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. Max Steel
    [A] drearily lame time-waster.
  2. Mirzya
    The life-and-death stakes are there, but the people involved — while uniformly ravishing to gaze upon — are too wanly sketched for this melodrama to pump much blood.
  3. Little Sister
    Clark’s fifth feature is marked by his characteristic brand of distorted realism, though a classically redemptive arc — with even a hint of spiked sentimentality — sounds a new note in his oeuvre.
  4. Kevin Hart: What Now?
    He leaps so quickly into exaggeration that he bypasses reality, and the result isn’t very funny.
  5. The Accountant
    The Accountant is nothing if not a puzzle — not so much a jigsaw as a three-dimensional brain teaser that gets deeper and stranger with each new revelation.
  6. Houston, We Have a Problem!
    It’s simply not about very much aside from lampooning the ease with which a canny storyteller (for such Virc undoubtedly is) can fabricate “truthiness” by co-opting the tropes and mechanisms that we all long ago accepted as the documentary norm.
  7. Tower
    A gripping dramatic reconstruction, a tribute to the heroes and the fallen, and inevitably an expression of nostalgia for the days when a mass shooting still had the power to shock, Keith Maitland’s film weaves rotoscopic animation, archival footage and present-day interviews into a uniquely cinematic memorial.
  8. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    While uneven in places, The Great Gilly Hopkins works because it boasts an actress tough enough for the title role.
  9. Inferno
    There’s a stern, let’s-get-to-work air to the film’s craft and conception that hampers whatever thrill of the chase “Inferno” has to offer. Fundamentally silly the film may be, but it never graduates to spryness.
  10. Trolls
    It’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.
  11. 20th Century Women
    20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.
  12. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
    The fleeting counterbalance of seriousness makes the funny business marginally yet appreciably funnier.
  13. Green Is Gold
    Baxter packs the film with sound insights on masculinity and young adulthood, as well as the hand-to-mouth realities of black-market farming.
  14. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    The dialogue is very clear-cut, devoid of all contractions so that people speak in unnatural ways, though perhaps it makes the conversations clearer, especially to audiences whose native language might not be English. More problematic are the never-ending platitudes, all tied to spreading the message of equality.
  15. Courted
    Vincent’s calm, almost strenuously low-key film never gathers enough emotional momentum to become a fully dimensional romance — which might be its poignant intention.
  16. Don't Look Down
    A solid, and solidly engaging film that nevertheless feels like an extended promo for the Branson brand.
  17. Shin Godzilla (Godzilla Resurgence)
    The Original Gangsta Lizard gets a largely satisfying reboot in Shin Godzilla, a surprisingly clever monster mash best described as the “Batman Begins” of Zilla Thrillers.
  18. Long Way North
    In both tone and approach, this animated treasure couldn’t be more different from the lavish high-tech toons competing in the American marketplace.
  19. Milton's Secret
    Even a prickly pro like Sutherland can’t do anything to elevate a hokey self-help lecture disguised as family entertainment.
  20. The Girl on the Train
    As a big-screen thriller, The Girl on a Train is just so-so, but taken as 112 minutes of upscale psychodramatic confessional bad-behavior porn, it generates a voyeuristic zing that’s sure to carry audiences along.
  21. I Am Not Madame Bovary
    Long, relatively low-key but always engaging, I Am Not Madame Bovary wears its expansive scale lightly.
  22. Do Not Resist
    The doc is stylistically uninspiring, with a tedious threatening sound design, but the powerful subject matter largely overcomes such missteps.
  23. 13th
    More than just another documentary, it’s a crucial and stirring document — of racism and injustice, of politics and the big-picture design of America — that, I believe, will be watched and referenced for years to come.
  24. The Rolling Stones Olé Olé Olé!: A Trip Across Latin America
    The band still sounds phenomenal onstage, and the concert scenes are expertly shot, with plenty of roaming on-the-ground footage to take in the audience ambiance.
  25. Among the Believers
    The filmmakers quietly expose conflicts and contradictions without the intrusion of voiceover, and with only occasional intertitles furnishing factual information.
  26. Phantasm: Ravager
    Even dedicated Phantasm fanatics may be hard-pressed to discern anything resembling a unifying narrative thread. But the latter group — the film’s target audience — likely will be willing to eschew coherence for the opportunity to savor this chaotic reprise of familiar characters and concepts in the cinematic equivalent of a greatest hits album.
  27. ClownTown
    The greasepaint-by-numbers terror is often so laughably rote, not to mention so poorly written and acted, that some viewers will find considerable entertainment value here — albeit very little of the intentional kind.
  28. Masterminds
    It’s this improv-ready ensemble’s wit and Galifianakis’ own gift for physical humor that account for most of the laugh-out-loud moments, heightened by silly flourishes so eccentric...they could only be found in a Jared Hess movie.
  29. Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang
    “Sky Ladder” may not fully penetrate the mystery of Cai’s artistic identity, but it ends with the poignant suggestion that the most significant accomplishments often stem from the simplest, most personal impulse.
  30. 150 Milligrams
    Televisually presented and arduously overlong at 127 minutes, 150 Milligrams can’t always separate the compelling personal stakes of its narrative from its surfeit of informational minutiae.
  31. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    While “Autopsy” lives up to its title, providing plenty of grisly medical gore, the forensics induce less squirming than the exacting yet playful way Ovredal keeps making us anticipate more unnatural acts as the Tildens realize something is seriously amiss.
  32. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Goldman’s frequently amusing script is the secret ingredient that makes “Miss Peregrine” such an appropriate fit for Burton’s peculiar sensibility, allowing the director to revisit and expand motifs and themes from his earlier work.
  33. Kékszakállú
    It takes an uncommon talent to keep the mundane from seeming inert, and through Solnicki’s lens, the absence of outer conflict doesn’t mute the turmoil within.
  34. Generation Startup
    Generation Startup is too blurry about the grass-roots wheeling and dealing it shows.
  35. Closet Monster
    Canadian writer-director Stephen Dunn’s first feature treads no new ground in basic outline. But the risk-taking confidence with which he weaves in sardonic magical-realist elements, not to mention his unpredictable yet assured approaches to style and tone, make this a most auspicious debut.
  36. I.T.
    Brosnan is very effective at playing Regan as a wary technophobe who has become too comfortable with his power and success.
  37. Land of Mine
    Zandvliet’s script and direction avoid milking an innately loaded situation for excess melodrama or pathos, sticking to a discreet economy of approach that accumulates considerable power.
  38. The Eyes of My Mother
    Pesce’s spare script doesn’t seek to obscure, but its quiet, matter-of-fact handling of drastic dramatic events will catch some off-guard.
  39. Trespass Against Us
    It’s hard to say what the title of Trespass Against Us actually means, but then it’s hard to know what anything in this movie thinks it’s about. Even Ed Wood would have said, “Needs work.”
  40. Audrie & Daisy
    [A] powerful, well-crafted documentary.
  41. Chicken People
    An illuminating and amusingly entertaining look at the thriving subculture of competitive poultry breeders.
  42. Rats
    Rats is that rare breed of nature doc, one designed not to foster greater empathy for a misunderstood species, but rather to exploit our preexisting fears of the filthy critters in question.
  43. Colossal
    Colossal takes diminishing advantage of an amusing premise, one that seems made for satirical treatment yet is executed with an increasingly awkward semi-seriousness the characters aren’t depthed (or likable) enough to ballast.
  44. Storks
    In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.
  45. Amanda Knox
    A gripping and incisive documentary.
  46. Belle Épine
    Unfolding with the disjointed logic of a bad dream, the pic never catches emotional fire — though not for lack of trying by fast-rising young star Lea Seydoux, who shows her range in a defiantly unglamorous performance.
  47. Finding Altamira
    [Banderas] acquits himself admirably with his restrained yet subtly detailed portrayal of an intelligent man subjected to the stings of intolerant attitudes and professional jealousies.
  48. The Untamed
    While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.
  49. A United Kingdom
    These two are meant to be together, as the film’s clever title suggests, though all the truly interesting things they accomplished happen only after that reunion.
  50. Their Finest
    Their Finest is the sort of crowd-pleaser that knows the difference between satisfying its viewers and flattering them, all the while showcasing surprising performances from Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin, and an entirely unsurprising one from Bill Nighy — a master scene-stealer pulling off yet another brazen heist.
  51. The Secret Scripture
    A classic case of a literary adaptation capturing the high-gloss trappings of its source without getting a handle on its story or themes, The Secret Scripture is like a nicely decorated Craftsman home built on a foundation of Jell-O, with a toilet where the kitchen sink should be. It looks nice on first glance, but spend any time there, and things start to get messy.
  52. Queen of Katwe
    The film’s strongest assets are undoubtedly its actors.
  53. The Promise
    The events being considered deserve better than a sloggy melodrama in which the tragedy of a people is forced to take a back seat to a not especially compelling love triangle.
  54. Planetarium
    Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.
  55. Never Ever
    It’s Roy, having written herself a part for which many actresses would patiently wait, who does the heavy lifting here: Playing a woman who’s either losing her mind or playing dangerously at it, with as much attention paid to body language as befits her character’s artistic calling, she makes a revelatory, slightly otherworldly impression.
  56. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea feels like a first draft, the one that needed to be written before the second draft added flesh and blood.
  57. Mascots
    It lopes along, merrily but a bit slack, always reminding you of the earlier Guest films, and then it works up a bit of a fizz in the competition.
  58. Lady Macbeth
    An impressively stark, narratively ruthless Victorian chamber piece that feels about as modern as its crinolines will permit, William Oldroyd’s pristine debut feature slowly reveals a violent moral ambiguity that needles the mind far longer than its polite period-piece trappings suggest.
  59. From What Is Before
    The fragile interplay of nature and civilization is best expressed in the way Diaz frequently sets the stage for each scene, allowing us to absorb the contours and details of every location before ever so gradually introducing human characters, looking small and ant-like, into the frame.
  60. A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery
    A major disappointment from a major filmmaker, Diaz’s latest super-sized tapestry of historical fact, folklore and cine-poetry is typically ambitious in its expressionism — but sees the helmer venturing into the kind of declamatory, didactic rhetoric that his recent stunners “Norte, the End of History” and “From What Is Before” so elegantly avoided.
  61. The Woman Who Left
    This occasionally transcendent opus finds Diaz’s formal powers — not least his own incisive monochrome lensing — at full strength.
  62. The Edge of Seventeen
    It’s a teen movie that starts off funny ha-ha but turns into something more like a light-fingered psychological thriller. The drama is all in Nadine’s personality, in how far she’ll go to act out her distress.
  63. I Called Him Morgan
    It’s fitting that Kasper Collin’s excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage.
  64. Frantz
    Frantz plays like classic melodrama, and has certain charms.
  65. Denial
    For all the powerful relevance of its subject, Denial, directed by Mick Jackson from a script by David Hare, never finds its grip. It’s a curiously awkward and slipshod movie that winds up being about nothing so much as the perverse, confounding eccentricities of the British legal system.
  66. Catfight
    That it succeeds more often than not is due in no small part to Heche and Oh, who are wonderfully unafraid to make their characters deplorable people, and also able to invest their downfalls with sincere pathos, complicating any schadenfreude one might be expecting to find.
  67. Carrie Pilby
    Limply cute, with underdeveloped subplots and secondary characters, this sitcomish dramedy shares the source material’s primary fault: For a story about a supposed genius, it’s not all that clever or complicated.
  68. Lion
    Fortunately for Davis, he’s got a terrific cast, chief among them the pair of charismatic actors who split the lead role.
  69. Jackie
    Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.
  70. Una
    Needless to say, Una is not an easy film to watch, in part because it deals with not just the act of pedophilia (never depicted outright) but also its consequences, exposing the raw wounds still seething long after the inappropriate relationship has ended.
  71. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    "Southwest of Salem” proves a portrait of individual tragedy, and an indictment of a system willing to let prejudice cloud its judgment — and, also, to avoid admitting its own wrongdoing.
  72. A Family Affair
    This deceptively artless, journal-style film has no need for any carefully sculpted twists; rather, it’s the sheer unpredictable perversity of human nature that takes the breath away at key points in Fassaert’s unsettling, perhaps unsolvable, inquiry.
  73. The Vessel
    Cuban-American writer-director Julio Quintana’s feature debut has an understated formal loveliness that helps offset its more heavy-handed allegorical inclinations.
  74. Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
    There are bad movies, and then there are worse movies, and then there are full-bore misfires such as Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
  75. Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids
    Demme proves he’s still a wily master of the craft, and the director’s work here makes this more than just a fans-only proposition.
  76. Tanna
    The pic weaves fascinating details of tribal life into a universally accessible and emotionally affecting romantic drama.
  77. Chuck
    The film is most thoughtful, and sometimes even painful, as a study of the pitfalls (and pitiful rewards) of local celebrity.
  78. The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez
    'Aranjeuz” has less of a pulse than the already inert “Every Thing Will Be Fine."
  79. Deepwater Horizon
    For a movie in which you can’t follow what’s going on for 75% of the time, Deepwater Horizon proves remarkably thrilling.
  80. Barry
    You could almost watch Barry even if you’d never heard of Barack Obama: The movie is simply interested in what it looks like when a guy who’s got this much going for him has a piece missing.
  81. American Pastoral
    Groping for grand tragedy and finding only actorly melodrama, shooting for political contrarianism but landing instead on reactionary conventionalism, American Pastoral is as flat and strangled as its source is furious and expansive.
  82. All I See Is You
    Look past the gimmick, and all that remains is an overly arty study of a lopsided marriage in which super-attentive husband James (Jason Clarke) actually seems to prefer when his wife Gina (Blake Lively) can’t see — and another opportunity for Lively to prove that she’s more than just a pretty face.
  83. The Age of Shadows
    If anything, the film is most indebted to classic cloak-and-dagger movies, in which sharp, richly succinct dialogue and plenty of atmosphere seem effortlessly carried along by the force of magnetic personalities.
  84. The Assignment
    Nobody — not even viewers willing to settle for good, unclean B-movie fun — is done any favors by something as crude as (re)Assignment, which gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny “Oh no! I’m a chick now!!” gender-change narrative hook.
  85. The Disappointments Room
    There is more mood than matter to be sampled in “The Disappointments Room,” a spooky psychological thriller — or, perhaps, a psychological thriller with spooks — that is initially intriguing but ultimately, unfortunately, lives down to its title.
  86. Blair Witch
    Setting up a number of promising kinks in the now-standard found-footage formula, as the seemingly spooked forest begins to close in its hapless victims, Blair Witch disappointingly casts most of them aside for a finale that does little to advance the series’ existing mythos.
  87. Eternity
    Éternité is a meditative, gorgeous-looking film imbued with such gentle sensitivity that it’s difficult to dislike. Yet the experience of watching it is much like sitting in an opulent garden café on a glorious spring morning, waiting for a meal that never arrives.
  88. Sing
    While there are no profound life lessons to be found in these subplots, Jennings and his cast manage to deliver a steady supply of laughs, while respecting one of Illumination’s core principles: It’s OK to be silly.
  89. A Monster Calls
    We’ve heard the same lesson countless times before in other movies, and though it’s certainly impressive to see Conor’s anxieties manifest themselves in such a stunning Ent-like being, as monsters go, Bayona’s creation is all bark and no bite.
  90. Level Up
    As it episodically flirts with absurdism, black comedy, and other offbeat flavors, Level Up seems to be simply trying on different attitudes without owning them.
  91. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    “Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.
  92. Scarred Hearts
    Emanuel’s likeability (more apparent in the film than in Blecher’s novel) unquestionably helps bridge the extended running time, and Solange is a fascinating character, liberated yet still drawn to the scene of her hospitalization. The film also has a sense of humor...but the project never quite comes together.
  93. The Fight Within
    Scene after scene (or, if you prefer, round after round) of “The Fight Within” is clunky and didactic, and the movie as a whole has appreciably less mainstream appeal than several other recent, and much better, faith-based dramas.
  94. Ithaca
    By turns poignant and plodding, affecting and affected, Ithaca is the sort of frustrating movie that’s just good enough to make you wish it were a lot better.
  95. Come What May
    Director Christian Carion’s first feature since 2009’s “Farewell” is bolstered by a sweeping Ennio Morricone score, yet his narrative is too episodic, and his characters too one-dimensional, to carry the weight of grand historical tragedy, resulting in a picturesque, middle-of-the-road effort.
  96. Snowden
    It’s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years.
  97. Command and Control
    Based on the harrowing book by Eric Schlosser (who not only co-wrote, but also appears in the film), this unsettling production...is equal parts history lesson, cautionary tale and nerve-rattling thriller, using all manner of nonfiction devices to elicit both horror and outrage over the precariousness of our deadliest arsenals.
  98. When the Bough Breaks
    The presence of a predominantly African-American cast arguably is the only distinguishing characteristic of this by-the-numbers thriller.
  99. Free Fire
    The fact that they could all lay down their weapons and finish the deal heightens Wheatley’s generally irreverent approach, all of which serves to remind that guns don’t kill people; insecure, overcompensating idiots do.
  100. The Apostate
    Gonzalo’s dalliances add up to precious little, but Veiroj’s comic tone finds purchase in his absurd run-ins with the bishop and a church so unwilling to lose a member from the rolls that they’ll stick him in a bureaucratic roundabout until he gives up.
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