Variety's Scores

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For 17,831 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 2.3 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: 9,163 out of 17831
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17831
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17831
17831 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dark Star
    Dark Star is a limp parody of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that warrants attention only for some remarkably believable special effects achieved with very little money. The dim comedy consists of sophomoric notations and mistimed one-liners.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask
    Allen's gift is in the depiction of a contemporary intellectual shlump who cannot seem to make it with the chicks always tantalizingly out of reach. That persona could well have served him once more as the focus for a good bit of caustic comedy on today's sexual mores.
    • Variety
  3. The Last Dalai Lama?
    The thing you want from a documentary about his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the chance to get right up close to him, in the way that movies can do. You want the chance to bask in his presence and come out with a heightened sense of what he’s about. The Last Dalai Lama? accomplishes that, and with an offhand eloquence, though it’s a sketchy, catch-as-catch-can movie.
  4. Survivors Guide to Prison
    If ever a proselytizing documentary could be described as assaultive, Survivors Guide to Prison might sport that label as a badge of honor.
  5. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    There’s nothing particularly inspired about Mitchell’s treatment here — he’s directed a lot of DVD extras, and this first feature feels like a plus-sized version of one — but there’s considerable entertainment value in its subject.
  6. The Life Ahead
    The film, modest and often maudlin on its own storytelling terms, runs on a current of beyond-the-screen devotion that makes it compelling. Without that unquantifiable x-factor presence in the frame, it’s hard to say what reason this Netflix release would really have for being.
  7. Diary of the Dead
    Gripping, intimate genre triumph.
  8. Peterloo
    When Peterloo’s unaligned fingers form a fist, for a punching, unyielding, robustly choreographed finale of rage against the right-wing machine, the film makes good on its most taxing demands.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Hunter Black Heart
    Clint Eastwood's film isn't an African adventure epic, as those unaware of Peter Viertel's 1953 book may surmise from the title. It's an intelligent, affectionate study of an obsessive American film director who, while working on a film in colonial Africa, becomes sidetracked by his compulsion to hunt elephants.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alan Partridge
    A scissor-sharp comedy of ineptitude and failure.
  11. Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton
    Even at two full hours, “Take Every Wave” must do a lot of condensing. Still, as ample and awesome as Hamilton’s exterior doings are, one gets something of a classic “authorized portrait” vibe here in that he’s not about to let us get too far into his head.
  12. Innocent Voices
    While the respectable result is a more meaningful film than just about anything Mandoki worked on during his 17 years in Hollywood ("Angel Eyes," "Message in a Bottle"), pic suffers from an overindulgence of triumph-over-adversity cliches and a meandering narrative.
  13. Afterschool
    Unsettles without illuminating, marred by narcotic pacing and a blank lead performance.
  14. Stuart Little 2
    Slight but lively sequel. Aimed squarely at moppets with piddling attention spans.
  15. Bolivia
    A dignified second film for Caetano.
  16. Auto Focus
    Schrader directs with a very smooth hand, providing a good-natured and frequently amusing spin to eventually grim material that aptly reflects the protagonist's almost unfailing good humor.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Miller's Crossing
    Substance is here in spades, along with the twisted, brilliantly controlled style on which filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen made a name.
  18. Clara's Ghost
    Clara’s Ghost is determinedly quirky, but its ideas are seldom all that original or funny, too often degenerating into rote scatological humor. Nonetheless, there’s a formative creative sensibility that seems on the verge of defining itself — something that never quite happens before the film ends, its anecdotal story having drifted nowhere in particular.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Slaughterhouse-Five
    Slaughterhouse-Five is a mechanically slick, dramatically sterile commentary about World War II and afterward, as seen through the eyes of a boob Everyman. Director George Roy Hill's arch achievement emphasizes the diffused cant to the detriment of characterizations, which are stiff, unsympathetic and skin-deep.
  20. Desert of Namibia
    Like Kana, it’s gloomy, purposeless and hard to love — but that only makes the film, and its lead, feel more pulsating alive.
  21. Devotion
    Director JD Dillard dazzles with see-it-in-Imax airborne sequences, but the meat of the film focuses on the friendship between Brown (“Da 5 Bloods” star Jonathan Majors) and his white wingman, played by Glen Powell, the “Hidden Figures” actor who most recently appeared in “Top Gun: Maverick.”
  22. Dark Horse
    Result is far less abrasive than some of its predecessors, but for that very reason seems unlikely to generate the attention needed to meet Solondz's already modest commercial standards.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dead Again
    Engaging film style is buoyed by an infectious sense of fun and punctuated by wild and woolly character turns.
  24. The Optimists
    Explores another courageous, little-known chapter in the saga of resistance and heroics during World War II.
  25. Creed II
    Creed II has been made with heart and skill, and Jordan invests each moment with such fierce conviction that he makes it all seem like it matters.
  26. Nina Wu
    Nina Wu is a thrillingly complicated sort of corrective, living out the progressive ideal of giving the victim back her story, even when that story, told with lacerating self-criticism and a deep undercurrent of dismay, includes a great deal that falls far short of progressive ideals.
  27. Ben Is Back
    The entire film is that rarest of gifts for its cast, providing virtually every character with a chance to play not only the present moment, but the complicated history they’ve established with Ben in the past, as well as whatever chance they see in the troubled young man’s future.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rush
    Head-swiveling directorial debut of Lili Fini Zanuck lays out a tough masculine scenario [based on Kim Wozencraft's book] in a way that is always emotionally riveting.
  29. Wiener-Dog
    This elegantly wrought oddity appears at the halfway mark to be heading into uncharacteristically hopeful territory for Solondz — until a toe-tapping intermission marks a reassuring plunge into abject despair.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    L.A. Story
    Goofy and sweet, L.A. Story constitutes Steve Martin's satiric valentine to his hometown and a pretty funny comedy in the bargain.
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