Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,779 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Ted K
    Quite what we gain from the experience is uncertain, with most viewers likely to leave the film understanding little more of the Unabomber than they did two hours before. Still, Ted K is impressive and oppressive in equal measure.
  2. Detective Chinatown 3
    For all its narrative and structural shortcomings, Cheng’s film is always visually arresting and frequently very funny as it switches tone and tack at the drop of a hat.
  3. Charli XCX: Alone Together
    In the end, Alone Together is a love story — about the love between Charli and her fans.
  4. Beginning
    Beginning is not a derivative work. Its slow-cinema trappings aren’t merely plucked from the films that have taught its maker along the way, but prove a rhythmically apt, intuitive way into the headspace of its protagonist, a woman who feels her very life has been put on pause.
  5. El Planeta
    There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.
  6. The Lost Sons
    For a while, we’re bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we’ve passed through the looking glass of the story’s peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it.
  7. I'm Fine (Thanks for Asking)
    “I’m Fine” teases the structure of comedies in which something must be achieved in too short a span. Only, instead of ha-ha challenges, Danny encounters the poignant, the frustrating, even the perilous.
  8. The Fallout
    It’s a remarkable accomplishment: a film with the confidence to pose big questions, and the humility to leave them unanswered.
  9. Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free
    It’s so removed from having a dark side that you know you’re getting the feel-good version of a Tom Petty portrait.
  10. Women Is Losers
    It’s a rewarding experience to watch Izzo thread a tricky line with ease here, emitting both a child-like innocence and gradual steeliness that slowly yet convincingly sharpens and matures. If only the film could deserve her level of commitment.
  11. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror
    A slippery thesis doesn’t detract from the pleasures of this documentary from genre scholar and programmer Kier-La Janisse. She draws on alluring clips from more than 100 films, plus myriad interviews, to survey an alternately lurid and surreal cinematic (as well as television) field of mostly rural tales inspired by traditional superstitions and lore.
  12. Enforcement
    A thriller that’s both a relentless adrenaline rush and a social-issue Rorschach test for all who watch it.
  13. Swan Song
    Kier isn’t panhandling for laughs by playing some tired gay stereotype. There’s a heart-on-his-sleeve sincerity to the performance that’s better than the material merits, for Stephens has written an earnest but anemic script.
  14. Introducing, Selma Blair
    Rachel Fleit’s film Introducing, Selma Blair is eye-opening and empathetic — but it’s also intensely moving as a documentary in its own right, enriched by a human subject who appears to learn as much about herself in the course of filming as we do.
  15. Here Before
    The tension that drives Here Before is our curiosity as to whether or not the film is taking place in the world of the uncanny. In a way we want it to be, because that would make it scary fun; in another way we don’t want it to be, because that would make it corny scary fun.
  16. Wojnarowicz
    “Wojnarowicz” is impressive as a tapestry woven near-whole from preexisting materials, amplifying its subject’s own voice in every creative form it took. Editor Dave Stanke merits kudos alongside McKim for their evocative, first-rate assembly.
  17. City of Lies
    The truth is out there, but when pot and kettle go to battle, Hollywood best be careful using the term City of Lies to describe anything other than itself.
  18. Happily
    Aiming for a darkly humorous portrait of marital bliss — and the difficulties of maintaining it — the film comes off as a half-formed “Twilight Zone” joke minus the punchline.
  19. Dutch
    Dutch is dreadful. It’s a shambling, rambling recycling of clichés and conventions from ’70s Blaxploitation fare mixed with stilted murder-trial melodrama and half-baked morsels of sociopolitical topicality. But, really, to describe this rancid slice of ineptitude that way is to risk making it sound a lot more interesting than it is.
  20. Come True
    With sterling command of its malevolently dreamy tone, it casts a disquieting spell.
  21. The Tunnel
    Solidly crafted if a bit uninspired, Pål Øie’s thriller is like a horizontal, colder, sootier “Towering Inferno” minus the all-star-cast, though their soap-operatics are intact.
  22. Kid 90
    In many ways, Frye’s collage only makes sense to its maker, where someone else might have brought enough distance to put all this material in perspective.
  23. The Last Blockbuster
    The Last Blockbuster taps into analog lovers’ fond feelings for the monstrosity that gobbled up the little guys, then gave up, leaving not just movie fans but franchise owners like Sandi Harding to fend for themselves. Is the company’s demise really something to be mourned, or was its rise the real tragedy?
  24. Perfumes
    This is a film that chooses to keep things crisp and feather-light. And there is nothing wrong with the movie equivalent of a modestly happy floral cologne you’d splash on for a little daytime pick-me-up.
  25. Rose Plays Julie
    The most disturbing thing about the impressively disturbing Rose Plays Julie may just be how satisfying it is.
  26. The Man Who Sold His Skin
    An audacious but not always palatable mix of drama, tragedy, romance, satire and dark humor.
  27. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.
  28. The Good Traitor
    Fascinating backroom politics circa WWII are undermined by banal marital melodrama in Danish director Christina Rosendahl’s The Good Traitor, resulting in a so-so period drama that raises more questions than it answers.
  29. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Each of these episodes is well acted, follows a reasonably conventional three-act structure and emphasizes interesting female characters in a compelling situation — which is more than can be said for many portmanteau films, where one segment is markedly more satisfying than the others. But it also suggests an ongoing resistance on Hamaguchi’s part to engage with the feature form itself.
  30. Keep an Eye Out
    It’s a mildly amusing trifle, but Dupieux has already made several of those. It’s one thing not to challenge your viewers, but another not to challenge yourself — something Dupieux has shown little interest in doing.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »