Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
    The documentary is too tepid to generate anything like excitement or outrage, and elicits admiration more for its intentions than for its execution.
  2. The Skyjacker's Tale
    A Skyjacker’s Tale is all in the telling, and Jamie Kastner’s haphazard documentary misses the opportunity to get it right, despite having access to Ali and an impressive assembly of major players from his past.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hot Shots!
    Jim Abrahams tries to tap the zany Airplane! vein with this Top Gun spoof but bats far too low a percentage with the usual rapid-fire assault of numbingly stupid gags.
  4. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
    Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is an outstanding Stanley Kramer production, superior in almost every imaginable way, which examines its subject matter with perception, depth, insight, humor and feeling.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The 'Burbs
    Director Joe Dante funnels his decidedly cracked view of suburban life through dark humour in The ‘Burbs. Hanks does a fine impersonation of a regular guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Dern adds another memorable psychotic to his resume.
  6. Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge
    Marie Noelle’s evidently impassioned portrait of the trailblazing Polish-French physicist and chemist emerges as an odd blend of, well, formulae, following a starchy biopic pattern one minute and giving in to impressionistic abstraction the next.
  7. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    It’s fine — and true enough to Marvel — to make a “Spider-Man” movie about a young adult, but Spider-Man: Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavor.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blame It on Rio
    Central premise of a secret romance between Michael Caine and the love-smitten daughter of his best friend (Joe Bologna) while the trio vacations together in torrid Rio may be adventurous comedy. Zany comedic conflict, however, is offputting, even at times nasty, in this essentially dead-ahead comedy that sacrifices charm and a light touch for too much realism.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jumpin' Jack Flash
    Jumpin' Jack Flash is not a gas, it's a bore. A weak idea and muddled plot poorly executed not surprisingly results in a tedious film with only a few brief comic interludes from Whoopi Goldberg to redeem it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai plays more like an experimental film than a Hollywood production aimed at a mass audience. It violates every rule of storytelling and narrative structure in creating a self-contained world of its own.
  11. A Beginner's Guide to Snuff
    The problem is that this watchable indie isn’t all that funny, clever or surprising despite its outré premise.
  12. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    What the film offers is evidence of a pattern, the shadows of a disturbing trend that add up to a warning: If we, as a society, don’t push back against the chipping away of the freedom of information, it’s only going to get worse, until it eats us alive.
  13. 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.
  14. War for the Planet of the Apes
    It’s fitting that the visual effects have advanced so dramatically since 2011, as it allows the series to suggest that its ape protagonists have evolved to an equivalent degree, and yet, “War’s” story is beneath their intelligence.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story
    “Can’t Stop” is essentially a post-reality-TV documentary: It’s got quick-cut pacing, dozens of talking heads, flashbacks in the form of vintage footage and visits to old neighborhoods, and most of all, the snowballing drama inherent in working toward a looming, difficult goal.
  16. In Transit
    Sampling snippets and snatches of lives and conversations, Maysles and his fellow filmmakers undertake a folk odyssey through northern landscapes that proves a fitting farewell to an American ethnographer.
  17. Some Freaks
    All the performances are very nicely turned in a movie that deliberately excludes any significant adult presence in order to immerse us fully in an adolescent world.
  18. Bill Nye: Science Guy
    Bill Nye: Science Guy is an efficiently thought-provoking study of what it means to be a rational and analytical advocate for science in an age when deniers of evolution and climate-change often seem to have higher profiles, deeper pockets and louder voices. But it’s even more interesting as the story of a beloved celebrity who wants to reinvent himself, to be taken more seriously.
  19. Transformers: The Last Knight
    For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.
  20. Annabelle: Creation
    Here, Sandberg once again plays with both lighting, composition and suspense, framing shots in such a way that we’re constantly searching the shadows for hints of movement, while drawing out scenes for maximum tension.
  21. Moka
    Watching these two fine actresses circle each other in a kind of watchful alligator’s tango, each waiting for the other to blink first, is the chief pleasure on offer in Moka.
  22. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    What scant charms this direct-to-video-style Nineties throwback has belong mostly to Willis.
  23. 47 Meters Down
    Director Johannes Roberts’ mostly underwater thriller is a compact and sturdily crafted B-movie that generates enough scares and suspense to qualify as — well, maybe not a pleasant surprise, but a reasonably entertaining one.
  24. All Eyez on Me
    Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.
  25. Kill Switch
    Had Smit developed his themes as scrupulously as his visual effects, Kill Switch might have been the next “Primer” or “District 9,” but instead it feels like a demo reel for a game that nobody can play.
  26. Despicable Me 3
    Yes, Despicable Me 3 is unwieldy, but it mostly works, as co-directors Pierre Coffin (who also voices the Minions) and Kyle Balda never lose sight of the film’s emotional center, packing the rest with as much humor as they can manage.
  27. Hampstead
    Gleeson and Keaton, for their part, play this bourgeois rags-to-tweed fairytale with such good humor that one is fleetingly able to overlook the frank bogusness of the mechanics that bring them together.
  28. The Book of Henry
    The film’s muted yet still rather flamboyant terribleness derives from the fact that it seems to be juggling three or four borderline schlock genres at once.
  29. Rough Night
    Rough Night, a bachelorette-party-from-hell thriller comedy that’s got some push and some laughs, despite its essentially formulaic nature, is a perfect example of why Hollywood needs (many) more women filmmakers.
  30. Viceroy's House
    Such a sprawling, two-pronged saga may well have been better served in television miniseries format.
  31. Harmonium
    Shot in a meticulous yet unmannered style, the film provides the veteran cast with an ideal framework to mount masterful performances.
  32. The Journey
    The Journey, thanks to its buddy-movie structure, is destined to feel a little corny, but the movie gets at something real. It’s a celebration, by two splendid actors, of the art of political theater.
  33. Cars 3
    Cars 3 is a friendly, rollicking movie made with warmth and dash, and to the extent that it taps our primal affection for this series, it more than gets the job done.
  34. Strange Weather
    There’s no free-at-last rain dance for Darcy, but just about every other lyrical cliche appears on cue.
  35. Letters from Baghdad
    The bottom line is that Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have fleshed out a complex, fascinating figure.
  36. Camera Obscura
    “Camera” scores more points for an intriguing premise than for its execution, which grows more muddled conceptually as the horror elements grow more prominent. Still, this is an accomplished effort that holds full attention while you’re watching it, even if it leaves a few too many questions dangling at the end.
  37. Moscow Never Sleeps
    The various story currents move swiftly but don’t run particularly deep, so the film works better as a kind of best-foot-forward overview of modern urban Russia — “Moscow, I Love You” — than it does as a multi-stranded human drama.
  38. Middle Man
    Crowley’s thinly conceived debut feature only has one big joke, and everything around it is either long-winded setup or deflating letdown.
  39. The Mummy
    The Mummy is a literal-minded, bumptious monster mash of a movie. It keeps throwing things at you, and the more you learn about the ersatz intricacy of its “universe,” the less compelling it becomes.
  40. My Cousin Rachel
    It’s pure pleasure to watch Weisz as Rachel, who is also an actress of sorts, adapting to suit the needs and desires of whoever she’s seducing. Her manipulations feel more intuitive than conniving and need not be explicitly sexual per se.
  41. Sami Blood
    This handsome debut feature from Swedish-Sami writer-director Amanda Kernell robustly blends adolescent fears that resonate across borders and generations with a fascinatingly specific, rarely depicted cultural context: Sweden’s colonial oppression of the indigenous Sami folk.
  42. Vincent N Roxxy
    Genre clichés catch up with Schultz just as surely as the past catches up with his characters and the sweet, redemptive possibilities of their relationship gets washed away in the tide of gratuitous bloodshed.
  43. April's Daughter
    Frankly, it’s anybody guess why characters do what they do in April’s Daughter, which may be both realistic and admirably nonjudgmental on Franco’s part, but it makes for a confusing and at times clinical moviegoing experience, as the director applies his detached Michael Haneke-like style to material that begs a certain amount of clarification.
  44. Jeune Femme (Montparnasse Bienvenüe)
    Serraille studied literature before switching to cinema, and her sharp attention to the detail distinguishes Jeune femme from so many first-time indie features.
  45. Fortunata
    The camera barely leaves Trinca’s side. She delivers an over-sized, nervy performance but the material is so flawed that it’s hard to truly say whether it’s exceptional acting.
  46. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
    Captain Underpants isn’t out to be more than a trifle; that’s part of its appeal. It’s not so much potty-mouthed as it is a potty-minded kiddie burlesque, one that finds the supreme innocence in naughtiness.
  47. Megan Leavey
    Often too clunky for its own good, and (ahem) doggedly apolitical throughout, this earnest feel-good tale nonetheless manages to pull on the heartstrings with sufficient gentleness.
  48. Churchill
    Churchill is a small, watchable, rather prosaic backroom docudrama.
  49. Wonder Woman
    Wonder Woman is the first major studio superhero film directed by a woman, and it shows in a number of subtle, yet important ways.
  50. Faces Places
    Agnès Varda, in the glory of her golden years, has become a humanist magician.
  51. A Ciambra
    Creatively speaking, however, A Ciambra is something of a step sideways for the Italian-American filmmaker, consolidating his considerable formal and observational gifts while fumbling a bit as storytelling.
  52. Barbara
    The movie lightly plumbs that dangerously unsettled space between performing and literally being the protagonist in a biopic.
  53. Gabriel and the Mountain
    On one level, the film can be classified as a journey of discovery, but what deepens interest is the way Barbosa constantly asks the viewer to question what it means to travel.
  54. Before We Vanish
    Playing frequently like an absurdist political satire with only flashes of violence, this low-tension, drawn-out work won’t gratify the chills or adrenaline rushes fanboys crave, but the ending strikes a romantic chord so pure that all but the most jaded cynics will be moved.
  55. A Man of Integrity
    A Man of Integrity is a tense, enraging drama about corruption and injustice, set in a small village.
  56. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    The film enunciates its raw themes — punk means individuality! the aliens are all about conformity! — but never begins to figure out how to embody those themes in a narrative that could lure in the audience.
  57. Based on a True Story
    Although the screenplay contains all the beats needed to generate tension, Assayas’ gift for conveying information between the lines is almost entirely lost on Polanski, who doesn’t give his actresses the opportunity to flesh out the subtext of their most awkward interactions.
  58. 24 Frames
    It’s an elegantly oblique movie, even for Kiarostami, whose art thrums with quiet ethereal metaphor.
  59. Ismael's Ghosts
    In its own weird way, Ismael’s Ghosts has something profound to say about the lingering pain of past relationships and the threat they still pose to the present, but it does so in such a needlessly complicated fashion, we can’t help but be overwhelmed. [Cannes Version]
  60. You Were Never Really Here
    Ramsay has made more sensually rapturous films, but this may be her most formally exacting: No shot or cut here is idle or extraneous.
  61. Godard Mon Amour
    A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).
  62. Jupiter's Moon
    This serious-minded, ambitious oddity shoots for the moon of a far-off planet, but it really only finds the grace it’s looking for in its magnificent supple camerawork.
  63. Happy End
    It’s as if the director has tied up loose ends from his earlier films, while forcing us to re-examine issues that have only grown more dire since he first brought them to our attention.
  64. Loveless
    The dramatic aesthetic of a movie like Loveless — rock-solid yet leisurely in its observance, grounded yet metaphorical — makes it a quietly commanding film.
  65. Let the Sunshine In
    Perfectly small rather than slight, and radiantly carried by Juliette Binoche — in a light-touch tour de force to be filed alongside her work in Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” — this turns out to be a subtler departure than it outwardly appears for Denis, most evoking her other Parisienne drifting-hearts study, “Friday Night,” in its bittersweet tone.
  66. The Rider
    Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.
  67. Rodin
    Rodin is a meticulously reverential, handsomely lit and very dull biopic.
  68. In the Fade
    Diane Kruger’s powerhouse performance in her first German-language production goes a long way toward compensating for the narrative’s dip into overly crystalline waters.
  69. Double Lover
    Sure, it’s kinky, but Ozon is having fun with it, to the extent that the entire film rewards that fetish all moviegoers have in common — voyeurism — offering up a kind of equal-opportunity objectification.
  70. A Gentle Creature
    The film beguiles with its bravura but it’s a deliberately punishing journey, made by a male Cassandra impelled to point out his nation’s destruction yet sadly aware that it’s too late to change the tide of history.
  71. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    [A] sprawling, thrilling, finally heart-bursting group portrait of Parisian AIDS activists in the early 1990s.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lover for a Day
    The film benefits from the collective contributions of four screenwriters...whose collective insights result in a beautiful complexity.
  73. Filmworker
    Filmworker is a brisk, compelling movie that’s pure candy for Kubrick buffs, yet there are oddities about it.
  74. The Square
    Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one.
  75. Hermia & Helena
    With its tricksy timeline and waifish subplots, the film feels unduly stretched even to reach its modest length, while our dramaturgy-fixated protagonist is slow to stumble into a compelling arc of her own.
  76. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Piscatella and editor Matthew Sultan have shaped the kind of exciting you-are-there narrative that captures the feeling of underdog “naive” idealism transforming into a game-changing popular movement.
  77. Good Time
    These restlessly independent auteurs have passed the genre-foray test with flying neon colors, at no cost or compromise to their abrasively humane worldview.
  78. Radiance
    The film’s thematic preoccupation with the power of images — as perceived through any of the senses — is a worthy and thoughtful one. Yet the execution lacks the visual and emotional rigor of Kawase’s most imposing films, instead swaddling viewers in buttery lighting and blunt, earnest platitudes.
  79. The Day After
    Even lesser Hong has its lackadaisical pleasures, and The Day After has its share of wry musings and twitchy banter between characters to counter its visual stasis and lulling storytelling.
  80. Claire's Camera
    Characters often most reveal themselves when they’re saying nothing of any particular consequence in Hong’s short, loose script.
  81. Blade of the Immortal
    The story’s supernatural elements enable Miike to take huge liberties with chanbara, the oldest genre in Japanese cinema, and break free from rigid traditions of choreographing swordplay sequences.
  82. The Florida Project
    As a filmmaker, Baker is a graceful neorealist voyeur who thrives on improvisation, and his storytelling, in The Florida Project, is mostly just a series of anecdotes. But that turns out to be enough.
  83. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    Farrell and Kidman are astonishingly gifted at playing the subtext of every scene.
  84. The Beguiled
    Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.
  85. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    With no shtick to fall back on, Sandler is forced to act, and it’s a glorious thing to watch.
  86. Wonderstruck
    Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.
  87. Baywatch
    The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.
  88. Ava
    Mysius’ startlingly assured, exquisitely shot “Ava” is a film that doesn’t simply explore the textural possibilities of 35mm film for the hell of it, it makes thematic use of them, to stunning, evocative effect.
  89. Don't Tell
    With West’s magnetic performance and Garrett’s sensitive direction leading the way, the film achieves its crucial goal of turning uncomfortable subject matter into emotionally rewarding viewing.
  90. War Machine
    Everyone has a different idea of what’s funny, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being amused by War Machine, a colossally miscalculated satire.
  91. Bobbi Jene
    For a film with such a narrow scope, this one oddly refuses to ask some of the basic questions that might have enriched our understanding.
  92. The Boy Downstairs
    Mamet has a quick, spry reaction time and a gently forlorn focus that holds the screen, and she holds this movie together.
  93. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    The franchise has lost a bit of its luster with every successive installment, but never has a “Pirates” film felt this inessential, this depressingly pro forma.
  94. Okja
    Downright charming at times and irrepressibly gonzo at others, Okja hews to an all-too-familiar trajectory.
  95. Everything, Everything
    For the first hour or so, it is unabashedly sappy yet modestly engaging, buoyed by the low-key charm of its two leads. But then an implausible third-act reveal spoils the fun, and the movie never recovers.
  96. Lost in Paris
    Who wouldn’t want a picturesque trip to the French capital that delivers more laughs than a nitrous oxide leak near the hyena compound? In fact, I’d go as far as to promise that Lost in Paris offers the three most delightful sight gags you’ll see on screen all year.
  97. Becoming Bond
    Even Lazenby detractors can’t help but be charmed by the man himself, who may not have been much of an actor, but turns out to be a bloody good storyteller, and an awfully salty one at that — revealing sexual conquests that would make even Bond blush.
  98. Paint It Black
    As directorial debuts go, Amber Tamblyn’s Paint It Black is kind of a mess, but then, so are its characters, which makes the film’s raw, off-kilter style somehow right for the material.
  99. Get Me Roger Stone
    When you watch Get Me Roger Stone, the lively, fun, sickening, and essential new documentary, you realize that Atwater and Rove may have excelled at what they did, but there was — and is — only one king.
  100. Whisky Galore!
    Oddly stiff where Alexander Mackendrick’s original village farce was infectiously tipsy, Gillies MacKinnon’s interpretation is twee, tweedy and rather timid about putting its own stamp on a now-quaint story.
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