Variety's Scores

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For 17,828 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: 9,160 out of 17828
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17828
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17828
17828 movie reviews
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  1. The Virgin Psychics
    Watching Sion Sono’s unruly telepathic sex comedy The Virgin Psychics is a bit like having a dog hump your leg for the better part of two hours; it’s filthy and monotonous and fairly interminable, but after a while you’ve been so thoroughly numbed that you have to admit it’s kind of sweet.
  2. Ratchet & Clank
    Whether or not they’re familiar with the source property, kids are unlikely to be bothered: There’s just enough blaring sound and color to this knowingly silly tale of interplanetary derring-do to adequately offset its impersonal corporate sheen.
  3. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    The arguments between Ramanujan and Hardy form easily the most absorbing aspect of The Man Who Knew Infinity, as their eloquent clash of wills is shown to be not just intellectual but ideological in nature.
  4. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    It is all aggressively stylized, abusively fast-paced and ear-bleedingly loud, relying so heavily on CGI that nothing — not one thing — seems to correspond to the real world.
  5. The Wannabe
    Since Thomas’ character is incapable of change or variation, and the film’s only engaging supporting players occupy a small fraction of the running time, it falls squarely upon Arquette to carry the film.
  6. Criminal Activities
    There’s nothing remotely fresh about this revival, but tight pacing and an overqualified cast keep things zipping along nicely.
  7. Hard Labor
    Hard Labor teeters uncertainly between horror and social commentary. It feels as if the helmers tried to imagine what Bunuel would have done if he had made a horror film.
  8. Snatched
    The movie’s mother-daughter jokes are like firecrackers with damp fuses.
  9. Christmas Eve
    Christmas Eve isn’t likely to make anyone feel exceptionally merry. Still, it remains modestly diverting from scene to scene.
  10. Prescription Thugs
    Engaging and enraging but also, alas, consistently superficial.
  11. It's Only the End of the World
    Here, in cinema’s most unpleasant genre (the dysfunctional family gathering), Dolan has found a way to exasperate and exhaust his audience, but he has also achieved a completely unexpected catharsis at the end of an agonizing hour and a half.
  12. Hyena Road
    This is the kind of movie where a major development in a character’s personal life instantly telegraphs his ultimate fate in the trenches.
  13. The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
    With its sultry two-tone, blue-and-bronze design, Sfar’s version certainly looks stunning, but it’s remarkably empty-headed.
  14. Ip Man 3
    Less offensively nationalistic than the second installment but falling short of the glowing humanity, genial Cantonese humor and visual flair of the first, the pic is somewhat tarnished by its pedestrian plot and limp characterization.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rocky IV
    Beyond its visceral appeal, Rocky IV is truly the worst of the lot, though Stallone himself is more personable in this one and that helps.
  16. Bolshoi Babylon
    “Babylon” actually provides little more than a lot of vague insinuations. Exasperatingly, it doesn’t even offer more detail on the Dmitrichenko affair.
  17. The Ones Below
    Farr delves into the sticky issue of parental ambivalence, but he only goes deep enough to carve a small pit in the viewer’s stomach.
  18. Safe
    The audaciousness that marked Todd Haynes’ earlier work has been supplanted by self-important preachiness in Safe.
  19. Diablo
    On the surface, Diablo would seem to have all of the proper ingredients for a rollicking retro Western, yet its sights are set a bit higher, which inspires both admiration for its moxie and disappointment that its script and direction aren’t up to the challenge.
  20. The Bye Bye Man
    Even when it seems to be making things up as it goes along, its slapdash hallucinatory quality is a token gesture toward placing you inside the characters’ heads.
  21. Synchronicity
    Synchronicity is best approached as a sort of Rubik’s cube, a series of shiny, sliding, interlocking surfaces that require dexterity to move and figure out, but contain nothing beneath of pressing value.
  22. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    Most of the surface pleasures of filmic Potterdom (the chiaroscuro tones, the overqualified character actors, the superb costuming, James Newton Howard’s warmly enveloping score) have survived intact, but real magic is in short supply.
  23. Misconduct
    A flagrantly derivative but modestly diverting drama.
  24. Embers
    Embers offers a series of compelling premises and never follows through on them, content to drift along on its characters’ dull malaise and allow self-conscious visual poetry to stand in for real emotion.
  25. Naz & Maalik
    The intense focus on the two lead characters emerges as both a strength and a weakness. There’s a lot of walking and talking, and what begins as rather charming ultimately turns tedious, even with a fleet 80-minute running time before closing credits factor in.
  26. Kevin Hart: What Now?
    He leaps so quickly into exaggeration that he bypasses reality, and the result isn’t very funny.
  27. Goat
    To pretend that the pledges (who voluntarily submit to such harassment) are somehow the victims in an institution of exclusion, objectification and underage substance abuse goes far beyond disingenuous, and the resulting film falls far short of actually surprising those who already know a thing or two about fraternities.
  28. The Bounce Back
    The Bounce Back was co-written, directed, and edited by Youseff Delara, and for a while he creates some lively screwball tension.
  29. Baywatch
    The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.
  30. JeruZalem
    The movie’s occasional stabs at political commentary never quite pay off. Nor can the writer-directors, brothers Yoav and Doron Paz, fully sustain the film’s novelty into the second half, when the script reverts to timeless, tired monster-movie tropes.
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