Variety's Scores

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For 17,840 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: 9,167 out of 17840
  2. Mixed: 7,035 out of 17840
  3. Negative: 1,638 out of 17840
17840 movie reviews
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  1. Magnifico
    A wholesome family movie with a moppet star and tearjerker ending, Magnifico milks the sentiment like an industrial dairy machine on overdrive.
  2. Benji
    Benji may be far too simplistic for adults to find much enjoyment in watching, but it rewards active viewing from kids and displays mostly model behavior on the part of its young protagonists (once they stop keeping secrets from their mother, that is).
  3. Knock Knock
    [A] glossy and reasonably fun update of Peter Traynor’s 1977 exploitation movie “Death Game.”
  4. Late Bloomers
    While the world could certainly use more films about characters entering their sunset years, a solution as toothless and saggy as Julie Gavras' Late Bloomers does little to help the cause.
  5. Private Romeo
    Sticking closely to the written text (with basketballs and barbells supplying incidental props) and wisely not attempting to reimagine the specific circumstances that separate the lovers, a dynamite ensemble cast of young actors invests the Bard's poetry with energetic immediacy.
  6. Chagall-Malevich
    To call results over-the-top is less a criticism than a statement of intent. While it may be old-fashioned and silly in many respects, Mitta’s film is not dull, and its heedless embrace of cliche has a retro charm.
  7. On a Magical Night
    On a Magical Night is whimsically cute, provocative in a coy way, and more than a little in love with itself.
  8. Beyond Outrage
    The Japanese action aesthete plays it cool and smooth in a picture that exerts a steadily tightening grip, though not until after a first hour of near-impenetrable gangster gab that may leave the uninitiated feeling stranded.
  9. Humor Me
    Humor Me manages to earn its audience’s indulgence, if never its full affection.
  10. Finding Steve McQueen
    Finding Steve McQueen is a ramshackle indie heist drama that has a little bit (but not much) to do with Steve McQueen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Subway
    Result may disappoint some for its singular lack of ambition or purpose and its ragged narrative, but still proves a charmingly cartoonish escapade, strong on humor and rock rhythms.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death Takes a Holiday
    It is the kind of story and picture that beckons the thinker, and for this reason is likely to have greater appeal among the intelligentsia. [27 Feb 1934, p.17]
    • Variety
  13. The Journey
    The Journey, thanks to its buddy-movie structure, is destined to feel a little corny, but the movie gets at something real. It’s a celebration, by two splendid actors, of the art of political theater.
  14. Rent
    Director Chris Columbus has pasted the grungy "La Boheme" update onto film with slavish respect for the original material but a shortage of stylistic imagination and raw emotions.
  15. Hellbound?
    By narrowing its range of voices to Christian leaders, thinkers and writers, Kevin Miller's sober, stimulating documentary on the hot topic of eternal damnation necessarily limits its audience, but achieves a level of rhetorical eloquence that would theoretically appeal to open-minded viewers of any religious stripe.
  16. Another Stakeout
    The most amazing thing about Another Stakeout is that even though some of its skits are dopey and cloying and its plot recycled and derivative, the movie is still very amusing.
  17. Renfield
    Cage’s Dracula, sipping blood out of a martini glass, is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Suspect
    Art imitates art - and not very well - in Peter Yates' gimmicky suspense drama sabotaged by a flimsy script full of cliches.
  19. Free State of Jones
    For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.
  20. Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick, in its quick verbal exchanges, its naked sexuality, its general air of busting taboos as if they were oversize balloons, is recognizably a Lena Dunham movie. But it’s the first one of her projects in which the parts don’t quite add up, because it seems as if what we’re watching hasn’t been so much created as contrived.
  21. I Trust You to Kill Me
    Deftly mixing alternating tracks of playful rowdiness, thoughtful introspection, ferociously slamming rock and not-so-quiet desperation, helmer Manu Boyer scores impressively with I Trust You to Kill Me, arguably the best rockumentary since "Some Kind of Monster."
  22. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    The way a movie like “Goosebumps 2” works, even a weary adult will be grateful, by the time it finally kicks in, for all the brainless whirling distraction. I almost wrote fun, but that would be pushing it. To achieve that F-word, the film would have to ground its amusing effects in a story that was less skittery yet leaden.
  23. A Good Woman
    Has a script that plays more like a period romancer studded with occasional Wilde-isms and gets uneven treatment from a mixed Anglo-American cast.
  24. The Big Question
    Intriguing and surprisingly witty.
  25. Another Evil
    Another Evil is somewhat unpredictable and nicely played, but so low-key that the comedy as well as everything else feels almost too modest for feature scale; it has the throwaway, anecdotal tenor of a droll short.
  26. Run
    The film, effective on its own unassuming terms, seems to cut out with some distance left to run.
  27. The Magician's Elephant
    While the movie itself is more whimsical than magical, it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.
  28. Stormy
    “Stormy” shows you what the scandal looks like from inside the sensationalist bubble of fame, and by the end of the film you may be a little bit ashamed of us all.
  29. The Killer Inside Me
    A film that should but doesn't get under your skin and give you the creeps.
  30. The Rocker
    Wilson makes the most of it in this well-crafted, feel-good satire.
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