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 Jesus Rolls
    In the end, the project doesn’t really work. The Coen brothers have a touch for the absurd, and a gift for dialogue, that’s lacking here, and without those two qualities, Jesus wears out his welcome relatively early in the journey.
  2. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
    Smith has every right to be older and wiser here, and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, with its gentle anarchy and not-quite-mock nostalgia, is a time-machine sequel that passes the time amiably enough. But if Jay and Silent Bob get any older or wiser than this, they’re going to stop being who they are.
  3. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Humor turns every kill into a sick punchline, and while the writers do a fine job of making them funny, like macabre cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote can rebound from unthinkable injuries, the movie’s tone negates a fundamental respect for human life.
  4. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    If America goes to war sometime in the next year, pundits will have a field day with this movie. But barring that, it’s just another ugly, unpleasant slog through a disposable fantasy universe. The true Disney villains in this case are off screen, sabotaging the studio’s canon from within.
  5. Lucky Day
    The trouble is, apart from Glover’s unforgettably weird contribution, Lucky Day isn’t a particularly memorable offering. It’s enough to get Avary back in the game, one hopes, but considering his talent, this is hardly the film his fans have been waiting for.
  6. Jexi
    Lucas and Moore write some whiplash funny lines, and since the film is just a throwaway, you can enjoy it on a trivial synthetic revenge-of-the-nerd level.
  7. The Dead Center
    There’s a lot of excellent atmospherics here that are more unsettling than the actual violence, which in turn is all the more effective for largely being kept just off-screen.
  8. A German Youth
    Utilizing news footage, TV programs, crude activist films and the like, Périot (always his own editor) builds his arguments almost invisibly, guiding the viewer while trusting his audience to use their heads. How refreshing to have a director refuse black-and-white conclusions, knowing that formulating questions is the best way to probe the past and its ramifications.
  9. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    There’s a momentum to his story — it has a heist-movie-style checklist, carried out by a team composed of only one — that has its own satisfactions, and set-pieces with real tension, even if they lead to a less-than-novel place.
  10. The Addams Family
    The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.
  11. Sink or Swim
    The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting.
  12. The Sky Is Pink
    The emotions we witness and feel should have more force given the obviously stressful circumstances depicted. But they feel like all the edges have been sawed off to flatter both the subjects and principal actors.
  13. Mary
    Beyond de rigueur jump scares, Mary has little real atmosphere or suspense, and that is at least partly due to the fact that its supernatural force is so generically ill-defined.
  14. Roger Waters: Us + Them
    A sonically superior if sometimes draggy affair that earns its stripes by affirming the timelessness of Waters’ thematic concerns and proving that fresh material doesn’t have to be the medicine we’re forced to swallow to hear the classics.
  15. Consequences
    Ultimately, Stante’s raw energy and sure hand with actors are more encouraging than the screenplay’s lack of depth is bothersome.
  16. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    Bully. Coward. Victim. isn’t as authoritative a chronicle as “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” but in its loosely anecdotal way it may bring us a notch or two closer to who Roy Cohn was.
  17. Celebration
    Celebration doesn’t feel entirely fair, but it’s a priceless addition to our understanding of how Yves Saint Laurent — the man, the myth, la marque — operated: a flawed film whose mere existence makes it essential viewing.
  18. Jallikattu
    A fever-pitch, adrenaline-soaked vortex of social issues drama, deconstruction of the male id, and hokey, hubristic descent into hell, this crazed howl of human brutality morphing inexorably into bestial savagery deserves, and feels destined to find, a willingly cultish following on the festival circuit.
  19. Mister America
    The movie amounts to a few weak gags stretched out to feature length.
  20. Low Tide
    In addition to establishing a tangible sense of place, McMullin impresses by putting together such a strong ensemble and eliciting from them the performances he does. He’s a very visual director, jump-starting scenes with an unexpected extreme-closeup of some kind before allowing audiences to get their bearings — a strategy that subconsciously reinforces the notion that we can never get too comfortable in this otherwise familiar genre.
  21. Semper Fi
    Though professionally smooth in execution, Semper Fi has the frustrating sum impact of a movie at fundamental conflict with itself.
  22. Dilili in Paris
    In its native France, “Dilili” was released in stereoscopic 3D, which may have helped things look less wooden, but it feels as if the director stuck to a style that works well in silhouette — where characters typically appeal in profile, and bend only at elbow, knee and waist. In any case, it hurts the brain, which is clearly the opposite of what Ocelot intended.
  23. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    “Memory” captures the hypnotic layers of history and meaning that were folded into the shock value of “Alien.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    Perry Henzell emerges a director with a solid visual flair who can mix action and inchoate rage sans excess to give the film a taut pacing and use the local color and a basically predictable tale with a few new twists.
  25. The Pretenders
    While the film’s sense of experimentation carries a fair amount of intrigue, it traps its central threesome in an Easter egg-filled intellectual exercise punctuated by melodramatic strokes. It’s skillful enough to tickle the mind and the emotions but not effective enough to fully engage them.
  26. Cuck
    Cuck is powerful so long as we’re simply trapped observing Ronnie’s all-too-palpable incomprehension and childlike tantrums over his dead-end circumstances. But when those circumstances start to feel rigged, the film’s value as analysis of a hot-button social phenomenon begins to cool.
  27. Monos
    A sublimely crafted saga about child soldiers discovering their own hearts of darkness in an unnamed, untamed Latin American wilderness, Monos presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.
  28. The Day Shall Come
    The title suggests that the revolution Moses is praying for will someday arrive, but that shouldn’t be nearly as scary to Americans as the fact that his own government is trying to push people like him over the edge. That day is already here.
  29. The Irishman
    Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.
  30. Sister Aimee
    Unfortunately, the invention on display is of a helter-skelter variety, as Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann’s film so madly lurches about in search of a tone that it feels like the first draft of a gonzo faux-biopic.
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