84. Havenhurst
    Havenhurst grows less scary the more urgently action-packed it becomes. It’s not that Erin’s direction lacks energy when needed, but rather that his and Daniel Ferrands’ script never develops any of its numerous familiar but viable plot themes enough to really give the film a distinguishing edge.
  85. This Beautiful Fantastic
    Everything about “Fantastic” is designed to charm, and its success in that respect will depend upon the viewer’s susceptibility to cuteness and contrivance ladled on with some proficiency but no subtlety whatsoever.
  86. Give Me Future
    Somewhere buried beneath Peters’ new-day-rising clichés and superficial celebration of electronica stars, there’s an intriguing documentary about Cuba’s transformation struggling to break free.
  87. The Hero
    Haley and Basch have mistaken what the AARP calls “movies for grownups” for a kind of mushy feel-good pablum, throwing together a handful of familiar clichés in the hope that Elliott’s charm will carry the day.
  88. Person to Person
    Mildly amusing, a tad amateurish in some aspects, this little ensemble piece about funny little people is ultimately just too damn little.
  89. Wolves
    It’s a showcase for some fine acting and even finer basketball action, but neither are enough to cover for this story’s enervating formulaic construction.
  90. Speech & Debate
    Though energetically shot and blessed with some appealing performances (including winningly strange cameos for theater darlings Lin-Manuel Miranda and Darren Criss), Speech & Debate never manages to make a convincing case for itself.
  91. Daddy's Home 2
    It arrives at a moment when the crackling voltage of the culture wars — blue state vs. red state, Trump haters vs. Trump lovers — is coursing through every fiber of the nation. This means that a film like Daddy’s Home 2, in its stupido-on-purpose way, can seem almost relevant in its trivial hit-or-miss yocks.
  92. Viceroy's House
    Such a sprawling, two-pronged saga may well have been better served in television miniseries format.
  93. Ana, Mon Amour
    Călin Peter Netzer’s follow-up to his Golden Bear winner “Child’s Pose” lacks that film’s directness and drive, and not only because this time he’s chosen to shuffle the sequence of events.
  94. Django
    The film — while not an especially compelling or well-told biopic unto itself — shines much-needed attention on the plight of the Roma people at the hands of German (and French) officials.
  95. The First Purge
    The First Purge is a slipshod B-movie comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.”
  96. Junction 48
    Issues are overly simplified and scenes are often poorly constructed (not helped by uneven editing), though Nafar is a charismatic performer. Ditto Qupty, and the energetic hip-hop scenes are welcome distractions. Visuals are spirited.
  97. The Land of Steady Habits
    No matter how much you want to like the film, something is missing: a spark, a shimmer, a thrust of discovery.
  98. Below Her Mouth
    A sexually frank but narratively flimsy girl-meets-girl romance that never gets under its gorgeous characters’ amply exposed skin.
  99. Live Cargo
    Live Cargo is one of the most evocatively shot debut films in recent memory, which is why its shabby storytelling is such a crushing disappointment.
  100. Mean Dreams
    The join-the-bullet-holes nature of Mean Dreams' storytelling would be less of a problem if the characterization were a little more textured, but for all the picturesque anguish on display, the febrile messiness of actual human life is little in evidence.
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