Variety's Scores

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For 17,837 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 17837
  2. Mixed: 7,034 out of 17837
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17837
17837 movie reviews
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  1. Where God Left His Shoes
    Piles the pathos high as if to see how many hard-luck cliches its pugilist hero can fend off without succumbing to schmaltz. Given John Leguizamo's knockout perf, sentimentality never dares raise its head, and the improbably stacked deck from which his character is dealt gives the pic's would-be "neo-realist" premise a peculiar edge.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beyond the Sea
    Manages to be at once historically elucidating and personally compelling.
  3. Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox
    Tyro helmer Sara Lamm satisfyingly stitches together the family soap opera into a comfortable crazy quilt without sacrificing its unique, oddly topical edge.
  4. Oka!
    If movies were subject to sanity tests, Oka! would be a crazy old man with a three-day beard and a sock full of kruggerrands under his mattress.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The tender story, with its frank and unashamed assault on the emotions, still has its effective moments at times when the sentiment doesn’t grow a little too thick.
  6. Brides
    Clearly inspired by cases like that of Shamima Begum, the London teen who traveled in secret to Syria to become an ISIS bride, Nadia Fall‘s debut feature seems on the surface like a hot-button provocation, but it’s surprisingly humane and good-humored in its attempt to understand the individual lives behind a sensational headline issue.
  7. Lower City
    Though the storyline is dirt simple and not particularly meaningful or involving, the action in this character-driven film is scintillatingly sexy.
  8. Faraway, So Close!
    Overlong and ultra-slow, this meditation on the sad state of things will tax the patience of even dedicated Wenders fans.
  9. Zeros and Ones
    What Zeros and Ones does do — deliberately, calculatedly, in the kind of messy intuitive manner that’s been the director’s signature of late — is reproduce the general state of unease and insecurity that’s plagued most of us during lockdown.
  10. Nigerian Prince
    Okoro has bent over backwards not to make the poverty-row version of a glib crime thriller, but he shouldn’t have bent so far.
  11. The Place of No Words
    While occasionally wearisome in its fragmented structure ... Webber’s film navigates the vast notion of grief gently and with seriousness.
  12. Coup!
    This is quick, nippy entertainment that raises plenty of sociopolitical talking points without digging too deep into any of them.
  13. Tetris
    Tapping into late-1980s nostalgia — including the launch of the handheld Game Boy console — the movie doubles as a nifty history lesson, reminding audiences of just how tense things were between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.
  14. The Best Man
    Overall, this smooth, glossy, enjoyable film showcases an impressive new authorial voice.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Comfort of Strangers
    Neither the beguiling romance of Venice nor the undraped bodies of Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett can disguise the hollowness of The Comfort of Strangers.
  16. Rob Peace
    A sense of tangible intellect looms just beneath its surface — not only Rob’s supposed genius, but the movie’s own identity as political cinema. But it never quite unearths this, even though “Rob Peace” establishes Ejiofor as a director with a knack for dramatic storytelling, in a way his previous film could not.
  17. Velvet Buzzsaw
    In her capacity as a film critic — and the sort of populist who was allergic to snobs like Morf — Pauline Kael famously quipped, “Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.” Gilroy doesn’t even aspire to making great art, but he’s getting better at delivering the latter.
  18. Dead Snow
    The pic reveals itself as a horror-action-comedy a la "Evil Dead," with amusing twists of fate and over-the-top gore.
  19. Notes on Marie Menken
    Handsome tribute is paid to the eponymous experimental filmmaker in Notes on Marie Menken, the fourth feature by Austrian docu helmer Martina Kudlacek, who previously made "In the Mirror of Maya Deren."
  20. Antarctica: Ice and Sky
    A colossally overproduced white elephant of a movie that obfuscates both its own protagonist and his important message with layer upon layer of unnecessary “style.”
  21. First Girl I Loved
    This watchable but middling drama tackles a worthy, relatable subject without quite figuring out what to say about it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Swiss Family Robinson
    The rather modest 1813 Johann Wyss tale has been blown up to prodigious proportions. The essence and the spirit of the simple, intriguing story of a marvelously industrious family is all but snuffed out, only spasmodically flickering through the ponderous approach.
  23. When You Finish Saving the World
    To When You’re Finished Saving the World, being good is exhausting and miserable, and aspiring to be good is even worse. Joy exists only to be taken away.
  24. Dogville
    An artistically experimental, ideologically apocalyptic blast at American values that is as obvious in intent as it is murky in aesthetic achievement.
  25. Scream VI
    Scream VI, while it goes on for too long, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a homicidal shell game that‘s clever in all the right ways, staged and shot more forcefully than the previous film, eager to take advantage of its more sprawling but enclosed cosmopolitan setting.
  26. The War Within
    An honorable but failed attempt to dramatize the dynamics that propel a basically good man to become a suicide bomber, The War Within contains provocative points inside a dull package.
  27. The Bourne Legacy
    Subbing character actor Jeremy Renner into a franchise that requires Matt Damon-caliber magnetism, series scribe Tony Gilroy takes over the helming duties with an overlong sequel that features too little action and an unnecessarily complicated plot.
  28. Elysium
    Even working within a more conventional framework, Blomkamp again proves to be a superb storyteller. He has a master’s sense of pacing, slowly immersing us into his future world rather than assailing us with nonstop action, and envisioning that world with an architect’s eye for the smallest details.
  29. Boynton Beach Club
    Briskly paced humor and/or pathos flow organically from situation and characters.
  30. American Blackout
    If all that Ian Inaba's latest Guerilla News Network missive, American Blackout, wants to do is get left Democrats worked up into a lather of righteous anger at crafty Republicans, it does so at the expense of speaking to any other group of Americans. As such, docu is extremely limited and almost without purpose except as an organizing tool for party foot soldiers.
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