Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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 2.4 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. A Summer's Tale
    The thoughts may not be profound, but they are profoundly true to life,and the writer-director’s approach to young people’s concerns is remarkably universal and timeless.
  2. The BFG
    No matter how fantastical the tale (and it gets pretty out-there at points), this splendid Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation makes it possible for audiences of all ages to wrap their heads around one of the unlikeliest friendships in cinema history, resulting in the sort of instant family classic “human beans” once relied upon Disney to deliver.
  3. Black Mass
    If Johnny Depp’s mesmerizing performance — a bracing return to form for the star after a series of critical and commercial misfires — is the chief selling point of Black Mass, there is much else to recommend this sober, sprawling, deeply engrossing evocation of Bulger’s South Boston fiefdom and his complex relationship with the FBI agent John Connolly, played with equally impressive skill by Joel Edgerton.
  4. The Empty Hours
    Fernandez (“Used Parts”) has a masterful handle on narrative, structure and character, skillfully blending them all in a tale with atmosphere to spare.
  5. Housebound
    Separating Housebound from most films of its type is super-smart plotting and confident tonal control, as Johnstone’s screenplay throws one terrific curve ball after another and never allows its goofy humor to compromise its genuinely scary components.
  6. The Martian
    An enthralling and rigorously realistic outer-space survival story.
  7. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a visionary tour de force, morphing from a childlike gambol into a sophisticated allegory on the folly of materialism and the evanescence of beauty.
  8. The Nice Guys
    The Nice Guys is an ultra-violent burlesque, the sort of cheerfully hostile buddy bash that’s been a staple since the ’80s, only this one is singularly clever about its own triviality, and it offers the scruffy pleasure of seeing two great actors dial down their gravitas with style.
  9. Love & Mercy
    A wonderfully innervating cure for the common musical biopic, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy vibrantly illuminates two major breakthroughs — one artistic, one personal — in the life of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.
  10. Phoenix
    Because Petzold is such a gifted storyteller, with the lean, driving narrative sense of the film noir masters, he also keeps those twists and turns chugging smoothly along, building to a climax so expertly orchestrated that one imagines he started with it in mind and worked the rest of the movie backward from there.
  11. Still Alice
    Julianne Moore guides us through the tragic arc of how it must feel to disappear before one’s own eyes, accomplishing one of her most powerful performances by underplaying the scenario.
  12. Top Five
    Rock is enormously appealing here, balancing his patented comic abrasiveness with a real tenderness, the faint bewilderment of an ordinary man blindsided by his own success. And Dawson makes an excellent foil.
  13. While We're Young
    Though While We’re Young is primarily a comedy — and a very funny one at that, managing to be both blisteringly of-the-moment and classically zany in the same breath — Baumbach has bitten off several serious topics, for which laughter serves as the most agreeable way to engage.
  14. Beloved Sisters
    An enthralling, gorgeously mounted depiction of the complicated relationship between the post-Enlightenment writer and philosopher Friedrich Schiller and the sisters Charlotte von Lengefeld (who would become his wife) and Caroline von Beulwitz (his eventual biographer).
  15. Actress
    Robert Greene's extraordinary collaboration with actress Brandy Burre is a playful, provocative examination of self-performance.
  16. The Supreme Price
    With beauty, brains and dignity to burn, Hafsat Abiola inherits her mother’s mantle and offers riveting insight into the contradictions of a dynasty of reformist aristocracy.
  17. Watchers of the Sky
    An impressive and artful cinematic thesis of palpable substance.
  18. E-Team
    A dynamic and immersive piece of you-are-there verite.
  19. Moana
    As princess movies go, this one broadens the studio’s horizons, and as Moana herself sings in the film, “no one knows, how far it goes.”
  20. Shazam!
    A light, funny, grounded, engagingly unpretentious sleight-of-hand action comedy.
  21. Captain Marvel
    Boden and Fleck are low-key American neorealists, and in Captain Marvel they barely retain a vestige of their signature style. Yet they have brought off something exciting, embracing the Marvel house style and, within that, crafting a tale with enough tricks and moods and sleight-of-hand layers to keep us honestly absorbed.
  22. Night Will Fall
    Night not only conveys the almost unbelievable atrocities captured by the Russian, American and British camera teams and photographers, but also highlights the dedication of the team determined to document and disseminate this evidence and the changing policies of those in charge of postwar reconstruction.
  23. Little Feet
    Here, as in his 1992 breakthrough feature, “In the Soup,” Rockwell conveys his characters’ peculiar suppositions and perceptions using a variety of cinematic approaches, many recalling the untrammeled exuberance of early cinema.
  24. Song of the Sea
    Song of the Sea is differentiated not only by its rich visual design — grayer and more subdued than “The Secret of Kells,” yet still a marvel to behold — but also by its ethereal musical dimension, another collaboration between composer Bruno Coulais and Irish folk band Kila.
  25. Time Out of Mind
    Richard Gere goes slumming in the streets of Manhattan and emerges with one of his more remarkable performances in Time Out of Mind, a haunting piece of urban poetry that further confirms Oren Moverman as a socially conscious filmmaker of rare conviction and authority.
  26. Tales of the Grim Sleeper
    What emerges, finally, is an urgent distress call from one of America’s many, predominately black inner cities cast adrift by decades of municipal neglect and institutional racism.
  27. Maidan
    Beyond the film’s immediacy, “Maidan” is an impressive, bold treatment of a complex subject via rigidly formalist means
  28. The Salt of the Earth
    Wim Wenders’ mastery of the documentary form is again on display in The Salt of the Earth.
  29. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    In Reuveny’s subtle hands, any uplift to emerge from this extraordinary tale is earned, not gratuitously extracted.
  30. The Greatest Showman
    The director, Michael Gracey, is an Australian maker of commercials who has never directed a feature before, and he works with an exuberant sincerity that can’t be faked. The Greatest Showman is a concoction, the kind of film where the pieces all click into place, yet at an hour and 45 minutes it flies by, and the link it draws between P.T. Barnum and the spirit of today is more than hype.
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