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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  1. The New Boy
    In Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable The New Boy, spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.
  2. Robot Dreams
    Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Exodus
    Transposing Leon Uris' hefty novel to the screen was not an easy task. It is to the credit of director Otto Preminger and scenarist Dalton Trumbo that they have done as well as they have. One can, however, wish that they had been blessed with more dramatic incisiveness.
  4. Fallen Leaves
    It’s a nice but exceedingly minor movie. It leaves little imprint.
  5. The Animal Kingdom
    “The Animal Kingdom” isn’t a traditional genre movie so much as a coming-of-age story with a creature-feature twist — picture a moody French “Teen Wolf,” minus the laughs. ... Stumble even for a moment, and the whole movie could feel silly, which is what makes the fact that it works all the more remarkable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    National Velvet
    Story is told with warmth and understanding.
  7. Rotting in the Sun
    With its tricky tone and its wildly ambitious themes, it’s not surprising to find Silva’s outrageous, salacious film stumbling as it brings its many threads into focus. Like Sebastián’s art and his journal in the film, Rotting in the Sun remains a patchwork of quotes and ideas and provocations hastily if hilariously stitched together.
  8. I.S.S.
    While the landing isn’t as smooth as might be hoped for after the exemplary first act, neither does I.S.S. burn up on reentry.
  9. The Dive
    If The Dive’s final stretch feels a bit less urgent than what precedes it, one appreciates that the filmmakers did not pile on the usual melodramatic gotchas, hewing to a relatively realistic course of events.
  10. Stephen Curry: Underrated
    With enough fresh stories to keep basketball fanatics engaged and a coda that every soccer mom will appreciate, this is a film that’s worthy of its subject.
  11. As Far as I Can Walk
    As Far As I Can Walk is most affecting in its circuitous, open-ended irresolution — all too true to the refugee experience — even as it adopts the closed form of a hero’s journey.
  12. Sound of Freedom
    This is a genre thriller. That said, it’s an urgent and honest one, and Caviezel gives his most committed performance since “The Passion of the Christ.”
  13. The Line
    While The Line doesn’t offer an especially unique take on this milieu, it plays well and acts as a solid showcase for its young cast.
  14. The Boy and the Heron
    Better to think of The Boy and the Heron as the bonus round — a worthy but mid-range addition to a remarkable oeuvre that expands his filmography without necessarily topping it.
  15. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    That current of feeling and conviction is what powers the doc through some uneven construction.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stage Fright
    Alfred Hitchcock doesn't stress melodrama throughout. He plays a surprising number of sequences strictly for lightness. Also, he has a choice cast to put through its paces, and there's not a bad performance anywhere [In this adaption by Alma Reville of a novel by Selwyn Jepson]. The dialog has purpose, either for a chuckle or a thrill, and the pace is good.
  17. Best. Christmas. Ever.
    Lambert and screenwriters Todd Calgi Gallicano and Charles Shyer turn in a multi-faceted tale that blessedly never devolves into a one-dimensional story about two competitive, smart women sniping at each other while their clueless families watch from the sidelines.
  18. Peter Case: A Million Miles Away
    Watching this film satisfying tie up Case’s loose ends, you can still lament the lost promise of the Plimsouls, or wonder what might’ve happened with a more copacetic label/artist relationship.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wings
    When the action [from a story by John Monk Saunders] settles on terra firma there is nothing present that other war supers haven’t had, some to a greater degree. But nothing has possessed the graphic descriptive powers of aerial flying and combat that have been poured into this effort.
  20. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    "The Caine Mutiny,” for all the tinkering, remains a warhorse of a play. And that’s both a good and a limited thing. The way Friedkin has directed it, it certainly plays.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Mirror Crack'd
    Taylor has an uproarious good time as she trades bitchy insults with Kim Novak. Adroit supporting performances are given by Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson as Taylor’s husband and director, and Geraldine Chaplin.
  22. AGGRO DR1FT
    Because Korine’s never been one to subscribe to traditional narrative tropes, there’s an insidious sort of suspense running beneath the otherwise-thin plot, like some kind of high-voltage electric current.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
    The comedy team battles it out with the studio's roster of bogeymen in a rambunctious fracas that is funny and, at the same time, spine-tingling. Stalking through the piece to add menace are such characters as the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man and Dracula.
  24. The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
    The Storms of Jeremy Thomas persuasively makes the case for closer scrutiny of a producer’s career, though it leaves viewers with some homework to do.
  25. The Promised Land
    Notionally rooted in historical fact, but embellished with storybook romance and flouncing cartoon villainy, this roundly enjoyable Venice competition entry finally owes all its residual gravitas (and at least half its considerable handsomeness) to the expressive woodcut visage of one Mads Mikkelsen.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Carve Her Name with Pride
    Part of the pic's attraction is its lack of hysteria. It keeps resolutely to the facts [from a book by R.J. Minney] and refuses to allow the espionage and torture sequences to go past the bounds of credulity.
  27. Hit Man
    Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.
  28. Thanksgiving
    Thanksgiving follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have.
  29. One Life
    Although the film as a whole struggles to match the poignancy of its finale . . . it nevertheless serves as an urgent reminder of the importance of individual action at a time when the world refugee crisis is at a scale not seen since the Second World War.
  30. Lee
    Even at her character’s most vulnerable, the Oscar-winning actor presents Lee with an edge of defensiveness, her guard never fully down, likely tied to a traumatic event in childhood.
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