Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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 2.4 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    Sensitive, delicate and involving.
  2. Water Lilies
    The painfully spot-on essence of teen angst meets the spirit of Esther Williams in Water Lilies. First film by gifted scripter-helmer Celine Sciamma nails the aching doubts and offhanded cruelty of 15- and 16-year-old girls.
  3. Cut Throat City
    Cut Throat City has vivid moments, but RZA’s direction is better than P.G Cuschieri’s script. The film is a muddled social-protest thriller that tries to bridge the corrupt machinations upstairs with the desperation of the streets, and can’t find a way to connect them convincingly.
  4. Long Shot
    More creepy than romantic, more chauvinist than empowered — and in all fairness, funnier and more entertaining than any comedy in months — Long Shot serves up the far-fetched wish-fulfillment fantasy of how, for one lucky underdog, pursuing your first love could wind up making you first man.
  5. Freaky
    As a meta entry in that most disposable of genres, the teen slasher movie, Freaky manages to feel original, which is saying something, since it’s basically warping conventions we’ve all seen a million times before.
  6. The Legend of Ochi
    “Ochi” oozes wonder shot after shot, in part from the eye-popping environments produced through a combination of Evan Prosofsky’s lambent cinematography and the use of matte paintings.
  7. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Small but charming film.
  8. Alice's House
    If telenovelas were convincingly real, they would no doubt look like the tumultuous world of domestic strife and libido deftly limned in Alice's House. Documaker Chico Teixeira gives a light, natural feel to his small but fetching first feature.
  9. Girl Asleep
    Girl Asleep is an exuberant example of imaginative filmmaking that takes its cues from imagination and talent — with nary a focus group in sight.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    1984
    In this unremitting downer, writer-director Michael Radford introduces no touches of comedy or facile sensationalism to soften a harsh depiction of life under a totalitarian system as imagined by George Orwell in 1948.
  11. Furious 7
    Furious 7 provides both a satisfying chapter in the movies’ preeminent gearhead soap opera and a tactful, touching memorial to Walker.
  12. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    In short, the movie doesn’t seem nearly skeptical enough of its subject, using his sometimes dodgy memory as a vehicle to remind audiences that their classic Hollywood heroes — so perfect on the silver screen — were human after all, with sex lives and carnal desires like the rest of us. Well, maybe not exactly like the rest of us.
  13. Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    A quietly devastating exploration of the cruel paradox that, in order to feed their loved ones, emigrants have to leave them behind.
  14. Upgrade
    The film isn’t a dud — it “delivers the goods” in a certain reductive, baseline action-fanboy way. Yet Upgrade is the sort of movie that thinks it’s more ingenious than it is, starting with the premise, which is a semi-catchy, semi-stupido hoot in a way that the movie couldn’t have completely intended.
  15. Gotta Dance
    Heartwarming and full of self-deprecating humor, albeit somewhat over-long and repetitive.
  16. The Freedom to Marry
    [A] solid yet unexceptional documentary.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Rose
    Result is an ultra-realistic look at the infusion of money, sex, drugs and booze into the simple process of singing a song, a chore Midler does faultlessly in several excellent concert sequences.
  18. Archive
    The sleek result, like the scientist’s hi-tech Frankenstein creation, impressively looks and sounds the part, without quite having a soul of its own. That’s enough to make Archive a compelling calling card for the British freshman, with the promise of more advanced models to come.
  19. Detention
    The absorbing and entertaining Detention works well enough as a primer on a traumatic period of history, and as a story of semi-supernatural salvation for sins past, that it earns its surprisingly moving final moments, and even its heavily on-the-nose exhortation to modern-day Taiwan to remember and honor its ghosts.
  20. Ponyboi
    Sparkling like a rhinestone in the rough, Ponyboi stands out amid a lineup of cartoon gangsters, tough-guy dealers and gum-smacking prostitutes — lowlifes recycled from a hundred late-night cable movies with superficially similar plots.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Boy Who Could Fly
    Under Nick Castle’s careful direction, scenes never become maudlin, which is remarkable considering the potential of the subject matter. Deakins and Underwood handle their difficult roles with amazing grace.
  22. Brothers of the Head
    Feature debut by Yank duo Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe isn't so far from their engrossing docus on Terry Gilliam's filmic adventures, "The Hamster Factor" (1996) and "Lost in La Mancha" (2001), except here the madness and exploitation is part of the music scene.
  23. The Green Wave
    Mixed-media approach is eye-catching, and the subject is unquestionably powerful, but the sentimental score and stridently drawn imagery detract from picture's impact.
  24. Private Parts
    A funny and unexpectedly beguiling account of the outrageous humorist's unlikely rise to the pinnacle of radio celebrity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
    Top-flight cinematic entertainment.
  26. Patti Cake$
    In the end, it’s the ensemble’s collective attitude, plus the palpable chemistry between Patti and her friends, that defines the experience, not the stock desire to be discovered. Though if Patti Cake$ really did exist, this movie would certainly make her star.
  27. Death at a Funeral
    With a circus parade of mourning Brits and enough appalling circumstances to set proper Englishness back to the Dark Ages, Death at a Funeral pits decorum against sex, drugs and dysfunction.
  28. The Surfer
    The film is trying for something, but it’s also sketchy in the extreme.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moscow on the Hudson
    Directed by Paul Mazursky with his usual unusual touches, Moscow would be in a lot of trouble without a superbly sensitive portrayal by Robin Williams of a gentle Russian circus musician who makes a sudden decision to defect while visiting the US.
  30. While You Were Sleeping
    Director Jon Turteltaub has a smooth style suited to classic farce and knows just how to pace the material to accentuate the positive.
  31. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    Its extremely narrow focus on the death throes of an art form, rather than the art itself, limits its appeal.
  32. 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.
  33. Wild Life
    Sidestepping thornier questions of optics and ownership, Wild Life ultimately takes the side of nature over politics, and most viewers will follow suit.
  34. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    Shot for shot, line and line, it’s an extravagant and witty follow-up, made with the same friendly virtuosic dazzle. Yet this time you can sense just how hard the series’ wizard of a director, James Gunn (now taking off from a script he wrote solo), is working to entertain you. Maybe a little too hard.
  35. Farewell, My Queen
    A well-observed but emotionally muted costume drama that might well have been titled "My Week With Marie Antoinette."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deep Cover
    Convoluted and mostly unconvincing as a portrait of the drug underworld, Deep Cover [based on a story by Michael Tolkin] still carries some resonance due to its vivid portrait of societal decay and a heavyweight performance by Larry Fishburne.
  37. The Life of Chuck
    Any romantic notions the film might have are swiftly undone when it starts to explain the disappointing method behind its sleight of hand — until this explanation becomes the magic trick itself.
  38. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    A celebration and a lament -- a celebration of Channing's seven decades as musical comedy star, and a lament that there's really no one like her anymore.
  39. Jealousy
    More tightly scripted than Garrel’s usual rambles, the comedy-drama also has an unexpected emotional warmth.
  40. The Paper Tigers
    The three leads summon lovely chemistry, re-creating a dorky-kid dynamic in later life that feels like the perfect summation of the film’s almost Spielbergian belief that at 10 years of age we are our best and truest selves.
  41. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    Some will find it entirely too sentimental, others a tad repetitive (Callahan tends to repeat the same stories), but it’s hard to argue with a movie that celebrates the kind of recovery he went through.
  42. Reality Bites
    The verite of this saga of Generation X is that it is no more fierce than a peck. "Reality Bites" begins as a promising and eccentric tale of contemporary youth but evolves into a banal love story as predictable as any lush Hollywood affair.
  43. Rosewater
    Stewart’s confident, superbly acted debut feature works as both a stirring account of human endurance and a topical reminder of the risks faced by journalists in pursuit of the truth.
  44. Stranger Than Fiction
    Sometimes becomes too self-consciously clever, and it doesn't entirely resolve its own central dilemma. But it remains inventive and funny to the end, features fine performances from Will Ferrell and especially Emma Thompson.
  45. Cairo Time
    The fourth feature from Canadian writer-helmer Ruba Nadda ("Sabah") has a slightly breathless, old-fashioned feel, calling to mind the cliched fiction found in the type of ladies' magazine the heroine edits.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia expertly blends horror and tongue-in cheek comedy in the tale of a small California coastal town overrun by Venezuelan killer spiders. Frank Marshall’s sophisticated feature directing debut never indulges in ultimate gross-out effects and carefully chooses both its victims and its means of depicting their dispatch.
  47. Damsels in Distress
    Stillman proves he still knows how to write crackling, articulate dialogue for quirky preppie characters whom he loves laughing at as much as with.
  48. Selena
    Although Nava's screenplay hits the subject of every scene right on the head and doesn't ask for much subtlety or subtext, Lopez is wonderful to watch in the dramatic sequences as well as in the numerous musical interludes.
  49. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    In The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world.
  50. Calm with Horses (The Shadow of Violence)
    If the overall narrative arc is less than inspired, however, the milieu and personalities depicted do have real character.
  51. A Wolf at the Door
    the pic gathers steam and displays considerable drive, even if it can’t quite shake the feel of a good TV movie.
  52. The Gospel According to André
    “Gospel” is Novack’s first solo feature, though she co-directed “Eat This New York” with husband Andrew Rossi, whose “Page One: Inside the New York Times” she also produced, and she seems to have an implicit understanding that shot composition is every bit as important in a documentary as in a narrative feature.
  53. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    “Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.
  54. Nowhere Boy
    A respectable but surprisingly conventional feature-debut effort from Brit artist-turned-helmer Sam Taylor-Wood.
  55. Turning
    The 13 women, all born or made New Yorkers -- all born or made women -- of various ages, shapes, sizes and backgrounds, lose none of their mystique by being captured "behind the scenes," traipsing through airports or meticulously applying weird makeup. Rather, they reveal themselves as more conscious, integral parts of a spectacle that unfolds to hypnotic effect.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Desert Hearts
    Helen Shaver, playing the lead, does a most commendable job as a character who starts by being all tied up inside, and ends up by melting and opening up to emotions she couldn’t even conceive before.
  57. Queen of Hearts
    In a conversation piece pitched halfway between the delicate Sirkian tragedy and Adrian Lyne at his most sensational, it’s the overridingly controlled nature of proceedings — from performance to production design — that keeps “Queen of Hearts” from sliding into the hysterical silliness that its provocations invite.
  58. Zathura: A Space Adventure
    Its unwieldy title notwithstanding, Zathura: A Space Adventure is arguably the best adaptation of a Chris Van Allsburg book to date.
  59. Medusa
    The audacity of de Silveira’s concept — in which enrollees at an upscale Christian college indulge in secret, moralizing vigilante mayhem — and her deliberately over-the-top aesthetic render Medusa a compelling mixed bag. It may miss the bull’s-eye, but not for lack of intriguing ideas or style.
  60. The Darjeeling Limited
    Inventively staged picture should satisfy the upscale, youth and cult auds Anderson has developed, though it's unlikely to draw significantly better than his earlier work.
  61. The Peanuts Movie
    For those who know the strip well, The Peanuts Movie should feel like the first day of a new school year, reunited with a classroom full of familiar faces.
  62. Ronin
    A pleasurable throwback to the sort of gritty, low-tech international thriller that was a staple of the 1960s.
  63. The Wrecking Crew
    What you see in the key art and the first-look impression you get from the teaser and trailers is a clear and accurate indicator of what you’ll get in the film. And for many action movie fans that’ll do just fine.
  64. The Swenkas
    Ronde demonstrates a painterly eye and ripe affection for these people, but as with "Jerusalem, My Love" he maintains a too-polite, worshipful distance from his subjects.
  65. Convento
    Documentarian Jarred Alterman emphasizes oddball lyricism in the one-of-a-kind Convento, in which a 400-year-old Portuguese monastery provides the canvas for a Dutch family's artistic experimentation.
  66. The Creeping Garden
    Good-humored but not campy in its regard of some genuinely fascinating research, and full of trippy visuals, this science-fair bonanza would have been a midnight staple in the era of “The Hellstrom Chronicles.”
  67. Storm Boy
    This version of Storm Boy, directed by excellent Aussie small-screen helmer Shawn Seet, has the emotional heft and visual splendor to win the hearts of domestic and international family audiences.
  68. Sometimes Always Never
    Riley, Nighy, Lowe and Agutter all find some truthful, moving place to work from, despite the ever-present threat of being upstaged by a kitschy sconce or an eye-jangling turquoise-and-pink color scheme.
  69. Over the Hedge
    Despite a sprinkling of laughs and eye-catching moments, this adaptation of a popular comicstrip reps a middling effort from the house that "Shrek" built, a rather narrowly conceived tale that makes only modest hay from the overworked conflict between wildlife and encroaching humans.
  70. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    The Prisoner is in many ways a justifiably angry film, simmering with moral outrage. But it is also -- surprisingly, maybe even amazingly -- hopeful.
  71. The Girl with All the Gifts
    Director McCarthy does little visually that would generate a sense of fear in any viewer, and there’s nothing that will generate so much as a startled jump.
  72. Cinemania
    An unsparing, if light-touched, look at obsession, denial and where to find the cheap seats in Manhattan.
  73. Me Without You
    The two appealingly played central characters and the film's enjoyable evocation of the 1970s and '80s keep it buoyant and diverting.
  74. Hamlet
    In one of the most accessible versions of Hamlet yet committed to film, Campbell Scott's self-helmed Great Dane is more than ever a man for our time.
  75. Too Much Sleep
    The material is slender, the characters not sufficiently engaging or eccentric for a feature-length movie.
  76. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    A powerful and creative film.
  77. The Way I See It
    The Way I See It mostly feels like a love letter to Obama.
  78. Hipsters
    Although a massive hit at home, taking approximately $16 million at the wickets, this great-looking but tonally uneven pic won't jive with audiences quite so well anywhere else.
  79. Meanwhile on Earth
    This sophomore directorial effort proves Clapin’s adept hand for soulful, existentialist tales with an offbeat touch, regardless of the medium he’s creating in.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Russia House
    John le Carre's glasnost-era espionage novel has been turned into intelligent adult entertainment, but somber tone, utter lack of action and sex, and complexity of plot tilts this mainly to upscale audience.
  81. Solaris
    Despite its undeniably pure and earnest intent, Solaris is equally undeniably an arid, dull affair that imposes and maintains a huge distance between the viewer and what happens onscreen.
  82. As Good as It Gets
    A sporadically funny romantic comedy with all the dramatic plausibility and tonal consistency of a TV variety show.
  83. The Goebbles Experiment
    A man whose name has become a byword for pure evil gets a disarming makeover in The Goebbels Experiment. Far from being the horror show expected from its title, Lutz Hachmeister's cool, almost anti-dramatic docu paints a portrait of an insecure manic-depressive solely through extracts from Joseph Goebbels' own voluminous diaries.
  84. Run
    Between this and “Searching” (with its Asian American leads), Chaganty is actively expanding audiences’ ideas of what movie heroes can be. In the end, the character’s disability feels like an extension of the approach taken in his debut. Once again, perceived limitations become opportunities for more creative solutions, and differences disappear unless audiences decide to obsess over them.
  85. No Man of God
    Individual moments are gripping, and Kirby’s performance puts its queasy hooks in you, but the film, overall, has a scattershot momentum until the last act, set in 1989, when Bundy is about to be executed.
  86. Rudo y Cursi
    Picture scores a solid goal for its national cinema and the cause of comedy.
  87. Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything
    Outside those charged moments of hands-on connection, however, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything is something of a slog, hampered by escalating dramatic obviousness and thin characterization
  88. Another Body
    A groundbreaking, creepy, fascinating, and important documentary.
  89. Deep Cover
    It’s busier than it is funny, more frenetic than dynamic, but watchable enough.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trust
    Long Island filmaker Hal Hartley progresses from his debut feature, The Unbelievable Truth to this bleak, off-center comedy about dysfunctional families in working class suburbia.
  91. Nancy
    Instead of exploring her actions, and the people they affect, Nancy‘s restraint keeps the film closed-off and grim, as muddy gray as the life she’s aching to ditch.
  92. Fight Club
    Bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie.
  93. Outrage
    Focusing on the absurdly ultraviolent tit-for-tat tussles among a trio of Tokyo crime families, the film is a beautifully staged marvel that confidently reasserts Kitano's considerable cinematic gifts.
  94. R
    More pathetic than sympathetic, the young protags are not romanticized or made heroic. While this suits the style of the picture, which never conforms to the melodramatic conventions and stock characters of the prison genre, it also works against audience identification.
  95. Some Freaks
    All the performances are very nicely turned in a movie that deliberately excludes any significant adult presence in order to immerse us fully in an adolescent world.
  96. The Final Year
    The Final Year clings to a precooked thesis about the Obama Doctrine that misses the behind-the-scenes drama and candor of superior political documentaries like “The War Room” or “Weiner.”
  97. Price Check
    After a strong start, the picture itself has trouble checking out, but it provides a terrific showcase for indie princess Posey, leading a topnotch cast.
  98. Fitting In
    While imperfect, Bloody Hell does entertainingly offer food for thought via an important overall point made in non-preachy form: Nature indeed does have room for variation in gender and sexual norms, no matter how loudly political or religious conservatives these days protest otherwise.
  99. Wild Canaries
    Levine’s script does a clever job of keeping numerous balls in the air over the taut 99-minute running time, and the writer is especially good at using the information he feeds us in unexpectedly resourceful, double-edged ways.
  100. Sublet
    With two screenwriters (including the director) and three script editors credited, it may be a classic “too many cooks” situation, as the whole structure is as risk-free and standardized as a TV film, though newcomer Niv Nissem provides a freshness that papers over the conventionality of it all.
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