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. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    An amiable, fast-paced entry that should win over fans.
  4. 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.
  5. Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    A powerful and important documentary.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Icaros: A Vision
    This trippy work maps the intersections of West and East, body and spirit, faith and terror with beguiling grace.
  13. The Last Shaman
    At once superficial and overblown, this documentary also often feels downright phony.
  14. The Wedding Plan
    The film nicely plays with the standards of romantic comedy.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Unlocked
    An anonymously enjoyable espionage thriller that, for purposes of memory, all but self-destructs the second the closing credits begin to roll.
  19. Tomorrow Ever After
    The movie’s one recurring joke stems from watching Shaina catch strangers off-guard, and it starts to wear thin by around the one-hour mark, when things start to turn dark.
  20. Illicit
    Illicit is too tepid to qualify as an erotic thriller, or even a guilty pleasure, and the performances range from over the top to tiresomely obvious.
  21. Everyone’s Life (Chacun sa vie)
    Everyone’s Life contains a few of the most effective individual scenes in the director’s recent filmography, as well as some of the most befuddling.
  22. 32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide
    Gripping and discomfiting, this first directorial feature by the veteran editor is the kind of diaristic inquiry that can seem self-indulgent but here sports a fearlessness that transcends vanity — at times it’s downright unflattering.
  23. Becoming Who I Was
    The endearing, guileless personalities of the two principals constitute much of the film’s appeal.
  24. Forbidden Games: The Justin Fashanu Story
    The short, mercurial, sometimes self-defeating life of professional soccer player Justin Fashanu is so packed with drama that “Forbidden Games,” Adam Darke and Jon Carey’s documentary about him, often feels like a narrative feature — one that engrosses even as its complex central figure defies full understanding.
  25. Brimstone & Glory
    Mixing sheer spectacle with modest but pleasing human-interest threads, Viktor Jakovleski’s first directorial feature is a poetical, entrancing documentary.
  26. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    It’s mostly interested in the off-kilter but natural chemistry of its leads, who despite their differences come across as comrades who genuinely care about each other, and whose bond is solidified by their shared hangups.
  27. Natasha
    A pair of rich central performances, an authentic eye for its second-generation immigrant milieu and a novelist’s comfort with ambiguity allow Natasha to modestly transcend its overpopulated genre.
  28. Violet
    Devos depicts stages of grief not as a series of emotions but as an evolving alchemy of perception that surrounds the protagonist, distorting time, space, color and light in patterns of dislocation, muffling the synapses that connect sounds and images.
  29. The Drowning
    Whatever suspense it musters feels artificial, manufactured in the first half by withholding information all the characters already possess from the audience, and in the second by adding more curlicues and flourishes to the elaborate plot at the expense of nourishing the milquetoast characters.
  30. Snatched
    The movie’s mother-daughter jokes are like firecrackers with damp fuses.
  31. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Ultimately, “King Arthur” is just a loud, obnoxious parade of flashy set pieces, as one visually busy, belligerent action scene after another marches by, each making less sense than the last, but all intended to overwhelm.
  32. Absolutely Anything
    It’s devastating to think how far Jones has fallen in the four decades since “Holy Grail,” in which he got more laughs banging a few coconuts together than he musters from his entire movie.
  33. Alien: Covenant
    As acts of creation go, Scott has made an “Alien” movie for that segment of the audience that has always rooted for the monster.
  34. Sacred
    It is entirely well intentioned. But the fair-mindedness of Lennon’s approach also contributes to a sense, ironically enough, of godlike detachment from the slivers of life and faith the film comprises.
  35. A Woman's Life
    A Woman’s Life has the kind of majesty found not in the grand gesture but the modest detail, the kind that accumulates resonance with each seemingly minor event until the picture of a character becomes as complete as a painting by Ingres. Or a story by Maupassant.
  36. Another Evil
    Another Evil is somewhat unpredictable and nicely played, but so low-key that the comedy as well as everything else feels almost too modest for feature scale; it has the throwaway, anecdotal tenor of a droll short.
  37. Burden
    A portrait of the artist emerges that’s complex, somewhat mysterious, but ultimately quite winning.
  38. Keep the Change
    It’s an ode to self-discovery and acceptance that’s as funny as it is sweet.
  39. Like Crazy
    Boasting a deliriously loquacious script together with a rare understanding of how to balance certain Italian caricatures with a grounding sense of realism – a combination that’s truly Virzì’s forte – the film takes two psychologically damaged women...and makes them into a mutually supportive duo who surprisingly touch our emotions.
  40. Long Strange Trip
    It has the sprawl and generosity of a good Dead show, yet there’s nothing indulgent about it — it’s an ardent piece of documentary classicism.
  41. Hounds of Love
    A harrowing ride that morphs from discrete horror to probing character study and back again in a vivid yet admirably restrained 108 minutes.
  42. The Divine Order
    Though the film’s feel-good construction undercuts its ability to surprise, Petra Volpe’s cine-history lesson remains a mainstream crowd-pleaser adept at inspiring and amusing in equal measure.
  43. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    It just has a story to tell, and it does that incredibly compellingly.
  44. River
    Dagg’s thriller is slow to get going and hampered by an inexpressive leading man.
  45. Sweet Virginia
    It’s this strange alchemy — the way that a terse script can leave so much unsaid, combined with such a talented ensemble’s ability to suggest all the details left either in silence or in darkness — that makes “Sweet Virginia” such a haunting character study.
  46. Ice Mother
    For the first time, older characters are at the heart of a Sláma film, and Kronerová and Nový repay the helmer-writer with warm, dignified turns that require both soul- and flesh-baring.
  47. I Am Heath Ledger
    I Am Heath Ledger is a catchy and seductive portrait of an extraordinary artist, but it leaves you wanting more, because you know it’s not close to being all of Heath Ledger.
  48. House of Z
    House of Z captures the way in which direct hands-on engagement is vital to an artist’s continued relevance, and vitality.
  49. The Pirates of Somalia
    The movie’s much too flashy, allowing its cheeky attitude to overpower the otherwise humanist message (somehow, absurd situations feel less so when the narrator is constantly pointing out how outrageous everything seems to be), while the acting is all over the place.
  50. The Clapper
    The movie is not entirely without charm — although it’s safe to say, it’s mostly without charm. In fact, the movie has so little charm to offer that it borders on insipid.
  51. The Trip to Spain
    That The Trip to Spain is unabashedly more of the same is good news…but not entirely good news.
  52. The Lovers
    The Lovers is a comedy of Middle American doldrums that leaves you rooting for its characters instead of smirking at them.
  53. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    Driven by both empathy and a passion for justice, “How to Survive a Plague” director David France’s stellar documentary charts an investigation into the still-unsolved death of trans icon Marsha P. Johnson, along the way illuminating the persistent discrimination that exists today, and the bonds of community designed to counter it.
  54. Abundant Acreage Available
    It’s a pleasure to see such a fine actress navigate the nuances of her role.
  55. Take Me
    From one wild mood swing to the next, it keeps us interested with aplomb, with Mike Makowsky’s script never lingering too long on any one element, the better to keep the pace brisk, and unpredictable.
  56. Rupture
    This is a plot that feels lazily reverse-engineered from a collection of disparate, pre-existing scenes and elements, rather like one of those cooking shows where contestants are given a selection of random ingredients and forced to come up with a meal.
  57. How to Be a Latin Lover
    There are some very funny bits and pieces scattered amid the proceedings, along with a few darkly comical gags that appear to belong in a different movie, but are more than welcome here.
  58. Casting JonBenét
    Director Kitty Green’s high-concept documentary Casting JonBenét breaks fresh ground, probing the public, rather than family members or suspects (often the same thing).
  59. Sleight
    Perhaps Dillard is too young or green to escape the recycled clichés that constitute the bulk of his script (co-written with Alex Theurer), and yet, charitably speaking, Sleight shows potential.
  60. The Wall
    The Wall succeeds because of Worrell’s words.
  61. One Week and a Day
    This sentimental film takes things one step at a time.
  62. Below Her Mouth
    A sexually frank but narratively flimsy girl-meets-girl romance that never gets under its gorgeous characters’ amply exposed skin.
  63. The Circle
    You could call The Circle a dystopian thriller, yet it’s not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that.
  64. NOLA Circus
    NOLA Circus (the title refers to both a lead character and the abbreviation for New Orleans) is the kind of hideously unfunny folderol in which most cast members are encouraged to act at the top of their lungs to compensate for the witless script.
  65. The Cage Fighter
    An engaging and sympathetic documentary.
  66. The Devotion of Suspect X
    Ultimately, the film’s elaborately-mapped plots are unraveled in a blow-by-blow account that doesn’t give the brain much of a workout, but makes it suitably accessible for a wider audience.
  67. Tomorrow
    When Tomorrow starts to make intellectual as well as geographical leaps and to draw macroeconomic, political, and social factors into its bright-eyed, approachable orbit, that’s when cynicism gives way to admiration, and admiration can flare into inspiration.
  68. Victoria Day
    Victoria Day (a very Canadian holiday) is expertly put together, the editing and framing so sturdy and right that the twin currents of the film flow over the viewer unimpeded.
  69. Obit
    If, overall, Obit is merely pleasant in a predictable, innocuous way, it’s nonetheless well-crafted and moderately educational.
  70. Amazon Adventure
    Slee’s film boasts such a high level of writing, acting, and overall production polish that youngsters may be fooled into thinking they’re watching a mindless blockbuster, when in fact, they’ve actually been fooled into thinking.
  71. Phoenix Forgotten
    After 40 or so minutes of teasing hints that its makers may have hit upon a fresh approach to found-footage thrillers, “Phoenix Forgotten” indicates the genre may be having its last gasp on life support as the movie devolves into yet another threadbare patchwork of mounting hysteria, faux cinéma vérité, and shaky-cam visual clichés.
  72. Urban Hymn
    Competent if pedestrian Urban Hymn takes a familiar walk down the path of inspirational youth drama.
  73. Love in the Buff
    It’s the narrative non sequiturs and comic vignettes sprinkled throughout that give the freewheeling pic its playful charm.
  74. Love Off the Cuff
    The dialogue is dirtier than ever, and the gags outrageous, and yet, like the two central characters and the seven-year relationship they labor to keep alive, “Love Off the Cuff” shows signs of fatigue.
  75. Wakefield
    Cranston humanizes his sociopathic character, which is essential, considering that Wakefield is essentially a one-man show whose star grows increasingly creepy as his beard fills in and his fingernails lengthen and turn back.
  76. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
    This portrait of the artist as an old woman is a gentle-hearted gem, as profoundly subtle as it is subtly profound.
  77. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    Shot for shot, line and line, it’s an extravagant and witty follow-up, made with the same friendly virtuosic dazzle. Yet this time you can sense just how hard the series’ wizard of a director, James Gunn (now taking off from a script he wrote solo), is working to entertain you. Maybe a little too hard.
  78. Behind the White Glasses
    There was a time when audiences lined up around city blocks to see the movies of Lina Wertmüller. Behind the White Glasses lets you revisit a bit of that passion, without quite nailing what it was.
  79. Let It Fall: L.A. 1982-1992
    There are moments in “Let It Fall” that feel like a significant reframing of the riots, both in terms of what actually happened and in terms of who’s really to blame.
  80. Unforgettable
    It’s tawdry “Sleeping With the Enemy”-style fun while it lasts, boasting a better cast and splashier production values than the next closest Lifetime movie, while being so ridiculous at times that audiences can’t help but talk back to the screen.
  81. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
    The movie just about pulses with contemporary resonance.
  82. Sandy Wexler
    While the humor mostly misfires, there’s a certain pleasure to be had simply from spotting the celebrity cameos in Sandy Wexler.
  83. Lucky
    Everything Harry Dean Stanton has done in his career, and his life, has brought him to his moment of triumph in “Lucky,” an unassumingly wonderful little film about nothing in particular and everything that’s important
  84. Fast Five
    The 10-year run of the “Fast and Furious” roadshow isn’t slowing down a bit in Fast Five, by most measures the best of the bunch, combining fresh casting choices, interesting Rio locales and literally smashing bookended action sequences.
  85. Spark: A Space Tail
    It’s hard to imagine that even the least demanding of tykes will ask for a second sampling of this thoroughly second-rate animated feature, which has all the charm, and twice the volume, of a barking dog.
  86. Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
    Axelrod plays along with her eccentric subject’s insouciant attitude vis à vis his own identity to mostly delightful effect.
  87. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    Writer-director Jared Moshé’s solidly entertaining period drama...can be enjoyed as both a straight-shooting homage to crotchety sidekicks and shoot-’em-up conventions, and a well-crafted movie about loyalty, betrayal, and redemption.
  88. Finding Oscar
    A standard-issue piece of heart-tugging reportage better suited to small screens than art houses.
  89. Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary
    “Chasing Trane” is a seductive piece of middle-of-the-road documentary filmmaking; it gives you the basics, but beautifully.
  90. Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo
    The film benefits greatly from its ability to review events from the viewpoints of the men on the ground in Houston.
  91. Speech & Debate
    Though energetically shot and blessed with some appealing performances (including winningly strange cameos for theater darlings Lin-Manuel Miranda and Darren Criss), Speech & Debate never manages to make a convincing case for itself.
  92. All These Sleepless Nights
    Taken as a whole, All These Sleepless Nights presents a restless, some-might-say-dynamic portrait of characters who seem to be going absolutely nowhere.
  93. Glory
    The film quietly builds to a feeling of inexorable disaster, guided by terrific performances as well as spot-on editing.
  94. Born in China
    To the extent that Born in China is, by its very existence, a minor act of cross-cultural diplomacy, its most progressive effect is to unveil the majestic diversity of Chinese landscapes.
  95. City of Tiny Lights
    Director Pete Travis’s film is distinguished by some transposition of noir tropes into cultural spaces not traditionally associated with the genre — from the London bar scene to a mosque — that keeps things from feeling too déjà vu.
  96. Heal the Living
    It’s Quillévéré’s soaring visual and sonic acumen (with an assist from composer Alexandre Desplat, here in matchless form) that suffuses a potentially familiar hospital weeper with true grace.
  97. The Fate of the Furious
    The Fate of the Furious is nothing more than pulp done smart, but scene for scene it’s elegant rather than bombastic, and it packs a heady escapist wallop.
  98. Last Men in Aleppo
    May not be the most comprehensively explanatory or analytical film yet made on the war, but it’s the one that provides viewers with the most sensorily vivid and empathetic sense yet of how it feels to live (and die) through the carnage.
  99. The Case for Christ
    Although it sporadically errs on the side of sentimentality and simplification, The Case for Christ sustains interest, and even generates mild suspense, while offering a faith-based spin on the template of an investigative-journalism drama.
  100. The Ticket
    Boasting complex, sharply drawn characters and top-notch performances, this mature drama plays with ideas of seeing, both the outside world as well as within oneself, as Fluk (“Never Too Late”) masterfully depicts intimacies gone awry.
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