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. Traffik
    Noble intentions are derailed by deeply confused execution in writer-director Deon Taylor’s Traffik, which attempts to marry cheap genre thrills with an unflinching depiction of the horrors of international sex trafficking, only to cheapen the latter and cast a grimy pall over the former.
  2. Wanderland
    Real, inspired strangeness — not to mention laughs, and an actual point — prove elusive here, while the musical elements feel so inessential they might be excised entirely without notable loss. Wanderland deserves credit for trying something different. But such an effort shouldn’t end up so innocuous and inconsequential.
  3. Little Pink House
    If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.
  4. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    The film is sufficiently intelligent and entertaining to engage most grown-ups and, no kidding, fascinate history buffs.
  5. An Ordinary Man
    An incredibly precise actor who understands exactly how to play to the camera, conveying volumes via even the slightest microexpressions, Kingsley navigates the tricky mix of humor, horror, and deep-seated regret that make this man, if not exactly ordinary, then relatable, at least.
  6. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
    Undemanding yet never quite effortless, agreeable yet never quite engrossing, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society has fewer stumbling points than its loopy title, but that title sticks for longer than the rest of it.
  7. Three Identical Strangers
    A gripping, stranger-than-fiction account of a real-world medical conspiracy, the film begins as a human-interest story and builds to an impressive work of investigative journalism into how and why they were placed with the families who raised them.
  8. Pick of the Litter
    “Pick” is brisk and pleasant, but not terribly involving or memorable.
  9. Beyond the Clouds
    It’s a commendable departure, even if you can sense the helmer struggling to get the lay of the land at certain intersections in this heartfelt tale of an impoverished brother and sister seeking roundabout justice when she’s imprisoned for attempted murder.
  10. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    While trying to save her from being considered as merely an inspiration to the great men around her, the script inadvertently reinforces this impression.
  11. Kodachrome
    Thanks to some likable performances from Jason Sudeikis, Elizabeth Olsen and Ed Harris, it’s an entirely watchable if entirely by-the-numbers throwback to the sweet-and-sour Sundance-style indie films of yore. But there’s a blurry boundary between “vintage” and simply “passé,” and Kodachrome is too often caught on the wrong side of that line.
  12. I Feel Pretty
    What sets I Feel Pretty apart is the inspired premise that Renee’s transformation takes place entirely in her head, while those around her are left befuddled by her sudden change of attitude — a concept that begs the question of why our society encourages women to second-guess their self-image in the first place.
  13. Super Troopers 2
    Super Troopers 2 is an aggressively lame and slobby comedy full of cardboard characters and in-your-face naughty jokes that feel about as dangerous as old vaudeville routines.
  14. Alex Strangelove
    It’s hard to dislike Alex Strangelove; one just wishes the film didn’t lean in quite so insistently to be petted.
  15. This Is Our Land
    The film is so calculated in its plotting that it loses some of its chill.
  16. This Is Home: A Refugee Story
    This Is Home gestures toward a more detailed, heterogeneous understanding of these war victims as human beings, characterizing its four chosen families in detailed, individual terms, and listening attentively to their varied expressions of ambition and concern for their new future.
  17. Baja
    Blandly competent in assembly, Baja has only pedestrian comic ideas, and even those aren’t executed well.
  18. The Wife
    The Wife is Close’s film from start to finish, and several of the supporting performances fail to rise to her level, with Pryce and Slater the only ones who manage to impress in her orbit.
  19. Bye Bye Germany
    There’s a storybook complacency to Garbarski’s filmmaking (indeed the literal translation of the German title is “Once Upon a Time in Germany”) that gives us the impression that all this is snow-globe history, put away behind glass on a shelf somewhere.
  20. Mercury
    The movie is a mess, yet once the thriller plot kicks in, you do start to absorb it as a “silent” film, tuning into the visual atmosphere of stalker fear and rusty chemical entropy.
  21. The Judge
    Greater attention to how and when information is revealed would make “The Judge” a far more valuable film.
  22. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    If only the music and lyrics were more memorable, then “Jeannette” might have delivered on its potential. But Dumont has a stiff, fixed-camera style that deprives the story of its transcendence.
  23. Come Sunday
    Marston, working from Marcus Hinchey’s sensitive and remarkably nuanced script, invites measured introspection from both his characters and the audience.
  24. Aardvark
    The film can never quite decide what it wants to be — wounded-inner-child drama, quirky comedy, quasi-thriller, all the above — and its good ideas never quite gel, or lead toward sufficient narrative revelation.
  25. Krystal
    Though Macy is an odd fit to direct (coming at the talky script like it was a madcap piece of theater), the wonky tone is all screenwriter Will Aldis’ invention.
  26. The Broken Tower
    Though clearly besotted with Crane’s poetry, the writer-director-star never achieves full immersion in the man’s life or work; the sense is of people playing a very cerebral game of dress-up.
  27. Rampage
    Peyton delivers a unified-looking whole, in which the visual effects integrate well with stage and location work.
  28. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    The movie isn’t scary, it isn’t gripping, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t fueled by any sort of clever compulsion. It’s just a strangely arduous exercise that feels increasingly frantic and arbitrary as it goes along.
  29. Blaze
    Blaze, which leaps around in time, telling Blaze Foley’s story by zeroing in on a handful of disparate moments, is beautifully made. It’s an organic slice of life — raw and untidy, deceptively aimless but always exploratory.
  30. 6 Balloons
    You can’t help feeling that something terrible will happen at any moment, unless something worse happens first.
  31. What We Started
    Though it offers a decent enough primer on dance music history, it’s so eager to play all the hits that it never quite settles into any particular groove.
  32. Back to Burgundy
    Though not a documentary, this gorgeous French family saga benefits enormously from Klapisch’s natural curiosity, informed by research (he participated in a harvest in order to observe its nuances) and elevated by his insistence that they film over the course of a full year, so as to capture the impact of the seasons on both viticulture and its human stewards.
  33. Pyewacket
    It’s the rare horror film that’s actually more effective in psychological terms than in suspense ones.
  34. That Summer
    Almost exclusively composed of 16mm footage shot in 1972 and lost until now, Göran Hugo Olsson’s fascinating documentary recounts the summer when Lee Radziwill and photographer Peter Beard decided to record Radziwill’s reclusive aunt and first cousin, hiring the Maysles and shooting in and around Grey Gardens while workers fixed the place up.
  35. The Gardener
    Chabot’s film is not “The Garden,” but The Gardener and as a portrait of the man behind Quatre Vents, unlike the gorgeous flora, it never blossoms.
  36. Lowlife
    Prows and company don’t simply play the often outrageous (and occasionally grisly) content for tasteless sensationalism, comic or otherwise. They treat it with an interesting, empathic yet slightly detached tone somewhere between the respectful and the droll.
  37. Mrs. Fang
    This is a merciless film, and whether the process of teasing its meaning out for yourself feels like a punishment or a reward will depend entirely on your patience and your point of view.
  38. Spinning Man
    Spinning Man, like a film noir turned into a video game, winds up crafting a rickety atmosphere of deception out of the question of guilt or innocence. The result keeps you guessing, but it forgets to keep you caring.
  39. The Humanity Bureau
    Director Rob W. King and screenwriter Dave Schultz’s engaging effort has enough standard genre elements to satisfy more open-minded sci-fi fans, and its political-allegory angle is ultimately quite potent without becoming too heavy-handed.
  40. Summer in the Forest
    Wright satisfies in providing a glimpse of an alternative community and lifestyle that appears near-idyllic without being painted in terms that are too sentimental or cute.
  41. The Miracle Season
    Even if you see through the benign (manipulative) strategies of The Miracle Season, which isn’t hard to do, resistance is futile. You will surrender. You’ll feel the tear on your cheek, the lump in your throat, the reverent huggy glory of it all.
  42. The Gospel According to André
    “Gospel” is Novack’s first solo feature, though she co-directed “Eat This New York” with husband Andrew Rossi, whose “Page One: Inside the New York Times” she also produced, and she seems to have an implicit understanding that shot composition is every bit as important in a documentary as in a narrative feature.
  43. The Cleanse
    You might wish that the ending, and the story overall, had packed a bit more dramatic oomph, but Miller’s decision to keep the emphasis entirely on character and theme shows impressive confidence. He gives the movie all the juice it needs.
  44. Big Fish & Begonia
    Big Fish & Begonia commands awe on the strength of its imagery alone...while weaving an epic tale that’s uniquely informed by local myths and motifs. If only it made the slightest bit of sense.
  45. Pandas
    Pandas is less sentimental than you expect, but you can respect the film’s honesty and still leave it hoping that the next true-life panda adventure delivers more of a feel-good ending — for the audience, and mostly for the pandas.
  46. Caught
    Instead of emphasizing tense action and atmosphere — the usual limited-budget solutions — the filmmakers here seem to think having their characters nervously chatter on about their situation in reams of clumsy dialogue will do the trick. It does not.
  47. Los Angeles Overnight
    Chrisoulakis and screenwriter Guy J. Jackson attempt a violent, moody neo-noir about Tinseltown fringe-dwellers, but their conceit is flimsy and under-realized, grafting a boilerplate heist story onto a bitter commentary about the corrupting forces of the film industry.
  48. Birthmarked
    The material comes across as too far-fetched to be taken seriously, and too bland to elicit laughs.
  49. The Endless
    Moorhead and Benson may not be movie-star charismatic in the lead roles, but the bond between them is palpable, delivering just the dynamic the movie needs.
  50. Sweet Country
    The spare, classical chase drama that ensues is seeded with barbed observations on colonialism, cultural erasure and rough justice, kept poetically succinct by Thornton’s lithe, soaring visual storytelling.
  51. Ghost Stories
    There’s the phantom of a psychothriller for the ages inside “Ghost Stories” that never quite fights its way out of the film’s tightly structured creepshow homage, but the goosebumps it raises are real, and honestly earned.
  52. Status Update
    Inasmuch as one can complain about a film having plot holes when it hinges entirely on a magic cellphone app, much of “Status Update” feels cursory and unconsidered by its hokey standards.
  53. All I Wish
    It’s left to Stone to prop up the whole scented-tissue affair, and that she cheerfully does, with a calm, centered force of personality that lends credibility even to the most raggedly developed aspects of her character.
  54. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    A ludicrously scattershot drama in which overwrought feminine rage, diary-of-a-mad-woman craziness, and inept filmmaking are all but inseparable.
  55. God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness
    This one, taken on its own terms, isn’t bad in a TV-movie-fodder-as-parable way.
  56. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    What on paper might be a standard sporting bio-doc, largely relevant only to tennis aficionados or fans of John McEnroe at the height of his powers, instead becomes a lovely meditation on time and movement, dedication and obsession, image and perception.
  57. King in the Wilderness
    King in the Wilderness is a searing film because it takes Martin Luther King Jr. down from the mountaintop. You glimpse the real glory of who he was: not a walking monument but a human being with fear, humor, guts, and (amazing) grace under pressure.
  58. First Match
    Emanuelle manages to make us care about this bullying girl without pleading for sympathy.
  59. March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step
    Unavoidably, this sequel is, for all its majestic beauty, somewhat less awe-inspiring than its revelatory predecessor. Once again boasting narration from Morgan Freeman, the doc has a gracefulness and understated profundity that’ll naturally appeal to those who loved the first film.
  60. A Bag of Marbles
    Even when the chips are down, every boy’s adorable beret looks box-fresh. It’s the boys themselves, however, who often cut through the Camembert to deliver a shot of honest, imperilled feeling.
  61. Attack of the Southern Fried Zombies
    This genial but very silly gorefest looks like it was fun to make — practically the entire population of Charleston, Mississippi, seems to have pitched in. Still, horror fans will have to be in a generous, perhaps beered-up mood to feel the same way about watching it.
  62. Midnight Sun
    The trouble isn’t just that Midnight Sun cherry-picks the most poetic elements of a real-world disease to serve its transparently manipulative ends, but that it offers audiences such an unrealistic portrait of romance in the process.
  63. Sherlock Gnomes
    The actors give little life to the proceedings, since no one’s bothered to figure what this movie has to offer beyond terrifically tactile stone figures going through the motions of what might be called Generic Animated Action Rescue Plot.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Game Over, Man!
    Game Over, Man! is a movie with few original ideas, plenty of tropes, and not enough love for the Bill Paxton “Aliens” character who made its eponymous catchphrase popular
  65. Madame
    With writing that’s nowhere near as sharp as the tailoring, and which adorns a trite Cinderella story that stuffs the fabulously unconventional De Palma into a stiflingly conventional corset, Madame is less a baroque masterpiece than a subpar reproduction in a gaudy frame.
  66. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    Countering the CG bombast and apocalyptic doom and gloom of the modern blockbuster with a soft-spoken message of faith and love, Paul, Apostle of Christ struggles to find a compelling entry point to a critical period in the early Christian church.
  67. Mountain
    If you like your metaphors thuddingly literal (and literally thudding, with the whole final act unfolding to the grunting rhythm of a man bashing away at a cliff face with a mallet), the Iranian director’s “Monte” will prove a treat. The rest of us may find ourselves wondering, like the biblically unfortunate central character, just what we’ve done to deserve this. The film at least looks extraordinary.
  68. The Devil and Father Amorth
    It is often an oddly compelling tabloid foray, since it winds up shedding a crucial ray of light on the mad moment we’re in now. Whether or not you believe in the Devil, the film helps to color in how our culture got possessed.
  69. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Neville’s fantastic archival footage reveals the man through his work — or at least, it reveals his philosophies, if not the childhood memories that gave Rogers the ability to understand a four-year-old’s brain, almost as if he still carried his in his cardigan pocket.
  70. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Pacific Rim Uprising delivers plentiful CG mayhem.... What it lacks, though, is both del Toro’s trademark Lovecraftian imagery (all slick tentacles and dank subterranean locales) and the sense of thunderous heft that the Mexican auteur bestowed upon his titans.
  71. Roxanne Roxanne
    It’s a vivid and unusually honest drama about the pain and bravado that were the fuel of hip-hop.
  72. The Workshop
    A sly, supple and repeatedly surprising collision of literary, moral and political lines of debate that marks an enthralling return to form for writer-director Laurent Cantet.
  73. The China Hustle
    Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining documentary The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.
  74. Beauty and the Dogs
    Ben Hania’s decision to divide the film into 9 chapters, each seemingly orchestrated in a single take, works on a cerebral level, but the form doesn’t serve the story, and while the overall choreography of actors and camerawork is impressive, it never fully satisfies.
  75. No Light and No Land Anywhere
    The story Sealey tells is slender, dissociative and inward-looking to the point of self-indulgence at times. But Brockis, with her stubborn jawline, two-tone shock of hair and striking heterochromatic eyes, is a powerful presence.
  76. Flower
    As icky a comedy as you’re likely to see this year, Flower comes from an angry place — one that is clearly more concerned about sounding provocative and clever than having anything meaningful to say.
  77. Support the Girls
    Hall’s performance — tender, tough, empathetic, controlled — crumples from tears to laughter in a blink. It’s phenomenal.
  78. Wild Nights with Emily
    If the film has a flaw, its that it’s so preoccupied with balancing its furious feminism with gags about Victorian life that there’s little running time to lavish on Dickinson’s actual poetry.
  79. Unlovable
    There are times when you’re tempted to turn away when Joy makes the latest in a long line of really bad, even self-destructive choices. But deGuzman’s performance is so arresting and engaging, you keep your eyes glued to her — if only so you don’t miss the next development that will be hilarious or heartbreaking or both.
  80. Benji
    Benji may be far too simplistic for adults to find much enjoyment in watching, but it rewards active viewing from kids and displays mostly model behavior on the part of its young protagonists (once they stop keeping secrets from their mother, that is).
  81. Thunder Road
    At Thunder Road, you’ll giggle at moments, and you’ll also be moved, but mostly you’ll know the precise crazy-sane reality of who this man is.
  82. Prospect
    Constructing character does not appear to be Earl and Caldwell’s strong suit (what’s satisfying about Cee owes almost entirely to Thatcher, a fresh face who tricks us into assuming she’s just a callow teen, when in fact, she proves to be the film’s toughest character). On the other hand, the duo show a real aptitude for world building.
  83. People's Republic of Desire
    People’s Republic of Desire is provocative and unsettling as it brings us on a guided tour through the digital marketplace for something resembling human contact.
  84. The New Romantic
    The film only feigns at analysis. It’s as naïve about love as Blake herself, who skips through the world like a temperamental child.
  85. Jinn
    Jinn is the rare coming-of-age story that doesn’t simply pat kids on the head and tell them they just need to love themselves. Instead, Mu’min holds her characters accountable for the way they discombobulate each other’s lives, while giving them the space to do better, if they can figure out what better is.
  86. The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter
    McBride is good for a few chuckles during the first two-thirds of the movie and continues to contribute a fair share of funny business after the plot takes a not altogether persuasive serious turn. But Brolin remains the main attraction, and the saving grace, during this lost weekend in the woods.
  87. Fast Color
    Ultimately, Fast Color’s thesis is more inspirational than the film, which often seems like it, too, is struggling to swirl itself into something more solid. Instead, its magical sparks don’t quite congeal as the audience can’t help hoping a movie this empathetic and unusual reaches transcendence
  88. Boundaries
    Boundaries, to be sure, delivers you to a place you know you’re going, but there should always be room for a movie that does that this well.
  89. Take Your Pills
    The kinds of connections that Take Your Pills makes, between the culture of information overload and a radically tightened job market and heightened personal performance and the chemical itch that fuels this whole late-stage capitalist dynamic, may strike some as too speculative for comfort. Yet it’s precisely by making connections like these that a documentary can fire up your perceptions enough to burn through the cumulative effects of advertising.
  90. Ramen Heads
    Ramen Heads may be a tad lacking in visual excitement, but it succeeds in imparting the ineffable appeal of Japan’s national dish.
  91. Paradox
    Paradox, a waste of time made bearable only by its brevity, plays like a bad acid flashback from the 1970s, a time when similarly self-conscious trippy pastiches of rock music and genre conventions proliferated on the midnight-movie circuit.
  92. Unfriended: Dark Web
    "Dark Web” skates by on saturated nastiness, one terrific kill, and the audience’s engagement in seeing if the filmmakers can pull off the stunt. Barely, but it’s fun to watch them try.
  93. Dear Dictator
    Pleasant enough to watch, even innocuous, Dear Dictator is something that gets worse the more you think about it.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Foreign Body
    In composing this group portrait, “Buried Secrets” director Amari relies upon an efficient but relatively conventional dramaturgic arsenal: the beginning of a love triangle; the classic “makeover session,” during which a pop-eyed spectator will discover the princess under the rags; and so forth.
  95. Veronica
    The care that goes into Veronica’s assembly is still ultimately let down a bit by its content: This movie just takes too long getting somewhere that isn’t different enough from umpteen other recent “haunted family” chillers in the “Conjuring” mode.
  96. Josie
    While eschewing genre formula is admirable, England’s tack proves enervating, since Hank and Josie generally feel like archetypes devoid of purpose.
  97. Our Blood Is Wine
    Oenophiles may swoon over the delicious native varietals that tease Quinn’s palate, but Railsback’s thin and disorganized documentary doesn’t go down so smoothly.
  98. The Happys
    When the jokes don’t actually materialize (or land), the proceedings become bogged down in drama that the film’s one-dimensional characters can’t sustain.
  99. Furlough
    Its first draft-grade script lacks the absurdity necessary to elicit laughs, or the depth that might make it moving. Caught between its competing urges, it merely squanders its accomplished leads Tessa Thompson and Melissa Leo in a listless purgatory.
  100. Tomb Raider
    The movie is full of vine-swinging, bow-and-arrow-shooting, ancient-spirit-meeting action, but most of it is staged on a convincing human scale, one that’s been expertly tailored to its star’s understated directness.
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