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. River of Grass
    River of Grass works much better as a jokey , theoretical piece of genre revisionism than as a real movie.
  2. Joshy
    Joshy offers a strange mix of elements that never quite add up.
  3. How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town
    How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town emerges as surprisingly tame fluff, a modestly amusing trifle scarcely saucier than those wink-wink naughty farces that were staples of the ’70s dinner-theater circuit.
  4. Collateral Beauty
    By the end of Collateral Beauty, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.
  5. F9: The Fast Saga
    Considering that F9 is Lin’s fifth “F and F” film and his first one in eight years, it goes through the motions with more energy than intoxication.
  6. Five Nights in Maine
    Attempting to naturalistically capture the hugely internal process of mourning, but rarely managing to offer much of an opening into that process, Curran’s tasteful, challenging yet ultimately inscrutable debut feature never quite lives up to the caliber of her fine cast.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Born in Flames
    It is impertinent, audacious, abounding in fresh ideas, considerably untraditional ideas. On the other hand, it is disjointed, with no real characters, preachy, the script unsufficiently developed and the acting often amateurish.
  8. White Girl
    As much as White Girl has to offer in raw immediacy, it lacks the distance to offer much in the way of meaningful commentary, distinguishing itself (for the worse) from such earth-shaking social critics as Bret Easton Ellis and Harmony Korine.
  9. Snowtime!
    Covering the emotional spectrum between dog farts on one end and tragedy on the other reps a tonal challenge that Showtime! can’t pull off, despite a gentler touch than most kiddie fare of its kind.
  10. Too Late
    As a spiritually “lost” man searching for a more literally lost woman, Hawkes has just the offhand gravitas required for a noir hero. Yet in a movie where character backstory and plot coherence hardly figure, any emotional realism the actor provides is wholly his invention.
  11. Lion
    Fortunately for Davis, he’s got a terrific cast, chief among them the pair of charismatic actors who split the lead role.
  12. The Trust
    Cage supplies a stream of tension-defusing laughs while the script steadily applies the screws, but this disposable exercise in comic nihilism offers only a modest payoff at best.
  13. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum.
  14. A Cure for Wellness
    The movie deprives us of either a tragic villain or a sympathetic lead, hoping that its grab bag of squirm-inducing details — dental drills, stillborn livestock, flesh-eating eels — will suffice, when in fact, they reveal how a shorter, tighter treatment ought to have done the trick.
  15. The Shallows
    At times, it’s hard to tell whether The Shallows is trying to sell a tropical vacation, that Sony Xperia phone or a fantasy date with Lively herself, but in any case, the film looks virtually indistinguishable from a slick, high-end commercial.
  16. Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
    The lack of a single clear character with whom to identify ultimately proves problematic.
  17. Unlocking the Cage
    Wise is plenty eloquent on the complex legal issue, but remains vague about how the status he seeks will practically impact animals (could animal weddings be far behind?) or why he’s the “person” best qualified to represent them in court.
  18. Julieta
    While Julieta represents a welcome return to the female-centric storytelling that has earned Almodovar his greatest acclaim, it is far from this reformed renegade’s strongest or most entertaining work.
  19. The Neon Demon
    The Neon Demon is a tease. It starts off as a relatively scannable, user-friendly thriller, but it turns out to be a movie made by a macabre surrealist gross-out prankster.
  20. How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change
    An environmental documentary that consists of roughly one-third doom-and-gloom to two-thirds wide-eyed optimism, and that is more potent in individual scenes than it is as a sprawling whole.
  21. It
    As spine-tingling as a number of individual scenes are, the film struggles to find a proper rhythm. Scene-to-scene transitions are static and disjointed, settling into a cycle of “…and then this happened” without deepening the overall dread or steadily uncovering pieces of a central mystery. Curiously, It grows less intense as it goes.
  22. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    It’s a unique, associative blend of sounds and images that aims to convey details as well as underlying truths about Frank’s life. Unfortunately, it also often leaves one feeling aesthetically pummeled to the point of exhaustion.
  23. Divine Access
    None of Jack’s relationships are handled with enough conviction to make them stick, and that carries over to a religious message that’s squishy in the extreme. “Agreeable” is a good quality, but it should never be the best quality a film possesses.
  24. Slack Bay
    None of it seems to make much sense, though it’s clear that the absurdity is no accident.
  25. Insidious: The Last Key
    Despite the indomitable Shaye’s best efforts, however, new director Adam Robitel is rarely successful in shaking the cobwebs off this increasingly creaky franchise: The Last Key is wildly uneven, confused and confusing, and it appears to leave the “Insidious” saga written into a corner yet again.
  26. The Meg
    If there’s a disappointment to The Meg, it’s not just that the movie isn’t good enough. It’s that it’s not bad enough.
  27. The Land
    The Land feels a few drafts away from succeeding on its own terms. Still, there’s enough on screen, beyond Lendeborg’s confident star turn, to label Caple as a filmmaker to watch.
  28. The Phenom
    It’s not necessary, of course, for The Phenom to be an all-out sports drama, but writer-director Noah Buschel sets up the rare opportunity to explore what makes a jock tick, then doesn’t follow through.
  29. Morgan
    It’s little more than a schlock replay of “Ex Machina.” It toys around with some of the same situations, but it doesn’t know where to take them. Instead of developing its themes, it uses them as grist for an overload of “commercial” action.
  30. Buddymoon
    This is the kind of buddy comedy where you have to take a giant leap of faith just to believe these two characters would ever be friends.
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