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. The Monkey King 2
    Certainly less of a dud than the director’s inane original, this follow-up is even more tyke-oriented, but at least it’s a livelier yarn and boasts a slick upgrade in visual effects.
  2. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    A sparely plotted, low-key but ultimately rewarding slice of South Dakota reservation life.
  3. London Has Fallen
    For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.
  4. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances.
  5. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
  6. Marguerite
    This splendid satire benefits...from “The Singer” director Giannoli’s gift for striking just the right tone with such tricky material.
  7. The Final Project
    The Final Project does feel like a student film, though not in a way that benefits its own found-footage conceit.
  8. Cabin Fever
    Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.
  9. Sweet Bean
    Just as An itself seems on the verge of flying away, however, Kawase rewards her audience with an unapologetically contrived but effectively eye-moistening surge of feeling.
  10. Gods of Egypt
    This is by any measure a dreadful movie, a chintzy, CG-encrusted eyesore that oozes stupidity and self-indulgence from every pore. Yet damned if Proyas doesn’t put it all out there with a lunatic conviction you can’t help but admire.
  11. Fatima
    This poignant slice-of-life proves as modest in length (78 minutes) as it is generous in rueful insight and emotional complexity.
  12. A Strange Course of Events
    Too often the pic feels as if it’s killing time to pad itself out into feature length.
  13. The Other Side of the Door
    The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy’s weekend lineup, The Other Side of the Door brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.
  14. A Quiet Passion
    [Davies'] most mannered and least fulfilling work to date, A Quiet Passion boasts meticulous craft and ornate verbiage in abundance, but confines Cynthia Nixon’s melancholia-stricken performance as arguably America’s greatest poet in an emotional straitjacket of variously arch storytelling tones.
  15. Barney Thomson
    Thompson elevates and enervates every scene she’s in.
  16. The Brothers Grimsby
    Baron Cohen’s unflinching ability to play dumb is still good for a few chuckles, making some of the film’s funniest moments out of its most innocent quips.
  17. The Mermaid
    Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid defies the time-worn nature of its material, concocting pure enchantment with the director’s own blend of nutty humor, intolerable cruelty and unabashed sweetness.
  18. Becoming Mike Nichols
    If the material feels inadequate for a freestanding doc, that’s no fault of Nichols, who’s on playful, perspicacious form.
  19. Risen
    Whether or not it triggers a craze for divinely inspired detective stories, Risen makes a decent case for itself as the “Columbo” of the genre: It’s amiable, creaky and not remotely predicated on the element of surprise.
  20. Race
    Stephen Hopkins’ film offers a safe, middlebrow slice of history that beats a snoozy lecture any day. Making a few admirable attempts to complicate what could have been a standard-issue inspirational sports narrative, Race is better than it has to be, but not by too much.
  21. Snowtime!
    Covering the emotional spectrum between dog farts on one end and tragedy on the other reps a tonal challenge that Showtime! can’t pull off, despite a gentler touch than most kiddie fare of its kind.
  22. White Girl
    As much as White Girl has to offer in raw immediacy, it lacks the distance to offer much in the way of meaningful commentary, distinguishing itself (for the worse) from such earth-shaking social critics as Bret Easton Ellis and Harmony Korine.
  23. Triple 9
    Well suited to Hillcoat’s gifts for low-boil suspense and brutal eruptions of violence in close, male-dominated quarters, the film has grit and atmosphere to burn but also a certain narrative sketchiness, as though unable to reconcile its sharp sociological portraiture with the pleasures of a more robustly plotted crime yarn.
  24. Glassland
    Rather than presenting a nuanced ending that’s open to interpretation, Barrett simply leaves us scratching our heads as to what just happened.
  25. Funny or Die Presents: Donald Trump's the Art of the Deal: The Movie
    Other than skewering Trump, both personally and politically, this is obviously a rather slim construct. And while Depp throws his all into perhaps his hammiest role since Jack Sparrow, it probably would have benefited from a bit less length and a tighter focus.
  26. Things to Come
    Huppert is such a persistently and prolifically rigorous performer that she risks being taken for granted in some of her vehicles, but this is major, many-shaded work even by her lofty standards.
  27. Zootopia
    It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story, a la “The Big Lebowski” or “Inherent Vice,” yielding an adult-friendly whodunit with a chipper “you can do it!” message for the cubs.
  28. Midnight Special
    Nichols’ impressively restrained yet limitlessly imaginative fourth feature takes its energy from an ensemble of characters who hold fast to their convictions, even though their beliefs remain shrouded in mystery for much of the journey.
  29. Mavis!
    A spirited and captivating bio-doc that richly deserves the exclamation point in its title.
  30. How to Be Single
    Splintered between thinly sketched focal points rather than actually plumbing the real fear, paranoia and elation that come from operating without a romantic partner, How to Be Single never transcends its most sitcom-y instincts.
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