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. The Divine Order
    Though the film’s feel-good construction undercuts its ability to surprise, Petra Volpe’s cine-history lesson remains a mainstream crowd-pleaser adept at inspiring and amusing in equal measure.
  2. Godard Mon Amour
    A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).
  3. Hickok
    Less censorious aficionados likely will be willing to look past the rough edges and enjoy the simple pleasures provided by a respectfully sincere retelling of a familiar legend.
  4. Tully
    Tully has its heart (and many other things) in the right place, but by the end you wish it had an imagination finely executed enough to match its empathy.
  5. Brimstone & Glory
    Mixing sheer spectacle with modest but pleasing human-interest threads, Viktor Jakovleski’s first directorial feature is a poetical, entrancing documentary.
  6. 32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide
    Gripping and discomfiting, this first directorial feature by the veteran editor is the kind of diaristic inquiry that can seem self-indulgent but here sports a fearlessness that transcends vanity — at times it’s downright unflattering.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gaslight
    Patrick Hamilton's London stage melodrama, is given an exciting screen treatment by Arthur Hornblow Jr's excellent production starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sword in the Stone
    It emerges as a tasty confection.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Midnight Cowboy
    The sometimes amusing but essentially sordid saga of a male prostitute in Manhattan,...Midnight Cowboy is of the modern moment moderne. It has a hot topical theme; a popular actor from last year’s greatest film comedy; a miscellany of competent bit players, a good deal of both sly and broad humor. If the women object, and some will, that it accords their sex scant courtesy, the story hardly presents males as admirable. Indeed in this film the scenery is lovely and only the human race is vile.
  10. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    The movie is diligent and, to a degree, absorbing — a legal/business saga that’s also the story of a family in crisis.
  11. Soul on a String
    Chinese director Zhang Yang (“Shower,” “Sunflower”) eschews the thrill of propulsive duels for a discursive allegorical approach, serving up picturesque visuals, highland-dry humor, and karmic plot twists.
  12. The King
    Promised Land is a searching, flawed, let’s-try-this-on-and-see-how-it-looks movie. At times, it veers too close to being a standard Elvis chronicle, and at others its insight into our national neurosis may strike you as a tad ethereal. It’s an essay in the form of an investigation. Yet it’s the definition of tasty food for thought.
  13. Blade of the Immortal
    The story’s supernatural elements enable Miike to take huge liberties with chanbara, the oldest genre in Japanese cinema, and break free from rigid traditions of choreographing swordplay sequences.
  14. Before We Vanish
    Playing frequently like an absurdist political satire with only flashes of violence, this low-tension, drawn-out work won’t gratify the chills or adrenaline rushes fanboys crave, but the ending strikes a romantic chord so pure that all but the most jaded cynics will be moved.
  15. April's Daughter
    Frankly, it’s anybody guess why characters do what they do in April’s Daughter, which may be both realistic and admirably nonjudgmental on Franco’s part, but it makes for a confusing and at times clinical moviegoing experience, as the director applies his detached Michael Haneke-like style to material that begs a certain amount of clarification.
  16. Platoon
    There is plenty of good work to be found here, and pic certainly grabs the viewer by the collar in a way not found everyday in contemporary films.
  17. Shot Caller
    It’s a genre movie, to be sure, but there’s an impressive sense of authenticity — in the language, the locations and the overall texture —that goes a long way to sell the scenario.
  18. Better Watch Out
    What starts out looking like a prank run amuck gradually grows more sinister, with director Chris Peckover (“Undocumented”) nicely handling the swerves toward dramatic peril and fatal consequences while still maintaining a confectionary “family entertainment” veneer of antic doings in a glossy suburban setting.
  19. The Boy Downstairs
    Mamet has a quick, spry reaction time and a gently forlorn focus that holds the screen, and she holds this movie together.
  20. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    “Here We Go Again” is another kitsch patchwork; it’s as if you were watching the CliffsNotes to an old studio weeper that happened to be carried along by some of the most luscious pop songs ever recorded. Yet the feeling comes through, especially at the end — a love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters.
  21. The Angry Birds Movie 2
    Van Orman, Emmy-nominated creator of the quirky, cult-inspiring kids’ cartoon series “The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack,” brings just the right level of dippy zeal to the project, committing to extended, farcical routines that, at their most immaculately choreographed and paced, channel the pure, physical hilarity of vintage Chaplin or Sellers.
  22. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    The remarkable thing is that the movie acquires the quality of a time machine. You don’t just watch “Dawson City.” You step into it to and draw back a magical curtain on the past, entering a world of buried memory that’s the precursor to our own.
  23. Charlie's Angels
    The movie is relentless, it’s pulpy and exciting, it’s unabashedly derivative, and at an hour and 58 minutes it’s a little too much of a rousingly of-the-moment feministic but still rather standard-issue thing.
  24. The Rider
    Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.
  25. Barbara
    The movie lightly plumbs that dangerously unsettled space between performing and literally being the protagonist in a biopic.
  26. Gabriel and the Mountain
    On one level, the film can be classified as a journey of discovery, but what deepens interest is the way Barbosa constantly asks the viewer to question what it means to travel.
  27. Song of Granite
    Pat Collins’ echoing, elegiac evocation of the spirit of Irish sean nós singer Joe Heaney is most interested in his haunted vocal gift, letting the troubled life that weathered it show through only in glimmers between the gorgeous songs.
  28. Us
    Terrifying...The less you know going in — and the less energy you spend thinking about it after the fact — the better the movie works, trading on some uncanny combination of Peele’s imagination and our own to suggest a horror infinitely larger and more insidious than the film is capable of representing.
  29. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    In addition to being a rather fine addition to the Christmas-movie canon, the film marks a useful teaching tool — a better option for classroom screenings than any of the previous “Carol” adaptations, once students have finished reading the novella.
  30. Letters from Baghdad
    The bottom line is that Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have fleshed out a complex, fascinating figure.
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