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. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    Snyder has set a Sisyphean task for himself. That this very long, very brooding, often exhilarating and sometimes scattered epic succeeds as often it does therefore has to be seen as an achievement.
  2. Thank You for Playing
    Even the flaws of Thank You for Playing have the effect of underscoring its humanity; the movie may immortalize a creative endeavor, but it never loses sight of the fact that it’s also honoring a life.
  3. April and the Extraordinary World
    Here, within a thrilling tale that respects the intelligence of its audience, attentive parents will find the antidote to their fear that watching cartoons might rot your brain. If anything, April and the Extraordinary World seems bound to do the opposite, encouraging children to pursue their own passions and creativity.
  4. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
    Every bit as sitcom-ish and saccharine as its predecessor, but considerably less distinctive.
  5. Men & Chicken
    In its own playful way, this tonally astounding, genre-confounding movie offers a variation on the famous chicken-and-egg debate, being a twisted inquiry into the characters’ origins and mankind’s own search for meaning.
  6. Boris Without Béatrice
    A brittle, no-joke comedy of unchecked privilege that maintains the tone of social satire without ever alighting on a specific target.
  7. The Birth of Saké
    A richly immersive documentary that plays like an elegy for a time-honored but slowly vanishing way of life.
  8. A Space Program
    It’s a singularly off-kilter vision of repurposed invention, though even at 72 minutes, the film struggles to keep itself afloat, its central conceit too slender to maintain its sense of mirth or wonder.
  9. Pee-wee's Big Holiday
    The biggest surprise, frankly, might be that the funniest person here is frequently Manganiello. Indeed, the mere visual juxtaposition of the towering “Magic Mike” star and Reubens in the same frame together is practically a special effect in itself.
  10. The Trust
    Cage supplies a stream of tension-defusing laughs while the script steadily applies the screws, but this disposable exercise in comic nihilism offers only a modest payoff at best.
  11. Sausage Party
    Sausage Party is something far short of Shavian in terms of sophisticated dialogue — really, there is just so much novelty value one can milk from repetitious fusillades of F-bombs launched by animated characters — but it is difficult to deny the hilarity quotient of a movie so exuberantly and unapologetically rude and crude.
  12. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Few Iranian films have tried to realistically depict both the urban middle and lower classes, and fewer still with the complexity of story telling and depth of characterization in Asghar Farhadi’s impressive third feature, Fireworks Wednesday.
  13. Miracles from Heaven
    In a welcome gender reversal from the father-son dynamic of “Heaven Is for Real,” Garner and Rogers deliver fully committed performances that credibly convey the physical and mental anguish endured by sick children and their caregivers.
  14. Desierto
    Cuaron’s movie may be an exaggerated nightmare vision of murderous xenophobia run amok, but the catharsis in this tale of survival and payback is undeniably real.
  15. Don't Think Twice
    Portraying a cutthroat business in which little is “fair,” Don’t Think Twice acknowledges the bloodshed, but applies the razor with enough empathetic delicacy to earn its cautiously upbeat fade.
  16. Keanu
    An initially amusing but fatally overstretched action-comedy that marks a lamer-than-expected big-screen outing for Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.
  17. The Young Messiah
    This pious drama is a work of minimal imagination and even less subtlety.
  18. The Idol
    The movie largely benefits from Abu-Assad’s natural talent for building suspense and rhythm; if the story’s elisions and fabrications occasionally feel too tidy, it more than earns its emotional impact on the strength of its excellent young cast.
  19. Everybody Wants Some!!
    Linklater indulges his characters’ antics with such wild, free-flowing affection that you might miss the thoughtful undertow of this delightful movie: Few filmmakers have so fully embraced the bittersweet joy of living in the moment — one that’s all the more glorious because it fades so soon.
  20. The Perfect Match
    An attractive and appealing cast helps this formulaic pablum go down easy, but the genial tone buffs the edge out of every element.
  21. A Haunting in Cawdor
    Though never outright dull, A Haunting in Cawdor manages to provide few incidents of genuine interest while leaving potentially rewarding character and thematic elements unexplored.
  22. The Automatic Hate
    This arresting seriocomedy deftly walks a tightrope between droll and tense, over a gaping pit of crazy.
  23. Everything Is Copy
    Anything but a morose tale of a bright light snuffed out far too soon, Bernstein’s documentary is an inspiring heartstring-tugger.
  24. Creative Control
    A contemplative tone, a zigzagging narrative, superb widescreen black-and-white cinematography and an infusion of dry humor make it feel genuinely fresh.
  25. Hyena Road
    This is the kind of movie where a major development in a character’s personal life instantly telegraphs his ultimate fate in the trenches.
  26. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    The tension is rooted in psychology rather than gimmickry, and evinces a command of craft that feels old-fashioned in the most refreshing possible sense.
  27. The Meddler
    With no car chases or artificial villains to get in the way, and no treacly contrivances to force unearned emotions, the bright, vaguely sitcom-styled movie is free to make audiences feel good on its own genuine terms.
  28. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    Although “Allegiant” does recapture the original film’s sense of constantly discovering and adapting to fresh information, audiences no longer identify with anyone in particular.
  29. Emelie
    This potentially lurid material is lent considerable ballast and believability by the excellent work of its trio of child actors.
  30. Colliding Dreams
    Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s excellent history of the changing faces of the ideology that built the State of Israel offers a careful antidote to the shrill entrenchment that attends the very mention of Zionism.
  31. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of minute observations rather than grand revelations, less concerned with butterfly-effect consequentiality than the variable human foibles that can turn a bad day into a good one.
  32. Trapped
    Powerful material doesn’t automatically yield a timeless or artistic documentary, and for better or worse, Trapped is an op-ed aimed squarely at the present moment in an enduring national conversation.
  33. From Vegas to Macau III
    Single-handedly killing a once internationally beloved, one-of-a-kind Hong Kong genre that Wong himself invented, the filmmakers have so mangled their material to suit mainland criteria that they’re left with a string of moronic gags barely held together by cheapskate production values.
  34. The Monkey King 2
    Certainly less of a dud than the director’s inane original, this follow-up is even more tyke-oriented, but at least it’s a livelier yarn and boasts a slick upgrade in visual effects.
  35. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    A sparely plotted, low-key but ultimately rewarding slice of South Dakota reservation life.
  36. London Has Fallen
    For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.
  37. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances.
  38. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
  39. Marguerite
    This splendid satire benefits...from “The Singer” director Giannoli’s gift for striking just the right tone with such tricky material.
  40. The Final Project
    The Final Project does feel like a student film, though not in a way that benefits its own found-footage conceit.
  41. Cabin Fever
    Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.
  42. Sweet Bean
    Just as An itself seems on the verge of flying away, however, Kawase rewards her audience with an unapologetically contrived but effectively eye-moistening surge of feeling.
  43. Gods of Egypt
    This is by any measure a dreadful movie, a chintzy, CG-encrusted eyesore that oozes stupidity and self-indulgence from every pore. Yet damned if Proyas doesn’t put it all out there with a lunatic conviction you can’t help but admire.
  44. Fatima
    This poignant slice-of-life proves as modest in length (78 minutes) as it is generous in rueful insight and emotional complexity.
  45. A Strange Course of Events
    Too often the pic feels as if it’s killing time to pad itself out into feature length.
  46. The Other Side of the Door
    The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy’s weekend lineup, The Other Side of the Door brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.
  47. A Quiet Passion
    [Davies'] most mannered and least fulfilling work to date, A Quiet Passion boasts meticulous craft and ornate verbiage in abundance, but confines Cynthia Nixon’s melancholia-stricken performance as arguably America’s greatest poet in an emotional straitjacket of variously arch storytelling tones.
  48. Barney Thomson
    Thompson elevates and enervates every scene she’s in.
  49. The Brothers Grimsby
    Baron Cohen’s unflinching ability to play dumb is still good for a few chuckles, making some of the film’s funniest moments out of its most innocent quips.
  50. The Mermaid
    Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid defies the time-worn nature of its material, concocting pure enchantment with the director’s own blend of nutty humor, intolerable cruelty and unabashed sweetness.
  51. Becoming Mike Nichols
    If the material feels inadequate for a freestanding doc, that’s no fault of Nichols, who’s on playful, perspicacious form.
  52. Risen
    Whether or not it triggers a craze for divinely inspired detective stories, Risen makes a decent case for itself as the “Columbo” of the genre: It’s amiable, creaky and not remotely predicated on the element of surprise.
  53. Race
    Stephen Hopkins’ film offers a safe, middlebrow slice of history that beats a snoozy lecture any day. Making a few admirable attempts to complicate what could have been a standard-issue inspirational sports narrative, Race is better than it has to be, but not by too much.
  54. Snowtime!
    Covering the emotional spectrum between dog farts on one end and tragedy on the other reps a tonal challenge that Showtime! can’t pull off, despite a gentler touch than most kiddie fare of its kind.
  55. White Girl
    As much as White Girl has to offer in raw immediacy, it lacks the distance to offer much in the way of meaningful commentary, distinguishing itself (for the worse) from such earth-shaking social critics as Bret Easton Ellis and Harmony Korine.
  56. Triple 9
    Well suited to Hillcoat’s gifts for low-boil suspense and brutal eruptions of violence in close, male-dominated quarters, the film has grit and atmosphere to burn but also a certain narrative sketchiness, as though unable to reconcile its sharp sociological portraiture with the pleasures of a more robustly plotted crime yarn.
  57. Glassland
    Rather than presenting a nuanced ending that’s open to interpretation, Barrett simply leaves us scratching our heads as to what just happened.
  58. Funny or Die Presents: Donald Trump's the Art of the Deal: The Movie
    Other than skewering Trump, both personally and politically, this is obviously a rather slim construct. And while Depp throws his all into perhaps his hammiest role since Jack Sparrow, it probably would have benefited from a bit less length and a tighter focus.
  59. Things to Come
    Huppert is such a persistently and prolifically rigorous performer that she risks being taken for granted in some of her vehicles, but this is major, many-shaded work even by her lofty standards.
  60. Zootopia
    It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story, a la “The Big Lebowski” or “Inherent Vice,” yielding an adult-friendly whodunit with a chipper “you can do it!” message for the cubs.
  61. Midnight Special
    Nichols’ impressively restrained yet limitlessly imaginative fourth feature takes its energy from an ensemble of characters who hold fast to their convictions, even though their beliefs remain shrouded in mystery for much of the journey.
  62. Mavis!
    A spirited and captivating bio-doc that richly deserves the exclamation point in its title.
  63. How to Be Single
    Splintered between thinly sketched focal points rather than actually plumbing the real fear, paranoia and elation that come from operating without a romantic partner, How to Be Single never transcends its most sitcom-y instincts.
  64. Zoolander 2
    The results may delight those who believe recycled gags and endless cameos to be the very essence of great screen comedy, but everyone else will likely recognize Stiller’s wannabe Magnum opus as a disappointment-slash-misfire, the orange mocha crappuccino of movie sequels.
  65. Southbound
    This entertaining-enough quartet of loosely interwoven terror tales falls right into the middle ground of horror omnibuses, with no outright duds but no truly memorable (or scary) segments either.
  66. Touched With Fire
    Potent performances by stars Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby, strong contributions by well-cast supporting players and an overall sense of understated verisimilitude offset the predictable aspects of the narrative.
  67. Deadpool
    As a vehicle for the impudent comic stylings of Ryan Reynolds, this cheerfully demented origin story is many, many cuts above “Green Lantern,” and as a sly demolition job on the superhero movie, it sure as hell beats “Kick-Ass.”
  68. How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town
    How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town emerges as surprisingly tame fluff, a modestly amusing trifle scarcely saucier than those wink-wink naughty farces that were staples of the ’70s dinner-theater circuit.
  69. Innocence of Memories
    It’s an occupational hazard of rambling psychogeography that the unwary traveller will find themselves irritated as often as they are enthralled: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Gee negotiates this hurdle with variable success.
  70. All Roads Lead to Rome
    Though Parker’s assured performance, along with the enchanting backdrop, eases the action toward harmless gentility, they’re hijacked by a plot that mimics the plate-spinning business of classic screwball, but moves at agonizing half-speed.
  71. Misconduct
    A flagrantly derivative but modestly diverting drama.
  72. The Choice
    Director Ross Katz’s The Choice, which mimics “The Notebook” in everything but meaningful conflict, believable characters, style and emotional honesty, is a very unsuccessful story.
  73. Hail, Caesar!
    This gorgeously crafted romp through the backlots and Malibu enclaves of Hollywood’s Golden Age tosses off plenty of eccentric comedy and musical razzle-dazzle before taking on richer, more ruminative dimensions, ultimately landing on the funny-sad question of whether life is but a dream factory.
  74. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt substantial audiences, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in fact a moderately entertaining film, not deficient in old-fashioned costume drama when it pleases, nor in the power of being clever where it chooses, but awkward and unsatisfying.
  75. Lazer Team
    Lazer Team is consistently enjoyable in a respectable-dumb-fun way, which puts it a few light-years ahead of most similar stuff Hollywood has come up with lately.
  76. Swiss Army Man
    At times deliriously dynamic, at others patience-grating in the extreme, the constantly inventive film fires off ideas that are as exhilarating as anything American audiences will see all year, only to lag in long swells on either side.
  77. Yoga Hosers
    If it’s true, as Kevin Smith noted in his lengthy introductory remarks at Sundance, that “failure is just success training,” then he should be in the best shape of his career after Yoga Hosers, an imbecilic, strenuously wacky helping of see-what-sticks juvenilia.
  78. Wiener-Dog
    This elegantly wrought oddity appears at the halfway mark to be heading into uncharacteristically hopeful territory for Solondz — until a toe-tapping intermission marks a reassuring plunge into abject despair.
  79. Weiner
    Filmmakers Josh Kriegman (a former Weiner aide) and Elyse Steinberg utilize their seemingly unfettered access to deliver a rollicking and never-dull insider’s view of a political campaign in crisis mode, but the most fascinating questions surrounding Weiner’s epic fall remain unanswered.
  80. Under the Shadow
    Slyly merging a familiar but effective genre exercise with a grim allegory of female oppression, Babak Anvari’s resourceful writing-directing debut grounds its premise in something at once vaguely political and ineluctably sinister.
  81. Tallulah
    Page is simply superb in a complex role that perfectly plays to her gift for balancing deadpan comedy with surprisingly deep emotional reserves.
  82. Southside with You
    Richard Tanne’s writing-directing debut deepens into a pointed, flowing conversation about the many challenges (and varieties) of African-American identity, the need for both idealism and compromise, and the importance of making peace with past disappointments in order to effect meaningful change in the future.
  83. Sing Street
    The truest and most tearduct-tugging relationship here is that between Conor and his lank-haired college-dropout brother, played with spaced-out warmth and wistful good humor by the ever-likeable Reynor.
  84. Other People
    While Chris Kelly’s semi-autobiographical writing-directing debut gets off to a painfully broad start, it does intermittently find its footing as it progresses, gathering enough well-observed moments and details to counterbalance its otherwise flailing stabs at humor and pathos.
  85. Operation Avalanche
    Operation Avalanche demonstrates that there’s still plenty of room left within the found-footage format to craft fresh, high-concept projects, regardless of the fact that no one’s falling for their alleged authenticity any longer.
  86. Newtown
    Structured more like a requiem than a polemic, the doc ebbs and flows in accordance with the cycles of mourning as it speaks with parents of the murdered children, as well as the teachers, priests, doctors and neighbors afflicted with survivor’s guilt, elegantly and devastatingly capturing the tenor of a small town that will carry these scars for at least a generation.
  87. Morris from America
    This coming-of-age dramedy explores how the challenges of being young, black and misunderstood can be compounded in a foreign environment, but goes about it in a grounded, character-driven way that never smacks of manipulation or special pleading.
  88. Love & Friendship
    [Stillman] takes the inherent sophistication of Austen’s worldview and introduces just the right note of sly, self-deflating mockery.
  89. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    The virtual future may be now, but “Lo and Behold,” with its stimulating volley of insights and ideas, always feels persistently, defiantly human.
  90. Little Men
    Ira Sachs’ Little Men is a little movie brimming with little truths about modern life. It won’t change the world, but it does understand it
  91. Kate Plays Christine
    Greene encourages our curiosity (and even a hint of caution) about documentary perspectives and techniques that other films prefer viewers to take as given.
  92. Joshy
    Joshy offers a strange mix of elements that never quite add up.
  93. The Intervention
    Actress Clea DuVall’s debut feature as writer-director is an ensemble piece that breaks no new ground in themes or execution, but is pleasingly accomplished on all levels.
  94. The Hollars
    Krasinki’s film remains resolutely resistant to surprise in style or story terms.
  95. The Fundamentals of Caring
    Solid performances and some genuinely sharp humor elevate writer-director Rob Burnett’s second feature.
  96. The Free World
    [A] well-meaning, well-acted but otherwise clumsily executed parable about second chances.
  97. Jane Got a Gun
    A solidly made and conventionally satisfying Western.
  98. The Fits
    Even at its conclusion, Holmer’s film refuses to provide easy answers regarding its meaning, instead using poised formal techniques to impart that which is not spoken — and, in the process, portends impressive things to come from its confident, capable director.
  99. Equity
    While the severity of the film’s environment convinces, the specifics of Amy Fox’s screenplay — tangled up in tech IPOs, post-Snowden security paranoia and venal investment banking practice — are less consistently persuasive.
  100. Ip Man 3
    Less offensively nationalistic than the second installment but falling short of the glowing humanity, genial Cantonese humor and visual flair of the first, the pic is somewhat tarnished by its pedestrian plot and limp characterization.
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