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. Colossal
    Colossal takes diminishing advantage of an amusing premise, one that seems made for satirical treatment yet is executed with an increasingly awkward semi-seriousness the characters aren’t depthed (or likable) enough to ballast.
  2. Frantz
    Frantz plays like classic melodrama, and has certain charms.
  3. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
    Intriguing as the resulting ambiance is, it alone can’t sustain the film.
  4. Katie Says Goodbye
    Even if first-time writer-director Wayne Roberts is sympathetic to the plight he’s chosen for the protagonist, his film never burrows deep enough under her skin to make the string of miserable scenarios connect in a meaningful way.
  5. A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery
    A major disappointment from a major filmmaker, Diaz’s latest super-sized tapestry of historical fact, folklore and cine-poetry is typically ambitious in its expressionism — but sees the helmer venturing into the kind of declamatory, didactic rhetoric that his recent stunners “Norte, the End of History” and “From What Is Before” so elegantly avoided.
  6. Rock Dog
    Rock Dog is cluttered with incompatible subplots that never quite seem to belong in the same film.
  7. Mute
    What is Jones trying to say with Mute? One would hardly guess this over-congested generic exercise came from the same mind as the elegant, almost minimalistic “Moon,” which made far better use of all that went unsaid.
  8. Phantasm: Ravager
    Even dedicated Phantasm fanatics may be hard-pressed to discern anything resembling a unifying narrative thread. But the latter group — the film’s target audience — likely will be willing to eschew coherence for the opportunity to savor this chaotic reprise of familiar characters and concepts in the cinematic equivalent of a greatest hits album.
  9. Operation Mekong
    How straightforward your enjoyment of the film will be largely depends on your ability to read “based on” as “very loosely inspired by” and to immediately forget that some of these archetypes and stock genre characters have real-life (and real-death) counterparts.
  10. The Hollow Point
    There are sporadic compensations for your investment of time: Ian McShane’s robust overplaying of an unapologetically scuzzy small-town lawman, John Leguizamo’s dead-serious villainy as a scarily resilient hit man, evocative lensing by David Jose Montero, and a few modestly inventive twists in the otherwise predictable plot.
  11. Courted
    Vincent’s calm, almost strenuously low-key film never gathers enough emotional momentum to become a fully dimensional romance — which might be its poignant intention.
  12. The Comedian
    Even with a bona fide icon at its center, The Comedian doesn’t dig deep enough to add anything substantial to the subgenre.
  13. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    The dialogue is very clear-cut, devoid of all contractions so that people speak in unnatural ways, though perhaps it makes the conversations clearer, especially to audiences whose native language might not be English. More problematic are the never-ending platitudes, all tied to spreading the message of equality.
  14. Mirzya
    The life-and-death stakes are there, but the people involved — while uniformly ravishing to gaze upon — are too wanly sketched for this melodrama to pump much blood.
  15. 100 Streets
    While the film initially exercises commendable restraint in braiding its separate narratives, its second half grows increasingly reliant on pat connections and coincidences.
  16. Always Shine
    With her confident second feature, director Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs itself nearly to death.
  17. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone
    Jenkins and Nasfell refrain from hard-selling anything, so that Gavin never really comes off as an obnoxious jerk, his chaste relationship with Kelly — so chaste, they never even kiss — progresses at a credible pace, and the movie’s religious elements, while respectfully given due dramatic weight, are scarcely more conspicuous here than in many more secular entertainments.
  18. Wilson
    In Wilson, Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated.
  19. All We Had
    Katie Holmes makes an undistinguished helming debut with All We Had, a middlebrow drama with no pretensions but also no depth.
  20. The Frontier
    An appreciably moody but dramatically stilted crime drama that exudes a certain retro appeal before collapsing into a series of empty neo-noir poses.
  21. A Wrinkle in Time
    A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless, and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes.
  22. The Zookeeper's Wife
    There’s no nice way to put it in this case, but The Zookeeper’s Wife has the unfortunate failing of rendering its human drama less interesting than what happens to the animals — and for a subject as damaging to our species as the Holocaust, that no small shortcoming.
  23. Abattoir
    Though it’s handsome enough to look at, Abattoir can’t quite seem to decide just how supernatural it wants to be or how meta its horror content should play
  24. Sleight
    Perhaps Dillard is too young or green to escape the recycled clichés that constitute the bulk of his script (co-written with Alex Theurer), and yet, charitably speaking, Sleight shows potential.
  25. They Call Us Monsters
    They Call Us Monsters, alas, is so taken with its access to kids facing such legal circumstances that it forgets to form a compelling argument about them.
  26. Unforgettable
    It’s tawdry “Sleeping With the Enemy”-style fun while it lasts, boasting a better cast and splashier production values than the next closest Lifetime movie, while being so ridiculous at times that audiences can’t help but talk back to the screen.
  27. The House That Jack Built
    The House That Jack Built, however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive.
  28. Cézanne et Moi
    The cinematic equivalent of calendar art.
  29. The Possession of Hannah Grace
    Viewers hooked on the spectacle of demonic possession tend to like their satanic tropes served neat. The Possession of Hannah Grace serves them sloppy, if not without a certain random soupçon of grisly style.
  30. Murder on the Orient Express
    Though he succeeds in creating the most memorable incarnation of Poirot ever seen on-screen (upstaging even Johnny Depp’s competing cameo), the movie is a failure overall, juggling too many characters to keep straight, and botching the last act so badly that those who go in blind may well walk out not having understood its infamous twist ending.
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