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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    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Raggedy Man
    This is standard stuff and hardly worth Spacek’s talents.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Silent Running
    Silent Running depends on the excellent special effects of debuting director Douglas Trumbull and his team and on the appreciation of a literate but broadly entertaining script. Those being the highlights, they are virtually wiped out by the crucial miscasting of Bruce Dern. Production lacks dramatic credibility and teeters on the edge of the ludicrous.
  3. Death of Me
    Bousman’s film pulls off some effectively nasty jolts and jabs: its feverish, whispery, eventually shrieking island-of-lost-souls claustrophobia may be rooted in cliché, but cliché takes root for a reason.
  4. Epicentro
    It’s a fascinating moment for cultural stock-taking. Yet despite the filmmaker’s evident fondness for the people and nation, this impressionistic feature feels frustratingly obtuse, unfocused and unstructured.
  5. Eternal Beauty
    With an assist from Sally Hawkins’ valiantly committed lead performance, the result occasionally summons the genuinely disoriented perspective of an unstable protagonist, but more often, it’s the filmmaking that seems to spiral out of control.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    Minnelli could have timed many of the scenes so that laughs would not have stepped on dialog tag lines. Also he permits the wedding rehearsal sequence to play too long, lessening the comedic effect.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Butterfield 8
    Alterations made on John O'Hara's 1935 novel by the scenarists (among other things, they have updated it from the Prohibition era, spectacularized the ending and refined some of the dialog) have given Butterfield 8 the form and pace it needs, but the story itself remains a weak one, the behavior and motivations of its characters no more tangible than in the original work.
  8. Ammonite
    Ultimately more symbolic than satisfying, the project leaves one grateful that two stars of this caliber would take on such a story, while wishing their efforts had left us with a more resonant artifact.
  9. The Mole Agent
    Alberdi’s comic-caper approach soon fizzles. Like Sergio, the film is hunting for drama, something to merit the 007 guitar and upright bass riffs of Vincent van Warmerdam’s score.
  10. Sportin' Life
    There’s at least something honest about the messiness and occasional superficiality of the documentary, as a ragged, unsynchronized collection of events and ideas — whether personal, trivial or globally resonant — that have passed through Ferrara’s eyes and his mind in the last year.
  11. Hubie Halloween
    Director Steve Brill (another regular Sandler ally) keeps a lot of colorful balls in the air, even if the pacing is lumpier than you’d like in an enterprise this sketchy: Set pieces and one-off visual gags are simply stuffed in wherever they fit, like the cinematic equivalent of Hubie’s over-decorated Halloween front yard.
  12. Friendsgiving
    This vagueness of purpose wouldn’t matter much if the film were genuinely, raucously funny, but comedian-turned-filmmaker Paone’s best gags are the kind to raise a smile rather than a laugh.
  13. New Order
    Essentially picking up where “The Joker” left off, this ultra-provocative case of speculative fiction promises a view of what change might look like, only to succumb to a deep sense of cynicism as the scope of the film becomes unmanageable.
  14. Final Account
    Clocking in at a swift 90 minutes, Final Account is like a teenager-friendly approach to “Shoah,” designed as an introduction to issues of responsibility, guilt and the banality of man’s inhumanity to man.
  15. Akilla's Escape
    Williams’ effortless, near-otherworldly presence gives Akilla’s Escape all the grace and mystique it requires; the film strains a little too hard for its own.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Windmill
    All principal players are well cast, but the production fizzles in its final half-hour because the story premise gets clobbered by clumsy and ineffective resolution and execution.
  17. Fear of a Black Hat
    Good musical numbers serve as welcome punctuation to a film that grows increasingly tedious.
  18. Mr. Nanny
    Cross Uncle Buck with Home Alone, stir in the Hulkster, and you've got Mr. Nanny, a gonzo comedy-actioner that should entertain the under-12 and couch-potato sets.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ball of Fire
    A simple gag is hardly enough on which to string 110 minutes of film. And that's all - one funny situation - that Samuel Goldwyn's director and writers have to support Ball of Fire. It's sufficient, however, to provide quite a few chuckles.
  20. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    His vision is big, but the execution clunky and crowded with detail, such that it all plays like a regional-theater production of “The Wiz” staged within the walls of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.” Talbert is positively unabashed about Jingle Jangle’s too-muchness, as if trying to make up for a century of underrepresentation by stuffing everything he can into two hours’ worth of Christmas pageantry.
  21. Honest Thief
    It’s a serviceably energized and routine action crime movie, with a few slammin’ fistfights and gun battles, and it proves once again that Liam Neeson is an actor who will take a paycheck gig without treating it like one.
  22. Chick Fight
    Instead of the cleavage, hair-pulling and Jerry Springer antics it teases, Chick Fight serves up a blandly formulaic and scrupulously inoffensive tale of female empowerment.
  23. Siempre, Luis
    Siempre, Luis winds up sidelining the bulk of Luis’ life to focus disproportionately on a recent achievement: his part, alongside that of his son, in bringing “Hamilton” to a Puerto Rican audience. The perky but lopsided result isn’t particularly revelatory on either front, and so relentlessly glowing that it’s hard not to feel some of Luis’ political expertise at play.
  24. Fatman
    This, in other words, is not your father’s grungy one-joke yuletide action comedy. It’s “The Santa Clause” meets “Magnum Claus,” and it’s pitched to the Gibson faithful with the idea that they’ll follow him anywhere (which they probably will).
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Marnie
    Marnie is the character study of a thief and a liar, but what makes her tick remains clouded even after a climax reckoned to be shocking but somewhat missing its point.
  26. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Wild Mountain Thyme is the kind of film you want to love, just as you want these two characters to fall in love, and it’s simultaneously exasperating and original that they don’t go about their courtship in the usual fashion.
  27. Hillbilly Elegy
    As long as Close is acting up an award-worthy storm (her performance is actually quite meticulous), Hillbilly Elegy is never less than alive. Adams does some showpiece acting of her own, but as skillful as her performance is, she never gets us to look at Bev with pity and terror.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rabid
    Rabid, as the dictionary explains means both ‘affected with rabies’ and ‘extremely violent’. Using both definitions, Rabid, is so accurately titled that this one word tells all. Here is an extremely violent, sometimes nauseating, picture about a young woman affected with rabies, running around Montreal infecting others.
  29. Radium Girls
    Scrupulously sincere in its approach and well-meaning to a fault in intention, the film aims for inspirational true story, but is sadly uninspired, and its relationship to real history is obscured by the schematic way it is fictionalized.
  30. My Psychedelic Love Story
    When you watch a documentary, some talking heads are more arresting than others, and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, seated before Morris’ camera, seems like a supporting player who’s been elevated to the lead.
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