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. Brahman Naman
    Overall, the mix of medium-grade raunchy humor and middleweight drama works fairly well, albeit with few real highlights.
  2. Fire at Sea
    Rosi has long been drawn to quiet lives, but has never been quite so successful in conveying the soulful qualities he sees in them to his audience — until now, using the oblique approach of Lampedusa’s residents to spotlight this growing international crisis, while using his young protagonist’s obliviousness to reflect and indict our own.
  3. Breaking a Monster
    What makes Luke Meyer’s documentary interesting isn’t so much the music or even the incipient stardom, but rather the push-pull between high-stakes biz pressure and subjects who — being 13 years old or so — hardly have the attention spans for the drudgery and minutiae a “career” requires.
  4. Honeyglue
    Throughout, Bird’s visuals are consistently flat, and his habit of cinematographically spinning around his characters (at a dinner table, on a dance floor, in a field) is dizzying in an unpleasant, nausea-inducing way — thus creating a fitting marriage of form and content.
  5. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    As the hours roll slowly past, it’s hard not to feel that this epic achievement in monotonous misery might have retained its impact at a fraction of the length, and that even our grimmest truth-tellers might well find themselves capable of saying more with less.
  6. Lowriders
    Much like classic car customization, effective cinematic storytelling is often all about the detailing, and Ricardo de Montreuil’s Lowriders, which sets a tale of inter-generational rivalry and artistic awakening amidst East LA’s Latino car culture, has style and local color to spare.
  7. Time to Choose
    Time to Choose may come off, at moments, like the “Koyaanisqatsi” of environmental devastation, but it is also a dreadfully beautiful achievement. It shows us what the building blocks of climate change look like.
  8. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    Generally laudatory in its approach to its irresistible human subject — if Lear’s signature white hat remains immovably on his head, the film’s stays very much in hand — this appreciation is nonetheless most fascinating in a brief stretch where the political correctness of Lear’s work is called into question by black performers.
  9. T-Rex
    Though T-Rex leaves some questions unaddressed, and ends with little resolution to protag’s various challenges, it’s compelling throughout.
  10. The President
    An allegorical lesson about dictatorships and the cycle of violence they breed, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The President unfortunately offers a simplified and simplistic reduction, akin to an ancient morality tale without the ancients’ brevity – rather than sophistication cloaked in innocence, the pic feels like didacticism submerged in naivete.
  11. The Conjuring 2
    Wan has a gift that most slam-bang horror directors today do not: a sense of the audience — of their rhythm and pulse, of how to manipulate a moment so that he’s practically controlling your breathing.
  12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    Visual spectacle still takes precedence over coherent plotting, and the human characters retain all the gravitas of generic placeholders who accidentally made it into the shooting script.
  13. Holy Hell
    Like watching a takedown of Hitler by a disillusioned Leni Reifenstahl, what emerges is one of the decade’s strangest and most unsettling documentaries, especially given its as-yet-unwritten ending.
  14. Now You See Me 2
    Now You See Me 2 is more like a giddy piece of cheese from the ’80s, a chance to spend two more hours with characters we like, doing variations on the things that made us like them in the first place. The revisit, in this case, is well-earned.
  15. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    It longs to be a close-to-the-bone lampoon in the scathing spirit of Christopher Guest, and it has a few amusing moments, but it’s really a predigested one-joke comedy. It’s less an honest satire than an overscaled satirical package.
  16. Gleason
    Tweel masterfully assembles roughly four years of footage, much of it shot by Gleason himself, and the result is painfully raw at times but undeniably rewarding.
  17. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    An intelligent, restrained but warmly intimate cinematic conversation with the Sixth Generation Chinese trailblazer.
  18. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    The docu’s hyperactive editing and visuals eventually grow a tad monotonous, undercutting some of this life story’s poignancy.
  19. To Life
    Given the complexity of everything the characters went through, it’s a shame to witness their lives reduced to a sequence of TV-movie moments.
  20. Seoul Searching
    Lee’s movie at once examines and embodies the complicated riddle of cultural identity: Beneath its boozy antics and largely predictable narrative developments, it offers warmly perceptive insights into how difficult it can be for so many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants to define themselves.
  21. Buddymoon
    This is the kind of buddy comedy where you have to take a giant leap of faith just to believe these two characters would ever be friends.
  22. Princess
    Princess plays out an unsettling scenario of underage sexuality in enigmatic, almost dreamlike terms.
  23. Unlocking the Cage
    Wise is plenty eloquent on the complex legal issue, but remains vague about how the status he seeks will practically impact animals (could animal weddings be far behind?) or why he’s the “person” best qualified to represent them in court.
  24. The Wailing
    On the one hand, the film is a gripping whodunnit, exemplified by a scene of classic Hitchcockian suspense, when Jong-gu makes a frightening discovery while snooping around the Japanese man. At the same time it treads into supernatural territory through nightmarish dream sequences that feel unnervingly real.
  25. Warcraft
    So good at making the most outlandish elements of his first two films seem completely credible, Jones can’t find a way to get this cartoony spectacle to soar. His heartfelt approach to the material only underlines the silliness.
  26. Presenting Princess Shaw
    That rare Princess whose wishes do come true, Montgomery’s what is known as a “genuine discovery.”
  27. Me Before You
    A melodrama with soft-rock ballads where its beating heart should be.
  28. The Ones Below
    Farr delves into the sticky issue of parental ambivalence, but he only goes deep enough to carve a small pit in the viewer’s stomach.
  29. Zero Days
    Clear, urgent and positively terrifying at times.
  30. Raw
    Raw is a deliciously fevered stew of nightmare fuel that hangs together with a breezily confident sense of superior craft.
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