Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. The Dark Red
    An overcomplicated stew of apparent madness, conspiracy, supernatural powers and revenge whose narrative elements never quite mesh or even come to full fruition individually. Nonetheless, this quasi-horror mixed bag will hold viewers’ attention for its originality even as it flags in both credibility and suspense.
  2. Sea Fever
    It’s a conventional buildup-to-process-of-cast-elimination suspenser that’s unfortunately low on actual suspense, let alone thrills or narrative invention.
  3. The Quarry
    In The Quarry, sin has its wages, but that’s all it has. It’s too dry to offer anything like temptation.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Inside Moves
    Inoffensive and essentially compassionate, Inside Moves is also a highly conventional and predictable look at handicapped citizens trying to make it in everyday life.
  5. The Secret Garden
    In its top-heavy image-driven way, The Secret Garden is trying for some of the atmospheric poetry that was missing from Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 version. Yet if anything, that just makes it fall further away from the novel’s essence. The garden isn’t a supernatural place, but it’s supposed to be a mystical place. In this movie, it comes closer to being a special effect.
  6. Tigertail
    It’s courageous of Yang to share such a tribute to his father, though the most important things remain unspoken.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Airport '77
    The story’s formula banality is credible most of the time and there’s some good actual US Navy search and rescue procedure interjected in the plot.
  8. Clover
    Despite a capable cast and reasonably energetic execution from director Jon Abrahams, this violent caper lacks any real wit or novelty.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Power
    Not so much about power as about p.r., this facile treatment of big-time politics and media, featuring Richard Gere as an amoral imagemaker, revolves around the unstartling premise that modern politicians and their campaigns are calculatedly packaged for TV. In spite of relentless jet-propelled location hopping that helps to stave off boredom, Power never gets airborne.
  10. Shooting Heroin
    When someone finally make that great drama about our national addictions, it will need to be a more complex horror film. This one is a little too much “Alien Invaders,” not enough “They Came From Within.”
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ninja III: The Domination
    The new outing into the never-never land of the world's trickiest controlled violence is done with quite a twist.
  12. Almost Love
    With Almost Love, Doyle proves he has an eye, a sense of pacing and a thoughtful touch with actors. But the Almost Love saga is about as distinctive as the canvases Adam paints for Ravella.
  13. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb, sometimes tedious, sometimes fun civilization-vs.-aliens showdown.
  14. The Marvels
    The director, Nia DaCosta (who made the intriguing remake of “Candyman”), stages the action efficiently, but she doesn’t center the narrative; the film is a series of goals in search of a higher mission.
  15. Four Kids and It
    “Careful what you wish for” may have been the essential moral takeaway from the source books, but that wasn’t to discourage wishing for anything at all: In all respects, this serviceable but anodyne programmer could dream a bit bigger.
  16. The Mindfulness Movement
    An earnest, over-stuffed infomercial for the potential and benefits of practicing mindfulness.
  17. LA Originals
    They’re also among the most visible contemporary Chicano artists Los Angeles has to offer, and better a self-serving documentary than none at all.
  18. The Main Event
    Even though the feature reflects WWE’s core values built on family, teamwork and inspirational aspirations, and contains healthy messages about proving one’s mettle using wit and wisdom, The Main Event sags far too frequently.
  19. 1BR
    With its aspects of human captivity, brainwashing, collective insanity and ersatz utopianism, Marmor could have taken his story in myriad tonal directions. But instead of a wild ride, his film emerges a competent one that holds the attention, yet also feels like a missed chance at something truly memorable from a promisingly offbeat premise.
  20. Capone
    Handsomely shot and small of scale, Capone ambles along without catching fire. That’s because the movie, at heart, is shaped as a pedestal for Hardy’s prankish mumbly Method showboating.
  21. Stardust
    The movie gives us only a small taste of it, but it’s enough to whet your appetite: for a Bowie biopic that captures this cracked actor in all his funhouse-mirror rock ‘n’ roll glory.
  22. The Wrong Missy
    The Wrong Missy is a harmless dumb-meets-smart-mouth comedy that doesn’t necessarily feed your appetite for more Netflix throwaways. But it does make you want to see Lauren Lapkus’s next act.
  23. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
    Those looking for much in the way of real insight will find this amiable enterprise doesn’t stray very far from a general, standard-stoner-yuks tenor of “OMG I was SO HIGH!!!”
  24. Robert the Bruce
    McGowan knows how to invest ire with intelligence, and he has mastered the art of making riding a horse look like a form of strutting. When he’s onscreen, the film vibrates. When you’re watching MacFadyen’s Robert, it swells with nobility and deflates at the same time.
  25. Blood Quantum
    Despite sufficient gore, there’s more style than bite to this undead opus, which does not excel at scares or action set-pieces.
  26. Tesnota (Closeness)
    Closeness is a tough-minded, rigorously composed, quite brilliantly acted story of the challenges of everyday religious prejudice and ethnic divides in the bleak heart of Russia’s North Caucasus, and in many ways Balagov’s uncompromising but stylized social realism rewards as much as it punishes.
  27. Come Play
    Even though the kid is the hero we should clearly be rooting for, the filmmaker conjures equal amounts of empathy and compassion for the monster. That serves to add complexity to the characterizations, but balancing both sides muddles the poignancy of the climax.
  28. Chemical Hearts
    For all its serious-faced surface grit, Chemical Hearts never quite rings true.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Human Factor
    Graham Greene's low-keyed, highly absorbing 1978 novel of an aging English double agent finding himself trapped into defecting to Moscow and leaving his family behind may have seemed like ideal material for Otto Preminger's style of dispassionate ambiguity, but helmer doesn't seem up to the occasion, bringing little atmosphere or feeling to the delicate ticks of the story.
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