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. Happy Accidents
    A lighthearted yarn designed to stand out by virtue of its intricate structure and trippy time-travel element. But the fanciful material wears thin pretty quickly, the air leaking out of the balloon long before party's over.
  2. Cellular
    Because plot is the sum total here, the alarming holes, inconsistencies and impossibilities in Chris Morgan's script corrode this drama of distress.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Never Been Kissed
    A likable romantic comedy with an engaging premise and strong cast.
  4. Brassed Off
    This well-played, often very sparky dramedy about the shenanigans in a northern brass band composed of miners threatened with pit closure gets a bad attack of social realism in the latter stages that rocks the crowded craft.
  5. Conventioneers
    Filmmakers' own left-leaning sympathies are occasionally felt around the margins, but Conventioneers achievement lies in its honoring the sincerity and passion on both sides.
  6. Behind the Burly Q
    The women's outspoken commentaries prove consistently colorful and their long-ago stripteases -- feathers flying, tassels spinning -- still pack a sensual, sassy, what-the-hell punch.
  7. Max Manus
    This engaging second feature from "Bandidas" duo Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning combines artistic ambition and commercial appeal with a well-paced action-adventure approach.
  8. Happy, Happy
    Picture ultimately pulls off a fairly ambitious narrative agenda with a wrap both credible and crowdpleasing.
  9. RA. One
    Much of the film is marked by a sense of dead air, owing to the fact that there's not a lot of story, but nevertheless, per Bollywood conventions, a lot of time to fill.
  10. The Other F Word
    The Other F Word is a raucous, eye-opening, sad and unexpectedly wise look at veteran punk rockers as they adapt to the challenges of fatherhood.
  11. Mateo
    It’s easy to see what drew filmmaker Aaron I. Naar to his eponymous subject in Mateo, but it’s almost impossible to share his enthusiasm or even feel much sympathy for a figure who, for a good chunk of this sluggish yet disconcerting documentary, comes across as a genuinely creepy person.
  12. The Violators
    This study of adolescent desire and alienation across class lines takes its time nurturing a tensely ambiguous relationship between its two young female leads — alertly played by newcomers Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis — only to squander a measure of that intrigue on a blunt third-act twist.
  13. Sacred
    It is entirely well intentioned. But the fair-mindedness of Lennon’s approach also contributes to a sense, ironically enough, of godlike detachment from the slivers of life and faith the film comprises.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blues Brothers
    If Universal had made it 35 years earlier, The Blues Brothers might have been called Abbott & Costello in Soul Town. Level of inspiration is about the same now as then, the humor as basic, the enjoyment as fleeting. But at $30 million, this is a whole new ball-game.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Andromeda Strain
    The Andromeda Strain is a high-budget science-fact melodrama, marked by superb production, an excellent score, and intriguing story premise and an exciting conclusion. But Nelson Gidding's adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel is too literal and talky.
    • Variety
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Make Mine Music
    Make Mine music is a 75-minute Walt Disney treat. You can call it a big short which, technically, is just what it is - 10 items pieced together in one 'musical fantasy' as it is billed - but it entertains all the way.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cat Ballou
    Middlingly successful, sparked by an amusing way-out approach and some sparkling performances.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Escape to Witch Mountain
    Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann are happy choices as the orphans.
  19. Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story
    What begins as seemingly another lurid Netflix true-crime excavation emerges as a considerably more affecting testament to the damage wrought by generation upon generation of sexual abuse.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coffy
    Jack Hill, who wrote and directs with an action-atuned hand, inserts plenty of realism in footage in which Pam Grier in title role ably acquits herself.
  21. Caveat
    Mc Carthy serves up a generically foreboding premise and pulls off several efficiently traditional jump scares in this variation on a haunted-house formula, but it’s the shape-shifting mind games of his own narrative that most unnerve the viewer, as seemingly fixed plot points of who is under threat — and when, and why, and so on — keep darting out of sight.
  22. Justice
    Justice re-equips the anti-Kavanaugh side by pulling a more streamlined narrative from the blizzard of detail that threatened observers at the time with snow-blindness.
  23. Between Two Worlds
    The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.
  24. Analyze This
    The gradual dilution of fresh humor is further undercut by a queasy sense that the picture, in the end, is quietly endorsing all the psychoanalytical mumbo jumbo that it has been poking fun at all along.
  25. Mrs. Hyde
    Half enjoyable, half frustrating.
  26. They Came Together
    A lively comic jamboree that’s sometimes smarter than it is funny and hits about as often as it misses, but is, on balance, a good deal of fun.
  27. Bad Tales
    Drowning in style but shallow in substance.
  28. The Music Never Stopped
    The novel premise and otherwise nuanced performances are enough to hold attention.
  29. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    While trying to save her from being considered as merely an inspiration to the great men around her, the script inadvertently reinforces this impression.
  30. To the Stars
    To the Stars needn’t have taken itself so seriously, but the fact that it ultimately does is exactly what turns it from a potentially charming, bittersweet fable to a pretentiously overblown yet undercooked Amerindie soap opera.
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