Variety's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. Outlaws and Angels
    Outlaws & Angels trades in the lurid character psychology and crude ironies of the spaghetti Western — an idiom whose cynical worst-case-scenario view of humanity seems more acceptable to modern audiences than the good-shall-triumph faith of the traditional Hollywood western.
  2. Microbe and Gasoline
    With Microbe and Gasoline, the French writer-director has wisely restrained his usual flourishes, allowing the two teenage leads in his relatively calm summer-vacation coming-of-age comedy to assume centerstage, imbuing them with creative agency rather than forcing them to compete with the film’s own style.
  3. Cold War 2
    Slow to heat up yet quick to burn out, police procedural-thriller Cold War 2 dramatizes internal strife and conspiracy among Hong Kong’s police force and ruling elite, adding some new twists in a narrative framework that ultimately can’t support the film.
  4. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    Thorsten Schutte’s entirely archival assemblage is most likely to be appreciated by the previously converted, as its stimulating if somewhat patchy overview of a multi-various career skims over or omits too many aspects to comprise a definitive introduction.
  5. Raman Raghav 2.0
    Psycho Raman often entertains most with its most lurid formal, musical and narrative gambits.
  6. Life, Animated
    This latest film from Roger Ross Williams (“God Loves Uganda”) teems with insights into how children’s fantasy can and can’t bridge a developmental gap, but works on an even more basic, emotional level as a warm testament to a family’s love and resilience.
  7. 31
    Rob Zombie truly loves horror movies. But he still hasn’t made a good one, and “31” is a perfect encapsulation of the reasons why: It’s a fanboy’s highlight reel of homages, without any of the credibility or context that made most of the films he’s inspired by so fine.
  8. Cosmos
    Zulawski maintains such expert control of the film’s look and tone that there can be no question that each choice has been deliberate, whatever the significance.
  9. The Secret Life of Pets
    The formula may be familiar, but the personalities are completely fresh, yielding a menagerie of loveable — if downright ugly — cartoon critters banding together to help these two incompatible roommates from ending up on the streets.
  10. Parched
    Yadav pinpoints the various ways in which institutional and personal prejudices keep people enslaved, crafting a sharp portrait of gender inequality.
  11. The Lovers and the Despot
    While a more thorough archival survey of Choi and Shin’s work together (pre- and post-abduction) would have allowed for a deeper perspective, this real-life romantic thriller/escape saga still boasts enough fascinating details and angles to qualify as essential stranger-than-fiction viewing.
  12. Central Intelligence
    It delivers — on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. It’s an action-comedy utensil, like “Rush Hour” crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
  13. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    It’s not that “My Love” feels inherently dubious; it’s that its execution is just a little too smiling-through-tears slick to be swallowed whole.
  14. The Final Master
    It’s a passionate comic book in which the combat has meaning.
  15. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    In addition to everything else he does right in February, Perkins plays fair: When you replay the movie in your mind after the final fadeout, you realize that every twist was dutifully presaged, and the final reveal was hidden in plain sight all along.
  16. In a Valley of Violence
    We never get more than a glimmer of personality within these well-worn character types, and West never digs beneath them to offer any sort of commentary or criticism.
  17. Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes
    Norgaard wants to keep viewers guessing the whys and wherefores, but putting two and two together is so easy here that only the narratively challenged will be surprised by the culprit’s motivations.
  18. Mr. Six
    Scored to a beautiful, introspection-oriented saxophone score, Mr. Six surprises by attempting to delve behind Feng’s sometime-inscrutable facade, rather than pushing its leading man toward action.
  19. Tracktown
    What the film lacks in originality, it makes up for via its star’s naturally glamor-resistant sensibility, giving us an unpolished glimpse into the personal life of a professional runner.
  20. Therapy for a Vampire
    If a diagram were the same thing as a script, then Therapy for a Vampire might be a smashingly silly lark. But as written and directed by Daniel Ruehl, the film is a blueprint of mild anemic kitsch.
  21. Traded
    Mostly due to the limp direction by Timothy Woodward Jr., Traded never really offers much in the way of suspense or excitement. But the sporadic outbursts of bloody violence are efficiently rendered.
  22. Lights Out
    Very obviously a first feature, Lights Out is full of camp (most of it clearly intentional, some perhaps not), and its underlying mythology is confused and often ridiculous. But there’s an invigorating leanness — and a giddy, almost innocent energy — to the filmmaking.
  23. Kicks
    An arresting visual experience, Kicks has style to spare, and in fact it probably should have spared a little, as this first-time director sometimes crowds his film with more auteurial flourishes than his rather simple story can support. Nonetheless, this is a debut of undeniable promise, both for its director and its largely unknown cast.
  24. Finding Dory
    It’s a film that spills over with laughs (most of them good, a few of them shticky) and tears (all of them earned), supporting characters who are meant to slay us (and mostly do) with their irascible sharp tongues, and dizzyingly extended flights of physical comedy.
  25. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    Luis Guzmán and Edgar Garcia give the project much more than it ever gives them, sustaining audience interest and generating mild amusement more or less through sheer force of will as they amble through a threadbare plot.
  26. Tikkun
    Austere but fascinating.
  27. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.
  28. Len and Company
    Amid the film’s narrative lulls and lapses, it’s the actors who hold our attention.
  29. Phantom Boy
    Though Felicioli and Gagnol’s visuals suggest colorful kidlit illustrations come to life, their labor-intensive style isn’t for everyone.
  30. Brahman Naman
    Overall, the mix of medium-grade raunchy humor and middleweight drama works fairly well, albeit with few real highlights.
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