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. The Invisible War
    An aptly infuriating expose of sexual abuse within the U.S. military, Kirby Dick's documentary The Invisible War calls high-ranking officials to account for turning a blind eye to a violent epidemic.
  2. Down from the Mountain
    Before the music takes over, the film inserts a few bits of charm, such as Emmylou Harris excitedly following the latest Major League Baseball scores.
  3. The Motorcycle Diaries
    This intelligently made picture is artful but not arty, political without being didactic.
  4. A Private War
    A Private War manages to be simultaneously appalled by the humanitarian crises it depicts...and honest about the thrill that visiting such hot spots offered to someone who found it hard to readjust to her life in London between assignments.
  5. The Wolfpack
    So weirdly fascinating is the tale of the Angulo clan that one wishes The Wolfpack were that much sharper, more searching and coherently organized. Still, there is much to enjoy in director Crystal Moselle’s debut documentary feature.
  6. A Beautiful Planet
    Short of putting Emmanuel Lubezki through astronaut training, it’s difficult to imagine more rapturously beautiful images of the Earth from orbit than those supplied by A Beautiful Planet, the latest collaboration between Imax and NASA.
  7. Infinite Football
    [Ginghină's] endlessly evolving ideas for revolutionizing football are not a blueprint for a real-world solution at all. Instead they represent that intensely relatable and human place inside, where any of us, however small our lives and crushed our ambitions, can be limitless, unhobbled by injury, unfettered by ordinariness, unbounded by physics: infinite.
  8. Little Children
    Like "In the Bedroom," Little Children, at well over two hours, is somewhat long for an intense, intimate drama, and arguments could run many ways concerning what could be tightened or excised.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    As with "Aliens," director James Cameron has again taken a first rate science fiction film and crafted a sequel that's in some ways more impressive - expanding on the original rather than merely remaking it.
  10. Hammer
    The pileup of disasters is such that this tale might easily have been spun as some kind of grotesque comedy. But writer-director Christian Sparkes’ second feature plays it straight, narrowly evading viewer disbelief via strong principal performances and sufficiently urgent execution.
  11. 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.
  12. The Plagiarists
    Wilfully student-video amateurish in form, but impishly sophisticated in content, a gleeful cultural curiosity fairly crackles off The Plagiarists, and it is highly contagious.
  13. The State Against Mandela and the Others
    The State Against Mandela and the Others outlines a complex network of motives and tensions underpinning this single sensational trial: Nothing here is exactly revelatory to those with a working knowledge of apartheid history, but few documentaries have gathered the stakes involved in the trial quite so deftly.
  14. Another Road Home
    Fascinating.
  15. The Boxer
    Intelligently conceived and well- acted, this compact, straightforward drama about two ordinary people caught in the ongoing political crossfire packs enough punch to command audience interest, but won't light up critics or the B.O. to the extent achieved by the team's previous outings, "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father."
  16. Together
    Audiences should have fun with Together, a body-horror movie about a serious thing — love — that never takes itself too seriously.
  17. By the Grace of God
    That the film works as stirringly as it does is largely because of that brash, heart-on-sleeve engagement with its characters’ messy, unfinished feelings, not to mention Ozon’s canny knack for playing on French star personae.
  18. Rich Hill
    Everything about the three principal teens registers as deserving of “human interest” to Rich Hill’s two helmers, whose generous attitude draws us into this deeply empathetic film.
  19. Dark Days
    Intimate and engrossing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kicking and Screaming
    The director is more successful in setting an easy, low-key tone, with nicely framed shots and subtle camera movements downplaying the script's pretensions.
  21. Martin Eden
    The outcome is an unwieldy intellectual sprawl whose incontestable visual pleasures (much like Marcello’s “Lost and Beautiful”) distract from the shallow characterizations. ... The overarching impression is of a film too much in thrall to theory.
  22. 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.
  23. Late Fame
    Kent Jones is a filmmaker who’s deeply and dramatically curious, and that’s a quality he shares with the film’s screenwriter, Samy Burch, who wrote May December.
  24. The Stones and Brian Jones
    It’s clear the filmmaker has never lost that besotted hero worship. The Stones and Brian Jones digs deep into the Jones mystique, trying to make the case for him as a misunderstood “genius.”
  25. The Ister
    Tyro helmers David Barison and Daniel Ross have sunk their teeth into a heady intellectual stew, and results are invigorating thanks to the filmmakers' inspired linkage of images and ideas and commentaries from three of the world's leading philosophers.
  26. The Desert of Forbidden Art
    Absorbing documentary is a natural for artscasters.
  27. Nina Forever
    Eccentric as this premise is, the Blaines’ screenplay trails behind their confident direction in terms of ringing interesting variations on a limited, somewhat repetitious theme.
  28. The Baltimorons
    Duplass is careful to make a film where it’s up to the people involved to make Christmas a special occasion, rather than any relying on the genre’s traditional trappings. In that regard, The Baltimorons has something to celebrate.
  29. Finding Vivian Maier
    [An] initially playful, ultimately haunting documentary.
  30. Frida
    Even those already familiar with the trajectory of Kahlo’s existence may find the delivery here raw, vulnerable, and refreshing.
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