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 Vicious Kind
    Before it bogs down in one too many moments of cathartic reckoning, The Vicious Kind is an unpredictable, off-kilter and scabrously funny piece of work.
  2. Becoming Bond
    Even Lazenby detractors can’t help but be charmed by the man himself, who may not have been much of an actor, but turns out to be a bloody good storyteller, and an awfully salty one at that — revealing sexual conquests that would make even Bond blush.
  3. Gully Boy
    A Bollywood movie about a rapper from the slums may sound derivative, but what does that matter when “Gully Boy” revels in high-wattage screen chemistry and an inclusive social message, all served up in a slickly enjoyable production showcasing Ranveer Singh’s many charms?
  4. Jinpa
    The movie is a dreamily austere shaggy-dog story that recalls the matter-of-fact absurdism of early Jim Jarmusch, yet at the same time generates a fair amount of suspense by repeatedly hinting at a potential for melodramatic upheaval. Ultimately, however, Tseden finds an audaciously different way to pull the rug out from under us.
  5. 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.”
  6. Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    Intelligent, informative and unusually entertaining documentary errs only when it yanks too insistently on heartstrings while focusing on worst-case scenarios involving desperate debtors driven to suicide.
  7. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is a capricious and touching surrealist kiddie ride that, in its sugar-high way, is as much a celebration of friendship as the “Toy Story” films.
  8. The Courier
    Ironbark’s hook is that it’s based on true events, and the underlying history deserves to be shared.
  9. Men
    The leaves are so green, the tone is so ominous, and the men are so … Rory Kinnear-y that audiences are all but guaranteed to leave this folk-horror bizart-house offering feeling disturbed, even if no two viewers can agree on what bothered them about it.
  10. The Horse Whisperer
    Directing himself for the first time, Redford has lavished his usual meticulous care on popular material that comes alive on the screen in ways that it never could on the page.
  11. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The Lego Movie 2 ought to have raised the bar, and while it’s faster, denser, and jam-packed with all sorts of catchy new songs (including one, “Catchy Song,” that’s insidiously engineered to get stuck inside your head), all that energy only goes so far to cover for the wobblier foundation on which this film is built.
  12. The Disappearance of Alice Creed
    Crisp handling, some clever twists and a welcome streak of dry humor hold attention throughout
  13. Saccharine
    Saccharine proves James’ gifts are better served by more independent means, even if it falls short of the emotional and dramatic heft that gave “Relic” equal genre and arthouse appeal.
  14. The Matador
    Deftly maneuvering through audacious mood swings and tonal shifts, The Matador emerges as a quirky yet commercial commingling of black comedy, seriocomic psychodrama, heart-tugging sudser and buddy-movie farce.
  15. Maudie
    What little dimension Maudie offers is a direct result of Hawkins’ contributions, which draw from her character’s past to add texture to her performance.
  16. Dangerous Animals
    The efficient and highly effective thriller scarcely allows a calm moment in which to question how deranged its premise truly is.
  17. The Good Boss
    At two hours, rather intricately stuffed with subplots ranging from frivolous to grimly consequential, “The Good Boss” struggles to pick up the pace when required: The laughs are there, but more spaced out than they could be.
  18. The Town Is Quiet
    Guediguian's seemingly sprawling but in fact quite precise picture takes a while to establish itself, but is eventually rewarding viewing.
  19. Pola X
    An often intriguing, sometimes hypnotic work, but one that quickly starts to unravel in the final hour as it becomes clear there’s not much beneath the emperor’s clothes.
  20. Panic Room
    Smartly plotted, convincingly acted and brilliantly executed technically, this engrossing thriller adds some clever modern wrinkles to the time-tested formula of sinister intruders threatening innocents in their home.
  21. Ae Fond Kiss...
    The flatness of several of the key performances badly lets down this promising material.
  22. Beyond Hatred
    Verite docu Beyond Hatred movingly accompanies the family of Francois Chenu, a gay man murdered by three skinheads in 2002, down the road to forgiveness.
  23. Stopmotion
    Masterful as he is at creating the stuff of nightmares, Morgan (as well as co-writer Robin King) is much less assured handling the character actions, psychology and dialogue outside his heroine’s fevered psyche.
  24. Punching Henry
    Phillips, who has the everyman look of a younger John Heard, is such a sympathetic sad sack throughout Punching Henry that it’s occasionally discomforting to watch what happens to him. But that is a major part of this low-key comedy’s charm.
  25. Adventures in Public School
    More antic and likable than it is laugh-out-loud funny, Adventures in Public School is handled with skill on modest means.
  26. Love in the Buff
    It’s the narrative non sequiturs and comic vignettes sprinkled throughout that give the freewheeling pic its playful charm.
  27. Take Me to the River
    The superlatively acted indie promises more than it delivers, but chillingly evokes sufficient primal dread.
  28. Bad News Bears
    The new Bad News Bears has adopted a somewhat raunchier tone but delivers enough laughs to go the distance.
  29. High-Rise
    What began as a self-contained allegory on open class warfare becomes a showcase for stylistic anarchy, wherein the ensuing orgy of sex and violence serves to justify a near-total breakdown of cinematic form.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Sherlock Holmes
    Young Sherlock Holmes is another Steven Spielberg film corresponding to those lamps made from driftwood and coffee tables from redwood burl and hatchcovers. It’s not art but they all serve their purpose and sell by the millions.
  31. Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
    An engaging and surprisingly playful documentary about the man who was arguably the most transgressive photographer to emerge from the 1960s and ’70s.
  32. The Wheel
    Pink, a veteran TV director who takes a rather self-important “a film by” credit on what feels like a first feature (it’s his fifth), shows almost no intuition for how to block or shoot a scene, inserting songs where silence would have been more effective. His clumsiness leaves the actors looking slightly amateurish, despite the strong, vulnerable performances they deliver.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Paper Chase
    The Paper Chase has some great performances, literate screenwriting, sensitive direction and handsome production. Timothy Bottoms is excellent as the puzzled law student, Lindsay Wagner is very good as his girl, and John Houseman, the veteran legit and film producer-director-writer, is outstanding as a hard-nosed but urbane law professor.
  34. The Living End
    As a portrait of late-millennial nihilism, The Living End rejects the sympathetic bent of every afflicted-by-AIDS portrayal before or since.
  35. Timecode
    If the satire feels familiar, and the dramatics often contrived, there's rarely a moment here when something funny, intense or cleverly interconnected doesn't keep one's synapses firing on overdrive.
  36. Paradise: Love
    Repulsive and sublimely beautiful, arguably celebratory and damning of its characters, it’s hideous and masterful all at once, “Salo” with sunburn.
  37. Good Night Oppy
    For large segments of its running time, Good Night Oppy is more than just a documentary; it’s an animated film as well — and a hugely entertaining one at that.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boys in the Band
    Boys in the Band drags. But despite its often tedious postulations of homosexual case histories instead of realistic dialog, and the stagey posturing of the actors, the too literately faithful adaptation of Mart Crowley's off-Broadway swish-set piece has bitchy, back-biting humor, fascinating character studies, melodrama and, most of all, perverse interest.
  39. Miss Americana
    Watching the movie, you know you’re getting a controlled and sanded-off confection of pop-diva image management, one that’s going to leave anything too dark or messy or random on the cutting-room floor. Yet what matters is that the things we do see ring true. In “Miss Americana,” the vision Taylor Swift presents of herself is just chancy and sincere enough to draw us in.
  40. Air Doll (2009)
    Japanese helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ongoing interest in love, loss and souls in limbo is stretched way too thin in Air Doll, a beautifully lensed (by Taiwanese ace Mark Lee) and charmingly played (by South Korean icon Bae Du-na) modern fairy tale about an inflatable doll who takes on a life of her own. Recut to a trim 90 minutes, this fragile yarn would work perfectly and have a chance of an afterlife as a specialty item. In its present form, pic may not get much farther than the fest netherworld.
  41. The Robber
    With no emotional or stylistic hooks, there's not much compelling viewers to engage with what's happening onscreen.
  42. Through the Fire
    Upbeat Urbanworld documentary prizewinner, full of strong personalities and crisply edited court action.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mortal Thoughts
    Played straight and for sympathy, tale of dark retaliation goes astray early on, despite the promise created at the outset by imaginative, energetic production and appealing performances.
  44. Wild Grass
    The picture is marked by superb performances and a dazzling technical display by the helmer and praiseworthy cinematographer Eric Gautier.
  45. Entertainment
    Take it or leave it, Alverson’s fourth feature is singular stuff, and it reconfirms the director as one of the truly bold voices in the all-too-homogenous U.S. indie film scene.
  46. Twisters
    Staring up at the tornadoes in Twisters, I felt like I’d already seen something exactly like them — and that when it comes to footage of actual tornadoes, I’d already seen something more incredible. Twisters, fun as parts of it are, is a movie where reality ultimately takes a lot of the wind out of its gales.
  47. Strange World
    Great as the people and places they explore may be, however, the relatively unimaginative story consigns this gorgeous toon to second-tier status — a notch below director Don Hall’s earlier “Big Hero 6” — instead of cracking the pantheon of Disney classics.
  48. Dan in Real Life
    Deftly interlaces heart and humor in a witty, warm and well-observed comedy about the unexpected and inconvenient blooming of romance at the weekend gathering of an extended family.
  49. Get Him to the Greek
    Barring a few lapses, the gags fly by in rapid-fire fashion, and enough of them connect -- thanks in part to the amusing mix of Hill's hang-dog demeanor with Brand's lanky, relentless hedonism.
  50. Oh, Canada
    Oh, Canada presents a dying artist’s final testimony as a multifaceted film-within-a-film, honoring Banks while also revealing so many of Schrader’s own thoughts on mortality.
  51. The Powerpuff Girls
    Small children who will accept it as rock-'em, sock-'em excitement with a touch of gender-specific empowerment, and hipper teens and grown-ups who can appreciate the whole thing as a semisatirical hoot.
  52. The Art of Self-Defense
    This singular black comedy balances off-kilter humor with an unexpectedly thriller-esque undercurrent, to the extent that audiences will find it tough to anticipate either the jokes or the dark, “Fight Club”-like turn things eventually take — all to strikingly original effect.
  53. Saving Face
    The film's appealing characters and amusing situations prevail over its general shortage of energy.
  54. Cadillac Records
    Most of the details are right-on in Cadillac Records, though the director's efforts to sell it sometimes steers the film into mawkish or hokey territory.
  55. Ali
    Just about everything Mann has chosen to present is valid, substantial and convincing, but by the end, the feeling persists that while certain essences have been grasped, only part of the story has been told.
  56. Twelve and Holding
    Deals in sometimes queasy areas of underage sexuality and emotional extremes; again, deftness and confidence ultimately put across a screenplay (this time by Anthony S. Cipriano) overloaded with sensational incident.
  57. Crooklyn
    Both annoying and vibrant, casually plotted and deeply personal, Spike Lee’s Crooklyn ends up being as compelling as it is messy.
  58. Knuckle
    As anthropology lessons go, Knuckle is strong stuff, and it's easy to accept Palmer's conclusion that the problem he's showing us may well have no solution.
  59. We Women Warriors
    Nicole Karsin's beautifully crafted documentary We Women Warriors highlights the activism of three strong, extraordinarily likable women from three different regions and indigenous cultures of Colombia.
  60. The Gardener
    A stimulating and highly accessible cinematic conversation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sugarland Express
    Unfortunately, the film degenerates in final reels to heavy-handed social polemic and sound-and-fury shootout.
  62. Deidra & Laney Rob a Train
    Crow and fellow up-and-comer Ashleigh Murray make an infectiously spirited duo in director Sydney Freeland’s sophomore feature; exuberant but not obnoxious, their combined energy and ingenuity is enough to steam the film through some off-track script wobbles.
  63. The Transfiguration
    Where the film runs into some difficulty is in sustaining its initially very promising mood of incipient violence. Withholding revelations can be an effective strategy, but it’s perhaps slightly overused here, as the result feels ever so slightly dry.
  64. Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk
    Corbett Redford’s film channels and sustains the energy of restless youth while communicating the distinctive qualities of a community that carried collectivist 1960s ideals into a new generation, even as it rejected any vestige of their hippie parents’ music.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Fistful of Dollars
    This is a hard-hitting item, ably directed, splendidly lensed, neatly acted, which has all the ingredients wanted by action fans and then some.
    • Variety
  66. Ladies in Black
    "Ladies” is let down by a screenplay lacking the sharp wit and emotional depth to bring its characters and themes fully to life.
  67. Alice, Darling
    This is a quietly powerful drama about psychological manipulation and damage.
  68. Drop
    It’s a junk-food thriller fried to near-perfection, balancing the tensions of kidnapping, conspiracy and murder with those of a nerve-wracking first date. It’s crisp and delicious.
  69. The Good Nurse
    What lingers most about it is a sense of selfless compassion, the kind that Amy possesses when she painfully reminds herself of the good buried within inexplicable evil. Watching her try to summon that good makes for a quietly devastating finale, one that’s thoroughly earned by the soulful film that precedes it.
  70. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams creates a character haunting in his extremity. But his dream becomes ours, as does the heartbreaking prospect of it being snuffed before our eyes.
  71. Clerks II
    A softer, flabbier and considerably higher-budgeted follow-up to Kevin Smith's 1994 indie sensation that nevertheless packs enough riotous exchanges and pungent sexual obscenities to make its 97 minutes pass by with ease.
  72. Tetro
    When Coppola finds creative nirvana, he frequently has trouble delivering the full goods. Tetro represents something of a middle ground in that respect.
  73. Unknown White Male
    Bruce's efforts to retrace and recover his life after his memory loss contain all the drama and uncertainty of a fine psychological drama.
  74. Knocking
    Crisply made and gutsily performed as it is, this slender 78-minute film too often feels like pointed social allegory in search of a really good cover story.
  75. Transformers One
    Transformers One approaches the well-known characters with a degree of nuance and complexity (as well as violent finality, in a few cases) that marks the most sophisticated onscreen portrait of them to date.
  76. The Black Phone
    It’s a horror ride that holds you, and it should have no trouble carving out an audience, but I didn’t find it particularly scary.
  77. Coco Before Chanel
    More sentimental than chic, Gallic biopic Coco Before Chanel nonetheless knits a convincing portrait of the designer's journey from her humble beginnings as a provincial seamstress to the halls of Parisian haute couture.
  78. Find Me Guilty
    Part mob-trial thriller, part "dese 'n' dose" extended standup routine, character-rich pic plays like vintage Lumet, mining the grim comedy from life-and-death legal wranglings in the manner of "Dog Day Afternoon," "Prince of the City" and "The Verdict."
  79. Washington Heights
    Believable characters trump the retread plot and hokey message.
  80. Queens of Drama
    The only way to enjoy Queens of Drama is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers.
  81. I Am Not Madame Bovary
    Long, relatively low-key but always engaging, I Am Not Madame Bovary wears its expansive scale lightly.
  82. Telling Lies in America
    Unswervingly sincere and dramatic without surprise or revelation, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' longtime pet project may be personal, but it offers little to audiences that hasn't been served up in quantity in the past.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Parallax View
    The Parallax View is a partially-successful attempt to take a serious subject - a nationwide network of political guns for hire - and make it commercially palatable to the popcorn trade - via chases, fights, and lots of exterior production elements.
  84. The Prosecutor
    As a Donnie Yen vehicle that showcases the star’s still-amazing physical skills and moves at a pacy clip for almost two hours, The Prosecutor has the storytelling energy and visual panache to smooth over the rough spots.
  85. In the Fade
    Diane Kruger’s powerhouse performance in her first German-language production goes a long way toward compensating for the narrative’s dip into overly crystalline waters.
  86. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
    The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Seven
    This weirdly off-kilter suspenser goes well beyond the usual police procedural or killer-on-a-rampage yarn due to a fine script, striking craftsmanship and a masterful performance by Morgan Freeman.
  88. The Swell Season
    Swell never really gathers momentum, remaining a collection of moments, some more privileged than others.
  89. Animals
    It’s the performances that punch through the illusion, as Grainger and Shawkat’s dynamic turns on a dime from raucous, debauched complicity to savage mutual confrontation — the kind of close, cold truth-telling that, where best friends are involved, results more often than not in hurtful lies being told.
  90. The Audition
    Weisse’s gripping, cool-blooded drama upends all manner of inspirational-educator clichés.
  91. Eddington
    [Aster] wants to show us the really big picture, and while “Eddington” isn’t a horror movie, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you’ll recognize with a tremor.
  92. A Letter to Momo
    The story distinguishes itself from other anime offerings through its attention to both visual and emotional realism.
  93. Klaus
    What goodwill the movie does inspire owes more to the splendid visual world than to anything the story supplies.
  94. Walk on Water
    Attempts the miraculous but achieves the adequate.
  95. Tyrannosaur
    Brit thesp Paddy Considine makes a strong writing-helming feature debut with Tyrannosaur, recycling the same cast, characters and setup he used for his 2008 award-winning short "Dog Altogether."
  96. The End
    There may never be another film like The End, and that alone makes it special, though surely all involved would prefer for it to be seen. As it is, the film feels like an obtuse missive, hidden in plain sight, just waiting for intrepid seekers to unearth it.
  97. Grazia's Island
    Crialese's first feature in his native Italy is a small but distinctive drama that displays a firm command of his cast, an arresting visual sense and an admirable avoidance of facile sentiment or cliche.
  98. Daughters of the Sun
    A plea for attention to despicable conditions of female servitude in contempo Iran.
  99. Sex and Lucia
    A slickly made, intense and powerfully visual take on time-honored problems such as identity and the body's power over the mind.
  100. Sleepy Hollow
    An entertainingly eccentric horror tale that envelopes the audience in a dreamy and bloody nightmare.
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