Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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  1. Pitch Perfect 2
    Kay Cannon’s script is even lighter on narrative than its predecessor, but fills any resulting void with a concentrated supply of riotous gags, and a renewed emphasis on the virtues of female collaboration and independence.
  2. The Rover
    Michod’s sophomore feature isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before, but it has a desolate beauty all its own, and a career-redefining performance by Robert Pattinson that reveals untold depths of sensitivity and feeling in the erstwhile “Twilight” star.
  3. Starred Up
    The pic owes its believability to Asser, who served as a therapist similar to Oliver’s character, drawing from his experience to shape the world. Asser brings more than just realism, however, crafting the central father-son relationship on the foundation of classical Greek tragedy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Postman Always Rings Twice
    In the key roles, Nicholson and Lange are excellent, as is Michael Lerner as their defense attorney.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    A tender tale [from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche] that avoids mawkishness and impropriety in treating the lives of two friends who are mixed up with a woman they share.
  6. Hasee Toh Phasee
    It makes the regeneration of an overweight and complacent commercial format look easy.
  7. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Karasawa deftly orchestrates the sometimes hairpin tonal shifts, never veering towards the saccharine; if she did, Stritch would probably shoot her.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Foreign Correspondent
    Story is essentially the old cops-and-robbers. But it has been set in a background of international political intrigue of the largest order.
  9. Black Coal, Thin Ice
    A bleak but powerful, carefully controlled detective thriller in which — as with all the best noirs — there are no real heroes or villains, only various states of compromise.
  10. The Final Member
    The Final Member finds hilarity in humanity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tess
    Tess is a sensitive, intelligent screen treatment of a literary masterwork. Roman Polanski has practiced no betrayal in filming Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and his adaptation often has that infrequent quality of combining fidelity and beauty.
  12. Particle Fever
    For all their concentration on the human factor, the filmmakers by no means shortchange the aesthetic dimensions of LHC.
  13. The Only Real Game
    Banks allows the exhilaration of the game and the exigencies of realpolitik to determine the ups and downs of her film’s sentimental journey.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Show Boat
    Show Boat, Universal’s second talkerized version, is a smash filmusical. Basic tender romance [from Edna Ferber’s novel] between Magnolia (Irene Dunne) and Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones), romantic wastrel of the Mississippi river banks, has been most effectively projected by this reproduction of the classic [1927] Edna Ferber-Oscar Hammerstein II-Jerome Kern operetta.
  15. The Great Invisible
    A uniquely thought-provoking chronicle of an event that, in the absence of any real preventive action taken by oil companies or the U.S. government, calls out for further cinematic and journalistic attention.
  16. The French Minister
    A sparkling and savvy comedy of political manners.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    the picture is really director Akira Kurosawa’s, who takes what could have been a terribly unwieldy subject and makes it believable and highly entertaining. Ichio Yamazaki’s camerawork is first-rate.
  18. Anita
    Anita may be a tribute doc, but it’s one with real heft.
  19. Brothers Hypnotic
    Lively, funny and at times philosophical, Brothers Hypnotic tackles the challenges of maintaining an independent music career, as well as some knotted generational conflicts, and handles it all with great sensitivity.
  20. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    It etches a sweet, sad and solemnly fatalistic love story between feeding times.
  21. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Assisted by the superb performances of his two young, refreshingly unaffected leads, Carbone has a profound understanding of the close but conflicted bond that exists between brothers on either side of the puberty divide.
  22. Manakamana
    For all its manipulations and self-imposed restrictions, Manakamana is expansive, intricate and surprisingly playful.
  23. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    "Whitey” emerges as yet another of Berlinger’s gripping, irony-laced snapshots of the American criminal justice system, in which his eponymous subject comes across as an incontestable monster who may, nevertheless, also be an unwitting patsy.
  24. Tom at the Farm
    It’s an improbably exciting match of knife-edge storytelling and a florid vintage aesthetic best represented by Gabriel Yared’s glorious orchestral score.
  25. Dancing in Jaffa
    A surprising, well-crafted documentary.
  26. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    This dual focus on the need to end the ineffective, destructive “war on drugs” and broader questions of political compromise gives director Riley Morton’s film particular resonance.
  27. Captain America: Civil War
    This chronicle of an epic clash between two equally noble factions, led by Captain America and Iron Man, proves as remarkable for its dramatic coherence and thematic unity as for its dizzyingly inventive action sequences.
  28. The King of Escape
    A marked strength of the movie is that it does succeed in making the unlikely central love affair believable within its own universe.
  29. Magic Magic
    Meticulously acted, gorgeously shot and hilariously insightful about the strange, inarticulable ways people can get on one another’s nerves, this psychological thriller takes its premise to surprising, darkly comic extremes.
  30. Next Goal Wins
    No sports film is short on pep talks, bonding sessions and heartfelt analogies to family kinship, but the teammates’ easy acceptance of Saelua — and her robust performance on the pitch — give the proceedings an extra kick.
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