Variety's Scores

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:
17837 movie reviews
  1. As it winds its way toward an unexpectedly grisly final showdown, The Other Woman often feels stranded between gross-out comedy, romantic fantasy and distaff psychodrama in a way that compels fascination and impatience alike.
  2. For Semans’ conceit of an obsessively narrow world to really work, he needed to have established an initially more expansive milieu.
  3. Clearly, Wheatley is bored with the paint-by-numbers approach of his horror contemporaries, but has swung so far in the opposite direction here, the result feels almost amateurishly avant garde at times, guilty of the sort of indulgences one barely tolerates in student films.
  4. Franco offers up a competently acted, technically adequate Cliff Notes take on Faulkner’s narratively refracted tale of dirt-poor Mississippi folk in mourning.
  5. Bruni Tedeschi holds all of pic’s myriad tangents in a delicate balance, no single one ever rising to the fore, no pressure felt to wrap everything — or anything — up in a tidy package at the end.
  6. The film is easier to admire than it is to invest in emotionally, though its pulse quickens with a dramatic, and boldly untelegraphed, feminist twist in the rural-set final reel.
  7. A sweet but slight love story about world-weary hipster bloodsuckers.
  8. There’s a certain pleasure to be had in seeing a revered auteur go off the disreputable deep end, and there’s no denying A Touch of Sin packs a visceral wallop.
  9. This tale of a violently disillusioned medical student’s wade into the weird world of extreme body modification doesn’t develop all its narrative and thematic ideas to the fullest. But the polished pic is still outre and entertaining enough to please most jaded horror fans.
  10. Even in the movie’s most ridiculous moments, Collet-Serra keeps the pacing brisk and knows how to divert our attention with a well-timed bit of comic relief.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Leigh builds a slight story intended to be a microcosm of today’s London.
  11. For Altman, this is a major statement about American hypocrisy and society’s haves and have-nots, in line with many of his films, but issued in a kind of offhand way that delivers only glancing emotional impact.
  12. A polished, watchable genre entertainment that nonetheless lacks the inspired dialogue and situations needed to make a memorable impression.
  13. A passable, tolerable, not unbearable, totally inoffensive adaptation of Judith Viorst’s beloved 1972 children’s book.
  14. It’s fine — and true enough to Marvel — to make a “Spider-Man” movie about a young adult, but Spider-Man: Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavor.
  15. Glossy, well cast, and a consistent hoot until it becomes a serious drag, this neo-“9½ Weeks” is above all a slick exercise in carefully brand-managed titillation — edgier than most grown-up studio fare, but otherwise a fairly mild provocation in this porn-saturated day and age.
  16. Sophisticated cutting brings out the story’s complex emotional undercurrents, though “Breakdown’s” less convincingly scripted second half sputters more often than it shines.
  17. Hendrickson shot “Colossus” from a partial script, leaving room for improvisation, and the movie’s loose, shapeless feel and scenes that go on far too long are the telltale signs of a filmmaker who fell so in love with his own material that he couldn’t bring himself to kill his darlings.
  18. Ron Frank and Melvut Akkaya’s docu isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but as a brief history of the Catskill resorts, liberally laced with well-edited archival promos, songs, homemovies and extended excerpts from routines by Jewish comics who performed there, it consistently entertains.
  19. The Judge pivots on a simple yet inspired stroke of casting, pitting Duvall’s iconic gravitas against Downey’s razor-sharp wit, and then supplying no shortage of opportunities for both men to chew the scenery.
  20. Director Vincenzo Natali (“Splice”) is more effective at sustaining clammy suspense than hiding all the holes in Brian King’s script. But top-billed Abigail Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”) is effective enough to generate a rooting interest in the plucky protagonist of the piece, and to sustain interest when narrative logic turns fuzzy.
  21. Full of warmth and refreshingly matter-of-fact sexuality, the film has its heart in the right place, yet it’s ultimately a bit blander than its subject matter ought to demand, and its chamber-piece intimacy and pileup of coincidences scan particularly awkwardly given its convincingly wide-open depiction of New York.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    US suburbia boredom is treated in an original manner in this cross between a sci-fi opus, a thriller, a suspense pic and a parable on certain aspects of American middle-class life.
  22. Director D.J. Caruso offers a practical solution to the issue of adolescent bullying, as its two young protags respond to a case of vicious hazing not with despair or retaliation, but through teamwork and character-building.
  23. Resolutely sappy and sometimes amateurish, the briskly paced doc remains heartfelt and direct about the same admirable mission Wampler had in making the climb.
  24. A cheerfully silly action fantasy.
  25. Though never dull, the result is a curiously distant meditation on intimacy.
  26. Those with just a casual interest will find it colorful if a bit undercooked in the human-interest department, with limited insight into what makes its subjects tick, and the occasional rivalries between them.
  27. An initially intriguing but ultimately exhausting tale of grieving parents left quite literally dazed and confused in the wake of their young son’s death.
  28. There’s something decidedly old-fashioned — and also dull as ditchwater — about Jonathan Teplitzky’s retelling of events.

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