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. Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo
    There’s something stirringly essential about Paris 05:59, partly thanks to the late-night-inspired sensation that Theo and Hugo have the world to themselves, and can make it into whatever they want.
  2. Strike a Pose
    By the time we see them playing “truth or dare” anew over dinner, Strike a Pose begins to feel like a rather flimsy, gimmicky exploitation rather than a thoughtful exploration of a shared, shining-moment-in-the-spotlight past.
  3. Starless Dreams
    With the conceptual rigor and emotional directness associated with the best of Iranian cinema, Oskouei simply listens to the stories of those who have never been listened to before. Their shattering testimony, elegantly harmonized in a chorus of stolen childhood, has universal appeal.
  4. Paris Can Wait
    The trouble with Paris Can Wait — apart from the sheer agony of being trapped with two insufferable characters as they sample gorgeously photographed food and wine that we can’t taste — is the way the movie seems so willing to let its leading lady be defined by her husband’s job.
  5. Dean
    Martin stays within his comfort zone as a New York-based illustrator still processing his mother’s death, but the tyro helmer struggles to square his distinct minimalist charm with the second-hand influence of standard-bearers like Woody Allen and Wes Anderson.
  6. Worlds Apart
    It isn’t bad, but it’s kind of a trifle. Though it treats its themes with reasonable honesty, it can’t help but come off as a bit diagrammed.
  7. Claire in Motion
    Those who seek neat narrative resolution to any mystery may leave underwhelmed. Still, the hard-won acceptance of uncertainty that Robinson and Howell allow their protagonist provides its own, more abstract satisfaction.
  8. Sleepless
    Sleepless is a propulsive thin exercise, “energetic” but tedious, the kind of January movie that Jamie Foxx should have permanently graduated from. Foxx is too good an actor — taut and committed — to phone in his performance, yet that hardly matters, since the whole movie is phoned in. It’s far from incompetent, but it’s a who-cares? thriller.
  9. The Book of Love
    Pseudo-revelatory bombshells and heart-healing epiphanies inevitably arrive by film’s climax, which only reaffirms that — no matter how it’s cleaned up, reconstituted and transformed into something new — garbage is still garbage.
  10. Alone in Berlin
    Tastefully lit and art-directed throughout, with a somberly mellifluous Alexandre Desplat score to ease it along, this fact-based drama finally cushions its harshest emotional blows, though Brendan Gleeson’s deeply sad, stoic dignity in the lead cuts through some of the padding.
  11. The Bye Bye Man
    Even when it seems to be making things up as it goes along, its slapdash hallucinatory quality is a token gesture toward placing you inside the characters’ heads.
  12. Arsenal
    Arsenal, a pulpy crime drama about desperate characters and excessive carnage in Biloxi, Miss., is memorable primarily for some random scraps of loopy dialogue, the credible evocation of a sleazy demimonde rife with white-trash lawbreakers, and yet another Nicolas Cage performance that could be labeled Swift’s Premium and sold by the pound.
  13. We Are the Flesh
    Serving as co-editor as well as writer and director, Emiliano Rocha Minter is very much the author of all the chaos wrought here, and his thoroughly arresting vision could squat quite comfortably alongside Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of hell.
  14. The Son of Joseph
    No one behaves quite like a human being in Eugene Green’s Le Fils de Joseph, yet a soulful sense of humanity emerges from their heightened declamations anyway.
  15. Reset
    Reset is so gorgeously shot that it almost distracts attention away from the sheer inertia of its material.
  16. Ma
    While the entire project seems to be commenting on all the ways that social pressures try to trap or confine us, the cinematic medium has seldom felt as free as it does in Rowlson-Hall’s hands.
  17. Underworld: Blood Wars
    There’s a story, and a mythology, and a prestige actress who knows how to push moodiness to the point that, in this series, it’s just about her only mood, but none of it, in the end, gets in the way of the splatter.
  18. The Sense of an Ending
    In places, The Sense of an Ending seems almost frustratingly uninterested in establishing, much less solving, the riddles at its core, when in fact, it’s merely uninterested in pandering to those who lack the patience to appreciate its nuances.
  19. Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
    Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds is a droll, spirited, and disarmingly intimate documentary that now feels karmically timed.
  20. The Ornithologist
    The Ornithologist is deliciously subversive and genuinely funny.
  21. Youth in Oregon
    Maudlin and mannered, this contrived indie squanders another fine late-career performance from Frank Langella, dousing its treatment of the subject in affectations until it’s snuffed out any trace of genuine life.
  22. Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer?
    Marson’s lively narrative employs a lot of diverse voices as well as a surprising amount of archival footage in telling a story that’s ethically complex yet easy to follow.
  23. Gold
    Directed with an odd mix of human compassion and giddy abandon by Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”), Gold is a lively portrayal of what’s often misidentified as the American Dream, but might be more accurately described as the American Fantasy — where men dream of wealth and success without having to put in the work.
  24. Railroad Tigers
    You know things are getting bad when an instantly forgettable, nearly impossible-to-follow, Chinese-language action movie manages to score a U.S. release simply because of Chan’s involvement.
  25. Monster Trucks
    Like it sounds, Monster Trucks is a lame kids’ movie reverse-engineered from a worse pun.
  26. Dangal
    There’s hardly a moment in Dangal that doesn’t go according to the numbers, but after 160 minutes’ worth of formula, the movie certainly hits a note of touching tribute to the way girl power is sweeping the world.
  27. The Ardennes
    The climax quickens the film’s pulse but doesn’t exactly grow organically from what’s proceeded it.
  28. Live by Night
    The film is sharply written and crafted, lavishly photographed, impeccably acted, with lots of twists and turns — yet for all that, it somehow lacks zing.
  29. It's Not the Time of My Life
    In addition to the highly relatable situations shot in a style of heightened naturalism and the Robert Altman-like overlapping dialogue, the drama gains further conviction from setting the action in the actual apartment lived in by the director and his wife, who, along with their real-life son, play the host family.
  30. Life on the Line
    The narrative is so predictable that, when an outburst of trash-talking doesn’t escalate into a barroom brawl, it’s not just surprising, it’s pretty close to shocking.
  31. SiREN
    Siren is lively if occasionally rough around the edges, packing a satisfying amount of action and a couple of amusingly nasty surprises into its short running time.
  32. The Hollow Point
    There are sporadic compensations for your investment of time: Ian McShane’s robust overplaying of an unapologetically scuzzy small-town lawman, John Leguizamo’s dead-serious villainy as a scarily resilient hit man, evocative lensing by David Jose Montero, and a few modestly inventive twists in the otherwise predictable plot.
  33. American Wrestler: The Wizard
    What the movie lacks in originality it makes up for in personality, as Kosturos brings the kind of rare alchemy to the role of Ali that makes all present feel as if they’re watching the birth of a movie star.
  34. Assassin's Creed
    In Assassin’s Creed, Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge.
  35. The Bad Kids
    Taking the macro view, [Fulton and Pepe] seem to miss out on the types of thorny micro details — about McGee’s relationship with his mother, or about Viland’s own history preceding her tenure at Black Rock — that would have provided additional complexity.
  36. The Great Wall
    Director Zhang Yimou capably gives period fantasy-action The Great Wall the look and feel of a Hollywood blockbuster, but his signature visual dazzle, his gift for depicting delicate relationships and throbbing passions are trampled by dead-serious epic aspirations.
  37. A Kind of Murder
    While thrills are mitigated by convoluted plotting and suspect character behavior, the film’s uniquely bleak twist on classic noir conventions is enlivening.
  38. Passengers
    There’s only one place for Passengers to go, and once it gets there, Jon Spaihts’s script runs out of gas. Tyldun handles the dialogue almost as if he were doing a stage play, but he turns out to be a blah director of spectacle; he doesn’t make it dramatic.
  39. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Director Gareth Edwards has finally made the first “Star Wars” movie for grown-ups.
  40. Collateral Beauty
    By the end of Collateral Beauty, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.
  41. My Life as a Zucchini
    On one hand, the cartoon is never afraid to be cute, but more importantly, it’s committed to being real.
  42. Why Him?
    It’s bluntly cheeky, it goes on for too long, but the concept keeps on giving.
  43. Hidden Figures
    Hidden Figures is empowerment cinema at its most populist, and one only wishes that the film had existed at the time it depicts — though ongoing racial tensions and gender double-standards suggest that perhaps we haven’t come such a long way, baby.
  44. Silence
    Though undeniably gorgeous, it is punishingly long, frequently boring, and woefully unengaging at some of its most critical moments.... Still, viewed through the narrow prism of films about faith, Silence is a remarkable achievement.
  45. The Bounce Back
    The Bounce Back was co-written, directed, and edited by Youseff Delara, and for a while he creates some lively screwball tension.
  46. Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America
    The differing responses Accidental Courtesy is likely to evoke in viewers make it a great conversation-starter for public and educational forums.
  47. Slash
    An effortlessly engaging dramedy that somehow manages to sustain an air of buoyant sweetness even while repeatedly referencing erotic fantasies and sexual anxieties.
  48. Abattoir
    Though it’s handsome enough to look at, Abattoir can’t quite seem to decide just how supernatural it wants to be or how meta its horror content should play
  49. Frank & Lola
    It’s poised between reality and paranoid daydream, it’s about the dangerous ways that love can go wrong, and it does the thing that noir was invented to do: It sucks you in.
  50. Old Stone
    Channeling the style of gritty mainland independent films but without the usual longueurs, the film deftly morphs into a suspense thriller with Dostoevskyan undertones.
  51. Beyond the Gates
    This fun if unmemorable occult thriller sports — all too faithfully at times — both the typical pleasures and shortcomings of the movies it pays homage to.
  52. Office Christmas Party
    Turn them loose, and this cast has nearly endless potential to be outrageous, and yet, the script...keeps interrupting the festivities with unnecessary details about whether the company will even be around tomorrow.
  53. Sky on Fire
    There’s really nothing new here. Still, it’s hard to deny the sporadically satisfying nostalgic appeal of this dash down memory lane.
  54. All We Had
    Katie Holmes makes an undistinguished helming debut with All We Had, a middlebrow drama with no pretensions but also no depth.
  55. Burn Country
    While Olds and Paul Felten’s screenplay requires some significant credulity leaps, The Fixer is flavorsome, engaging and unpredictable enough that one can give those gaps a pass, at least to an extent.
  56. Incarnate
    Offers a relatively fresh take on standard-issue exorcism-melodrama tropes, along with a performance by Aaron Eckhart that is more than persuasive enough to encourage the investment of a rooting interest.
  57. Anonymous
    Anonymous plods through a low-stakes tale that’s almost frictionlessly insulated against real-world consequences.
  58. The Belko Experiment
    As a self-aware guilty pleasure, The Belko Experiment may not quite seize greatness, but it does give it a playful squeeze.
  59. Run the Tide
    Lautner’s earnest turn, as well as those of familiar TV faces Johnson (“Bates Motel,” “The Shield”) and Zimmer (“Entourage,” “UnReal”), are hamstrung by writing that demands a certain emotional urgency while providing the performers little opportunity for surprise or nuance.
  60. Believe
    An aggressively sincere but off-puttingly saccharine drama.
  61. A Boy Called Po
    Noble intentions alone do not a great movie make, as evidenced by Po, whose heart is in the right place but whose drama is woefully lacking in momentum.
  62. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.
  63. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    This finely crafted docu may well long stand as the most balanced among such treatments, as it respectfully examines Sands’ folk-heroic legacy rather than simply amplifying it.
  64. Magnus
    Magnus, it turns out, is the anti-Bobby: a fascinatingly “normalized” prodigy.
  65. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a nimble documentary made with a personal touch of nostalgia, and it should prove nothing less than catnip to Sondheim obsessives.
  66. Seasons
    While it features some of the most breathtaking nature photography this side of BBC’s “Planet Earth” miniseries, this gorgeously cinematic docu ties said footage to a leaden all-purpose eco-consciousness message that nearly spoils the otherwise timeless experience.
  67. Fences
    Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.
  68. The Founder
    Keaton plays Kroc as a man both pathetic and singularly possessed, cannily resisting lovability at every turn, while delivering the internalized self-help speak of his sales pitches with chillingly glib precision.
  69. 100 Streets
    While the film initially exercises commendable restraint in braiding its separate narratives, its second half grows increasingly reliant on pat connections and coincidences.
  70. Allied
    Allied is tense and absorbing, yet the film’s climactic act somehow falls short.
  71. Prevenge
    While not every tonal downshift here is entirely fluid, this remains a smart, risky one-off, unconcerned with those (and there will be many) who can’t acquire its taste.
  72. Patriots Day
    It’s genuinely exciting megaplex entertainment, informed by extensive research, featuring bona fide movie stars, and staged with equal degrees of professionalism and respect.
  73. Officer Downe
    Imagine Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” stripped of its politics, its wit, its humanity, and its craft, and that only gets halfway down the bottom of the barrel scraped by Officer Downe, a hyper-aggressive and thoroughly repugnant piece of comic-book juvenalia.
  74. Split
    Shyamalan’s goal is to keep us guessing, and in that respect, Split is a resounding success — even if in others, it could have you rolling your eyes.
  75. Bad Santa 2
    It’s essentially a hangout movie populated exclusively with some of the worst people imaginable, rarely with any sort of solid scene-setting or straight-men to provide context.
  76. Uncle Howard
    This is no starry-eyed, heart-on-sleeve flashback but a low-key, respectful one, no less appealing for its relative reserve.
  77. Hunter Gatherer
    Deliberately steering clear of the usual gangland drugs-and-violence cliches, Josh Locy’s writing-directing debut features a welcome starring role for Andre Royo (“The Wire”), whose performance as a wily hustler trying to stay one step ahead of possible ruin sets the tone for this odd, occasionally mystifying but undeniably singular and imaginative work.
  78. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    Maintaining Yates as director lends a consistency to the project, and yet, it would have been refreshing to get a completely new take on Rowling’s world with this series, especially considering how murky and self-serious they got in the final chapters. Still, Yates knows this world as well as anyone, and he excels at finding visual solutions for challenging ideas.
  79. Shut In
    As thrillers go, Shut In is conspicuously short of thrills. It’s an undistinguished and predictable hodgepodge, so blandly generic as to suggest that it was cobbled together by filmmakers referencing a how-to handbook who picked spare parts from other, better thrillers.
  80. The Comedian
    Even with a bona fide icon at its center, The Comedian doesn’t dig deep enough to add anything substantial to the subgenre.
  81. Miss Sloane
    Miss Sloane is a talky, tense political thriller, full of verbal sparring and fiery monologues, undone by a really dumb ending. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t smart for most of its running time.
  82. Rules Don't Apply
    Beatty tries hard to re-create the look and feel of late-’50s Hollywood as it existed both on-screen and off, aided by DP Caleb Deschanel and terrific costume and set contributions. And yet, it actually comes off too conservative for its own time, with stiff performances from Collins and Ehrenreich.
  83. Lazy Eye
    Lazy Eye makes you realize how rare it is to see a movie, even an indie movie, that gives you the privilege of listening to authentically smart conversation. The understated flow of talk makes us feel like we’re eavesdropping.
  84. Almost Christmas
    David E. Talbert, the writer-director of Almost Christmas, has assembled a gifted cast and given them a chance to stretch out and play with their roles. He has made a heartwarming gripe-and-grouchfest that pushes a lot of buttons, though with a vivacity that’s exuberantly funny and sincere.
  85. A Street Cat Named Bob
    Unpretentiously touching on the page, this material feels stretched a bit thin on film, with televisual production values and a samey song score doing little to enrich matters: Still, it’s sweetly hopeful .
  86. The Frontier
    An appreciably moody but dramatically stilted crime drama that exudes a certain retro appeal before collapsing into a series of empty neo-noir poses.
  87. Moana
    As princess movies go, this one broadens the studio’s horizons, and as Moana herself sings in the film, “no one knows, how far it goes.”
  88. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
    "USS Indianapolis” is a World War II “epic” that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the audience with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.
  89. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    Story has made a potent political film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that data alone cannot possibly express.
  90. Your Name.
    This vividly realized and emotionally satisfying feature ought to make Shinkai a household name — certainly in Japan, and with any luck, in other countries as well.
  91. The Ivory Game
    There are moments when the movie tugs at your heart, but the subject matter, because it’s so epic, deserves an even more probing and definitive treatment.
  92. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil
    Everything leads to a third-act twist that is absurdly shameless, even by Bollywood standards. Unfortunately, Johar doesn’t appear to have intended it as another joke.
  93. Operation Mekong
    How straightforward your enjoyment of the film will be largely depends on your ability to read “based on” as “very loosely inspired by” and to immediately forget that some of these archetypes and stock genre characters have real-life (and real-death) counterparts.
  94. Buster's Mal Heart
    An unusual movie like Buster’s Mal Heart demands an unusual star, and Rami Malek proves an ideal fit for Sarah Adina Smith’s sophomore feature.
  95. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
    Intriguing as the resulting ambiance is, it alone can’t sustain the film.
  96. Oasis: Supersonic
    Hardly the most probing or edifying of rock docs, this A24-backed, one-night-only theatrical release is nonetheless a riotously enjoyable, appropriately deafening flashback to one of the last moments in music history when a bunch of knuckleheads with guitars could conquer the world on chutzpah alone.
  97. Before the Flood
    Handsomely shot and entertainingly paced, “Before the Flood” may not tackle too much new ground, but given the sincerity of its message, its ability to assemble such a watchable and comprehensive account gives it an undeniable urgency.
  98. Crosscurrent
    Plotless, pretentiously literary and lousy at explaining geography, the movie fails to put Yang’s vision into a fictional framework that’s even remotely engaging.
  99. By Sidney Lumet
    The movie is simply Lumet and his films, which turns out to be an astonishingly satisfying experience, because he’s an incredible talker, with the same earthy electric push that powers his work.
  100. Doctor Strange
    Yes, this new project shares the same look, feel, and fancy corporate sheen as the rest of Marvel’s rapidly expanding Avengers portfolio, but it also boasts an underlying originality and freshness missing from the increasingly cookie-cutter comic-book realm of late.
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