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. Girls Trip
    The movie’s equal-opportunity irreverence makes for a welcome addition to the bachelor-party genre, so often aimed at the frat-boy crowds.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ed Wood
    Always engaging to watch and often dazzling in its imagination and technique, picture is also a bit distended, and lacking in weight at its center.
  3. Next Goal Wins
    No sports film is short on pep talks, bonding sessions and heartfelt analogies to family kinship, but the teammates’ easy acceptance of Saelua — and her robust performance on the pitch — give the proceedings an extra kick.
  4. The Way He Looks
    The pic has genuine appeal, though in truth the script and direction are little more than average.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Walk on the Moon
    Despite strategic references to Joan Baez and pot, pic's sense of time and place feels synthetic.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Man Tate
    Filled with small, telling moments rather than big events, film never really gets inside Fred’s head, but it neatly sketches the external aspects of his predicament.
  7. What Happened Was...
    Off-Broadway actor Tom Noonan, best known for his offbeat, crazy and villainous roles on stage and screen, emerges as a talented writer and director in What Happened Was, an intriguing, often mysterious drama about a date between two lonely misfits.
  8. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Florence Foster Jenkins is an audience picture first and foremost: one wholly sympathetic to its eponymous subject’s delusional drive to delight crowds with or without the requisite artistry.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Splash
    Screenplay is marred by some glaring loopholes in its inner structure but story is a sweet takeoff on the innocence, mythology and sensuality associated with mermaids.
    • Variety
  10. Dragonslayer
    The film observes a guy verging on poverty or riches with a bounty of beautiful imagery and fresh angles on skateboarding culture.
  11. Francofonia
    Does it all come together? Well, yes, if viewers think of the film as a freewheeling poetic essay, highly personal yet captivating.
  12. Mavis!
    A spirited and captivating bio-doc that richly deserves the exclamation point in its title.
  13. The Space Race
    In telling the specific moving stories of a few men, The Space Race manages to provide such a rich perspective into their experience that it transcends its goals of shining a light on worthy lives and untold history, to entertain and educate.
  14. Drinking Buddies
    Relative to the major brands, the intimate, handcrafted approach should yield more flavor. Instead, Drinking Buddies offers mostly froth.
  15. The Theory of Everything
    What’s onscreen is less a cerebral experience than a stirring and bittersweet love story, inflected with tasteful good humor, that can’t help but recall earlier disability dramas like “My Left Foot” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
  16. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    Intellectually demanding and non-commercial film should be embraced in the festival and arthouse circuits by film students and viewers interested in postmodern, deconstructionist cinema.
  17. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    Crammed into a lively 85-minute package delivered with loads of dark humor and cinematic flair, this is a worthy winner of Sundance's Grand Jury prize for documentary.
  18. The Descent
    The chills and spills keep comin' to agreeable effect in Brit-made scarefest The Descent.
  19. Rana's Wedding
    Though shot from the Palestinian P.O.V., the Dutch/Palestinian Film Foundation co-production is remarkably balanced, offering a convinced message of hope for the future.
  20. REC
    Lazily scripted, without even a pretense of character development or psychological depth, it offers nothing new for genre fans and no reason for mainstream auds to bite.
  21. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Finds its titular merry pranksters up to yet more capitalist-critiquing chicanery and fat-cat-fooling fun.
  22. Sleeping Giant
    Cividino depicts the tricky male power games between the boys with tact and compassionate impartiality.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Perfect World
    Star Kevin Costner and director Clint Eastwood deliver lean, finely chiseled work in A Perfect World, a somber, subtly nuanced study of an escaped con’s complex relationship with an abducted boy that carries a bit too much narrative flab for its own good.
  24. Dogman
    Fonte, it must be said, gives an expert performance as a saintly scamp who “blooms” into a butterfly of vengeance. I might have bought what he’s doing in a different film, but the one that Garrone has made strains too hard to have it both ways.
  25. The Road
    This low-budget shocker eventually pays off, displaying just enough narrative ingenuity to compensate for a cinematically crude and logistically sketchy deployment of the requisite blood-and-guts mayhem.
  26. Unicorns
    The movie doesn’t deal in labels — it’s not important to the filmmakers whether Luke identifies as gay, straight or bisexual — but instead presents this relationship as one that expands the provincial notion of romance someone like Luke might have had.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dawn of the Dead
    Dawn pummels the viewer with a series of ever-more-grisly events - decapitations, shootings, knifings, flesh tearings - that make Romero's special effects man, Tom Savini, the real 'star' of the film - the actors are as woodenly uninteresting as the characters they play. Romero's script is banal when not incoherent - those who haven't seen Night of the Living Dead may have some difficulty deciphering exactly what's going on at the outset of Dawn.
  28. Cam
    Reflective of its subject, the movie is content to exist on the stimulating surface, teasing us with the promise of something deeper while skirting around its delivery.
  29. Sunshine
    Well-intentioned but never entirely engaging chronicle.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Piranha
    This is one film where the fish win.
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