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. Aftermath
    Aftermath is one of those mopey coping-with-grief movies in which the characters grapple with intense emotions, while audiences feel nothing.
  2. Going in Style
    Going in Style coasts along on the testy spiky charms of its leading men, who have 246 years of life on earth between them (Caine is 84, Freeman 79, and Arkin 83), but it’s nothing more than an amiable connect-the-dots movie.
  3. Salt and Fire
    This most defiantly rule-resistant of filmmakers certainly hasn’t lost his capacity to surprise. Salt and Fire’s punchline, however, only enhances the sense of a shaggy-dog tale dashed off on the back of a postcard — it’s the scenery on the other side that holds our attention.
  4. The Void
    At least its failings aren’t formulaic ones — or perhaps they’re the fault of jamming in more fantastic-cinema formula than one modestly scaled film can support.
  5. Mine
    The Fabios appear to have some talent, but not a lot of common sense. They’ve made a land-mine suspense thriller with a few heart-in-the-throat, hair-trigger moments, but Mine is so eager to be a “metaphor” (it’s a little Beckett, a little Tarantino, a little Lifetime channel) that it’s the film’s pretension that winds up exploding in your face.
  6. Despite the Falling Snow
    When a film’s basic strategy is to cut between the past and the present, it should create ripples of anticipatory tension. But Despite the Falling Snow is one of those movies in which the cross-cutting keeps destroying all mood and momentum — it feels more like channel-surfing.
  7. Truman
    Cesc Gay’s wise, wistful and well-observed film about two friends enjoying a final reunion in the shadow of impending death, is by turns amusing and affecting — and quite often both at once.
  8. Pitching Tents
    The big giveaway: While some of the genuine articles sporadically earned chuckles with vulgar sight gags and gratuitous nudity, Pitching Tents is too timorous to risk being truly offensive.
  9. God Knows Where I Am
    The film gradually thaws out the stark, frozen mystery at its heart, but the warm-blooded, breathing truth of Linda’s life is no less tragic than that of her cold death.
  10. Live Cargo
    Live Cargo is one of the most evocatively shot debut films in recent memory, which is why its shabby storytelling is such a crushing disappointment.
  11. Gifted
    Gifted wants to be an “honest” tearjerker, but it’s as plotted out as an equation on a blackboard. It’s the undergirding of formula that roots the movie in the commercial marketplace, but that may ultimately limit its appeal.
  12. The Work
    When the participants convulse and cry, the film’s empathetic connection is so direct and so strong, audiences may be driven to weep as well.
  13. Bokeh
    The result is a “What if?” exercise that ultimately doesn’t take its starting premise to any place that’s terribly interesting. However, for at least as long as it appears to be heading somewhere, Bokeh holds attention with polish and resourcefulness on a limited budget.
  14. Tickling Giants
    Tickling Giants is a terrific movie that leaves you cherishing (a little more) the freedom we have, and holding in contempt (a little more) those who would compromise it. Mostly, the movie makes you understand how every society — and ours more than ever — needs people like Bassem Youssef to demonstrate that laughter will always be one of the essential ways to keep power in check.
  15. A Woman, a Part
    A Woman, a Part knows how to hold an audience, and it’s got a fresh, if commercially limited, subject: What happens when hipsters get old.
  16. Leap!
    An unabashed wish-fulfilment fantasy that sweetly checks off every conceivable follow-your-heart cliché.
  17. Cézanne et Moi
    The cinematic equivalent of calendar art.
  18. The Levelling
    The Levelling is an intimate story, waterlogged with guilt, grief and blame, but it explores this dark spectrum with such unsentimental honesty that its tiny moments of uplift, when its repressed characters form tentative connections despite themselves, are magnified and moving.
  19. For Here or to Go?
    Writer-producer Rishi S. Bhilawadikar’s too-busy script nevertheless scores legitimate points about the complexities and paradoxes of the visa application process, the resulting limbo in which many legitimately productive immigrants find themselves, and other frustrating and soul-searching issues facing ethnic communities.
  20. Summer 1993
    Striking a careful balance between narrative and atmosphere, the writer-director paints a vivid portrait of a light-filled summer when a little girl has to face the loss of her mother and integration into a new nuclear family
  21. The Death of Louis XIV
    The vividness of the realization — with a sound design that emphasizes every chew and tick of the clock — makes the movie continually engrossing.
  22. Ghost in the Shell
    Spectacularly honoring the spirit and aesthetic of Mamoru Oshii’s beloved animated adaptations without resorting wholly to slavish cosplay, this is smart, hard-lacquered entertainment that may just trump the original films for galloping storytelling momentum and sheer, coruscating visual excitement — even if a measure of their eerie, melancholic spirit hasn’t quite carried over to the immaculate new carapace.
  23. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Nominally focused on the celebrated filmmaker’s lesser-known dabblings in fine art, The Art Life emerges as a more expansive study of Lynch’s creative impulses and preoccupations, as he relates first-hand the formative experiences that spurred and shaped a most unusual imagination.
  24. All This Panic
    All This Panic is more remarkable for the way it looks than the actual, somewhat banal, girl-talk content.
  25. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    It’s not a rousing animated comedy that parents will cherish along with their kids. It’s more like a colorful and diverting pacifier.
  26. Band Aid
    Band Aid has wit and nasty charm to burn in the earlygoing, generating enough goodwill to power it through an uneven final act.
  27. I, Olga Hepnarová
    Unforgivingly rigorous to its final, exactingly composed monochrome frame, I, Olga Hepnarova shows us scarcely a flickering moment of light or joy in its anti-heroine’s short, loveless life, depicted on screen from adolescence upwards.
  28. Dig Two Graves
    It’s all quite nicely handled by Adams’ direction and his script (co-written with Jeremy Phillips), though the latter ultimately somewhat disappoints.
  29. Karl Marx City
    Epperlein offers Karl Marx City as her own act of painful transparency, an essential warning about what happens to societies when ordinary citizens are being watched.
  30. CHIPS
    Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”
  31. The Time of Their Lives
    A likably lame rattletrap of a road movie that gets what limited spark it has from the “Dynasty” diva’s still-lascivious on-screen charisma.
  32. The Zookeeper's Wife
    There’s no nice way to put it in this case, but The Zookeeper’s Wife has the unfortunate failing of rendering its human drama less interesting than what happens to the animals — and for a subject as damaging to our species as the Holocaust, that no small shortcoming.
  33. Most Beautiful Island
    The movie’s payoff is every bit as delicious as its build-up.
  34. Saban's Power Rangers
    We’re now so awash in superhero culture that kids no longer need the safe, lame, pandering junior-league version of it. They can just watch “Ant-Man” or the PG-13 “Suicide Squad.” Safe, lame, and pandering have all grown up.
  35. Life
    Life’s a thrill when it’s smart, but it’s even more exciting when the characters are dumb — which is ultimately a paradox the film wears proudly, to the possible extinction of the human race.
  36. All Nighter
    The part may be tailor-made for Simmons’ no-nonsense persona, and his performance reliably rock solid, but the bland execution of director Gavin Wiesen and the uninspired scripting of Seth Owen have no comic zing.
  37. I Am Another You
    By the end of I Am Another You, what starts off as a celebration of reckless freedom turns into a revelation of a broken yet soaring soul: the story of a life that resists being judged as much as it does being pigeonholed.
  38. The Devil's Candy
    Accomplished visually and busy sonically, it nonetheless falls short with a story of rock ‘n’ roll demonic possession that scarcely begins to exploit the ideas embedded in its serviceable premise.
  39. California Dreams
    As is Ott’s wont, California Dreams blurs the line between simulated vérité and authentic observation, making it often impossible to tell whether those on camera are playing themselves, simply being themselves or a combination of the two.
  40. Win It All
    Funny, warm, and broken-in in all the right ways, Win It All marries Swanberg’s loping, observational style with a plot that wouldn’t have been out of place in an old-school Warner Bros. melodrama, and ends up dealing a surprisingly strong hand.
  41. The Most Hated Woman in America
    Though he clearly admires the woman, O’Haver doesn’t want to let her off easy, which makes for a more nuanced portrayal than the stock canonization another director might have chosen (it would have been just as easy to paint her as a devil).
  42. Deidra & Laney Rob a Train
    Crow and fellow up-and-comer Ashleigh Murray make an infectiously spirited duo in director Sydney Freeland’s sophomore feature; exuberant but not obnoxious, their combined energy and ingenuity is enough to steam the film through some off-track script wobbles.
  43. Gemini
    For a director who emerged from indie film’s so-called “mumblecore” movement, Gemini feels like a grown-up achievement, and the sign of a director with so much more to give in the future.
  44. Ben-Gurion, Epilogue
    The new documentary Ben-Gurion, Epilogue offers a rare intimate look at what went on inside Ben-Gurion’s heart and mind.
  45. The Disaster Artist
    Somehow, in accentuating Wiseau’s weirdness, Franco overlooks his soul.
  46. Mean Dreams
    The join-the-bullet-holes nature of Mean Dreams' storytelling would be less of a problem if the characterization were a little more textured, but for all the picturesque anguish on display, the febrile messiness of actual human life is little in evidence.
  47. Porto
    This narratively slender item is unapologetically a mood piece: a film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.
  48. The Wound
    The Wound is rich in such small, observational details.
  49. The Transfiguration
    Where the film runs into some difficulty is in sustaining its initially very promising mood of incipient violence. Withholding revelations can be an effective strategy, but it’s perhaps slightly overused here, as the result feels ever so slightly dry.
  50. Atomic Blonde
    Virtuosic kick-ass filmmaking can be its own reward, but to paraphrase “Idiocracy,” you still need to care about whose ass it is, and why it’s being kicked.
  51. The Boss Baby
    The Boss Baby, the jokey new 3D animated lark from DreamWorks Animation (it’s being distributed by 20th Century Fox), is a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy that’s also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other.
  52. Uncertain
    In another director’s hands, the residents might be labeled “eccentric” and condescendingly depicted for laughs, but Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands approach this touch-and-go community with curiosity and humanism, capturing what feels like a deciding moment in a series of struggles so far off the grid, they would otherwise escape our notice entirely.
  53. Baby Driver
    Like all Edgar Wright movies, Baby Driver is a blast, featuring wall-to-wall music and a surfeit of inspired ideas. But it’s also something of a mess, blaring pop tunes of every sort as it lurches between rip-roaring car chases, colorful pre-caper banter, and a twee young-love subplot.
  54. Actor Martinez
    Narrative and reality clash, tussle, and are eventually rendered indistinguishable in a witty, tortured puzzle picture — one in a growing subgenre of hybrid inquiries into the nature and limits of performance, which is not to say there’s anything quite like it out there.
  55. Little Boxes
    Even as some of the supporting players and subplots veer toward caricature, the family dynamics at the film’s center remain entirely relatable.
  56. Song to Song
    Song to Song finds the maestro in broken-record mode, rehashing more or less the same themes against the backdrop of the Austin music scene — merely the latest borderline-awful Malick movie that risks to undermine the genius and mystery of his best work.
  57. The Other Half
    What might have seemed pro forma on paper...overcomes its occasionally studied stylistic tics to become a troubled, anguished love story that neither exaggerates nor soft-pedals the demons on display.
  58. Love & Taxes
    The movie takes Kornbluth’s stage show, recorded live, and intersperses it with dramatized scenes that are just deft and amusing enough to make you wish they were part of a larger indie production. Yet it all works together, as if Kornbluth was narrating and acting out the graphic novel of his life.
  59. Suntan
    Right from the superbly framed opening scene of Kostis on the ferry, the visuals satisfy with their unerring sense of composition.
  60. Brimstone
    The film has gruesomely effective moments, and one at times gets caught up in the gears of its big interlocked narrative, but it also has serious longueurs.
  61. School Life
    There’s considerable poignancy in the contrast between this eccentric pair’s mutual sense that their lives are winding down and the vast, still-unshaped futures of their young charges, but Ní Chianáin’s film largely resists sentimentality of the “Greatest Love of All” variety.
  62. Radio Dreams
    Radio Dreams is a witty, low-key exercise in deferred gratification.
  63. White Sun
    Skillfully blending intimate human drama with sharp political observations, Deepak Rauniyar’s outstanding second feature sends a powerful message about the need for tolerance if Nepal is to overcome divisions that remain long after the Comprehensive Peace Accord of 2006
  64. In This Corner of the World
    Adapting Fumiyo Kono’s 2007 manga of the same title, director Sunao Katabuchi captures the manifold experiences of a housewife during WWII with beguiling intimacy and appealing hand-drawn illustration.
  65. Contemporary Color
    It’s not every documentary that can so exhilaratingly make us feel a part of something so special.
  66. The Last Laugh
    Pearlstein’s very deft assembly manages to raise all these ideas and others for viewer consideration while underlining that there are few, if any, definitive responses to them.
  67. The Freedom to Marry
    [A] solid yet unexceptional documentary.
  68. Beauty and the Beast
    It’s a lovingly crafted movie, and in many ways a good one, but before that it’s an enraptured piece of old-is-new nostalgia.
  69. Junction 48
    Issues are overly simplified and scenes are often poorly constructed (not helped by uneven editing), though Nafar is a charismatic performer. Ditto Qupty, and the energetic hip-hop scenes are welcome distractions. Visuals are spirited.
  70. Nakom
    There’s an air of authenticity as well as a pleasingly laid-back yet substantive narrative engagement to this polished effort.
  71. Wolves
    It’s a showcase for some fine acting and even finer basketball action, but neither are enough to cover for this story’s enervating formulaic construction.
  72. Lavender
    The film would be a routine affair if not for its baroque aesthetic gestures and a captivating turn from star Abbie Cornish.
  73. The Settlers
    The real achievement here is in going beyond the buzzwords of newscasts and talking points to convey a sense of what’s happening on the ground — and to give it a sense of urgency.
  74. Punching Henry
    Phillips, who has the everyman look of a younger John Heard, is such a sympathetic sad sack throughout Punching Henry that it’s occasionally discomforting to watch what happens to him. But that is a major part of this low-key comedy’s charm.
  75. The Ottoman Lieutenant
    Though the film ultimately hinges on a “forbidden” Muslim-Christian romance, almost nothing is made of the enormous hurdles that would be present in this time and place.
  76. Kong: Skull Island
    The surprise is that “Skull Island” isn’t just ten times as good as “Jurassic World”; it’s a rousing and smartly crafted primordial-beastie spectacular.
  77. The Shack
    The strangest thing about The Shack, and the reason it’s finally a so-so movie, is that all the rage and terror and dark-side vengeance that Mack has to learn to transcend is something we’re told about, but we never actually see him mired in it.
  78. The Women's Balcony
    Offering solid, middle-brow entertainment that borrows from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” the film shows the relationships and tensions between different groups within Orthodox Judaism in Jerusalem, and provides a cautionary (and universally understandable) tale about religious fundamentalism.
  79. 4th Man Out
    [A] thoroughly ingratiating, touchingly heartfelt comedy.
  80. Table 19
    Almost everything that happens in this movie rings cloyingly false. It wants to make you laugh and cry, but you may be too busy cringing.
  81. Apprentice
    The movie feels a little too sparse and literal in places.
  82. Aroused by Gymnopedies
    "Gymnopedies” is an engaging and ultimately touching portrait of love, loneliness and loss of youth.
  83. Rock Dog
    Rock Dog is cluttered with incompatible subplots that never quite seem to belong in the same film.
  84. Bitter Harvest
    While Bitter Harvest will undoubtedly serve to raise awareness, there can be no doubt that the events deserve a more compelling and responsible treatment than this.
  85. Burning Sands
    The occasional heavy-handed or clumsy elements don’t seriously impair a film whose high spirits, talented cast and luridly intriguing subject consistently entertain, even if they seldom truly surprise.
  86. You're Killing Me Susana
    Somewhere buried deep within You’re Killing Me Susana is a commentary on loutish manliness, and the way in which romances are inherently fraught with tensions between individual and shared desires. Unfortunately, such notions are drowned out by all manner of irritating shenanigans.
  87. Step
    Without any fuss, Lipitz has made a film deeply rooted in intergenerational relationships between women.
  88. As You Are
    A promising and impressively self-assured debut for 23-year-old filmmaker Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, As You Are is crafted with the confidence and skill of a veteran, but also the youthful eye of someone not far removed from his protagonists.
  89. Have a Nice Day
    Liu’s storyline may be a slight and generic madcap gangster/hitman/thief movie, but the details of aesthetic design and character interaction flesh it out into something a little more wittily resonant, if not exactly deep. The pointed inventiveness of the carefully premeditated form doesn’t just compensate for the banality of the content, it becomes the content.
  90. Ana, Mon Amour
    Călin Peter Netzer’s follow-up to his Golden Bear winner “Child’s Pose” lacks that film’s directness and drive, and not only because this time he’s chosen to shuffle the sequence of events.
  91. The Young Karl Marx
    It’s dutiful, but it’s also superficial and polite, and it commits the genteel sin of the old biopics: It turns its hero into a plaster saint.
  92. Spoor
    The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.
  93. On Body and Soul
    It’s to the credit of Borbély’s intelligent, melancholically understated performance that Maria remains sympathetic even as she becomes more of a condition than a character — and to the richness of the writer-director’s ideas that they move and intrigue even when they’re most artificially expounded.
  94. Félicité
    Gomis’ latest is far from the miserablist issue drama that synopsis portends, instead weaving a sensual, sometimes hopeful, sometimes disturbing urban tapestry with threads of image, sound, poetry, and song.
  95. The Party
    Slight and self-contained, it won’t go down in cinema history as anything but, perhaps, the most purely fun film ever made by peculiar British experimentalist Sally Potter.
  96. Django
    The film — while not an especially compelling or well-told biopic unto itself — shines much-needed attention on the plight of the Roma people at the hands of German (and French) officials.
  97. The Dinner
    Moverman balances the potential for staginess with his flowing cinematic bravura; he keeps surprising you, and he gives the drama a dash of poison elegance.
  98. Barrage
    After a taut, flinty opening that sees Huppert and Chammah sparring to quietly heart-ripping effect, the air trickles out of this sensitive but cliché-laced drama
  99. Logan
    Each time the violence explodes, it’s slashingly satisfying, because it’s earned, and also because Mangold knows just how to stage it.
  100. The Other Side of Hope
    As long as Kaurismäki presents this tidy a vision (aesthetically and morally), he’ll continue to be an engagingly hermetic art-house curio impersonating an artist.
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