Variety's Scores

For 17,777 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:
17777 movie reviews
  1. This directing debut by helmer-scribe Shim Sung-bo echoes Bong’s trademark cynical vision of human nature, but the characters lack dimensionality and psychological depth.
  2. "Hillary’s America” is a slow-motion seizure of ideological rancor, served up in the filmmaker’s trademark style of wide-eyed schoolbook infamy. The only novelty here is that there’s been a subtle shift of emphasis in the D’Souza vision. It’s now really all about him.
  3. It’s a sturdily built movie that gets the job done, and it’s got a likable retro vibe.
  4. Those expecting insight into Robbins’ life or career, let alone the overall self-help industry, will be disappointed by this atypically non-investigative Joe Berlinger documentary.
  5. It’s a unique, associative blend of sounds and images that aims to convey details as well as underlying truths about Frank’s life. Unfortunately, it also often leaves one feeling aesthetically pummeled to the point of exhaustion.
  6. Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.
  7. The pitfall of a tantalizing set-up is that it requires a sterling payoff to match — a recipe for disappointment born out by Rebirth, whose premise-establishing early passages lead only to underwhelming revelations.
  8. Mature and moving in its navigation of convoluted, conflicting desires, it’s an indie as assured in its silences as it is in its speeches.
  9. While both funnier and scarier than Ivan Reitman’s 1984 original, this otherwise over-familiar remake from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig doesn’t do nearly enough to innovate on what has come before.
  10. Attempting to naturalistically capture the hugely internal process of mourning, but rarely managing to offer much of an opening into that process, Curran’s tasteful, challenging yet ultimately inscrutable debut feature never quite lives up to the caliber of her fine cast.
  11. Striking in its evocation of a demanding time and place, this intimate drama about individual and national transformation heralds the arrival of an arresting new filmmaking voice.
  12. It’s a prosaic piece of muckraking, shot in a functional flat visual style, but it grazes a nerve.
  13. Sometimes bloody good fun is enough. It’s as good a reason as any for making this sunny, silly rallying cry for irresponsibility, and a better one still for watching it.
  14. Schemes like this have a way of spiraling out of the characters’ control, but Moland and Aakeson maintain a firm grasp on the pacing, progressively building both carnage and suspense as the situation escalates toward a Mexican standoff of which even Sam Peckinpah would be proud.
  15. While at about the two-thirds mark, Under the Sun begins to seem a bit attenuated, its obvious (if only implied) points already made, the ending is a stunner.
  16. Bryan Cranston gives the most authentic and lived-in performance as an agent pretending to be a criminal that I have ever seen.
  17. What’s funny and winning about Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is that it’s a comedy of equal-opportunity raunch, where everyone in sight is right at home inside the animal house.
  18. You’d think the concept would now be wearing thin, but Election Year, which feels like the final chapter in a trilogy...is the best “Purge” film yet. The action is excitingly sustained in a way that it wasn’t in the previous two, and the political dimension, while crude as hell, exerts a brute-force entertainment value.
  19. As a brand, Burroughs’ hero has always been schlocky, and no amount of psychological depth or physical perfection can render him otherwise if the filmmakers can’t swing a convincing interaction between Tarzan and his animal allies. That dynamic — along with his full-throated yodel — has always been Tarzan’s trademark, but in this relatively lifeless incarnation, it simply doesn’t register.
  20. It reveals Robert Cenedella to be an artist far too infused with life to ever let a movie like this one live up to its title.
  21. It’s not necessary, of course, for The Phenom to be an all-out sports drama, but writer-director Noah Buschel sets up the rare opportunity to explore what makes a jock tick, then doesn’t follow through.
  22. Bidegain, who for years has served as the muscle behind Jacques Audiard’s scripts, advances his ongoing deconstruction of genre-movie masculinity in his uncompromising, anti-romantic directorial debut.
  23. A gripping psychological drama set in the seediest quarters of Mumbai, the pic cleverly weaves fantasy and reality so that neither can be taken at face value. The result is an intense, very well-performed tale.
  24. It’s less than the sum of its attractive parts, with scant overall insight or weight. Like an old handmade sweater, this is a movie that might unravel too easily if you gave any single element a hard tug.
  25. The Duel promises a battle of wits and wills, then turns into a violent grab-bag. But it does make you want to see Woody Harrelson get another movie worthy of his leering bald Nietzschean bravura.
  26. At times, it’s hard to tell whether The Shallows is trying to sell a tropical vacation, that Sony Xperia phone or a fantasy date with Lively herself, but in any case, the film looks virtually indistinguishable from a slick, high-end commercial.
  27. With a scuzzy style to match its sleazeball vision of spotlight desperation and depravity, this Tinseltown satire — led by voice work from Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt — revels in the foulness of 21st-century pop culture, albeit to a degree that’s ultimately both exhausting and redundant.
  28. It may be a slight entertainment in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been made with a busy, nattering joy that is positively infectious
  29. This cinematic Big Mac entertains abundantly on its own second-hand merits.
  30. For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.

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