Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. The Other Side of the Door
    The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy’s weekend lineup, The Other Side of the Door brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.
  2. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
  3. The Abandoned
    Despite the capable presence of Jason Patric in a thanklessly one-note role, this generic chiller clings so tightly to conventions that it fails to even moderately raise one’s pulse
  4. Greater
    An insistent, clunky sermon about triumph through faith, David Hunt’s film is so determined to turn its subject into a Christ-like saint that it loses any sense of him as an actual flesh-and-blood man, the result being a third-string sports saga only apt to play to its devout target audience.
  5. 31
    Rob Zombie truly loves horror movies. But he still hasn’t made a good one, and “31” is a perfect encapsulation of the reasons why: It’s a fanboy’s highlight reel of homages, without any of the credibility or context that made most of the films he’s inspired by so fine.
  6. All Roads Lead to Rome
    Though Parker’s assured performance, along with the enchanting backdrop, eases the action toward harmless gentility, they’re hijacked by a plot that mimics the plate-spinning business of classic screwball, but moves at agonizing half-speed.
  7. Correspondence (La corrispondenza)
    Even if Tornatore were deliberately aiming for the artificiality that clings to nearly every frame, the pic would still feel needlessly airless, hampered by an Italian-to-English script translation that may be precise but lacks naturalism.
  8. Colonia
    The leads are given the thankless task of maintaining grim poker faces through scene after scene of high contrivance and cliche-ridden dialogue.
  9. The Darkness
    At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.
  10. A Strange Course of Events
    Too often the pic feels as if it’s killing time to pad itself out into feature length.
  11. The Cloverfield Paradox
    The Cloverfield Paradox is a mind-boggling mish-mosh. It squanders whatever stray crumbs were left of the “Cloverfield” mystique by banging together bits and pieces of what must be a dozen genres. The result is a desperate plunge into the abyss of shoddy sci-fi.
  12. An Eye for Beauty
    An almost bizarrely limp, emotionless, blank greeting card of a movie, this purported romantic comedy-drama contains little of the three, at best serving as a sort of extended L.L. Bean advertisement, full of fabulously shot footage of Eastern Canadian vistas and the well-dressed rustic yuppies who live there.
  13. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    Disappointingly plodding and ham-fistedly obvious in its attempts to offer an up-close and personal portrait of a mood-swinging, self-loathing 59-year-old Ernest Hemingway.
  14. The Girl in the Photographs
    The Girl in the Photographs is a slasher movie filled with smug and self-absorbed characters who are not nearly as clever as they obviously assume they are.
  15. Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe
    Vaxxed comes across as a grab-bag of charts, theories and anecdotal evidence that would never pass muster by the editors of any major scientific journal (like, say, the Lancet), and too often resembles the kind of one-sided, paranoia-stoking agitprop that political activists construct to sanctify true believers and assault infidels.
  16. CHIPS
    Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”
  17. ma ma
    Julio Medem’s film is a smiling-through-tears saga whose generally tasteful execution can’t ultimately salvage a whopping load of maudlin contrivance, all designed to burnish the halo around St. Penelope.
  18. Tulip Fever
    Not only is there nothing presently in the zeitgeist to which to peg such a story (except perhaps the Dane DeHaan-Cara Delevingne reunion nobody asked for, shot before “Valerian” and shelved for nearly a year), but the entire package has a curiously old-fashioned feel — and not just because it takes place 380 years ago.
  19. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
    "USS Indianapolis” is a World War II “epic” that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the audience with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.
  20. The Last Face
    The Last Face would have been a better movie if it had an actual screenplay, rather than the bare-bones one credited to Erin Dignam.
  21. Bazodee
    Bazodee itself dutifully hews to convention, but its plotting is so torpid that it never feels as if there are any genuine stakes to the protagonist’s which-beau-should-I-choose predicament.
  22. Table 19
    Almost everything that happens in this movie rings cloyingly false. It wants to make you laugh and cry, but you may be too busy cringing.
  23. Planetarium
    Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.
  24. A Family Man
    Sparing no maudlin contrivance in a quest to jerk tears that remain stubbornly dry, this hokum is slickly executed by producer Mark Williams in his feature directorial debut. But the result never rises above polished plastic, formulaic, and pedestrian.
  25. Milton's Secret
    Even a prickly pro like Sutherland can’t do anything to elevate a hokey self-help lecture disguised as family entertainment.
  26. Never
    Writer-director Brett Allen Smith’s quasi-romance meanders about with the same aimlessness as its characters, revealing nothing substantial about them, or twentysomething love and identity formation.
  27. Fear, Inc.
    The main thing early reels have going for them isn’t any actual cleverness or wit, but Neff’s pleasant riffing within a stock slacker-bro role. When his character stops having fun, so does the audience. Though needless to say, the unimaginative references to prior/better horror flicks just keep on a-comin’.
  28. Message from the King
    It’s a dark and all-around unpleasant journey to take.
  29. Life on the Line
    The narrative is so predictable that, when an outburst of trash-talking doesn’t escalate into a barroom brawl, it’s not just surprising, it’s pretty close to shocking.
  30. Crosscurrent
    Plotless, pretentiously literary and lousy at explaining geography, the movie fails to put Yang’s vision into a fictional framework that’s even remotely engaging.
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