Variety's Scores

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For 17,832 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: 9,164 out of 17832
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17832
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17832
17832 movie reviews
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  1. Beauty and the Dogs
    Ben Hania’s decision to divide the film into 9 chapters, each seemingly orchestrated in a single take, works on a cerebral level, but the form doesn’t serve the story, and while the overall choreography of actors and camerawork is impressive, it never fully satisfies.
  2. The Seagull's Laughter
    A sprightly, enjoyable comedy-drama from veteran Agust Gudmundsson that's buoyed by a raft of excellent distaff performances.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Animal Factory
    In one of his best leading screen turns, Dafoe makes a potentially unlikely construct into a fascinating, full-blooded figure.
  4. Being Julia
    A minor affair, a confection based on dalliances and the way a set of sophisticated theater people handle them, that lacks true distinction.
  5. Manos Sucias
    Although it sports a few fresh moments, the tonally all-over-the-place drama is hampered by script and assembly problems.
  6. American Made
    A sweat-slicked, exhausting but glibly entertaining escapade on its own terms, American Made is more interesting as a showcase for the dateless elasticity of Cruise’s star power. It feels, for better or worse, like a film he could have made at almost any point in the last 30 years.
  7. The Boy and the Beast
    Though it piles all sorts of emotional baggage onto a series of already-tired believe-in-yourself cliches, Hosoda’s over-complicated script has the virtue of expressing itself less via words than it does through truly spectacular set pieces.
  8. Hearts Beat Loud
    Clemons has been a luminous presence who could bloom into a great grown-up actress. Hearts Beat Loud proves she’s the real deal. As for the film around her, Haley’s 21-drum solo salute to the passage of time is, like Frank, merely fine. But he admirably keeps his characters’ victories small and their losses familiar, making his movie a ballad everyone can hum to.
  9. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    Over-production-designed as the film is, Bening and Bell manage to hold their own within it.
  10. The End of the Affair
    A faithful adaptation that captures the haunting spirit and religious nature of the 1951 novel.
  11. Sex Positive
    Daryl Wein's engrossing portrait of Richard Berkowitz is freshly engaging largely due to the subject himself.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    La Femme Nikita
    [Parillaud] remains a totally uninteresting figment of Besson's blinkered movieland imagination, especially when she's in the company of Karyo and Anglade, who provide balance to her overacting.
  13. Axolotl Overkill
    Hegemann deserves considerable praise for avoiding the standard pitfalls of both the neophyte director and the writer-turned-filmmaker: Her movie is not overly wordy, and is anything but over-explained.
  14. Plainclothes
    Plainclothes builds to an intense and ultimately cathartic climax, but there’s something retrograde about the shame Lucas feels. Emmi wants us to experience his protagonist’s sense of suffocation, when looking back from the present, we just want to shout: “It gets better!”
  15. Jindabyne
    Never obtains the full impact of its potentially powerful inner core.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Compromising Positions
    Falling midway between a campy send-up of suburban wives soap operas and a legitimate thriller, Compromising Positions, from the 1978 novel by Susan Isaacs, emerges as a silly little whodunnit that's a mild embarrassment to all involved.
  17. Last Flag Flying
    The central reason that Last Flag Flying fails to take wing is that its characters don’t ring true. Not really. You never feel, in your bones, that you’re watching battle-scarred veterans.
  18. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
    This is a baleful and unfortunate tale; one feels for Granda, who describes his suicidal ideation at one point. But director Billy Corben’s attempts to connect his collision with the boomer-generation Falwells to the broader story of evangelicals in the United States seems at times like a stretch.
  19. Throw Down Your Heart
    Sascha Paladino's overlong but engaging doc about banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck's harmonious journey through four African countries.
  20. I See You
    An eerie suspense exercise that starts out looking like a supernatural tale — one of several viewer presumptions this cleverly engineered narrative eventually pulls the rug out from under.
  21. Kill the Jockey
    Awash with kooky gags and bolstered by the strange, soulful presence of leading man Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, it’s fun but flighty, liable to throw some viewers from the saddle.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Noises Off...
    Bogdanovich has judged his approach to the material astutely, resisting impulses toward comic overkill or transferring focus away from the stage. He takes his cue from the actors, and the camera is always in the right place.
  23. Mr. Untouchable
    Alternately seduced and repelled by its subject, the garish and power-hungry Harlem gangster and '70s cocaine kingpin Nicky Barnes, Mr. Untouchable is one seriously confused documentary.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
    Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a somewhat sordid, quite sexy and very violent murder-kidnap-theft meller which includes elements of rape, lesbianism and sadism, clothed in faddish leather and boots and equipped with sports cars. Some good performances emerge from a one-note script via very good Russ Meyer direction and his outstanding editing.
  25. Rounding
    While many movies these days feel stretched too thin to sustain their few real ideas, Rounding emerges in the end as a project that ought to have shed some surplus ideas to better focus on a few. Either that, or the compact pacing should’ve been eased to allow them all more breathing space.
  26. Crater
    It’s sci-fi informed by a Gen-Z sensibility, with a particular focus on those Zoomers who can’t imagine a bright future on the planet they actually inhabit — an ever-expanding demographic, one imagines.
  27. 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.
  28. Velvet Goldmine
    A constantly imaginative, stylistically lively but dramatically inert chronicle of cultural and sexual rebellion.
  29. The Other Side
    Whereas Minervini’s previous pics seemed to radiate a warm empathy toward his subjects — perhaps merely a manifestation of his open-minded curiosity toward the extreme cultural difference he found peering into the less explored corners of Southern culture — The Other Side feels far more shocking in its portrayal.
  30. Windfall
    Variably articulate subjects drone on and on in an 83-minute film that could easily make its TV news-style point in a half-hour or less.
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