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. Iron Will
    A seamless albeit frequently cornball scenario.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Until the End of the World
    In the logistically taxing effort to get all this on screen, Wenders has sacrificed some of his customary poetry. And the grand emotion and obsession needed to carry the two lovers around the world isn’t apparent in Hurt and Dommartin.
  3. The Banker
    You may wish that you were reading about these events in The New Yorker, because the movie is so choked with neutral detail that it’s a little bloodless. It lacks fire.
  4. Age Out
    Despite its climactic eye-rolls, Friday’s Child is a great showcase for Sheridan
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
    Coburn offers more of his smiles as testimony to the wizardry of Old West dentistry, while Kristofferson ambles through his role with solid charm. Neither conveys the psychological tension felt between the two men whose lives diverge after years of camaraderie.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Slaughterhouse-Five
    Slaughterhouse-Five is a mechanically slick, dramatically sterile commentary about World War II and afterward, as seen through the eyes of a boob Everyman. Director George Roy Hill's arch achievement emphasizes the diffused cant to the detriment of characterizations, which are stiff, unsympathetic and skin-deep.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Carnal Knowledge
    Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowlede is a rather superficial and limited probe of American male sexual hypocrisies.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blood In, Blood Out
    Producer-director Taylor Hackford clearly wants this to be a major cinematic exploration of the Latino experience, from its ponderous near-three-hour length to its more-than-occasional sermonizing. Unfortunately, disjointed storytelling and uneven performances undermine those aspirations.
  9. The Good Son
    The bizarre prospect of Macaulay Culkin as a latter-day "bad seed" should prompt enough curiosity to generate initial box office visits, but this peculiar thriller doesn't deliver enough jolts to leave the audience screaming.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reflections in a Golden Eye
    A pretentious melodrama.
  11. Sneakers
    Director Phil Alden Robinson demonstrates an agreeable flair for low-key comedy, changing tones, and the orchestration of complicated logistics until falling into the black holes of gaping plot gaps and an insincere jokiness worthy of Sinatra's Rat Pack.
  12. Judgment Night
    This is an exceedingly well directed, cleverly filmed and edited, tension-filled affair. It is also a wholly preposterous, muddled, paranoid's view of the inner-city nightmare where the slightest misstep is sure to have a fateful result.
  13. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    The new film lacks that kinetic haunted-house element. It’s the most somber and meditative and least aggressive of the “Conjuring” films. It’s out to deepen the series’ portrait of the Warrens, and damned if Patrick Wilson, with his gentle tenacity and Pat Boone grin, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine the psychic in high Victorian collars and embodies her gift with a feverish purity, don’t succeed in making Ed and Lorraine the coziest fighters of evil the movies have ever seen.
  14. The Lovebirds
    Bits and pieces of the movie are funny.
  15. Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made
    The quiet humanity of McCarthy’s filmmaking meshes oddly with the material’s zanier demands, finally reaching an anodyne middle ground.
  16. Scare Me
    Scare Me would work even better onstage. On screen, it feels like an experiment in minimalism. The film is heavy-handed only in Fred’s fear of emasculation and Fanny’s digs at “desperate white dudes,” troweled on for socially relevant heft.
  17. A Fall from Grace
    A Fall From Grace isn’t consequential moviemaking. This won’t come as a surprise to plenty of Perry’s detractors and maybe Perry doesn’t have to aim for that.
  18. The Sonata
    It’s Looks 10, Personality 4, however, as director Andrew Desmond and collaborator Arthur Morin’s screenplay doesn’t quite provide enough incident to properly milk its own premise, making for a supernatural thriller that ends just as it’s beginning to work up a sweat.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Humanoids from the Deep
    Given the nonsensical script and fact that considerable footage was added, editor Mark Goldblatt did a good job in making disparate elements at least hang together and play coherently. James Horner’s score makes it seem that more is happening than actually takes place.
  20. One Eight Seven
    Artistically pretentious, thematically fuzzy and almost sinister in its deterministic view of the human condition, this unusually ambitious and serious-minded major studio release is simply too negative in every possible way to find a receptive audience.
  21. John Henry
    Flashes of craft can’t make up for the director’s easy default to gore over story. Forbes and his co-writer knew how they wanted to depict Hell’s sadism but never nailed how to embrace the hero with the hammer.
  22. Sergio
    Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.
  23. The Night Clerk
    Sheridan and de Armas’s scenes together leave an impression long after the rest of the movie evaporates.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dick Tracy
    Though it looks ravishing, Warren Beatty's longtime pet project is a curiously remote, uninvolving film.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
    Howes goes through the romantic motions with Van Dyke and the maternal ones with the kids, but there is no real sentiment between players.
  26. Detective Chinatown 3
    For all its narrative and structural shortcomings, Cheng’s film is always visually arresting and frequently very funny as it switches tone and tack at the drop of a hat.
  27. Jumbo
    Eventually, Jumbo clatters to a stop with a tinny cheer for acceptance, a sugar rush of Belgian new wave music, and the sense that the audience has been taken for a bit of a ride.
  28. Charm City Kings
    The film’s truly ridiculous plot choices — the phony twists that make you leave the theater feeling like you’ve inhaled a tank of carbon monoxide — are its own invention, bolted onto a likable, if formulaic, charmer.
  29. Zola
    Sure, it’s fun to see a movie skewer the vapid soullessness of social media and the unregulated economy of male desire, but Zola ultimately rings hollow. The actors are fearless, and yet, how much do we know about these characters in the end? The answer: something of their values, but almost nothing of their lives.
  30. Cuties
    Cuties' job is to coil the contrasting messages and spin them until her lead falls down dizzy, which can make the film feel as subtle as a headache.
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