Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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 2.3 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Weightless
    The result is artful (and well-acted) enough to intrigue, yet underdeveloped enough in the writing to frustrate. Not the least frustrating thing here is that Nivola gives a serious, hardworking performance in a role that nonetheless remains more opaque than many past ones in which he’s had a fraction of the screen time.
  2. Narcissister Organ Player
    The drama of “Narcissister Organ Player” is that Narcissister isn’t layering her demons onto the culture; she’s layering the culture onto herself. That’s why that mask of hers looks more and more like one we’re all capable of hiding behind.
  3. On the Basis of Sex
    An RBG biopic shouldn’t be about sizzle and showpersonship, but hard work and determination in the face of rampant, seemingly unremitting sexism, and in that respect, Leder’s film gets its priorities right.
  4. 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.
  5. Stan & Ollie
    The film’s confidence falters only when it transposes the hapless slapstick of the duo’s screen act to their everyday reality. If a couple of labored gags around hauling luggage don’t fully land, that rather proves how much more art went into Laurel and Hardy’s craft than they ever chose to let on.
  6. The Grinch
    For anyone who grew up with “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” The Grinch won’t replace it, yet it’s nimble and affectionate in a way that can hook today’s children, and more than a few adults, by conjuring a feeling that comes close enough.
  7. Postcards from London
    Pretty but hollow, Postcards From London isn’t quite clever enough to get away with being this deeply frivolous. It exudes a sense of high amusement at itself but doesn’t make that satisfaction so easy to share.
  8. Chef Flynn
    it’s as an ambiguous study of parenting a prodigy that the film lingers on the palate, as McGarry’s mother Meg documents and manages his evolution to an obsessive, gradually oppressive degree.
  9. Nobody's Fool
    In Nobody’s Fool, Tiffany Haddish is just furious and funny enough to make you wish that the rest of the movie wasn’t a droopy romantic comedy without the comedy.
  10. Been So Long
    In the close, doting way the camera caresses its stars, Been So Long certainly shows where it chief strengths lie: Coel and Kene may both capably handle their songs, but the film’s real music is in their faces, singing, silent or otherwise.
  11. Maria by Callas
    First-time director Tom Volf plainly adores Callas — sometimes to a fault — but his film stands as a necessary corrective to decades of bad press. It’s an unalloyed tribute to her as a musical genius who gave all of herself to the public.
  12. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    So much care has gone into each of the departments, from Guy Hendrix Dyas’ exquisite production design to Jenny Beavan’s micro-detailed costumes to composer James Newton Howard’s loving update of the Tchaikovsky score, and while any one of these elements might be tasteful in and of itself, it’s all too much to take in at once — the kind of overkill for which Liberace was known.
  13. Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders
    Were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, in some rollicking sex-positive way, an intrinsic part of the feminist revolution? Or did they represent one step forward and one high kick back? You could make the case either way, but the film pushes the clean and forceful — if highly ironic — argument that the Cheerleaders were nothing more or less than empowered entertainers who seized control of their sexuality and, in doing so, advanced the liberation of women.
  14. The Panama Papers
    The Panama Papers captures and celebrates a different concentration of power: that of the journalists who’ve begun to band together by thinking globally, following the money as it travels — and does its best to hide — around the world.
  15. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    It’s an investigation in the form of a highly personalized meditation.
  16. The Grief of Others
    More experimental in form and wobbly in execution than its predecessor, this searching adaptation of Leah Hager Cohen’s 2011 novel nonetheless evokes a family’s fragile inner life in ineffably moving fashion, capturing how distant and isolated parents and children can feel from one another even when living under the same roof
  17. Number 37
    Far more substantial than a run-of-the-mill Hitchcock homage, Number 37 is richly satisfying on its own terms as a singularly crafty and strikingly well-crafted thriller that signals the arrival of a promising filmmaking talent.
  18. Mirai
    It’s the work of a true auteur (in what feels like his most personal film yet) presented as innocuous family entertainment.
  19. Silencio
    This turgid fantasy thriller, boasting scant thrills or imagination, douses a mystic time-travel concept with soap operatic hand-wringing to mawkishly unconvincing effect.
  20. Indivisible
    Filmed on Tennessee and California locations that convincingly double for everything from Fort Stewart to Iraq, Indivisible feels impressively edgy during battle scenes, especially during a suspenseful firefight set in the streets of Al Sakhar Province.
  21. Air Strike
    Air Strike feels like a movie whose populist yet complicated narrative elements have been haphazardly pared to the nub, while the money shots — all things that go boom, as a great many do here — were left intact.
  22. The Dark
    In trying to succeed as something both metaphorical and very literal-minded, the movie ends up being neither one nor the other — not psychologically deep enough to succeed as pure drama, and too earnest to offer the usual rewards of a genre film.
  23. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    It was probably inevitable that Hollywood would neuter the best elements of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” franchise, but did the producers really need to shift it into a commonplace cross between a superhero flick and James Bond?
  24. Hunter Killer
    Hunter Killer has good enough actors, but it never figures out what to do with them. They’re stuck in an underwater vacuum, a submarine movie that submerges anything of interest.
  25. Bohemian Rhapsody
    The movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them.
  26. The Night Comes for Us
    This cartoonish cavalcade of carnage potently reunites “The Raid” stars Joe Taslim and Iko Uwais as former friends on a corpse-strewn collision course.
  27. Reach
    Though its heart is in the right place when it comes to many of the boldly-portrayed sentiments, the indie melodrama plays like a hokey, weak after-school special rather than a powerful and alarming wake-up call.
  28. Big Kill
    A film made by people who respect its genre too much to be condescendingly clever, but embrace it so heartily that they want you to know that, yes, they’ve seen the same movies you have, and enjoy them just as much as you do.
  29. On Her Shoulders
    It’s one thing to tell a traumatic story, and another to capture how that trauma impacts a life. What makes Alexandria Bombach’s On Her Shoulders so powerful — besides the profound dignity of its subject, Yazidi massacre survivor Nadia Murad — is the way she reveals Murad’s distress at having to take on the role of activist.
  30. Caniba
    How illuminating or challenging Caniba proves for viewers will depend on their amenability to Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s amoral stance and literally up-in-your-face technique. Those who aren’t provoked by its ambiguous psychological inquiry, however, may wish for a bigger human picture from this relentlessly close-up exercise.
  31. Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle
    Salmerón’s film, crammed as full of tchotchkes and knick-knacks and bibelots as one of his mother’s closets, refutes that, presenting an endearingly haphazard portrait of an extraordinary woman and the family she made — one that has discovered its own, completely unique way to be happy.
  32. Nigerian Prince
    Okoro has bent over backwards not to make the poverty-row version of a glib crime thriller, but he shouldn’t have bent so far.
  33. High Voltage
    Short on thrills and energy despite its title, this slick yet sluggish feature often seems barely interested in the horror elements that are, after all, what will primarily lure viewers in.
  34. Change in the Air
    Without a compelling, coherent narrative drive, the film’s own spirit sags.
  35. The Waldheim Waltz
    Thanks to her smart narration — clear, impassioned but never polemical — and the astute way she allows exceptional footage to play out to its full extent, The Waldheim Waltz has a sense of urgency made more pressing given political developments not just in Austria but Poland and Hungary as well.
  36. Watergate
    The pace never flags, but some of its entertaining devices work against Ferguson’s insightfulness.
  37. Apostle
    Tantalizingly rich in atmosphere and altogether unhurried in revealing its secrets, the evocatively shot, ultra-widescreen Apostle will eventually veer into dark, mercilessly supernatural territory.
  38. I Still See You
    Newcomers will find this adapted tale’s fantasy logic arbitrary, its plot convoluted, and the sum effect wildly unconvincing without being nearly so fun.
  39. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    The way a movie like “Goosebumps 2” works, even a weary adult will be grateful, by the time it finally kicks in, for all the brainless whirling distraction. I almost wrote fun, but that would be pushing it. To achieve that F-word, the film would have to ground its amusing effects in a story that was less skittery yet leaden.
  40. Bikini Moon
    Dubbed “a documentary about a fairytale,” Manchevski’s film leaps around in time before eventually indulging in some magic realism, but it’s most compelling when simply fixating on Rashad, who makes Bikini at once wounded and tough, conniving and kind, desperate and volatile.
  41. Liyana
    It’s a simple but stirring tale, lent character by the boys’ endearingly eager telling and atmospheric texture by Coker’s inspired visual interpretation.
  42. The Price of Everything
    The Price of Everything exalts in the spirt of art over commerce, yet what’s thrilling about the film — and what echoes in your mind after it’s over — is that it captures all the ways those two forces can’t be separated.
  43. Sadie
    Equal parts coming-of-age story and slow-burn thriller, writer-director Megan Griffiths’ quietly absorbing and methodically disquieting drama is a genuine rarity: a sympathetic portrait of a budding sociopath.
  44. Over the Limit
    The intense abuse captured in Marta Prus’s brilliant, diamond-hard documentary portrait of a Russian rhythmic gymnast’s punishing road to the 2016 Olympics is all too vividly real — just watching it induces veritable stomach cramps, though it’s impossible to turn away from the film’s whipcrack construction and expert manipulation of perspective.
  45. Studio 54
    The film shows you the club from every angle, and seems to be gawking at every patron. It puts us right inside.
  46. At First Light
    Apart from the uncommon notion that these mysterious visitors may actually mean us well, the film seems a little too comfortable with clichés, right down to the men in black who show up mid-movie to ruin everybody’s fun.
  47. The Church
    Despite all rough edges, you want to root for a project that’s so clearly homegrown. (It was shot in Philly’s First Corinthian Baptist Church, which filmmaker Frank’s family has attended for decades.) But The Church’s problem isn’t so much that it lacks polish or spectacle, or even that its special effects look like something a kid developed as an unenthusiastic school project.
  48. Ride
    All three actors labor to make it work, demonstrating their professional skill sets (Thorne sings, Usher recites Shakespeare) to somewhat admirable effect — even if overall credibility and tension remain elusive.
  49. All About Nina
    Nina’s confessional set takes the already-raw portrait to a whole other level. All About Nina is very funny, but with that scene, it breaks our hearts, forcing us to reevaluate Nina’s recklessness while reiterating the lesson of the last year: that we never know what someone has been through until that person chooses to share it, and that going public takes courage, as there’s no going back.
  50. A Crooked Somebody
    Working from a smartly constructed script by Andrew Zilch, director Trevor White (“Jamesy Boy”) does an impressive job of propelling the narrative along parallel tracks of arrestingly suspenseful thriller and knowing media satire.
  51. A Private War
    A Private War manages to be simultaneously appalled by the humanitarian crises it depicts...and honest about the thrill that visiting such hot spots offered to someone who found it hard to readjust to her life in London between assignments.
  52. Lords of Chaos
    Åkerlund’s music videos established him as a whiz-bang technician, a skill he only unleashes in two terrifying montages. Lords of Chaos proves that he can also get great performances out of a young cast, especially Kilmer’s otherworldly Dead.
  53. Venom
    Venom is a textbook case of a comic-book film that’s unexciting in its ho-hum competence, and even its visual-effects bravura.
  54. Johnny English Strikes Again
    There are a minor handful of scenes in Johnny English Strikes Again that will make you laugh. A bit.
  55. All Square
    Away from the baseball diamond, All Square effectively pivots to moments of surprisingly affecting drama.
  56. Hell Fest
    Eye candy without much to offer the brain or emotions, Hell Fest is a competently crafted slasher film rendered instantly forgettable by its disinterest in character, plot, and motivation, let alone original ideas.
  57. Bad Times at the El Royale
    At two hours and 21 minutes, this 1969-set period thriller is taxingly slow and almost oppressively self-indulgent, constantly backtracking and replaying already-drawn-out scenes from multiple perspectives.
  58. Tyrel
    Sharply observed but lacking in the probing psychological insights of Silva’s best movies, Tyrel is a chamber piece whose rhythms feel entirely natural (it’s shot in cast member Arze’s house), but which doesn’t resonate greatly after the fadeout.
  59. Little Women
    This contemporary adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s enduring classic is certainly admirable in its attempt to give the material a modern spin. However, what’s new only serves to frustrate and detract from the reasons why this material has been beloved for generations.
  60. Scaffolding
    [A] gripping, realist drama.
  61. Black '47
    Daly’s characterful, slow-burn tale is a well-crafted experiment in grafting genre onto disregarded history.
  62. 306 Hollywood
    306 Hollywood is best when it gets either very scientifically dry, or reaches beyond its liminal cuteness into ambitious visual poetry.
  63. The Oath
    Here’s a project that had the nerve to address these tensions in a megaplex environment, only to squander them on a standoff it pretends could be so glibly resolved.
  64. Night School
    Night School has a handful of laughs, but it’s a bloated trifle that, at 111 minutes, overstays its welcome.
  65. Overlord
    Even at its most suspenseful, when Jed Kurzel’s cello score stabs at the eardrums, Overlord feels familiar, a collage of cinematic nightmares checking off its influences.
  66. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    The pull of Garry Winogrand’s photographs is that they dissolve the line between art and life.
  67. Tea with the Dames
    A wholly delightful talkathon.
  68. The Song of Sway Lake
    The Song of Sway Lake never finds a thematic center around which to pivot its action.
  69. The Last Suit
    [A] touching, albeit occasionally heavy-handed, drama.
  70. Call Her Ganda
    With access to only one side of its central conflict, and a scattershot approach that skims over key details and points of interest, this well-intentioned documentary leaves audiences feeling like they’re only getting part of a much larger story.
  71. Smallfoot
    It’s messy and distressingly unmemorable, which is a shame since there are no shortage of great Looney Tunes-level cartoon gags wasted along the way, including an ingenious rope bridge sequence worthy of golden-age Warner Bros. animation.
  72. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    While not terribly original, it would be fair to call the movie inventive, like one of those eccentrics who’s constantly pestering the patent office with what he thinks are fresh ideas, only to discover that someone else got there first.
  73. Teen Spirit
    Teen Spirit is too tidy, concocted, and safe. It longs to channel the high of great pop, but as a movie it lacks the ecstatic imagination to do what great pop does. It never soars.
  74. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    While always attractive, the look conveys a level of non-spontaneous construction that often takes away from the potency of hard, brutal reality.
  75. Unbroken: Path to Redemption
    It would be unfair, and not entirely accurate, to dismiss “Path to Redemption” as irredeemably dull and without merit.
  76. The Dawn Wall
    It’s a riveting and spectacular documentary.
  77. A Boy. A Girl. A Dream.
    If Basir and Samantha Tanner’s screenplay ultimately feels like less than a full meal, its intelligence and restraint — particularly in resisting the lure of a heavier-handed message — are nonetheless admirable.
  78. The Command
    Vinterberg’s Kursk occasionally lands an emotive blow but only in its more fictionalized stretches, while it pulls its punches with the thorniest and most provocative elements of the real story, an instinct that unduly submerges much of the real horror and lasting consequence of this tragically, enragingly, heartbreakingly bungled incident.
  79. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    What could have been a powerful ode to the impact that movies have in shaping our identities — and by extension, the reason broken people are drawn to the profession, through which they hope to reach others like themselves — becomes an over-the-top celebration of Dolan himself.
  80. Don't Leave Home
    The result is a diverting-to-a-point curio whose nice atmospherics and good performances ultimately don’t add up to quite enough to satisfy the constructs of horror, allegory, satire — or anything else.
  81. Smuggling Hendrix
    [A] delightful, droll, and intelligent comedy, which captures the absurdity and tragedy of a complicated political situation with a consistently light touch.
  82. Hold the Dark
    Boasting the sort of shocking brutality and unnerving menace that has become Saulnier’s signature, Hold the Dark is also a strangely seductive film, and one that understands the difference between simple plot resolution and catharsis, leading us on a journey into Alaska’s frigid heart of darkness that poses more questions than it answers.
  83. The Basement
    There’s a big twist at the end, but like everything else here, it aims for a shock effect that the film is simply too clumsy and psychologically far-fetched to pull off.
  84. Bel Canto
    Between its minimal setup and frantic denouement, the middle stretch of this pleasingly multilingual movie sags shapelessly, as the hostages and even their captors gradually bond across cultural and linguistic barriers, with music — of course — as the language that binds them.
  85. 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.
  86. Shadow
    Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou’s breathtakingly beautiful Shadow is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time.
  87. Quincy
    Stretching to more than two hours, Quincy stumbles into some pacing problems as it goes, and considering the sheer number of turns the man’s life took, one wonders if a miniseries might have served him better.
  88. The Quietude
    Boasting a trio of actresses at the top of their game and cinematography that constantly impresses with its confident yet unshowy fluidity, the movie deftly enters into the bosom of a family harboring multiple secrets, encompassing the personal and political.
  89. Our Time
    Die-hard acolytes will argue that the camerawork transcends or even complements the storyline; most everyone else will wonder what happened to an auteur whose work was awaited with such eager anticipation.
  90. The Nightingale
    Kent’s elemental revenge tale attains a near-mythic grandeur over the course of its arduous, ravishing trek. Some stricter editing wouldn’t go amiss, particularly in a needlessly baggy, to-and-fro finale, but it’s a pretty magnificent mass of movie.
  91. The Mountain
    Having dipped a toe into bigger-name casting with his previous feature “Entertainment,” Alverson experiments intriguingly with performance style here, submitting his otherwise rigorously controlled filmmaking to the whims of unpredictably idiosyncratic thesps like Lavant, Goldblum and Udo Kier. It’s a calculated clash that perhaps reflects the film’s own theme of agitated minds at odds with the stoic status quo.
  92. Hotel Mumbai
    Sitting through the harrowing events again nearly a decade later could hardly be described as entertainment, and the film plays to many of the same unseemly impulses that make disaster movies so compelling, exploiting the tragedy of the situation for spectacle’s sake.
  93. Green Book
    Featuring a pair of terrific performances by Viggo Mortensen as a goombah with a heart of gold and Mahershala Ali as multilingual composer-musician Don Shirley, the story may be unique, yet it goes pretty much exactly the way you might expect.
  94. Freaks
    The only problem is that it’s easier to be impressed by the ingenuity of the staging and the architecture of the screenplay than it is to stay invested in the characters.
  95. Donnybrook
    For Sutton — whose previous film, “Dark Night,” inspired by 2012’s Aurora megaplex shooting, made an austere statement about gun violence — Donnybrook marks a major step forward in both ambition and style.
  96. The Biggest Little Farm
    Both deeply personal and remarkably objective, The Biggest Little Farm offers a firsthand account of the ups and downs of married duo John and Molly Chester’s trial-and-error attempt to start a biodiverse agricultural operation on land that had long since been stripped of nutrients.
  97. Ben Is Back
    The entire film is that rarest of gifts for its cast, providing virtually every character with a chance to play not only the present moment, but the complicated history they’ve established with Ben in the past, as well as whatever chance they see in the troubled young man’s future.
  98. Mid90s
    Mid90s, though made by a Hollywood star, isn’t a nostalgic indie “fable” in gritty skate-punk drag. It’s something smaller and purer: a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality.
  99. Monrovia, Indiana
    Its methodical gathering of material never quite brings us to a more stirring understanding of the lives under its lens.
  100. Life Itself
    It is sentimental and sprawling, which are not necessarily bad things, but also manipulative and contrived, which very much are.
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