Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.
  2. Children of the Corn
    Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.
  3. Perpetrator
    Operating at a strange remove from modern reality, it seems to belong more to the teen experience of a couple of decades ago, the very era from which so many of its reference points hail.
  4. On the Adamant
    On the Adamant is most moving when it stands back, letting its most disenfranchised subjects talk, or shout, or sing.
  5. Tótem
    Rich with detail while also being intensely specific to the large middle-class family it observes, Avilés’ lifelike and lived-in second feature alternates among roughly half a dozen characters, inviting audiences to pick their own points of identification in the ensemble.
  6. Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything
    Outside those charged moments of hands-on connection, however, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything is something of a slog, hampered by escalating dramatic obviousness and thin characterization
  7. The Shadowless Tower
    As The Shadowless Tower ambles onward, it reveals its arcs of change not in dramatic showdowns or sudden revelations, but in ellipses, in the occasional mysterious fold in chronology and, most rewardingly, in the casual, unforced repetition of certain motifs.
  8. Music
    Whatever its frustrations, they are outweighed by the pleasures on offer in this scintillating example of film’s uncanny ability to transcend itself, to operate on planes above, below and in between the images and soundscapes of which it is composed.
  9. Superpower
    Too often, the film’s well-meaning reportage is muddled with needless vanity sequences of the actor-director as an on-the-ground trailblazer, as the film fashions the impression that Penn himself — as much as any news agency — is a vital courier of the horrific events around him to Western audiences.
  10. Limbo
    Limbo joins a long line of fine Australian films taking to the desert to disinter racial trauma, to rebury the bones with more care and awareness, but also enduring fury.
  11. Afire
    It’s the film’s great, disorienting structural risks, its humoring of human untidiness and confusion, that make it so subtly thrilling and moving.
  12. Ambush
    If it’s not a film that rivals the quality or seriousness of Vietnam War movie standard-bearers like “The Deer Hunter” or “Full Metal Jacket,” Ambush ultimately delivers more credible adventure than the cartoonish bombast of their knockoff competitors (then or since) — and more than a handful of genuine thrills.
  13. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    Paine and his crew do muster some decent action, set in places you’d hardly expect (like crowded Piccadilly Circus), but scenery only goes so far to disguise the utter preposterousness of Cross’ script.
  14. Suzume
    Come for Shinkai’s skies, stay for the feels.
  15. Kiss the Future
    In a sense, Kiss the Future is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out.
  16. Linoleum
    Consider this review primarily as an encouragement: Stick around. Your patience will be amply rewarded.
  17. Smoking Causes Coughing
    It’s a film of fragmentary but funny rewards — funnier still, most likely, if accompanied by smoking of a different kind.
  18. In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
    “In Viaggio” captures the Pope, and by extension the whole Church, in an uncomfortable limbo state between defensiveness and progressiveness, though it keeps its own critique tacit and un-narrated, hinging on what the viewer brings to its hand-picked footage.
  19. Creed III
    Creed III is a sports drama that feels like a thriller with an urgent conscience.
  20. We Have a Ghost
    Rarely ha-ha funny and never scary, it’s ultimately more sentimental than anything else — a clunky approach that undermines its strong performances.
  21. Cocaine Bear
    Cocaine Bear is less formulaic than a slasher film and more stylishly made. It’s a true oddball, one that mixes yocks and mock desperation and disembodied limbs. So when it’s over you can say, “Well, we definitely saw that.”
  22. Femme
    A pair of sensational performances by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (“Candyman”) and George MacKay (“1917”), locked in a nervy duet as two men with virtually nothing in common but their sexuality, represents the chief selling point for this stylish, commendably uncompromising fusion of genre fireworks and measured, thoughtful character study.
  23. Jesus Revolution
    It’s one of the most appealing faith-based big-screen entertainments in a while, polished and persuasive without getting too preachy.
  24. Bruiser
    From the squarish Academy ratio and unconventional framing to composer Robert Ouyang Rusli’s tense, bracing-for-conflict score, Warren’s choices frequently surprise, building to an ending that does exactly the right thing with the showdown we could feel coming all along.
  25. Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert
    In many ways, Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert feels like the exact opposite of the project we ought to be attempting, which is to reclaim the work of women of genius who are in danger of falling into obscurity, without reducing their already threatened legacies to mere romantic biography
  26. Golda
    Golda is a good drama about Israel. But it will take a great drama about Israel to dig into the nation’s long-simmering moral ambiguities.
  27. The Echo
    Examining the unique ties that bind farming families, where everyone’s welfare hangs on the same unkind elements, this exquisitely textured film observes how children’s lives echo those of their parents, repeating for generations on the same constantly inconstant land, until somebody breaks the pattern.
  28. The Survival of Kindness
    Man’s enormous inhumanity to man is reproduced in precise, characterful miniature, with a pared-back artistry that somehow earns de Heer the right to be thematically blunt, and deeply pessimistic.
  29. Disco Boy
    Even when Disco Boy threatens to be too much or too little, however, Rogowski’s strange, sparse, plaintive performance keeps its soul intact, and its most poignant query afloat above all the flash and dazzle and neon lights: just how much of themselves people will sacrifice for a paper identity.
  30. The Adults
    The Adults is most moving in its understanding of the trivial quips, asides and slight, splintered anecdotes that are sometimes all that remains between adult relatives who once shared richer connective tissue.
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