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 Ice Tower
    It can start to feel quite tedious, unless you allow your brain to engage with the movie on an almost subconscious level. That’s where the incredible attention paid to crafts — the cinematography, sets, costumes and sound design — kick in at last, and “The Ice Tower” becomes a sort of reverie in which we just might see ourselves reflected.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Search
    This simple film was made in the American zone of Germany, principally in and around the rubbled remains of Nuremberg. Only four of its actors are professionals, the others having been recruited on the spot.
  3. Being Maria
    Being Maria is a flawed but fascinating look at the turbulent life of actor Maria Schneider.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    El
    Luis Bunuel has fashioned an absorbing melodramatic psycho pic out of El. Although the story [from the novel Pensiamentos by Mercedes Pinto] borders on the banal, fine direction and acting keep this within bounds, and give a dimension to the harrowing tale of a madman's attempt to love.
  5. The Senior
    It’s basically a soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie, stocked with homilies about the game of football vs. the game of life. Yet it’s an effective soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie.
  6. Bullet Train Explosion
    Bullet Train Explosion feels like a blockbuster made for adults — or let’s say, not for a lowest-common-denominator audience — where the priority is throwing challenges and complications at smart characters instead of sparking conflict with cheap narrative shortcuts and bad, even dumb choices.
  7. Going All the Way
    Given that the story’s trajectory isn’t very surprising, it’s up to the character details and local color to imbue it with life, and in this the film largely succeeds.
  8. Nobody 2
    For a while, the movie is like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” if Clark Griswold had secretly been Steven Seagal. Is it remotely “believable”? No. But “Nobody 2,” like “Nobody” before it, unfolds in its own weirdly grounded action-fantasy universe. Odenkirk has the ability to make behaving glumly fretful seem like a form of slyness; he’s really creating a conspiracy with the audience.
  9. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    The affectionate reunion of alter-kocker rockers plays like a greatest hits of past laughs, building to a thrilling live performance of songs fans know by heart, featuring guest appearances from several bona fide music gods.
  10. The Rivals of Amziah King
    The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.
  11. The Threesome
    The results are mixed in ways the filmmakers probably didn’t intend, but they’re at once genuinely intriguing and enormously charming given the talent involved.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    Montgomery’s portrayal is a highlight in a group of excellent performances. Keyes displays plenty of charm. James Gleason scores as the fast-gabbing fight manager, who is bewildered by the proceedings. Direction by Alexander Hall sustains a fast pace throughout.
  13. Summer of 69
    It’s a big step backward from the likes of “Anora” in terms of respecting sex workers, but at least it scores as many laughs.
  14. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    Excerpted interviews with WWII and Vietnam veterans suggest that every war is hell, yet it is the specificity of the Iraq War combatants' reminiscences that makes their writing resonate so profoundly.
  15. The Naked Gun
    The Naked Gun has enough honest laughs to get by.
  16. Dangerous Animals
    The efficient and highly effective thriller scarcely allows a calm moment in which to question how deranged its premise truly is.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Angel on My Shoulder
    Rains shines as the Devil, shading the character with a likeable puckishness good for both sympathy and chuckles. Anne Baxter is excellent as the troubled fiancee.
  18. Queens of Drama
    The only way to enjoy Queens of Drama is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers.
  19. Neighborhood Watch
    There’s no great effort at building tension, or orchestrating major setpieces. But the narrative moves along at an engaging clip, and there’s a pleasing emotional payoff to the way things ultimately come together in Farley’s screenplay.
  20. Heads of State
    “Nobody” director Ilya Naishuller takes gags that have no business working . . . and milks them for laughs, adding original solutions to otherwise familiar action scenes.
  21. Him
    Tipping embraces the self-indulgent label of “elevated horror,” crafting a tense, trippy, ultra-stylized movie that’s so surreal at times, it might feel like you’re watching an extension of Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle.”
  22. Bono: Stories of Surrender
    While the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.
  23. Mountainhead
    The ambition of Mountainhead is much lower than diagnosing the underlying dysfunction of the privileged few who run the world, settling for putting their dysfunction on caustically hilarious display.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It Came from Outer Space
    Direction by Jack Arnold whips up an air of suspense and there is considerable atmosphere of reality created, which stands up well enough if the logic of it all is not examined too closely.
  25. Drop Dead City
    Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.
  26. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.
  27. Colours of Time
    Colours of Time doesn’t want to surprise so much as to please, and the multiple, largely antagonist-free storylines are just charming enough to keep the absence of real conflict from becoming a problem.
  28. A Private Life
    While the ultimate destination somewhat underwhelms, it’s a thrill to see Foster navigating a fully bilingual role, while tossing off the kind of personal insights only an expat could feel toward the French — a tiny glimpse into Foster’s private life, perhaps.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ring
    Hitchcock gets more out of Lilian Hall-Davis than any Continental director and at times makes her reminiscent of Lya de Putti.
  30. The Unholy Trinity
    It’s not just a wallow in nostalgia: It also stands on its own merits as a satisfying entertainment that could easily find a receptive audience among folks who’ve never seen, or even heard of, such golden oldies as “Seven Ways from Sundown” or “Gunfight at Comanche Creek.”
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