Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. Bad Actor
    The film draws its various techniques from far better and more accomplished documentaries, resulting in a multifaceted, mixed-bag approach that never clicks, thanks in large part to how the movie chooses to reveal information.
  2. Blitz
    McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex.
  3. Maya and the Wave
    Has some gaps in storytelling and contextualization that leave it feeling like a less-than-complete picture of the protagonist’s career to date. Yet the film more than succeeds in its primary goals of providing an inspirational role model plus lots of stupendous surfing footage, a combination that will enthrall most viewers.
  4. September 5
    In this case, revisiting it half a century later, knowing what happened doesn’t preclude us from wanting to get a better understanding of the specifics. But this movie’s insights are limited to the newsroom.
  5. Crumb Catcher
    If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale.
  6. Afternoons of Solitude
    The film’s gaze is arguably as mocking as it is dazzled — with the macho posturing and hero-worship of Roca Rey a tacit source of comedy — while Serra, living up to his reputation for challenging arthouse fare, doesn’t flinch in his presentation of animal abuse and suffering.
  7. Stream
    This unabashedly derivative movie makes so little pretense of aiming for the qualities it lacks, you can hardly begrudge boilerplate slasher enthusiasts the fun they’ll have with it.
  8. Flow
    The trouble with Flow is that it already looks dated — commendable to be sure, yet rudimentary at the same time. It’s as if Zilbalodis decided to dump an ocean’s worth of water in the Uncanny Valley. Still, animal-loving viewers will bond almost instantly with the cat and its motley companions.
  9. Daaaaaalí!
    Dupieux injects his own particular brand of daffy humor too, writing, directing, shooting and editing his movie, cutting it along a bias that is familiar to those of us who’ve been paying attention to his recent run of form.
  10. Serpent's Path
    Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not unlike Hitchcock, is the kind of tireless genre craftsman who seems to approach every feature as a test of his own proficiency: Serpent’s Path, a brisk, harsh and, yes, clinically professional update of his own 1998 thriller of the same title, passes said test without a moment’s strain.
  11. Emmanuelle
    Saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honoring the film’s defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief; Audrey Diwan‘s inert, frequently frigid new film opts to do neither.
  12. Happyend
    As befits the son of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (and director of acclaimed documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus) Sora displays a subtly fervent faith in music as perhaps the ultimate expression of nascent individuality, and therefore, ever and eternally, a threat to regimes that rely on conformity and obedience.
  13. A Mistake
    This imperfect drama nevertheless engrosses in its exploration of the life-and-death complexities of the healing arts, and how what may appear a simple matter of right or wrong from the outside can be much more trickily nuanced for those actually making fateful decisions.
  14. Apartment 7A
    The movie is largely entertaining, despite being pulled constantly in two directions: as a predecessor to an iconic work and as a distinct beast, with its own gripes against patriarchal norms.
  15. All Shall Be Well
    The lack of inflection in the film’s infinitely broad-spectrum compassion can sometimes feel less like restraint and more like timidity. Anger is alien to Yeung’s style but it is sometimes justified, and without it, All Shall Be Well is a plea for understanding that should by now, by rights, be a demand.
  16. My Favourite Cake
    What it lacks in edge, the film certainly makes up for in the quality of its performances and watching Farhadpour and Mehrabi mutually glow off each other is a pleasure that it feels almost cruel to have so abruptly denied.
  17. Rez Ball
    An almost comically brisk but genuinely rousing underdog story.
  18. Never Let Go
    Though not all of its clever ideas come together efficiently in the finale, its thematic ruminations on grief, sanity, rebellion and redemption are intrinsically intertwined to harrowing, claustrophobic effect, heightening the hallucinatory horrors and dread-soaked atmospheric pull.
  19. Superboys of Malegaon
    Although the film, which is based on real events, often tries to cover too much ground, it continually circles back to the idea that people must see themselves reflected in art, not just out of want, but out of deep desire stemming from need, in order to live with dignity.
  20. Hold Your Breath
    The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments.
  21. Heretic
    Go with it, and Heretic can be an entertaining ride. It may not change your mind about religion, but you’ll never think of blueberry pie the same way again.
  22. The Deb
    Screenplay credit goes to Hannah Reilly, who wrote the stage musical from which “The Deb” was adapted with Meg Washington. While their lyrics are clever and contemporary, this project is every bit Wilson’s jam. Her sensibility is grounded in sincerity but relies on bawdy, off-color jokes to deflect from empowerment messaging that might otherwise seem square. And it works.
  23. Harvest
    Tsangari’s vigorous, yeasty period piece occasionally loses the thread of its sprawling ensemble narrative, but transfixes as a whole-sackcloth immersion into another time and place.
  24. Vermiglio
    The remarkable, raw-boned and ravishing Vermiglio takes place in the past but operates like a future family secret playing out in the present tense.
  25. Youth (Homecoming)
    Youth (Homecoming) stands on its own, as a genuinely sorrowful film about how deeply the churn of industry has worked its way into people’s bones, as though they’ve become one with the machines they operate.
  26. Elton John: Never Too Late
    The portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving.
  27. The Penguin Lessons
    Peter Cattaneo‘s amiable film adaptation matches the book’s feathery whimsy while reaching for a little more political import. Almost inevitably, it’s best when it’s about the bird.
  28. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    At the end, Bruce, speaking to us in voiceover, says that he plans to just keep going, to play in concert “until the wheels come off.” Watching Road Diary, you hope they never do.
  29. Riff Raff
    Its all-star cast performs admirably, in a film that takes its time to get going, reveals and confronts little once it does, and uses none of its story swerves to build on its dramatic themes, or its one-note humor.
  30. The Cut
    While there’s a more streamlined and thus more effective version of “The Cut” in there somewhere, what remains on screen is plenty harrowing as it is, and allows Bloom to finally cement himself as a truly great performer — not for the lengths he’s willing to go, but for the spellbinding end result.
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