Variety's Scores

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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
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  1. The Road to Mandalay
    Midi Z has now delivered a tightly edited and emotionally rewarding drama that places him in the top rank of Asian social realists.
  2. Softie
    Softie clearly sees a beam of long-term hope for Kenya’s future in Mwangi and his political allies — including his no-bull, vinegar-tongued campaign manager Khadija, as delicious a documentary scene-stealer as we’ve seen this year. Yet Soko doesn’t go in for easy, crowd-pleasing uplift.
  3. True Mothers
    Adapting Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel of the same name helps impose more of a narrative framework than is typically found in Kawase’s oeuvre, although the film’s mix of genres — from marital drama to teen romance to social commentary — don’t gel.
  4. The Dry
    Expertly directed and co-written by respected filmmaker Robert Connolly (“Balibo,” “Paper Planes”), The Dry has all the character intrigue, clever plot twists and red herrings to keep viewers guessing.
  5. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    This is not historical revisionism, if anything, Quo Vadis, Aida? works to un-revise history, re-centering the victims’ plight as the eye of a storm of evils — not only the massacre itself, but the broader evils of institutional failure and international indifference.
  6. The Little Things
    This sort of clinical detective movie hinges on creating a feeling of revelation, a kind of horror-saturated awe. The Little Things is just a warmed-over set of serial-killer-thriller clichés, like crime-scene photos we’ve seen before. And some of it doesn’t track all that well.
  7. Palmer
    Stevens (who has expert instincts in his documentary work) falls short of making this scenario entirely convincing. Take out a few “gritty” details that account for the film’s R rating, and Palmer is formulaic enough to pass for a faith-based movie.
  8. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself
    Not all the tricks translate, nor do they need to, since DelGaudio has shrewdly constructed the experience around the theme of identity, revealing deeply personal elements of his own history in such a way as to prime audiences to look inward as well. The result is a kind of epiphany that leaves them with a feeling of discovery rather than deception.
  9. Malcolm & Marie
    Levinson gives his stars roughly equal time, carefully modulating the sense of balance throughout. His direction seldom seems showy, and yet, we sense the intention behind each cut as power and control shifts throughout the movie.
  10. Brothers By Blood
    It’s only Guez’s second film, although he’s written others (including the similarly genre-subverting zombie movie “The Night Eats the World”), and there’s enough promise here — especially on the performance front — to look forward to future projects.
  11. PG: Psycho Goreman
    As satire, Psycho Goreman is no “Planet Terror,” but it’s a droll enough schlock-in-quote-marks diversion, and part of its appeal is just how damn cheap it is. In the omni-tech era, it’s fun to see a filmmaker build an FX fantasy out of scraps, from the ground up.
  12. The Human Factor
    Moreh offers no analysis — an especially unfortunate stance given explosive feelings and wildly variable interpretations of events. Finally, the film pushes the deeply disquieting assumption that the United States knows what’s best for those troublesome people in the Middle East, whose tantrums kiboshed all the hard work and emotional investment put in by the sainted Americans.
  13. Identifying Features
    A film that straddles the line between artful and arty like this one isn’t designed for a wide public. There are moments that are striking, even if the their impact is muddied by a minimalism that at times feel pretentious. “Features” is ultimately worth the sit, but it needn’t have required quite so much effort.
  14. My Rembrandt
    Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.
  15. 1982
    Director Oualid Mouaness’ enriching use of images and sensitivity to narrative balance outweigh his unexceptional dialogue in 1982. Even with such a caveat, his debut feature succeeds in accessing emotional truths that leave a lingering bittersweet melancholy.
  16. Dead Pigs
    If that lack of discipline is the cost of the generous, expansive, energetic wit of Yan’s immensely promising first feature, it’s one we should be happy to pay.
  17. Simple Passion
    An imperfect but glassily compelling study of obsessive, finally debilitating desire that honors its source with an unblinking female gaze.
  18. The Ultimate Playlist of Noise
    In the last 20 minutes, Keean Johnson, who mostly acts cool and on top of things, drops his guard, letting in an honest ripple of pain and fear. He hits a true note, and the fact that Marcus can’t hear it almost makes up for the doom-laden whimsy of the rest of the movie.
  19. Blithe Spirit
    A tin-eared, lumpen-footed, almost perversely unfunny new spin on Noël Coward’s breezy 1940s farce.
  20. Once Upon a Time in Venezuela
    Over the course of several years, Anabel Rodriguez Rios’ unsentimentally elegiac documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela quietly observes Congo Mirador being brought to its knees, to progressively powerful and enraging effect.
  21. Acasă, My Home
    Balance and objectivity are laudable instincts, but they can put the film at a slightly frustrating remove.
  22. American Dream
    Kaminski takes a similarly dour, no-nonsense approach to what could be a cheerfully all-nonsense story — as if stripping junk food of its fat — and this “American Dream” dies somewhere in the impasse.
  23. Blizzard of Souls
    With its muscular direction by former documentarian Dzintars Dreibergs, atmospheric cinematography and careful attention to period detail, this account of a troop of Latvian Riflemen fighting first for the Russian Imperial Army against invading German forces and then for an independent Latvia should appeal to WWI buffs and fans of Sam Mendes’ “1917.”
  24. The Dig
    It’s hard to say whether the period this picture exhumes was any more innocent than what the world now faces, but that’s certainly the way Stone plays it, acting like an urbane orchidologist, cross-breeding contemporary art-house touches with the old-school refinement of a vintage Masterpiece Theatre production. Sometimes the best escape from the craziness of today is to lose oneself in history.
  25. Skyfire
    This thrill-packed tale about an angry volcano wreaking havoc on thinly written characters at a luxury island resort plays like a souped-up and much better remake of Irwin Allen’s 1980 turkey “When Time Ran Out.”
  26. If Not Now, When?
    It’s not groundbreaking but, written by Bass, the movie serves as a fine reminder of the pleasures of a female-focused story with the stuff of adulthood at its core.
  27. Locked Down
    Locked Down, at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops.
  28. Outside the Wire
    Apart from his programming, there’s little that sets Leo apart from your average action hero. And that, of course, is the problem with nearly all of these Netflix movies in the end: They approximate, but seldom surpass, what they’re meant to replace.
  29. Stray
    Throughout the mostly wordless “Stray,” we wonder with compassion and considerable self-critique whom the society uplifts and supports vs. whom it chooses to disregard and deem invisible.
  30. Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
    Nelson, who has the ace documentarian’s flair for making history far more interesting than the mythologies it’s cutting through, has directed a film that stays true to the epic devastation crack left in its wake and, at the same time, examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it.
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