Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Chaplin
    Telling the entire story of Chaplin's 88 years was probably a hopeless goal, but the biopic does offer the saving grace of a truly remarkable central performance by Robert Downey Jr. and some lovely moments along the way.
  2. Kuso
    The referentiality of “Kuso,” its general snark, and even its defensive self-criticism (characters state “I hate this movie!” more than once) fail to make it any more funny or inspired, let alone any less of a shapeless chore to sit through.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriot Games
    Tom Clancy was right the first time. Paramount's Patriot Games is an expensive stiff. Mindless, morally repugnant and ineptly directed to boot, it's a shoddy followup to Par's 1990 hit "The Hunt for Red October."
  4. The House
    The House, like too many Hollywood comedies of outrage, turns the extreme into the innocuous.
  5. Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
    The documentary is too tepid to generate anything like excitement or outrage, and elicits admiration more for its intentions than for its execution.
  6. The Skyjacker's Tale
    A Skyjacker’s Tale is all in the telling, and Jamie Kastner’s haphazard documentary misses the opportunity to get it right, despite having access to Ali and an impressive assembly of major players from his past.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hot Shots!
    Jim Abrahams tries to tap the zany Airplane! vein with this Top Gun spoof but bats far too low a percentage with the usual rapid-fire assault of numbingly stupid gags.
  8. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
    Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is an outstanding Stanley Kramer production, superior in almost every imaginable way, which examines its subject matter with perception, depth, insight, humor and feeling.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The 'Burbs
    Director Joe Dante funnels his decidedly cracked view of suburban life through dark humour in The ‘Burbs. Hanks does a fine impersonation of a regular guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Dern adds another memorable psychotic to his resume.
  10. Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge
    Marie Noelle’s evidently impassioned portrait of the trailblazing Polish-French physicist and chemist emerges as an odd blend of, well, formulae, following a starchy biopic pattern one minute and giving in to impressionistic abstraction the next.
  11. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    It’s fine — and true enough to Marvel — to make a “Spider-Man” movie about a young adult, but Spider-Man: Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavor.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blame It on Rio
    Central premise of a secret romance between Michael Caine and the love-smitten daughter of his best friend (Joe Bologna) while the trio vacations together in torrid Rio may be adventurous comedy. Zany comedic conflict, however, is offputting, even at times nasty, in this essentially dead-ahead comedy that sacrifices charm and a light touch for too much realism.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jumpin' Jack Flash
    Jumpin' Jack Flash is not a gas, it's a bore. A weak idea and muddled plot poorly executed not surprisingly results in a tedious film with only a few brief comic interludes from Whoopi Goldberg to redeem it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai plays more like an experimental film than a Hollywood production aimed at a mass audience. It violates every rule of storytelling and narrative structure in creating a self-contained world of its own.
  15. A Beginner's Guide to Snuff
    The problem is that this watchable indie isn’t all that funny, clever or surprising despite its outré premise.
  16. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    What the film offers is evidence of a pattern, the shadows of a disturbing trend that add up to a warning: If we, as a society, don’t push back against the chipping away of the freedom of information, it’s only going to get worse, until it eats us alive.
  17. Person to Person
    Mildly amusing, a tad amateurish in some aspects, this little ensemble piece about funny little people is ultimately just too damn little.
  18. War for the Planet of the Apes
    It’s fitting that the visual effects have advanced so dramatically since 2011, as it allows the series to suggest that its ape protagonists have evolved to an equivalent degree, and yet, “War’s” story is beneath their intelligence.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story
    “Can’t Stop” is essentially a post-reality-TV documentary: It’s got quick-cut pacing, dozens of talking heads, flashbacks in the form of vintage footage and visits to old neighborhoods, and most of all, the snowballing drama inherent in working toward a looming, difficult goal.
  20. In Transit
    Sampling snippets and snatches of lives and conversations, Maysles and his fellow filmmakers undertake a folk odyssey through northern landscapes that proves a fitting farewell to an American ethnographer.
  21. Some Freaks
    All the performances are very nicely turned in a movie that deliberately excludes any significant adult presence in order to immerse us fully in an adolescent world.
  22. Bill Nye: Science Guy
    Bill Nye: Science Guy is an efficiently thought-provoking study of what it means to be a rational and analytical advocate for science in an age when deniers of evolution and climate-change often seem to have higher profiles, deeper pockets and louder voices. But it’s even more interesting as the story of a beloved celebrity who wants to reinvent himself, to be taken more seriously.
  23. Transformers: The Last Knight
    For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.
  24. Annabelle: Creation
    Here, Sandberg once again plays with both lighting, composition and suspense, framing shots in such a way that we’re constantly searching the shadows for hints of movement, while drawing out scenes for maximum tension.
  25. Moka
    Watching these two fine actresses circle each other in a kind of watchful alligator’s tango, each waiting for the other to blink first, is the chief pleasure on offer in Moka.
  26. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    What scant charms this direct-to-video-style Nineties throwback has belong mostly to Willis.
  27. 47 Meters Down
    Director Johannes Roberts’ mostly underwater thriller is a compact and sturdily crafted B-movie that generates enough scares and suspense to qualify as — well, maybe not a pleasant surprise, but a reasonably entertaining one.
  28. All Eyez on Me
    Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.
  29. Kill Switch
    Had Smit developed his themes as scrupulously as his visual effects, Kill Switch might have been the next “Primer” or “District 9,” but instead it feels like a demo reel for a game that nobody can play.
  30. Despicable Me 3
    Yes, Despicable Me 3 is unwieldy, but it mostly works, as co-directors Pierre Coffin (who also voices the Minions) and Kyle Balda never lose sight of the film’s emotional center, packing the rest with as much humor as they can manage.
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