Variety's Scores

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For 17,810 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 2.4 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: 9,150 out of 17810
  2. Mixed: 7,023 out of 17810
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17810
17810 movie reviews
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  1. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    A thoughtful, detailed chronicle of the Fed’s origins, responsibilities and shifting monetary policies.
  2. Battle of the Year
    So fatally frontloaded with endless training montages, awfully written, indifferently acted drama, sports-film platitudes and jaw-dropping product placements that only the hardiest of viewers will make it through to the payoff.
  3. First Cousin Once Removed
    A fascinatingly fractured glimpse into a disengaged mind and a biopic-in-reverse of its subject, quite unlike any documentary seen before.
  4. The Unknown Known
    Ranging over familiar material, but made vivid by Morris’ fecund associations and invigorating stylistic flourishes.
  5. Locke
    This ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise.
  6. How I Live Now
    Wisely sticks to its protagonist’s p.o.v. while avoiding a longer view of the calamitous events around her, making up in emotional immediacy what it lacks in broad dramatic sweep.
  7. Child of God
    The crazed intensity of Franco’s filmmaking, while duly evocative of Haze’s primitive state, is ultimately too hectic and unmodulated for anything to burrow deep and stay there.
  8. The Armstrong Lie
    Director Alex Gibney delivers not just a detailed, full-access account of his subject, in all his defiance, hubris and tentative self-reckoning, but also a layered inquiry into the culture of competitiveness, celebrity, moral relativism and hypocrisy that helped enable and sustain his deception.
  9. Abuse of Weakness
    Of all living actresses, only Huppert could capture nuances that alternately elicit sympathy and fierce sexual attraction to a recent stroke victim.
  10. Miss Violence
    Avranas’ film employs an irony-free meter that certainly distinguishes his work from that of Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and lends the film’s most explicitly severe sequences of domestic and sexual abuse a kind of cumulative numbing power.
  11. Sacro GRA
    In keeping with Rosi’s style, there are no explanations and no interactions with the camera, and Sacro GRA suddenly ends without a sense of having come to any conclusions.
  12. Under the Skin
    Glazer has always been longer on atmosphere and uncanny moods than on narrative, but the fatal flaw of Under the Skin isn’t that not much happens; it’s that what does happen isn’t all that interesting.
  13. The Zero Theorem
    A sci-fi confection that, at best, momentarily recalls the dystopian whimsy of the director’s best-loved effort, “Brazil,” but ends up dissolving into a muddle of unfunny jokes and half-baked ideas, all served up with that painful, herky-jerky Gilliam rhythm.
  14. Are You Here
    One dead giveaway that the comedy isn’t working is the film’s score, which overcompensates throughout by attempting to bolster every second with bouncy energy.
  15. We Are the Best!
    It’s the rare film about adolescence that doesn’t seem exclusively targeted either to teens or to adults. Rarer still, it’s one that takes an interest in the nourishing qualities of female friendship.
  16. Stray Dogs
    Tsai here seems to be stripping his ornately eccentric style down to formal fundamentals. A certain pictorial grace remains; his sense of humor, sadly, appears to have been largely tossed out with the bathwater.
  17. Philomena
    It’s an undeniable whopper of a yarn and, coming after a string of middling efforts from Frears, easily the director’s most compulsively watchable picture since “The Queen."
  18. Life of Crime
    Flavorful yet brisk like the book, Life of Crime loses some of its source material’s character development as well as a few minor narrative pieces (the dialogue remains nearly all Leonard’s), but the excellent casting fills in any resulting gaps well enough.
  19. Parkland
    Granted, Landesman feels an obligation to history, but there’s something ponderously obvious about the way so many of these scenes are played.
  20. Palo Alto
    While Palo Alto doesn’t seem to be saying anything new exactly, it boasts a clear and confident voice of its own, and it will be exciting to see where the young Coppola goes from here.
  21. Night Moves
    Kelly Reichardt blends her lucid observational approach with a topical-thriller format to engrossing effect in Night Moves.
  22. Moebius
    A gloriously off-the-charts study in perversity.
  23. Joe
    A patiently observed, often unsettlingly violent drama that can’t help but feel overly familiar in some of its particulars, rich in rural texture but low on narrative momentum or surprise.
  24. The Invisible Woman
    So tastefully mounted and brilliantly acted that it wears down even the corset-phobic’s innate resistance to such things.
  25. The Fifth Estate
    Both the kindest and most damning thing you can say about The Fifth Estate is that it primarily hobbles itself by trying to cram in more context-needy material than any single drama should have to bear.
  26. Fading Gigolo
    John Turturro brings sensitivity and intelligence to a subject that could have gone terribly awry in Fading Gigolo.
  27. Stranger by the Lake
    This is essentially an absorbing and intelligent exploration of queer desire spiced up with thriller elements.
  28. What If
    Roughly three parts charming to one part cloying, The F Word attempts and largely succeeds at pulling off a smart, self-aware riff on romantic-comedy conventions while maintaining a core of earnest feeling.
  29. The Double
    Undeniably impressive as a visual-psychological construct, The Double is ultimately a rigid, one-joke movie that feels hard pressed to sustain any sort of momentum over the course of its 92-minute running time.
  30. Dom Hemingway
    Shepard balances a livelier-than-life script with striking, super-saturated images, which makes the film feel bigger than it is.
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