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. Maudie
    What little dimension Maudie offers is a direct result of Hawkins’ contributions, which draw from her character’s past to add texture to her performance.
  2. 20th Century Women
    20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.
  3. The Apostate
    Gonzalo’s dalliances add up to precious little, but Veiroj’s comic tone finds purchase in his absurd run-ins with the bishop and a church so unwilling to lose a member from the rolls that they’ll stick him in a bureaucratic roundabout until he gives up.
  4. Rat Film
    Artfully assembled and often entertaining, the diverse whole nonetheless doesn’t quite gel, with the film finally coming off as somewhat pretentious and heavy-handed.
  5. Blair Witch
    Setting up a number of promising kinks in the now-standard found-footage formula, as the seemingly spooked forest begins to close in its hapless victims, Blair Witch disappointingly casts most of them aside for a finale that does little to advance the series’ existing mythos.
  6. Eternity
    Éternité is a meditative, gorgeous-looking film imbued with such gentle sensitivity that it’s difficult to dislike. Yet the experience of watching it is much like sitting in an opulent garden café on a glorious spring morning, waiting for a meal that never arrives.
  7. Catfight
    That it succeeds more often than not is due in no small part to Heche and Oh, who are wonderfully unafraid to make their characters deplorable people, and also able to invest their downfalls with sincere pathos, complicating any schadenfreude one might be expecting to find.
  8. Never Ever
    It’s Roy, having written herself a part for which many actresses would patiently wait, who does the heavy lifting here: Playing a woman who’s either losing her mind or playing dangerously at it, with as much attention paid to body language as befits her character’s artistic calling, she makes a revelatory, slightly otherworldly impression.
  9. The Untamed
    While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.
  10. Wakefield
    Cranston humanizes his sociopathic character, which is essential, considering that Wakefield is essentially a one-man show whose star grows increasingly creepy as his beard fills in and his fingernails lengthen and turn back.
  11. Rats
    Rats is that rare breed of nature doc, one designed not to foster greater empathy for a misunderstood species, but rather to exploit our preexisting fears of the filthy critters in question.
  12. A Street Cat Named Bob
    Unpretentiously touching on the page, this material feels stretched a bit thin on film, with televisual production values and a samey song score doing little to enrich matters: Still, it’s sweetly hopeful .
  13. Belle Épine
    Unfolding with the disjointed logic of a bad dream, the pic never catches emotional fire — though not for lack of trying by fast-rising young star Lea Seydoux, who shows her range in a defiantly unglamorous performance.
  14. Don't Look Down
    A solid, and solidly engaging film that nevertheless feels like an extended promo for the Branson brand.
  15. 150 Milligrams
    Televisually presented and arduously overlong at 127 minutes, 150 Milligrams can’t always separate the compelling personal stakes of its narrative from its surfeit of informational minutiae.
  16. Mulan
    Storyboarded to within an inch of its life, then translated to screen with stunning energy and attention to detail, the film represents Hollywood’s most enthusiastic embrace of blockbuster Asian cinema tropes since “The Matrix” trilogy.
  17. XX
    Even at their least individually striking, each of these mismatched tasters stirs an appetite for a fuller, meatier meal from its maker — cooked as bloodily rare as possible, please.
  18. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.
  19. SiREN
    Siren is lively if occasionally rough around the edges, packing a satisfying amount of action and a couple of amusingly nasty surprises into its short running time.
  20. Gifted
    Gifted wants to be an “honest” tearjerker, but it’s as plotted out as an equation on a blackboard. It’s the undergirding of formula that roots the movie in the commercial marketplace, but that may ultimately limit its appeal.
  21. The Last Word
    Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.
  22. Sky on Fire
    There’s really nothing new here. Still, it’s hard to deny the sporadically satisfying nostalgic appeal of this dash down memory lane.
  23. Beyond the Gates
    This fun if unmemorable occult thriller sports — all too faithfully at times — both the typical pleasures and shortcomings of the movies it pays homage to.
  24. Alone in Berlin
    Tastefully lit and art-directed throughout, with a somberly mellifluous Alexandre Desplat score to ease it along, this fact-based drama finally cushions its harshest emotional blows, though Brendan Gleeson’s deeply sad, stoic dignity in the lead cuts through some of the padding.
  25. American Wrestler: The Wizard
    What the movie lacks in originality it makes up for in personality, as Kosturos brings the kind of rare alchemy to the role of Ali that makes all present feel as if they’re watching the birth of a movie star.
  26. How to Be a Latin Lover
    There are some very funny bits and pieces scattered amid the proceedings, along with a few darkly comical gags that appear to belong in a different movie, but are more than welcome here.
  27. A Bad Moms Christmas
    The new film, while just okay enough to get by, takes a step back from the audacity of “Bad Moms” to something more cautiously conventional.
  28. Leap!
    An unabashed wish-fulfilment fantasy that sweetly checks off every conceivable follow-your-heart cliché.
  29. American Fable
    Gorgeously shot, and helmed with a sense of daring and verve that belies Hamilton’s greenness to feature filmmaking, this is a debut of obvious promise, although its story never quite rises to the level of its craft.
  30. The Case for Christ
    Although it sporadically errs on the side of sentimentality and simplification, The Case for Christ sustains interest, and even generates mild suspense, while offering a faith-based spin on the template of an investigative-journalism drama.
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