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. Sneakerheadz
    The tone throughout Sneakerheadz is mostly light and bright, but the filmmakers don’t stint on anthropological detail, or shy away from the darker aspects of getting kicks by any means necessary.
  2. Money Monster
    As an indictment of Wall Street chicanery, it’s largely toothless; as a pure thriller, it only quickens the pulse once or twice; as a conspiracy saga, its central mystery falls flat. Yet somehow the film hangs together surprisingly well.
  3. The Falling
    Morley marries a quasi-Victorian premise with a modernist technique that feels drawn from her film’s own milieu.
  4. Ready Player One
    It’s an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie. Yet you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested.
  5. Bad Boys for Life
    Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bring their A game; they never let us feel as if they’re going through the motions. The marks may be standard issue, but they hit them with fury and flair.
  6. Baby Driver
    Like all Edgar Wright movies, Baby Driver is a blast, featuring wall-to-wall music and a surfeit of inspired ideas. But it’s also something of a mess, blaring pop tunes of every sort as it lurches between rip-roaring car chases, colorful pre-caper banter, and a twee young-love subplot.
  7. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    These two actors, with nothing matching but their goatees, have a spiky bromantic chemistry. They don’t just ping off one another’s lines — they lock and load each other.
  8. Prince
    A slender, morally simplified fable that makes up for its tonal and narrative imprecisions with considerable visual energy, musical pizzazz, and a panoply of colorful characters.
  9. Go Away Mr. Tumor
    Notwithstanding its bubblegum visuals and relentlessly perky hijinks, the yarn proceeds naturally toward a touching conclusion without high-handed lurches into tragedy or mawkishness.
  10. Palio
    The film boasts characters as rich, and a narrative as entertaining, as might be found in the most crowd-pleasing of scripted sports sagas.
  11. The Iron Ministry
    While cerebral in intent and planning, the pic doesn’t feel overly straitjacketed by theory and offers unexpected moments of amusement.
  12. Guidance
    The modest pic’s laughs get bigger as it goes along, and so does its surprising warmth.
  13. Tab Hunter Confidential
    Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, Tab Hunter Confidential is lively and entertaining.
  14. Mustang
    the director proves especially skilled with her cast of newcomers (of the thesps playing the sisters, only young Iscan, from “My Only Sunshine,” is a veteran), whose powerful individualism as well as their vibrant bond together are perfect vessels for the script’s message.
  15. The Golden Dream
    Though it takes some work to engage with the characters at first, the journey makes a powerful impact.
  16. 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.
  17. Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
    Reitz maintains his visionary sweep through history, favoring plot over development of characters, except as embodiments of large themes.
  18. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Florence Foster Jenkins is an audience picture first and foremost: one wholly sympathetic to its eponymous subject’s delusional drive to delight crowds with or without the requisite artistry.
  19. Hardcore Henry
    Hardcore feels like umpteen post-“Star Wars” action blockbusters trash-compacted into one — and whether that fundamentally appeals or not, the ingenuity of effort is undeniably high.
  20. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of minute observations rather than grand revelations, less concerned with butterfly-effect consequentiality than the variable human foibles that can turn a bad day into a good one.
  21. Lost in Hong Kong
    Trading the earlier film’s goofy fish-out-of-water gags for robust action acrobatics and fail-safe family drama, the laffer induces the warm-and-fuzzies as an ode to Hong Kong cinema and its role in mainland Gen-Xers’ sentimental coming of age.
  22. Labyrinth of Lies
    An intelligent and arresting fact-based drama.
  23. Francofonia
    Does it all come together? Well, yes, if viewers think of the film as a freewheeling poetic essay, highly personal yet captivating.
  24. In Jackson Heights
    In Jackson Heights is a classic example of Wiseman’s affinity for this type of subject, full of community organizers and advocacy meetings in which citizens and aspiring citizens learn to use their civic voices. In truth, the camera lingers longer than necessary in these gatherings, but the film has rewards on the macro and micro levels.
  25. East Side Sushi
    Writer-director Anthony Lucero’s delectable debut feature has its share of on-the-nose writing and Cinderella-story contrivances, but for the most part folds its cross-cultural insights into a pleasing underdog narrative as deftly as its heroine presses together rice and nori.
  26. The Big Short
    There’s an unmistakable, scathing sense of outrage behind the whole endeavor, and it’s impossible not to admire McKay’s reckless willingness to do everything short of jumping through flaming hoops on a motorcycle while reading aloud from Keynes if that’s what it takes to get people to finally pay attention.
  27. Manson Family Vacation
    If the outcome of the film feels at once daring and more than a little preposterous, Davis just about pulls it off, largely by treating the emotional fallout in completely rational, even realistic fashion.
  28. (T)error
    A vital expose of American law enforcement carried out with almost reckless zeal.
  29. 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.
  30. Microbe and Gasoline
    With Microbe and Gasoline, the French writer-director has wisely restrained his usual flourishes, allowing the two teenage leads in his relatively calm summer-vacation coming-of-age comedy to assume centerstage, imbuing them with creative agency rather than forcing them to compete with the film’s own style.
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