Variety's Scores

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For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
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    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bright Lights, Big City
    This novel-cum-feature film (from Jay McInerney's book) is a distinctly morose and maudlin journey through one man's destructive period of personal loss.
  2. The Addams Family
    The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    This film, about a homicidal orphan girl, is farfetched nonsense with precious little to appease shriek freaks. Laird Koenig's screenplay from his novel is riddled with unsuspended disbelief - coincidences, gimmicks.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    DeepStar Six
    Pic’s cast is a grab-bag ensemble with no real center. It eventually finds its emotional core in an affair between crewmen Greg Evigan and Nancy Everhard. A sharp performance by Miguel Ferrer as a punchy, smartmouthed crewmen is diluted when character goes campily berserk.
  5. Last Christmas
    As much as we go into Last Christmas eager to see a nicely wrapped package of acerbic fun, the film falls short of that. It’s not so much clever, toasty, and affectionate as it is the faux version of those things. It’s twee, it’s precious, it’s forced. And it’s light on true romance, maybe because the movie itself is a little too in love with itself.
  6. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
    To the extent that audiences are willing to go along with an overwrought documentary that strives to imitate what far more professionally executed podcasts have innovated in recent years ..., Berman’s stunt could turn into one of the year’s buzzier nonfiction releases.
  7. ECCO
    There’s more repetition and ponderousness than compelling intrigue in the end result here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Walkabout
    Roeg's bag is photography, but pretty pictures alone cannot sustain - and, in fact, inhibit - this fragile and forced screen adaptation of a James Vance Marshall novel.
  9. The Divine Fury
    Kim’s film is a slick concoction that affords moderate guilty-pleasure fun for a while, though it goes on too long to diminishing effect.
  10. The Sky Is Pink
    The emotions we witness and feel should have more force given the obviously stressful circumstances depicted. But they feel like all the edges have been sawed off to flatter both the subjects and principal actors.
  11. The Song of Names
    It’s a fatally old-fashioned and lugubrious historical drama, muting the emotional payoff it labors so hard to deliver.
  12. Guest of Honour
    At once overplotted and under-reasoned, hysterical and stiffly earnest, Guest of Honour is finally one of those strenuously diagrammatic mysteries in which everything notionally connects, which isn’t quite the same as everything making even marginal emotional sense.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Great Balls of Fire!
    It's a thin, cartoonish treatment of the hellbent, musically energetic young Jerry Lee Lewis.
  14. Angel of Mine
    Oddly, after leaving us aching for the film to go off the rails, when “Angel of Mine” finally does in the final scene, its message is so screwy that the audience might feel as loopy as poor Lizzie.
  15. 15 Minutes of War
    Grivois’ purpose is not to force a conversation about France’s colonial past or a comparison between Africa then and now. As the body count increases in this tense but troublingly context-free drama, he mistakenly believes we’ll gladly put politics aside to revel in the French gift for the kill shot.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Hand
    It’s not a pretty sight.
  17. Halloween Kills
    Halloween night may be Michael Myers’ masterpiece, but Halloween Kills is no masterpiece. It’s a mess — a slasher movie that‘s almost never scary, slathered with “topical” pablum and with too many parallel plot strands that don’t go anywhere.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Romper Stomper
    Romper Stomper is a Clockwork Orange without the intellect.
  19. Strange But True
    Both ambitious and overwhelmed, this sophomore feature from British-Indian director Rowan Athale — whose festival-traveled debut “Wasteland” had lively promise and similarly hinky storytelling — can’t quite decide what kind of weird it wants to be: a loopy B-movie corkscrew ride, or an “American Beauty”-style suburban burlesque with Something To Say.
  20. The Bromley Boys
    Steve Kelly’s lightweight film spins allegedly true events into the stuff of pure sitcom: affable enough, but so glibly inauthentic as to make “Bend It Like Beckham” look like cinéma vérité by comparison. It’s curious how the world’s most popular sport maintains such a thin roster of truly classic movies in its honor; that is unchanged here.
  21. Edie
    An uneven dramedy from U.K. commercials helmer Simon Hunter, working from a screenplay by Elizabeth O’Halloran that has a big problem in tone and beaucoup clichéd contrivance.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is a disappointing thriller that wastes an oddball premise and offbeat point-of-view.
  23. Bit
    On the one hand, it’s nice that in 2020 this hook should (despite our current political chaos) seem no big deal. On the other, one does wish this exercise in blase attitudinizing paid a little more attention to suspense, thrills, plot, mythology, and the other basic horror elements it leaves underdeveloped.
  24. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    The problem for “As It Was” is that this modest turnaround in lifestyle and attitude comes a third of the way into the movie, leaving an hour still to come that will be devoted almost strictly to how well the comeback is going.
  25. The Last Thing He Wanted
    The human dimension that gives the film brief jolts of energy never takes root. Instead, audiences are left grappling with a stuffy maze, albeit one presented with handsome production values and a filmmaker’s striking visual touch.
  26. American Son
    The overly finished language and theatrical intensity levels that might be potently effective onstage lose any pretense of naturalism under the camera’s unblinking gaze.
  27. Lucky Day
    The trouble is, apart from Glover’s unforgettably weird contribution, Lucky Day isn’t a particularly memorable offering. It’s enough to get Avary back in the game, one hopes, but considering his talent, this is hardly the film his fans have been waiting for.
  28. The Assistant
    Exasperatingly low-key ... This is no time for subtlety, and yet Green’s film feels so restrained, you’d think she was afraid of being sued for slander.
  29. The Elephant Queen
    There’s no denying the emotional pull of Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble’s storytelling or the vivid rapture of the images, but “The Elephant Queen” adheres too closely to the parameters of family-friendly nature docs, and the formula doesn’t always serve it well.
  30. Jungleland
    It’s the kind of enterprise that has everything but a single fresh idea, or even moment. ... The sombre tone feels forced rather than earned, because everything here comes out of The Giant Golden Book Of Coulda Beena Contenda Cliches.
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