Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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 2.3 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. And Breathe Normally
    What might, in other hands, be melodramatic or emotionally manipulative remains resolutely unsentimental here.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cooley High
    Cooley High is pitched as a black American Graffiti, and the description is apt. Furthermore, you don't have to be black to enjoy it immensely. The Steve Krantz production is a heartening comedy-drama about urban Chicago high school youths, written by Eric Monte.
  3. Little Woods
    There’s at least one more key aspect of Little Woods that sets it apart: Whereas DaCosta’s dialogue strains to find poetry amid such scrappy conditions, she intuitively reveals a deeper dimension to both of her heroines by taking an extra beat at the beginning or end of scenes to observe their faces when no one else is watching.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Enemy Mine
    It may be a long way to go to a distant sun system to get to a familiar place, but the $33 million project is largely successful in establishing a satisfying bond.
  5. Funan
    The last half hour of Funan is so heavy that the film effectively plays more as tragedy than as triumph, all the more impactful for being true.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Near Dark
    Main point of interest will be the work of Bigelow, who has undoubtedly created the most hard-edged, violent actioner ever directed by an American woman.
  7. Slut in a Good Way
    I don’t want to oversell Slut in a Good Way here. It’s a tiny movie, and the bleary black-and-white cinematography looks only a notch better than “Clerks,” and yet, like Antoine Desrosières’ “Sextape” (easily the funniest film I’ve ever seen in Cannes, but still without U.S. distribution), Lorain’s film challenges traditional gender roles in such a way that’s surface-level entertaining but also deep enough to inspire a college term paper or two.
  8. The Breaker Upperers
    It’s a terrific showcase for the duo and their entire cast, which, besides a pop-up bit from Clement, is curated from a local talent pool that Hollywood has yet to spelunk. After this, it should.
  9. Maiden
    Shattering a glass ceiling has rarely been more engrossing — or grueling — than it is in Maiden.
  10. The White Crow
    Lovely, elegant, and curiously opaque ... The film’s many ballet scenes are stunning, to say the least.
  11. Soni
    With an intelligent, subtle script and camerawork so organically natural one doesn’t immediately realize that each scene is shot in one take, the film draws on a subject much in the news and spins it into a multilayered yet low-key study without preaching or sensationalizing.
  12. Knives Out
    Knives Out recalls a time when audiences could still be surprised by such mysteries, before the genre devolved into a corny parody of itself. Johnson keeps us guessing, which is good, but the thing that makes this a better mousetrap than most isn’t the complexity, but the fact he’s managed to rig it without the usual cheese.
  13. Apollo 11
    Apollo 11 is a cool, meticulous, at times enthralling documentary that captures the Apollo 11 flight in its entirety through raw footage drawn from the NASA vaults.
  14. Adam
    Though too insider-hip (and sometimes sexually graphic) a movie for more conservative viewers, this ingratiating and nuanced tale has plenty to offer those accepting of but not particularly knowledgeable about trans culture.
  15. After the Wedding
    Granted, Freundlich has the benefit of Bier’s screenplay contributions to guide him, but in his particular execution, the story feels grounded for a very different strategy from Bier’s: Rather than going out of his way to include recognizable human moments, he strips away anything excessive, allowing subtext to surface in the quiet spaces between dialogue.
  16. The Suicide Squad
    The Suicide Squad is cunningly scuzzy, disreputable fun.
  17. A Vigilante
    As an actress, Olivia Wilde has been something of a shape-shifter, but in this movie she seems to be burning through all her previous roles to find something essential. She grabs hold of the spectacle of agonized female anger, and does it with a grace and power that easily matches that of Frances McDormand in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
  18. The Farewell
    What makes The Farewell so effective is that in delving into such a specific case, the film invites audiences to reflect on the passing of relatives close to them.
  19. Light From Light
    Neither thriller nor sentimental whimsy, Paul Harrill’s second feature (following 2014’s equally low-key “Something, Anything”) is a quietly matter-of-fact drama that utilizes a “haunting” story hook for non-religious yet affirming ends.
  20. 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.
  21. Them That Follow
    In the last act, Poulton and Savage’s long fuse explodes, and they get to prove they’ve made a hell of a picture.
  22. David Crosby: Remember My Name
    In David Crosby: Remember My Name, Crosby is more than just a rock ‘n’ roll survivor nursing a lifetime of second thoughts. He’s a romantic witness to a time that was genuinely about following the road of excess to the palace of wisdom.
  23. American Factory
    American Factory is anything but a dry documentary, and will likely be a prime contender in awards season.
  24. One Child Nation
    Simultaneously intimate and far-reaching, the film does far more than scratch the surface, forcing audiences to confront a policy that, amid concerns over population growth in other corners of the globe, begs to be better understood before another country seeks to repeat it.
  25. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    In The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Fine
    So Fine is quite all right. Andrew Bergman, screenwriter on Blazing Saddles and The In-Laws, has come up with a somewhat less zany concoction this time but makes an impressively sharp directorial debut highlighted by some good bedroom farce.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heart Like a Wheel
    Heart Like A Wheel is a surprisingly fine biopic of Shirley Muldowney, the first professional female race car driver. What could have been a routine good ol' gal success story has been heightened into an emotionally involving, superbly made drama.
  28. Holiday
    It’s a cool, hard trip, icy in the fullest glare of the afternoon sun, in which even the pallid, expensively tacky interior of the villa — hats off to production designer Josephine Farsø — invites tension and judgment.
  29. 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.
  30. Fourteen
    A wise, graceful but viciously felt study of middle-school best friends whose bond becomes a burden the further they recede into adulthood, it resorts neither to buddy-movie cliché nor melodramatic angst in portraying the ways we outgrow our friends, and they us.
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