Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Cherry
    There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.
  2. Rails & Ties
    Reserved, careful and largely predictable in the way it plays out its wrenching emotional crises.
  3. Treasure
    A film with heart but no real teeth, the commendable sensitivity of which turns too easily toward the sentimental.
  4. Klimt
    Billed as a phantasmagoria rather than a biopic, Klimt falls into the philosophical conundrum it attempts to resurrect -- whether portrait and allegory can coexist. Notwithstanding moments of great beauty, in this case the answer is clearly "no."
  5. Way Off Broadway
    Both extremely familiar and, despite frequent references to Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles, cinematically and dramatically dull.
  6. Music from the Big House
    The performances are fun, if musically only adequate -- there are no evident virtuosi languishing within Angola's walls -- and Chiarelli's attempts to frame matters philosophically fall a little flat.
  7. Colossus
    Hendrickson shot “Colossus” from a partial script, leaving room for improvisation, and the movie’s loose, shapeless feel and scenes that go on far too long are the telltale signs of a filmmaker who fell so in love with his own material that he couldn’t bring himself to kill his darlings.
  8. Perfect Sisters
    Stan Brooks’ first directorial feature provides scant psychological depth, drawing its characters and staging their incidents in crude fashion, despite superficial production gloss.
  9. The Girl and Death
    The film’s emotional center rings coldly hollow, its star-crossed lovers coming off more like projected figures than flesh-and-blood players.
  10. Salt and Fire
    This most defiantly rule-resistant of filmmakers certainly hasn’t lost his capacity to surprise. Salt and Fire’s punchline, however, only enhances the sense of a shaggy-dog tale dashed off on the back of a postcard — it’s the scenery on the other side that holds our attention.
  11. Wolf Warrior 2
    More apolitical moviegoers are likely to simply enjoy the runaway train of action set pieces that Wu propels with his flimsy but serviceable plot, and dismiss all the jingoist chest-thumping as roughly akin to John Rambo’s stated desire to refight the Vietnam War — and, dammit, win this time! — in “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”
  12. The Bay of Silence
    The film’s pained, ugly revelations finally carry more weight than any amateur detective work leading up to them: a #MeToo reckoning hidden within a glinting, noir-esque hall of mirrors.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Raven
    A good horror flicker. Just vaguely 'suggested' by the Edgar Allen Poe classic, the adaptation wanders not a little, but the basic romance is wisely kept to the fore, and Bela Lugosi, as the psycopathic medico to whom Irene Ware is indebted for her life contributes the shocker aspects forcibly.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Egg and I
    Shortcoming is in an evenness of treatment – partially in the writing but more importantly in Erskine’s direction – that fails to suck the drama out of the situations presented in the book.
  15. Homestead
    The lead characters are well-cast across the board, with Chase and McDonough especially effective as complex, unpredictable characters whose sporadic conflicts go a long way toward developing a rooting interest in both men.
  16. Wild Horses
    Tonally dissonant and narratively disjointed, Wild Horses plays like a patchwork quilt of scenes excerpted from a much longer movie, or maybe even a miniseries.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    K-9
    There are a few amazing moments (the dog’s rescue of Belushi in a bar). In between lingers lots of standard action-pic fare, plenty of toothless jokes and some down-right mangy dialog.
  18. Frontier(s)
    Can a movie be an adrenalin-fueled, blood-gushing thrill ride and still be as boring as dirt? Apparently. The French answer to "Hostel" and "Saw" -- Frontier(s) is a 100-minute hemorrhage that doesn't bring anything to the operating table of torture-porn but more gore, cruelty and misery.
  19. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    It's a very academic movie about academics that belongs in academia, not movie theaters.
  20. Miracles from Heaven
    In a welcome gender reversal from the father-son dynamic of “Heaven Is for Real,” Garner and Rogers deliver fully committed performances that credibly convey the physical and mental anguish endured by sick children and their caregivers.
  21. School for Scoundrels
    Picture seemed certain to either fly high on outrageous humor or crash under the weight of tastelessness. Instead, the movie just sits there and never comes alive.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    More American Graffiti
    While dazzling to the eye, the flirtation with split-screen, anamorphic, 16mm and 1:85 screen sizes does not justify itself in terms of the film’s content. What Norton and producer Howard Kazanjian are attempting, and what a variety of technicians pull off flawlessly, is daring, but ultimately pointless.
  23. Boys Life 3
    A typical grab bag of works of varying depth, all of them breezy and entertaining.
  24. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Beyond the participants' friends and co-workers, it's hard to imagine an audience for this professionally packaged exercise in navel gazing.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kate & Leopold
    A time-travel romantic comedy whose best elements -- Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman -- overcome distracting plot holes, loose threads and assorted contrivances to make for a mostly charming and diverting tale.
  26. A Slipping-Down Life
    A curiously bland drama that fails to fulfill the promise of its early scenes.
  27. I Am I
    This potentially intriguing concept is given disappointingly bland, flat treatment in the Kickstarter-funded project, in which Towne brings professionalism but little personality to both her on- and offcamera roles.
  28. Saban's Power Rangers
    We’re now so awash in superhero culture that kids no longer need the safe, lame, pandering junior-league version of it. They can just watch “Ant-Man” or the PG-13 “Suicide Squad.” Safe, lame, and pandering have all grown up.
  29. Mapplethorpe
    To rob Mapplethorpe of his controversy is to strip the movie of its dramatic conflict. By doing so, the script (co-written with Mikko Alanne) reduces to a rather banal biopic, reenacting how a scrappy outsider achieved unconventional success.
  30. Oz the Great and Powerful
    This elaborate exercise in visual Baum-bast nonetheless gets some mileage out of its game performances, luscious production design and the unfettered enthusiasm director Sam Raimi brings to a thin, simplistic origin story.
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