Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. Diane
    It’s a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie, and part of what’s revelatory about it is that it’s a story of boomers who are confronting the ravages of old age (disease and death, the waning of dreams), yet they’re doing it with a stubborn echo of the hopes and desires they had when they were younger.
  2. Zoe
    Zoe, like Cole, ties itself up in a lot of high-minded hand-wringing, and the result is that the movie, though it’s not badly told, fails to grip you.
  3. United Skates
    Like such trendsetting classics as “Paris Is Burning” and “Rize,” this kaleidoscopically vibrant, essential-viewing survey plunges audiences into a dazzling underground scene, celebrating the endangered art form it finds there.
  4. Stockholm
    The opening title says “Based on an absurd but true story,” yet there’s nothing absurd about the facts. Improbable? Yes. Hapless and desperate? Most definitely. But the absurdity — the impulse to giggle — is mostly there in the eye of the writer-director, Robert Budreau, who collaborated with Hawke two years ago on the entrancing Chet Baker biopic “Born to Be Blue” but here comes off as a far less sure-handed filmmaker.
  5. State Like Sleep
    Aided by Christopher Blauvelt’s sumptuous cinematography, this consistently surprising film slinks along with melancholic dreaminess, matching the fugue state that plagues its grief-stricken protagonist.
  6. The Seagull
    In a sense, each new take on Chekhov sheds insight on the timelessness of the material, and yet, this one does more to reveal missed opportunities for the next team to explore.
  7. The Party's Just Beginning
    The movie, a wayward portrait with surrealist touches, is trying for something genuine. Yet despite some good scenes, some tart lines...and an atmosphere of saintly desperation that suggests “Trainspotting” redone as a darkened YA fable, the movie is wispy and meandering; it doesn’t gather power as it goes along.
  8. The Week Of
    While some gags are funny the first time around, practically everything in The Week Of overstays its welcome.
  9. Mapplethorpe
    To rob Mapplethorpe of his controversy is to strip the movie of its dramatic conflict. By doing so, the script (co-written with Mikko Alanne) reduces to a rather banal biopic, reenacting how a scrappy outsider achieved unconventional success.
  10. Love, Gilda
    Love, Gilda is plain but beautifully crafted. It draws you close to Radner, presenting her rise through the world of ’70s comedy as a journey of discovery.
  11. Jonathan
    Taken on its own confidently crafted terms, Jonathan is an intelligent, absorbing tale that provides an impressive showcase for “Baby Driver” star Ansel Elgort.
  12. In a Relationship
    The movie is much funnier than the vast majority of indie comedies, serving as a great audition piece for a career of sitcom directing.
  13. Here and Now
    This film barely scrapes the surface when it comes to conveying everything someone in Vivienne’s shoes might be feeling.
  14. Supercon
    The humor misfires painfully even when it just tries to be charming.
  15. Goran
    Goran may in the end be simply a clever, sick joke, but it’s one that’s very astutely played.
  16. Shock and Awe
    The shock feels less than shocking and the awe less than awesome in Rob Reiner’s righteously motivated but clunkily executed exposé of media manipulation in the run-up to the Iraq War.
  17. Beast
    Upgrading a sleeping-with-the-enemy premise familiar from countless B-thrillers with a faintly mythic aura and cool psychosexual shading, Beast also sustains a fresh, frank feminine perspective through Jessie Buckley’s remarkable lead performance.
  18. Backstabbing for Beginners
    It’s to the film’s credit that it creates a sense of high-stakes peril despite us knowing the rough outcome from the get-go, and largely without simplifying its moral dilemmas into straightforward choices between heroism and villainy.
  19. 4/20 Massacre
    Though the deaths are diverse and fairly gory (Brennan Jones designed the special makeup f/x), “4/20 Massacre” isn’t very scary. It is, however, lively and well-enough crafted, with decent performances.
  20. Journeyman
    If Considine doesn’t seem to know his characters as intimately as he did in his debut, however, he still knows acting inside out. It’s his unguarded conviction in the lead — and that of a superb Jodie Whittaker as his devoted but devastated wife — that finally lands Journeyman a victory on points, if not quite a knockout blow.
  21. Corbin Nash
    It’s a movie that’s resourcefully accomplished on comparatively slim means, and less choosy fantasy action fans will find things to enjoy in its foamy cocktail of vampires, kickboxing and neo-noir.
  22. Avengers: Infinity War
    It’s a sleekly witty action opera that’s at once overstuffed and bedazzling.
  23. The Rachel Divide
    The portrait it paints is sure to confound and infuriate in equal measure. Far from simply a snapshot of a discussion about race, Brownson’s documentary is a riveting account of self-sabotage, misplaced priorities, and obstinacy run amok.
  24. Woman Walks Ahead
    Woman Walks Ahead offers dimension to its leading lady, but holds its Native characters to the same old surface stereotypes. Such a movie is a step in the right direction, but farther behind than it seems to realize.
  25. Vampire Clay
    Nothing this absurd should be this boring.
  26. Adventures in Public School
    More antic and likable than it is laugh-out-loud funny, Adventures in Public School is handled with skill on modest means.
  27. In the Last Days of the City
    The real achievement is how the film captures and holds a mood that develops and expands, with a yearning for what was and what might have been.
  28. Traffik
    Noble intentions are derailed by deeply confused execution in writer-director Deon Taylor’s Traffik, which attempts to marry cheap genre thrills with an unflinching depiction of the horrors of international sex trafficking, only to cheapen the latter and cast a grimy pall over the former.
  29. Wanderland
    Real, inspired strangeness — not to mention laughs, and an actual point — prove elusive here, while the musical elements feel so inessential they might be excised entirely without notable loss. Wanderland deserves credit for trying something different. But such an effort shouldn’t end up so innocuous and inconsequential.
  30. Little Pink House
    If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.
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