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. Our Friend
    So much of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the picture, until what remains is precisely the kind of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death that inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place.
  2. Military Wives
    If you’ve seen even one based-on-a-true-story British misfit hobbyists movie, you already know the tune.
  3. Ordinary Love
    David Holmes and Brian Irvine’s score is melodic and insistent, and it knows when to fall away into silence to let the audience appreciate Neeson and Manville’s superb chemistry.
  4. 3 Days with Dad
    Ultimately, however, this tonally untidy yet incrementally affecting dramedy scores a cumulative impact by credibly and astutely depicting eruptions, disruptions and reconciliations during the long goodbye to a dying paterfamilias.
  5. Can You Keep a Secret?
    Its candy-floss-lite sentiments and strong lead performances carry the picture beyond the genre’s limitations. That said, it lacks a sense of uniqueness to set it apart from other female-centric book-to-screen adaptations.
  6. The Weekend
    Notwithstanding any comparisons, there’s more assured personality here than there was in her last feature, the bright, proficient but somewhat synthetic big-studio teen romance “Everything, Everything.” Much of that film took place, by narrative necessity, in hermetically sealed rooms; here, the fresh autumn air agrees with everyone involved.
  7. Waiting for the Barbarians
    Coetzee’s novel, with its measured, interiorized voice and sparse, incrementally devastating narrative, was never an obvious fit for film treatment. After a stiffly mannered, overwritten first act, however, Waiting for the Barbarians gradually gains in poetry and power, while Mark Rylance’s lead performance, as a liberal-minded colonial official undermined and overwhelmed by his tyrannical superiors, gives proceedings a quiet but firm moral core.
  8. Saturday Fiction
    [A] grandiloquently incoherent misfire
  9. Lucy in the Sky
    Distractingly over-directed ... [Hawley] triple-knots his own shoelaces here, stumbling over cumbersome metaphors (butterflies, floating) and high-concept solutions to straightforward dramatic problems when he should have just entrusted his leading lady to carry the narrative.
  10. Synchronic
    Making underwhelming use of its not-bad ... conceit, Benson’s sci-fi-tinged script is not at all ingeniously plotted, insists we care about tritely sketched characters, and is never credible enough to transcend an air of escalating silliness.
  11. Haunt
    It offers nothing particularly new, yet it fulfills the only requirement that really matters for this kind of movie — it’s scary.
  12. How to Build a Girl
    The final product feels like if the greatest musician in the world tried to write a classic in 15 minutes. Yet, “How to a Build a Girl” dares to argue that reinventing yourself doesn’t make you a poseur ... It’s a young person’s jam that will hit the right teen like a thunderbolt.
  13. Harriet
    Harriet is a conscientiously uplifting, devoted, rock-solid version of her story. Yet when it comes to putting the audience in touch with what’s extraordinary about Harriet Tubman — not just illustrating what she did but letting us connect with that quest, and with her, on a moment-to-moment level — Harriet is a conventional and rather prosaic piece of filmmaking.
  14. Color Out of Space
    Entertaining but uneven, the result is a deliberately over-the-top sci-fi horror exercise that loses some focus as the action grows more psychedelically unhinged — its oscillating tone not necessarily helped by Nicolas Cage growing likewise, in one of his less inspired gonzo-style performances.
  15. Disappearance at Clifton Hill
    Shin’s film gets tangled up in its own web. ... His film leaves a vivid impression without quite leaving a mark.
  16. True History of the Kelly Gang
    Lithe and volatile and recklessly stylized to the hilt, True History of the Kelly Gang has moves like Jagger, but a head still teeming with language and history.
  17. The Elephant Queen
    There’s no denying the emotional pull of Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble’s storytelling or the vivid rapture of the images, but “The Elephant Queen” adheres too closely to the parameters of family-friendly nature docs, and the formula doesn’t always serve it well.
  18. The Cave
    This is both an immensely humanist film, and a tough, heartbreaking watch.
  19. Radioactive
    As startling as it is to see the beloved scientist hated in her time, that we’re able to see this headstrong legend as a sexual being at all is a credit to how much Pike gradually humanizes her as a woman, while never pleading for our pity.
  20. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield comes across as a bright and jaunty corrective to the dour and stuffy Dickens adaptations that have come before.
  21. Motherless Brooklyn
    Lionel’s mannerisms could have gotten obnoxious in a hurry, but Norton calibrates the performance so that the character remains unpredictable without becoming unbearable.
  22. Guest of Honour
    At once overplotted and under-reasoned, hysterical and stiffly earnest, Guest of Honour is finally one of those strenuously diagrammatic mysteries in which everything notionally connects, which isn’t quite the same as everything making even marginal emotional sense.
  23. Endings, Beginnings
    The movie may be a self-help exercise of sorts — for those who seldom recognize themselves on screen, and who don’t measure up to the expectations set by rom-coms and princess movies — but it’s disguised as a shaggy character study.
  24. The Burnt Orange Heresy
    Watching The Burnt Orange Heresy, you may find yourself wishing one of two things: that Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki had been around to make elegant little mystery capers with Alfred Hitchcock in his prime, or that Hitch were around today to direct this one, a marble-cool art-fraud thriller that begins lithely and sexily before, somewhat mystifyingly, it takes a terminal turn for the dour.
  25. Babyteeth
    Babyteeth works best as an abrasive four-hander, though Murphy’s limber, sensually electric direction leaves the film with little clear evidence of its theatrical origins.
  26. Downton Abbey
    As a series, Downton Abbey sprawled, giving viewers the drama and chaos they wanted before a season-ending resolution of conflicts. Here, there’s only time for the resolutions, even before the drama happens.
  27. Bad Education
    Bad Education doesn’t shy away from the humor of the situation, but it doesn’t go for the cheap laughs either.
  28. About Endlessness
    If we’ve been here before, the immaculate, somehow tender-hearted execution of About Endlessness ensures this is not a complaint.
  29. Abominable
    The journey is wondrous for the characters, less compelling for the audience.
  30. Ema
    What’s novel about Ema is that Pablo Larraín has made a movie that, in its form, is every bit as warped and jagged and jarring and difficult to cuddle up to as its heroine.
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