Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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 2.4 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. Don't Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl!
    Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl! aims for poetry yet, like its ridiculously clumsy title, manages only an odd mix of magical realism with over-heated Lynchian touches.
  2. The Yellow Birds
    The film keeps acting like it has something big to tell us; it plods and broods with self-importance. Yet in almost every crucial way, The Yellow Birds is a flat and listless piece of moviemaking, a monotonous indie dirge.
  3. This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous
    This glossy doc uncovers very little conflict or depth in a personality more colorful than it is interesting, at least as presented here.
  4. 13 Minutes
    What 13 Minutes fails to understand is that it’s a moral imperative to remember, but it’s an ethical minefield to remember in a simplified manner.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Beguiled
    Marking a distinct change of pace for both director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood, The Beguiled doesn’t come off, and cues laughter in all the wrong places.
  6. VooDoo
    Nearly two decades after the original “Blair Witch,” it’s a mystery why any filmmaker feels the need to be “purist” about the found-footage format when it’s been done to death.
  7. Phoenix Forgotten
    After 40 or so minutes of teasing hints that its makers may have hit upon a fresh approach to found-footage thrillers, “Phoenix Forgotten” indicates the genre may be having its last gasp on life support as the movie devolves into yet another threadbare patchwork of mounting hysteria, faux cinéma vérité, and shaky-cam visual clichés.
  8. Annette
    In this particular cocktail, Carax is boiling lead to Sparks’ soda-pop fizz, sucking all the fun from the root-beer float. What does go well with the French auteur’s honesty-insisting earnestness is Adam Driver’s over-committed lead turn.
  9. Venom
    Venom is a textbook case of a comic-book film that’s unexciting in its ho-hum competence, and even its visual-effects bravura.
  10. Wish Upon
    By any normal standards, teen horror flick Wish Upon is a pretty bad movie. But its badness is of such a distinct and kooky character that it can’t help but exert an inadvertent charm.
  11. Rampage
    Peyton delivers a unified-looking whole, in which the visual effects integrate well with stage and location work.
  12. Flower
    As icky a comedy as you’re likely to see this year, Flower comes from an angry place — one that is clearly more concerned about sounding provocative and clever than having anything meaningful to say.
  13. Noelle
    What you see a movie like Noelle, what the experience comes down to is: It’s something you’re not watching in a theater because most of us wouldn’t watch it in a theater. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. Whatever your idea of a sentimental connect-the-dots Christmas comedy is, this is sub that.
  14. Kill Switch
    Had Smit developed his themes as scrupulously as his visual effects, Kill Switch might have been the next “Primer” or “District 9,” but instead it feels like a demo reel for a game that nobody can play.
  15. The Drowning
    Whatever suspense it musters feels artificial, manufactured in the first half by withholding information all the characters already possess from the audience, and in the second by adding more curlicues and flourishes to the elaborate plot at the expense of nourishing the milquetoast characters.
  16. Woodshock
    With the film’s human element so glassy and its storytelling so thin, however, all this elegant formal trickery soon turns more aggravating than intoxicating — by its extremely splintered, impressionistic finale, the film skates perilously close to misery chic.
  17. Based on a True Story
    Although the screenplay contains all the beats needed to generate tension, Assayas’ gift for conveying information between the lines is almost entirely lost on Polanski, who doesn’t give his actresses the opportunity to flesh out the subtext of their most awkward interactions.
  18. Ismael's Ghosts
    In its own weird way, Ismael’s Ghosts has something profound to say about the lingering pain of past relationships and the threat they still pose to the present, but it does so in such a needlessly complicated fashion, we can’t help but be overwhelmed. [Cannes Version]
  19. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    If only the music and lyrics were more memorable, then “Jeannette” might have delivered on its potential. But Dumont has a stiff, fixed-camera style that deprives the story of its transcendence.
  20. The Beach Bum
    Simultaneously shaggy and hyper-stylized, The Beach Bum plays like a less-coked-out “Scarface,” the collected works of Charles Bukowski, and a Cheech & Chong movie all rolled up in one — an epic goof in which the cast (not just McConaughey but Snoop Dogg, Martin Lawrence, Jonah Hill, and Jimmy Buffett) play elaborate, semi-improvised caricatures of outlandish tropical fruits.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gremlins
    The humans are little more than dress-extras for the mechanics.
  22. Rodin
    Rodin is a meticulously reverential, handsomely lit and very dull biopic.
  23. The Bodyguard
    No wonder this Lawrence Kasdan script has been on the shelf for more than a decade: In the custody of director Mick Jackson, it proves a jumbled mess, with a few enjoyable moments but little continuity or flow.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    An American Tail
    Every character and every situation presented herein have been seen a thousand times before.
  25. Fortunata
    The camera barely leaves Trinca’s side. She delivers an over-sized, nervy performance but the material is so flawed that it’s hard to truly say whether it’s exceptional acting.
  26. A Beginner's Guide to Snuff
    The problem is that this watchable indie isn’t all that funny, clever or surprising despite its outré premise.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Willow
    Willow is medieval mishmash from George Lucas, a sort of 10th-century "Star Wars" tossed together with a plethora of elements taken from numerous classic fables. Even if Lucas has bastardized his own story with derivative and unoriginal elements, kids probably will love it. For MGM Pictures, b.o. should mean recoupment of its large investment.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Thing
    If it’s the most vividly gruesome monster ever to stalk the screen that audiences crave, then The Thing is the thing. On all other levels, however, John Carpenter’s remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 sci-fi classic comes as a letdown.
  29. First Kill
    Frankly, if forced to bet between John McClane and Anakin Skywalker, I’d take the “Die Hard” tough guy every time, but that’s just the underdog factor Miller is going for, staging a reasonably entertaining series of off-road chases and backwoods shootouts en route to that final confrontation.
  30. Death Wish
    All the new Death Wish is truly committed to is getting a rise out of the audience. It’s a first-person-shooter fantasy. The film’s only real view of justice is that it’s a blast.
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