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. Demon
    Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.
  2. Rebirth
    The pitfall of a tantalizing set-up is that it requires a sterling payoff to match — a recipe for disappointment born out by Rebirth, whose premise-establishing early passages lead only to underwhelming revelations.
  3. How He Fell in Love
    Mature and moving in its navigation of convoluted, conflicting desires, it’s an indie as assured in its silences as it is in its speeches.
  4. Ghostbusters
    While both funnier and scarier than Ivan Reitman’s 1984 original, this otherwise over-familiar remake from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig doesn’t do nearly enough to innovate on what has come before.
  5. Five Nights in Maine
    Attempting to naturalistically capture the hugely internal process of mourning, but rarely managing to offer much of an opening into that process, Curran’s tasteful, challenging yet ultimately inscrutable debut feature never quite lives up to the caliber of her fine cast.
  6. Men Go to Battle
    Striking in its evocation of a demanding time and place, this intimate drama about individual and national transformation heralds the arrival of an arresting new filmmaking voice.
  7. The Dog Lover
    It’s a prosaic piece of muckraking, shot in a functional flat visual style, but it grazes a nerve.
  8. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Sometimes bloody good fun is enough. It’s as good a reason as any for making this sunny, silly rallying cry for irresponsibility, and a better one still for watching it.
  9. In Order of Disappearance
    Schemes like this have a way of spiraling out of the characters’ control, but Moland and Aakeson maintain a firm grasp on the pacing, progressively building both carnage and suspense as the situation escalates toward a Mexican standoff of which even Sam Peckinpah would be proud.
  10. Under the Sun
    While at about the two-thirds mark, Under the Sun begins to seem a bit attenuated, its obvious (if only implied) points already made, the ending is a stunner.
  11. The Infiltrator
    Bryan Cranston gives the most authentic and lived-in performance as an agent pretending to be a criminal that I have ever seen.
  12. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    What’s funny and winning about Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is that it’s a comedy of equal-opportunity raunch, where everyone in sight is right at home inside the animal house.
  13. The Purge: Election Year
    You’d think the concept would now be wearing thin, but Election Year, which feels like the final chapter in a trilogy...is the best “Purge” film yet. The action is excitingly sustained in a way that it wasn’t in the previous two, and the political dimension, while crude as hell, exerts a brute-force entertainment value.
  14. The Legend of Tarzan
    As a brand, Burroughs’ hero has always been schlocky, and no amount of psychological depth or physical perfection can render him otherwise if the filmmakers can’t swing a convincing interaction between Tarzan and his animal allies. That dynamic — along with his full-throated yodel — has always been Tarzan’s trademark, but in this relatively lifeless incarnation, it simply doesn’t register.
  15. Art Bastard
    It reveals Robert Cenedella to be an artist far too infused with life to ever let a movie like this one live up to its title.
  16. The Phenom
    It’s not necessary, of course, for The Phenom to be an all-out sports drama, but writer-director Noah Buschel sets up the rare opportunity to explore what makes a jock tick, then doesn’t follow through.
  17. Les Cowboys
    Bidegain, who for years has served as the muscle behind Jacques Audiard’s scripts, advances his ongoing deconstruction of genre-movie masculinity in his uncompromising, anti-romantic directorial debut.
  18. Sunrise
    A gripping psychological drama set in the seediest quarters of Mumbai, the pic cleverly weaves fantasy and reality so that neither can be taken at face value. The result is an intense, very well-performed tale.
  19. Yarn
    It’s less than the sum of its attractive parts, with scant overall insight or weight. Like an old handmade sweater, this is a movie that might unravel too easily if you gave any single element a hard tug.
  20. The Duel
    The Duel promises a battle of wits and wills, then turns into a violent grab-bag. But it does make you want to see Woody Harrelson get another movie worthy of his leering bald Nietzschean bravura.
  21. The Shallows
    At times, it’s hard to tell whether The Shallows is trying to sell a tropical vacation, that Sony Xperia phone or a fantasy date with Lively herself, but in any case, the film looks virtually indistinguishable from a slick, high-end commercial.
  22. Nerdland
    With a scuzzy style to match its sleazeball vision of spotlight desperation and depravity, this Tinseltown satire — led by voice work from Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt — revels in the foulness of 21st-century pop culture, albeit to a degree that’s ultimately both exhausting and redundant.
  23. Ice Age: Collision Course
    It may be a slight entertainment in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been made with a busy, nattering joy that is positively infectious
  24. Independence Day: Resurgence
    This cinematic Big Mac entertains abundantly on its own second-hand merits.
  25. Free State of Jones
    For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.
  26. Outlaws and Angels
    Outlaws & Angels trades in the lurid character psychology and crude ironies of the spaghetti Western — an idiom whose cynical worst-case-scenario view of humanity seems more acceptable to modern audiences than the good-shall-triumph faith of the traditional Hollywood western.
  27. Microbe and Gasoline
    With Microbe and Gasoline, the French writer-director has wisely restrained his usual flourishes, allowing the two teenage leads in his relatively calm summer-vacation coming-of-age comedy to assume centerstage, imbuing them with creative agency rather than forcing them to compete with the film’s own style.
  28. Cold War 2
    Slow to heat up yet quick to burn out, police procedural-thriller Cold War 2 dramatizes internal strife and conspiracy among Hong Kong’s police force and ruling elite, adding some new twists in a narrative framework that ultimately can’t support the film.
  29. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    Thorsten Schutte’s entirely archival assemblage is most likely to be appreciated by the previously converted, as its stimulating if somewhat patchy overview of a multi-various career skims over or omits too many aspects to comprise a definitive introduction.
  30. Raman Raghav 2.0
    Psycho Raman often entertains most with its most lurid formal, musical and narrative gambits.
  31. Life, Animated
    This latest film from Roger Ross Williams (“God Loves Uganda”) teems with insights into how children’s fantasy can and can’t bridge a developmental gap, but works on an even more basic, emotional level as a warm testament to a family’s love and resilience.
  32. 31
    Rob Zombie truly loves horror movies. But he still hasn’t made a good one, and “31” is a perfect encapsulation of the reasons why: It’s a fanboy’s highlight reel of homages, without any of the credibility or context that made most of the films he’s inspired by so fine.
  33. Cosmos
    Zulawski maintains such expert control of the film’s look and tone that there can be no question that each choice has been deliberate, whatever the significance.
  34. The Secret Life of Pets
    The formula may be familiar, but the personalities are completely fresh, yielding a menagerie of loveable — if downright ugly — cartoon critters banding together to help these two incompatible roommates from ending up on the streets.
  35. Parched
    Yadav pinpoints the various ways in which institutional and personal prejudices keep people enslaved, crafting a sharp portrait of gender inequality.
  36. The Lovers and the Despot
    While a more thorough archival survey of Choi and Shin’s work together (pre- and post-abduction) would have allowed for a deeper perspective, this real-life romantic thriller/escape saga still boasts enough fascinating details and angles to qualify as essential stranger-than-fiction viewing.
  37. Central Intelligence
    It delivers — on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. It’s an action-comedy utensil, like “Rush Hour” crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
  38. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    It’s not that “My Love” feels inherently dubious; it’s that its execution is just a little too smiling-through-tears slick to be swallowed whole.
  39. The Final Master
    It’s a passionate comic book in which the combat has meaning.
  40. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    In addition to everything else he does right in February, Perkins plays fair: When you replay the movie in your mind after the final fadeout, you realize that every twist was dutifully presaged, and the final reveal was hidden in plain sight all along.
  41. In a Valley of Violence
    We never get more than a glimmer of personality within these well-worn character types, and West never digs beneath them to offer any sort of commentary or criticism.
  42. Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes
    Norgaard wants to keep viewers guessing the whys and wherefores, but putting two and two together is so easy here that only the narratively challenged will be surprised by the culprit’s motivations.
  43. Mr. Six
    Scored to a beautiful, introspection-oriented saxophone score, Mr. Six surprises by attempting to delve behind Feng’s sometime-inscrutable facade, rather than pushing its leading man toward action.
  44. Tracktown
    What the film lacks in originality, it makes up for via its star’s naturally glamor-resistant sensibility, giving us an unpolished glimpse into the personal life of a professional runner.
  45. Therapy for a Vampire
    If a diagram were the same thing as a script, then Therapy for a Vampire might be a smashingly silly lark. But as written and directed by Daniel Ruehl, the film is a blueprint of mild anemic kitsch.
  46. Traded
    Mostly due to the limp direction by Timothy Woodward Jr., Traded never really offers much in the way of suspense or excitement. But the sporadic outbursts of bloody violence are efficiently rendered.
  47. Lights Out
    Very obviously a first feature, Lights Out is full of camp (most of it clearly intentional, some perhaps not), and its underlying mythology is confused and often ridiculous. But there’s an invigorating leanness — and a giddy, almost innocent energy — to the filmmaking.
  48. Kicks
    An arresting visual experience, Kicks has style to spare, and in fact it probably should have spared a little, as this first-time director sometimes crowds his film with more auteurial flourishes than his rather simple story can support. Nonetheless, this is a debut of undeniable promise, both for its director and its largely unknown cast.
  49. Finding Dory
    It’s a film that spills over with laughs (most of them good, a few of them shticky) and tears (all of them earned), supporting characters who are meant to slay us (and mostly do) with their irascible sharp tongues, and dizzyingly extended flights of physical comedy.
  50. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    Luis Guzmán and Edgar Garcia give the project much more than it ever gives them, sustaining audience interest and generating mild amusement more or less through sheer force of will as they amble through a threadbare plot.
  51. Tikkun
    Austere but fascinating.
  52. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.
  53. Len and Company
    Amid the film’s narrative lulls and lapses, it’s the actors who hold our attention.
  54. Phantom Boy
    Though Felicioli and Gagnol’s visuals suggest colorful kidlit illustrations come to life, their labor-intensive style isn’t for everyone.
  55. Brahman Naman
    Overall, the mix of medium-grade raunchy humor and middleweight drama works fairly well, albeit with few real highlights.
  56. Fire at Sea
    Rosi has long been drawn to quiet lives, but has never been quite so successful in conveying the soulful qualities he sees in them to his audience — until now, using the oblique approach of Lampedusa’s residents to spotlight this growing international crisis, while using his young protagonist’s obliviousness to reflect and indict our own.
  57. Breaking a Monster
    What makes Luke Meyer’s documentary interesting isn’t so much the music or even the incipient stardom, but rather the push-pull between high-stakes biz pressure and subjects who — being 13 years old or so — hardly have the attention spans for the drudgery and minutiae a “career” requires.
  58. Honeyglue
    Throughout, Bird’s visuals are consistently flat, and his habit of cinematographically spinning around his characters (at a dinner table, on a dance floor, in a field) is dizzying in an unpleasant, nausea-inducing way — thus creating a fitting marriage of form and content.
  59. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    As the hours roll slowly past, it’s hard not to feel that this epic achievement in monotonous misery might have retained its impact at a fraction of the length, and that even our grimmest truth-tellers might well find themselves capable of saying more with less.
  60. Lowriders
    Much like classic car customization, effective cinematic storytelling is often all about the detailing, and Ricardo de Montreuil’s Lowriders, which sets a tale of inter-generational rivalry and artistic awakening amidst East LA’s Latino car culture, has style and local color to spare.
  61. Time to Choose
    Time to Choose may come off, at moments, like the “Koyaanisqatsi” of environmental devastation, but it is also a dreadfully beautiful achievement. It shows us what the building blocks of climate change look like.
  62. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    Generally laudatory in its approach to its irresistible human subject — if Lear’s signature white hat remains immovably on his head, the film’s stays very much in hand — this appreciation is nonetheless most fascinating in a brief stretch where the political correctness of Lear’s work is called into question by black performers.
  63. T-Rex
    Though T-Rex leaves some questions unaddressed, and ends with little resolution to protag’s various challenges, it’s compelling throughout.
  64. The President
    An allegorical lesson about dictatorships and the cycle of violence they breed, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The President unfortunately offers a simplified and simplistic reduction, akin to an ancient morality tale without the ancients’ brevity – rather than sophistication cloaked in innocence, the pic feels like didacticism submerged in naivete.
  65. The Conjuring 2
    Wan has a gift that most slam-bang horror directors today do not: a sense of the audience — of their rhythm and pulse, of how to manipulate a moment so that he’s practically controlling your breathing.
  66. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    Visual spectacle still takes precedence over coherent plotting, and the human characters retain all the gravitas of generic placeholders who accidentally made it into the shooting script.
  67. Holy Hell
    Like watching a takedown of Hitler by a disillusioned Leni Reifenstahl, what emerges is one of the decade’s strangest and most unsettling documentaries, especially given its as-yet-unwritten ending.
  68. Now You See Me 2
    Now You See Me 2 is more like a giddy piece of cheese from the ’80s, a chance to spend two more hours with characters we like, doing variations on the things that made us like them in the first place. The revisit, in this case, is well-earned.
  69. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    It longs to be a close-to-the-bone lampoon in the scathing spirit of Christopher Guest, and it has a few amusing moments, but it’s really a predigested one-joke comedy. It’s less an honest satire than an overscaled satirical package.
  70. Gleason
    Tweel masterfully assembles roughly four years of footage, much of it shot by Gleason himself, and the result is painfully raw at times but undeniably rewarding.
  71. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    An intelligent, restrained but warmly intimate cinematic conversation with the Sixth Generation Chinese trailblazer.
  72. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    The docu’s hyperactive editing and visuals eventually grow a tad monotonous, undercutting some of this life story’s poignancy.
  73. To Life
    Given the complexity of everything the characters went through, it’s a shame to witness their lives reduced to a sequence of TV-movie moments.
  74. Seoul Searching
    Lee’s movie at once examines and embodies the complicated riddle of cultural identity: Beneath its boozy antics and largely predictable narrative developments, it offers warmly perceptive insights into how difficult it can be for so many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants to define themselves.
  75. Buddymoon
    This is the kind of buddy comedy where you have to take a giant leap of faith just to believe these two characters would ever be friends.
  76. Princess
    Princess plays out an unsettling scenario of underage sexuality in enigmatic, almost dreamlike terms.
  77. Unlocking the Cage
    Wise is plenty eloquent on the complex legal issue, but remains vague about how the status he seeks will practically impact animals (could animal weddings be far behind?) or why he’s the “person” best qualified to represent them in court.
  78. The Wailing
    On the one hand, the film is a gripping whodunnit, exemplified by a scene of classic Hitchcockian suspense, when Jong-gu makes a frightening discovery while snooping around the Japanese man. At the same time it treads into supernatural territory through nightmarish dream sequences that feel unnervingly real.
  79. Warcraft
    So good at making the most outlandish elements of his first two films seem completely credible, Jones can’t find a way to get this cartoony spectacle to soar. His heartfelt approach to the material only underlines the silliness.
  80. Presenting Princess Shaw
    That rare Princess whose wishes do come true, Montgomery’s what is known as a “genuine discovery.”
  81. Me Before You
    A melodrama with soft-rock ballads where its beating heart should be.
  82. The Ones Below
    Farr delves into the sticky issue of parental ambivalence, but he only goes deep enough to carve a small pit in the viewer’s stomach.
  83. Zero Days
    Clear, urgent and positively terrifying at times.
  84. Raw
    Raw is a deliciously fevered stew of nightmare fuel that hangs together with a breezily confident sense of superior craft.
  85. Wolf and Sheep
    More compelling on a visual level than a narrative one.
  86. Albüm
    Turkish writer-director Mehmet Can Mertoğlu’s substantial debut feature can’t suppress a sneer at the very 21st-century practice of exhaustive yet evasively filtered self-documentation. That’s hardly the only modern malady under fire in this elegantly opaque social satire, which touches on bureaucratic ineptitude, class conflict and very questionable parenting.
  87. Mimosas
    Those familiar with the ethnographic works of Ben Rivers (who gets a thanks in the closing credits) and the films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”) will find much to admire in the movie’s combination of spiritual musings and stunning landscapes.
  88. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    Kuosmanen’s unassuming yet immaculate command of tone and form here would impress at any stage of his career, but it’s entirely remarkable in a first feature.
  89. Divines
    In her aces debut feature Divines, Houda Benyamina has what ought to be a career-making film on her hands.
  90. Kinatay
    Mendoza strengthens his gift for describing space with inquisitive cameras, but as the helmer’s star rises, his subtlety wanes, resulting in obvious statements made banal by heavy-handed ironies.
  91. Hands of Stone
    Gets the job done, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re watching a routinely conceived, rather generic boxing flick. It’s utterly competent, yet it makes Duran’s story seem a little so-what?
  92. Graduation
    As expected from a master like Mungiu, everything is beautifully structured and utterly credible, yet Graduation feels like a retread.
  93. Endless Poetry
    Make no mistake: Endless Poetry is still very much a Jodorowsky film, dotted with his trademark phantasmagorical conceits, which are like candified bursts of comic-book magic realism. Yet more than any previous Jodorowsky opus, it’s also a work of disciplined and touching emotional resonance.
  94. Elle
    Knowingly incendiary but remarkably cool-headed, and built around yet another of Isabelle Huppert’s staggering psychological dissections, Paul Verhoeven’s long-awaited return to notional genre filmmaking pulls off a breathtaking bait-and-switch: Audiences arriving for a lurid slab of arthouse exploitation will be taken off-guard by the complex, compassionate, often corrosively funny examination of unconventional desires that awaits them.
  95. Dog Eat Dog
    That’s not to say Dog Eat Dog is bereft of interesting choices. Far from it, though its infrequent bursts of gonzo brilliance are all in service of such an uninteresting premise.
  96. Clash
    Boasting superb camerawork from d.p. Ahmed Gabr and stellar crowd direction, Clash might strike some as crossing too often into hysteria, yet this is bravura filmmaking with a kick-in-the-gut message about chaos and cruelty (with some humanity).
  97. Blood Father
    Blood Father is trash, but it does capture what an accomplished and winning actor Mel Gibson can be. Just because he lost his bearings, and his career, doesn’t mean that he lost his talent.
  98. After the Storm
    Such is the finesse of Kore-eda’s script that it builds to neither the vehement confrontation nor the comforting reconciliation that melodrama decrees. Instead, it imparts those rare, liberating moments when characters revert to their most honest selves and pluck up the courage to express their deepest, albeit unattainable wishes.
  99. Two Lovers and a Bear
    Somehow, in the final stretch, Nguyen has transformed what felt like a relatively generic, un-special indie love story into something totally unpredictable, taking full advantage of the gorgeous widescreen lensing to convey the atmosphere and magic of his locations.
  100. The Student
    The Student is a film that never stops to think; it thinks (and speaks, and shouts) while prodigiously on the move.
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