Variety's Scores

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For 17,835 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: 9,166 out of 17835
  2. Mixed: 7,032 out of 17835
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17835
17835 movie reviews
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    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fourth Protocol
    The Fourth Protocol is a decidedly contempo thriller, a tale of vying masterspies and a chase to head off a nuclear disaster. Its edge is a fine aura of realism.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eyes of Laura Mars
    Eyes of Laura Mars is a very stylish thriller [from a story by John Carpenter] in search of a better ending.
  3. Cities of Last Things
    Cities of Last Things has a puzzle-box structure that makes it seem complex and that tasks us with teasing out allusions and associations that a straighter telling would miss, but emotionally it is also simple: Nestled in the middle of this loop-the-loop enigma, skewering the slippery narrative to its timeline like a pin through the heart, it’s a love story.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who'll Stop the Rain
    Film has a hardnose progression and solidity in its characterizations. Nolte earns his star stripes here, displaying presence and perceptiveness in socking home his character, while Weld and Moriarty are also effective.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gloria
    Gena Rowlands is excellent as the tired woman who decides to take her chances for the boy. The kid is a right blend of understanding and childish tantrums.
  6. The Goodbye Girl
    The Neil Simon script evolves a series of increasingly intimate and sensitive character encounters as the adults progress from mutual hostility to an enduring love. Performances by Dreyfuss, Mason and Cummings are all great, and the many supporting bits are filled admirably.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night Moves
    Night Moves is a paradox: a suspenseless suspenser, very well cast with players who lend sustained interest to largely synthetic theatrical characters.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    French Connection II
    Hackman’s performance is another career highlight, ranging from cocky narc, Ugly American, helpless addict, humbled ego and relentless avenger.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Next of Kin
    Picture climaxes with an elaborate war in a Chicago cemetery between Baldwin’s mafioso and Neeson’s Kentucky kin, matching automatic weaponry with primitive (but reliable) crossbows, hatchets, snakes and knives.
  10. American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel
    "American Heretics" is eye-opening, but it's never explosive.
  11. The Cat Rescuers
    While the production package is merely workman-like, the commitment, honesty and heart of the main interviewees makes the material compelling.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Gambler
    The Gambler is a compelling and effective film. James Caan is excellent and the featured players are superb. However, it is somewhat overlong in early exposition and has one climax too many.
  13. The Hunt
    The Hunt turns out to be a good deal smarter — and no more extreme — than most studio horror films, while its political angle at least encourages debate, suggesting that there’s more to this hot potato than mere provocation.
  14. The White Storm 2: Drug Lords
    Vigorously directed by prolific veteran Herman Yau (“Shock Wave”) and well served by an all-star cast headed by Andy Lau and Louis Koo, this Hong Kong action-thriller isn’t deep but is certainly not dull.
  15. Eternals
    Zhao’s sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She’s a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch.
  16. This Changes Everything
    Chances are, if you work in Hollywood, This Changes Everything won’t teach you anything you don’t already know. But that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful to hear it articulately communicated by some of the most respected women in the business.
  17. Dying to Survive
    Director and co-writer Wen Muye’s feature debut is a classy crowd-pleaser and an interesting example of a Chinese film that shows public protests and casts officialdom in a frequently unflattering light yet still received the stamp of approval from state censors.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lean on Me
    Morgan Freeman's inspired performance as Joe Clark, the New Jersey principal who uses controversial methods to clean up a drug- and crime-ridden high school, makes it easier to forgive John Avildsen's rather glossy and simplistic treatment of a serious dilemma in the public school system.
  19. Harriet
    Harriet is a conscientiously uplifting, devoted, rock-solid version of her story. Yet when it comes to putting the audience in touch with what’s extraordinary about Harriet Tubman — not just illustrating what she did but letting us connect with that quest, and with her, on a moment-to-moment level — Harriet is a conventional and rather prosaic piece of filmmaking.
  20. Just Mercy
    Cretton ... finds a newly supple way to deliver a liberal Hollywood knockout punch.
  21. Motherless Brooklyn
    Lionel’s mannerisms could have gotten obnoxious in a hurry, but Norton calibrates the performance so that the character remains unpredictable without becoming unbearable.
  22. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    The film picks up more general interest once it moves past the early nobility of the outfit as a band of brothers into the things that cripple the least greatest of groups ... Robertson [is] an articulate and ingratiating tour guide through all this glorious and eventually tortured history.
  23. Blackbird
    Thanks to Michell and a fine cast, it works admirably well — at least to a point, at which some viewers may feel [screenwriter Christian] Torpe piles on one crisis too many.
  24. Ordinary Love
    David Holmes and Brian Irvine’s score is melodic and insistent, and it knows when to fall away into silence to let the audience appreciate Neeson and Manville’s superb chemistry.
  25. Ema
    What’s novel about Ema is that Pablo Larraín has made a movie that, in its form, is every bit as warped and jagged and jarring and difficult to cuddle up to as its heroine.
  26. The Painted Bird
    The film’s sheer unblinking stamina is as impressive as its pristine formal composure, though it has to be said that at nearly three hours — somewhat surprising, considering the novel’s brevity — its blunt-instrument force doesn’t yield much fresh perspective on oft-dramatized atrocities.
  27. Mission Mangal
    Chronic cynics and inveterate snarkers would do themselves — and everyone else — a great big favor by steering clear of Mission Mangal, an entertaining and ingratiating feel-good movie about the 2013 launch of the Mangalyann space probe, an against-all-odds triumph of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
  28. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    An entertaining if hardly exhaustive overview of how the unlikely success came to be. The story it tells might easily have filled an engrossing documentary twice the length of this competent, not-particularly-inspired one.
  29. The Outsider
    Trace Adkins looms large in a dark and brooding sagebrush saga with a healthy dose of Spaghetti Western fatalism.
  30. Ms. Purple
    Though not in their class, Ms. Purple aims for something of the bruised romance of alienation and ennui that Antonioni made his name on (most notably “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse”). The fact that it even lands in the same ballpark without growing too pretentious or mannered — though it’s admittedly a little of both — is admirable, not least for simply being so out-of-step with any current cinematic vogue.
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