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. A Boy. A Girl. A Dream.
    If Basir and Samantha Tanner’s screenplay ultimately feels like less than a full meal, its intelligence and restraint — particularly in resisting the lure of a heavier-handed message — are nonetheless admirable.
  2. Ride Your Wave
    Sooner or later, Hinako is going to have to learn to face the world on her own, which is where the tension finally arises before this dopey film reaches its sappy conclusion — by showing its heroine, so effortless on water, “learning to ride life’s waves, too.”
  3. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    Bully. Coward. Victim. isn’t as authoritative a chronicle as “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” but in its loosely anecdotal way it may bring us a notch or two closer to who Roy Cohn was.
  4. Sharper
    A deep ensemble cast is game for this ambitiously overwrought material, but no amount of committed acting can overcome the movie’s manipulative artifice.
  5. The First Omen
    Stevenson’s consistently unsettling and gleefully sacrilegious offering packs its share of legitimate shocks en route to one glaringly obvious “surprise.”
  6. Come Sunday
    Marston, working from Marcus Hinchey’s sensitive and remarkably nuanced script, invites measured introspection from both his characters and the audience.
  7. Wild Diamond
    After all the despair, the piling up of glitzy delusion, there’s a feeling of redemption to it connected to what a good movie can do.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Soapdish
    Soapdish aims at a satiric target as big as a Macy’s float and intermittently hits it. Sally Field and Kevin Kline play a feuding pair of romantically involved soap opera stars in this broad but amiable sendup of daytime TV.
  9. Cargo
    Radiating not only paternal devotion but also a blunt matter-of-factness that amplifies as his situation becomes more dire, Freeman’s empathetic turn makes Andy an endearing center of attention, and the film — even for those who’ve seen its source material — a heartfelt entry in the overstuffed genre.
  10. The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil
    As much fun as it is to watch Lee beat people up and strut around in shiny pinstripe suits, it’s just as much of a pleasure to watch him think it all through.
  11. The Unknown Girl
    Though what we get is largely exemplary: a simple but urgent objective threaded with needling observations of social imbalance, a camera that gazes with steady intent into story-bearing faces, and an especially riveting example of one in their gifted, toughly tranquil leading lady Adèle Haenel. What’s missing...is any great sense of narrative or emotional surprise.
  12. The Phantom of the Open
    The jokes write themselves, though in The Phantom of the Open, screenwriter Simon Farnaby and director Craig Roberts make them sweeter and spryer than they could have been, while a wide-eyed, bucket-hatted Mark Rylance plays Flitcroft with abundant generosity of spirit.
  13. Bomb City
    Bomb City will keep you in its grasp during every moment leading to its climactic violence. And it won’t let go until the closing credits roll.
  14. The Hallow
    The directorial debut of visual artist Corin Hardy is never less than arresting to the eye, but thin characters and a familiar story hold this Irish chiller back from entering the top tier of recent horror entries.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    On Moonlight Bay
    All of the characters are good for some hefty laughs, and Del Ruth’s direction and the writing supply plenty of touches that keep punching the risibilities and jogging nostalgic memory.
  16. The Overnight
    The Overnight invites the audience to keep guessing exactly who is seducing whom, and exactly where the temptations will lead, right up to its final few beats. Barely hitting 70 minutes before the credit crawl, this comedy successfully achieves a climax of its own that is equal parts exciting and frustrating.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
    Although the film is punched up by some energetic cutting and hip-hop music, many dialogue scenes, particularly early on, are badly written and awkwardly staged.
  18. Hanna
    An exuberantly crafted chase thriller that pulses with energy from its adrenaline-pumping first minutes to its muted bang of a finish.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lone Wolf McQuade
    Fans of Soldier of Fortune magazine will think they've been ambushed and blown away to heaven by Lone Wolf McQuade. Every conceivable type of portable weapon on the world market is tried out by the macho warriors on both sides of the law in this modern western.
  20. Pacific Rim
    Although assembled with consummate care and obsessive attention to visual detail, Pacific Rim manages only fitful engagement and little in the way of real wonderment, suspense or terror.
  21. The Smashing Machine
    The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavolvian response of triumph out of us. It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way.
  22. Swallow
    A bold and unconventional thriller made real by the evolution of lead actress Haley Bennett ... Is it exploitative? Yes, to an extent that’s true. ... But, as in such Alfred Hitchcock classics as “Spellbound” and “Marnie,” with their facile psychoanalytic interpretations of compulsive and/or hysterical behavior, the approach can be quite effective in revealing the gender dynamics of the times.
  23. The Warrior
    Tendency to go for art rather than action, and a leisurely pace that isn't bolstered by much dialogue or food for thought.
  24. We Were Soldiers
    Gibson has the closest thing to a John Wayne part that anyone's played since the Duke himself rode into the sunset, and he plays it damn well.
  25. Red Flag
    There's a reason creepy character actors seldom play lead, and Karpovsky's amusingly off-kilter quality is better suited to the background, while Prediger (as the stranger he desperately wants to ditch, lest his ex-g.f. discover his infidelity) has the makings of an indie star.
  26. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    While “Autopsy” lives up to its title, providing plenty of grisly medical gore, the forensics induce less squirming than the exacting yet playful way Ovredal keeps making us anticipate more unnatural acts as the Tildens realize something is seriously amiss.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cocoon
    A fountain of youth fable [from a novel by David Saperstein] which imaginatively melds galaxy fantasy with the lives of aging mortals in a Florida retirement home, Cocoon weaves a mesmerizing tale.
  28. Ma Belle, My Beauty
    In this triangulated love story there is more roiling it than just desire. Although the central characters reflect the vast array of LGBTQ folk, the movie isn’t a coming-out tale. . . . These characters are in the midst of their lives, with many of the duties and emotions that come with that.
  29. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    Director David Yates spins the series' most expansive, structurally free-form chapter yet -- lumbering and gripping by turns, and suffused with a profound sense of solitude and loss.
  30. GoldenEye
    Most crucially, Brosnan makes the grade as 007. He handles the action capably and gets the standard quips out in a commendably straightforward way that's wry but not dismissive.
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