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. Comandante
    If the characters, apart from Salvatore, had been more developed, there might be more drama to it, but Comandante, in its honorable and slightly gloomy way, has been conceived as the delivery system for a humanitarian message.
  2. Finally Dawn
    One can sense what Costanzo’s trying to do, but he’s made a fatal miscalculation: Mimosa is not leading lady material, and 140 minutes is far too long to spend pretending otherwise.
  3. In the Land of Saints and Sinners
    When it comes time to move the story along, Lorenz often betrays his filmmaking’s lax virtues.
  4. Wildcat
    It’s emotionally exhausting, but audiences come away with a sense of her legacy, as well as an appreciation for the adversity she faced (and, to a lesser degree, a sense of the criticism that has been leveled against her).
  5. Heist 88
    It’s a crime film that finds little joy in criminality, crammed with characters who’ve been backed into a corner, hindered by an overarching morality that doesn’t match the material.
  6. Together 99
    What’s strange about Together 99 is that it looks like a Lukas Moodysson film (natural light), it moves like a Lukas Moodysson film (the documentary-like flow), but it’s blanketed with a sodden forlorn Swedish bourgeois cynicism that makes you think Moodysson needs to get out more.
  7. Old Dads
    For a first movie, Old Dads shows promise. Bill Burr is onto something about how the new culture of control messes with the heads of ordinary people. Next time, though, he should channel the rage instead of flaunting it.
  8. Bob Marley: One Love
    The point of the new biopic mode was to reveal totemic figures in a more complex way. “One Love” flirts with complexity but slides into the banality of hero worship.
  9. Stopmotion
    Masterful as he is at creating the stuff of nightmares, Morgan (as well as co-writer Robin King) is much less assured handling the character actions, psychology and dialogue outside his heroine’s fevered psyche.
  10. Wish
    Wish self-consciously packs 85 years of animated magic into a portable Disney fable. Does that make it a summation or a pastiche? A movie marbled with pop history or overstuffed with Easter eggs? One that launches the next Disney century or is stuck in the last one? Maybe all of the above.
  11. Argylle
    While common sense and good taste may be inclined to resist Vaughn’s garishly over-the-top style at first, the movie eventually finds its groove.
  12. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    There’s a hallowed place in cinema for multi-character dramas. But “Horizon,” simply put, doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries. Much of what happens is wispy and not very forceful; the film doesn’t build in impact, and it seldom seems to aim in a clear direction.
  13. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2
    Doubling down on the first chapter’s intermittent triumphs but also on its grievous structural issues, it is an exercise in contradictions: incident-packed yet oddly sedate; replete with characters new and returning, yet largely lacking in compelling characterization; and, running to over three hours, simply too long a film to be so jarringly abrupt.
  14. Ex-Husbands
    Ex-Husbands . . . is likable enough in intention, but flounders en route to its destination. Not unlike its befuddled protagonists, who can’t seem to translate meaning well into doing well.
  15. The Empire
    Despite fun trappings . . . the actual conflict in the film boils down to a series of very simplistic binaries: good and evil, sacred and secular, female and male, one and zero, being and nothingness.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Moby Dick
    Moby Dick is interesting more often than exciting, faithful to the time and text [of the Herman Melville novel] more than great theatrical entertainment. Essentially it is a chase picture and yet not escaping the sameness and repetitiousness which often dulls the chase formula.
  17. It's a Wonderful Knife
    The genre slant promised by the title seems to be less of a tonal responsibility than an excuse to abruptly break out into the occasional suspense set piece.
  18. The Accidental Getaway Driver
    Unfortunately, the script — co-written by Lee and Christopher Chen — leaves a lot to be desired, squandering the old-school appeal of the true-crime drama for a dull and overlong mood piece in which nothing much happens and no real sense of danger ever registers.
  19. The Queen of My Dreams
    It does little to separate itself, thematically or stylistically, from a now repetitive form of “third culture” storytelling.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Alphabet Murders
    Much of the suspence of Christie's writing is lost in converting to comedy, and as a result is no more than a parody of the original, insufficiently clever to be outstanding.
  21. Mothers' Instinct
    Mothers’ Instinct doesn’t breathe: It hasn’t the grandeur of great melodrama, nor the savoir-faire of great noir. Like its mismatched heroines, it’s constantly, twitchily figuring itself out, as we sit tight, intrigued, tensely waiting for it to trip.
  22. At the Gates
    Aiming to be a tense drama about trust, the film struggles to balance the personal and cultural stakes at the heart of its neat conceit.
  23. Orion and the Dark
    Kaufman’s innovations all make Orion and the Dark less predictable, potentially engaging young viewers in the storytelling process. But they also make for a more stressful experience overall, as if Orion wasn’t high-strung enough already.
  24. Imaginary
    Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.
  25. Genie
    The funny moments in Genie, and there are a handful of them, emerge mostly from McCarthy just tossing off lines with her dislocating insouciance.
  26. Nosferatu
    Visually striking as it is, with compositions that rival great Flemish paintings, the obsessive director’s somber retelling of F.W. Murnau’s expressionistic vampire movie is commendably faithful to the 1922 silent film and more accessible than “The Lighthouse” and “The Witch,” yet eerily drained of life.
  27. Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia
    It’s a competent yet uninspired overview of events.
  28. Miller's Girl
    Written, produced and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, the film is both impressively erudite and unrelentingly self-aware, a combination it bravely attempts but doesn’t quite fully balance.
  29. Mickey 17
    Though it earns points for sheer oddity (and the nearly monochromatic, future-noir look established by DP Darius Khondji and production designer Fiona Crombie), too much of “Mickey 17” turns out to be sloppy, shrill and preachy — ironically, the same things that make Mark Ruffalo’s deliberately Trump-styled villain so grating in this movie.
  30. Megalopolis
    To call this garish, idea-bloated monstrosity a mere “fable” is to grossly undersell the project’s expansive insights into art, life and legacy.
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