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. Mr. Gaga
    The result here may not be fully revealing of his process, but it’s as close as we’re going to get.
  2. Phantom Thread
    Phantom Thread sweeps you up and carries you along, much more, to my mind, than “The Master” did. Yet it’s a thesis movie: the story of a bullying narcissist who lacks the ability to have a relationship, and the outrageous way he’s schooled into becoming a human being. It’s the story of a control freak made by a control freak.
  3. Headshot
    In terms of sheer, punchy physical vigor, Headshot is a knockout.
  4. Super Dark Times
    It’s hard not to appreciate the astute ways the script captures the moment when carefree childhood turns into the loss of innocence.
  5. Chapter & Verse
    Despite its familiarity, Chapter & Verse manages to make its material both fresh and authentic.
  6. Punching Henry
    Phillips, who has the everyman look of a younger John Heard, is such a sympathetic sad sack throughout Punching Henry that it’s occasionally discomforting to watch what happens to him. But that is a major part of this low-key comedy’s charm.
  7. Duckweed
    The film is sprinkled with witty grace notes and is crowd-pleasing without being too ingratiating or idiotic.
  8. It Comes at Night
    It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.
  9. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Nominally focused on the celebrated filmmaker’s lesser-known dabblings in fine art, The Art Life emerges as a more expansive study of Lynch’s creative impulses and preoccupations, as he relates first-hand the formative experiences that spurred and shaped a most unusual imagination.
  10. The Other Side of Hope
    As long as Kaurismäki presents this tidy a vision (aesthetically and morally), he’ll continue to be an engagingly hermetic art-house curio impersonating an artist.
  11. A Fantastic Woman
    Vega’s tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It’s a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina’s condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn’t herself go.
  12. As You Are
    A promising and impressively self-assured debut for 23-year-old filmmaker Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, As You Are is crafted with the confidence and skill of a veteran, but also the youthful eye of someone not far removed from his protagonists.
  13. The Great & The Small
    Bias provides an emotionally and dramatically satisfying conclusion for his dramedy — which takes its title from a children’s book read aloud twice, each time with starkly different impact — by making sure that everyone gets what’s coming to them before the final credits roll.
  14. On Body and Soul
    It’s to the credit of Borbély’s intelligent, melancholically understated performance that Maria remains sympathetic even as she becomes more of a condition than a character — and to the richness of the writer-director’s ideas that they move and intrigue even when they’re most artificially expounded.
  15. Wonder Wheel
    It’s got movement and flow, it’s got a vibrant sunset look of honky-tonk nostalgia, and it’s got a bittersweet mood of lyrical despair that the film stays true to right up until the final note. It’s also strikingly acted.
  16. Aroused by Gymnopedies
    "Gymnopedies” is an engaging and ultimately touching portrait of love, loneliness and loss of youth.
  17. Okja
    Downright charming at times and irrepressibly gonzo at others, Okja hews to an all-too-familiar trajectory.
  18. The Women's Balcony
    Offering solid, middle-brow entertainment that borrows from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” the film shows the relationships and tensions between different groups within Orthodox Judaism in Jerusalem, and provides a cautionary (and universally understandable) tale about religious fundamentalism.
  19. Love & Taxes
    The movie takes Kornbluth’s stage show, recorded live, and intersperses it with dramatized scenes that are just deft and amusing enough to make you wish they were part of a larger indie production. Yet it all works together, as if Kornbluth was narrating and acting out the graphic novel of his life.
  20. The Settlers
    The real achievement here is in going beyond the buzzwords of newscasts and talking points to convey a sense of what’s happening on the ground — and to give it a sense of urgency.
  21. Ben-Gurion, Epilogue
    The new documentary Ben-Gurion, Epilogue offers a rare intimate look at what went on inside Ben-Gurion’s heart and mind.
  22. Radio Dreams
    Radio Dreams is a witty, low-key exercise in deferred gratification.
  23. 47 Meters Down
    Director Johannes Roberts’ mostly underwater thriller is a compact and sturdily crafted B-movie that generates enough scares and suspense to qualify as — well, maybe not a pleasant surprise, but a reasonably entertaining one.
  24. School Life
    There’s considerable poignancy in the contrast between this eccentric pair’s mutual sense that their lives are winding down and the vast, still-unshaped futures of their young charges, but Ní Chianáin’s film largely resists sentimentality of the “Greatest Love of All” variety.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mighty Joe Young
    Mighty Joe Young is wholesome, well-crafted family fare like Hollywood used to make.
  26. Outbreak
    Whether scarily charting the spread of the virus or choreographing a cat-and-mouse chase of choppers above a winding riverbed, Petersen demonstrates a smooth stylistic savvy that keeps the film highly absorbing from beginning to end.
  27. The Death of Louis XIV
    The vividness of the realization — with a sound design that emphasizes every chew and tick of the clock — makes the movie continually engrossing.
  28. The Disaster Artist
    Somehow, in accentuating Wiseau’s weirdness, Franco overlooks his soul.
  29. Porto
    This narratively slender item is unapologetically a mood piece: a film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.
  30. Private Life
    It’s witty and moving but a touch repetitive, and it goes on for too long. That said, Jenkins has made the most intimate comedy imaginable about the fertility blues. Private Life hits some delicate nerves, and heals a few of them too.
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