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. Transformers: The Last Knight
    For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    What scant charms this direct-to-video-style Nineties throwback has belong mostly to Willis.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Viceroy's House
    Such a sprawling, two-pronged saga may well have been better served in television miniseries format.
  13. Harmonium
    Shot in a meticulous yet unmannered style, the film provides the veteran cast with an ideal framework to mount masterful performances.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Strange Weather
    There’s no free-at-last rain dance for Darcy, but just about every other lyrical cliche appears on cue.
  17. Letters from Baghdad
    The bottom line is that Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have fleshed out a complex, fascinating figure.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. Churchill
    Churchill is a small, watchable, rather prosaic backroom docudrama.
  31. 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.
  32. Faces Places
    Agnès Varda, in the glory of her golden years, has become a humanist magician.
  33. 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.
  34. Barbara
    The movie lightly plumbs that dangerously unsettled space between performing and literally being the protagonist in a biopic.
  35. 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.
  36. 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.
  37. A Man of Integrity
    A Man of Integrity is a tense, enraging drama about corruption and injustice, set in a small village.
  38. 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.
  39. 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.
  40. 24 Frames
    It’s an elegantly oblique movie, even for Kiarostami, whose art thrums with quiet ethereal metaphor.
  41. 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]
  42. 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.
  43. Godard Mon Amour
    A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).
  44. 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.
  45. 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.
  46. 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.
  47. 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.
  48. The Rider
    Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.
  49. Rodin
    Rodin is a meticulously reverential, handsomely lit and very dull biopic.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  52. 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.
  53. 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.
  55. Filmworker
    Filmworker is a brisk, compelling movie that’s pure candy for Kubrick buffs, yet there are oddities about it.
  56. 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.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. 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.
  62. Claire's Camera
    Characters often most reveal themselves when they’re saying nothing of any particular consequence in Hong’s short, loose script.
  63. 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.
  64. 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.
  65. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    Farrell and Kidman are astonishingly gifted at playing the subtext of every scene.
  66. 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.
  67. 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.
  68. 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.
  69. Baywatch
    The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.
  70. 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.
  71. 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.
  72. 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.
  73. 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.
  74. 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.
  75. 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.
  76. Okja
    Downright charming at times and irrepressibly gonzo at others, Okja hews to an all-too-familiar trajectory.
  77. 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.
  78. 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.
  79. 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.
  80. 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.
  81. 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.
  82. 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.
  83. Soul on a String
    Chinese director Zhang Yang (“Shower,” “Sunflower”) eschews the thrill of propulsive duels for a discursive allegorical approach, serving up picturesque visuals, highland-dry humor, and karmic plot twists.
  84. It Comes at Night
    It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.
  85. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    An amiable, fast-paced entry that should win over fans.
  86. Legion of Brothers
    Its up-close portrait of heroic dedication in extreme situations has the dramatic immediacy and air of privileged access to impress both hawks and doves.
  87. Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    A powerful and important documentary.
  88. Afterimage
    While this grim story is one worth telling, it’s a pity that in relating the bum’s-rush Strzeminski got in later life, Wadja couldn’t have communicated more of what sustains his legacy as a great artist and innovator.
  89. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    The movie is diligent and, to a degree, absorbing — a legal/business saga that’s also the story of a family in crisis.
  90. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, directed by Daniel Raim, is a passionate and beguiling movie-love documentary that shines a light on two of the unsung artisan heroes of Hollywood.
  91. 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.
  92. AWOL
    Deb Shoval’s uneven first feature demonstrates greater assurance in conveying a sense of place (the filmmaker’s native northeastern Pennsylvania) than it does with narrative and character development.
  93. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.
  94. Icaros: A Vision
    This trippy work maps the intersections of West and East, body and spirit, faith and terror with beguiling grace.
  95. The Last Shaman
    At once superficial and overblown, this documentary also often feels downright phony.
  96. The Wedding Plan
    The film nicely plays with the standards of romantic comedy.
  97. Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web
    A giant data dump of diverse archival and interview materials shaped into an admirably cogent if cluttered two-hour whole, “Caught” provides a fascinating albeit extreme illustration of the intersection between fame, greed, copyright and technology in the internet age.
  98. The Challenge
    Loathe to mar his exquisite package with the least hint of vulgar commentary, Ancarani arrives at something that is at once luxuriously alluring and a little too like an advertisement for luxury products — dazzling, aloof, uncritical and fatuous.
  99. The King's Case Note
    Beginning brightly with goofy slapstick, irreverent humor and a dastardly plot to overthrow the monarch, the film squanders its early success in a second half marred by pedestrian pacing and ho-hum action scenes.
  100. Unlocked
    An anonymously enjoyable espionage thriller that, for purposes of memory, all but self-destructs the second the closing credits begin to roll.
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