Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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 2.3 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. The Raft
    The surprisingly short leap from radical academic study to lurid exploitation is navigated with wit, sensitivity and rueful social awareness in Swedish director Marcus Lindeen’s gripping debut feature The Raft.
  2. Mine 9
    Mensore’s film aims chiefly to highlight the typical plight of an American underclass that rarely gets big-screen attention. That it does with honesty and conviction, if not a great deal of inspiration.
  3. All Is Well
    A fascinating flip on themes contentiously raised in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” underpinned by a breakout performance of raw candor by Aenne Schwarz, this is grown-up filmmaking of sharp, subtle daring.
  4. Shéhérazade
    Shooting in a color-streaked vérité style and coaxing terrific performances from his non-pro cast, Marlin clearly has a promising future ahead. What keeps Shéhérazade from ranking higher in the pantheon of streetwise French crime dramas is the story’s overall familiarity.
  5. Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch
    For shootouts, explosions and tough talk, "Wild Bunch” has plenty to please action fans
  6. The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily
    Yet given the opportunity for misinterpretation, it’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t find a way of reworking the story to ensure the taint of anti-immigration rhetoric couldn’t be applied to what’s designed as a children’s tale.
  7. Palm Beach
    The cast is clearly what sells the experience, but it all goes down easy through the combined efforts of Ward’s perceptive direction, the nuanced editing of vet Nick Meyers, and Bonnie Elliott’s warm, crystalline camerawork. Melinda Doring’s meticulous, crowded-but-not-cluttered production design settles everyone right in.
  8. Dark Phoenix
    Turner’s damaged conviction holds Dark Phoenix together, giving it a treacherous life force.
  9. The Black Godfather
    The Black Godfather does yeoman’s work introducing a figure that few outsiders have likely heard of, but who needs no introduction in the power corridors of the entertainment industry.
  10. The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil
    As much fun as it is to watch Lee beat people up and strut around in shiny pinstripe suits, it’s just as much of a pleasure to watch him think it all through.
  11. Three Peaks
    Superbly crafted, utterly gripping.
  12. Domino
    To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.
  13. The Burial Of Kojo
    Though the film deals in tragedy, its sheer cinematic exuberance is immensely hopeful. As too, is the story of how one of the most exciting directorial debuts in recent memory was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing and planted in a few theaters before blossoming on Netflix.
  14. First Love
    First Love may be a fluffier, more eager-to-please bauble than Miike’s more challengingly outré titles, but like the cutesy mechanical toy puppy that turns up yapping in the middle of the film, it is wired to explode, and it is a blast.
  15. Pavarotti
    The genius of Pavarotti’s voice is that it had the power to heal. The movie pays ample testament to how that voice, for 40 years, poured out of him, rapturous and tragic, soaring on wings of pure emotion, at times wracked with a spiritual pain that was surely his own, but always lifting his audience to the mountaintop of beauty, saying, “This is where I live. And you can too.”
  16. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
    Chuck Smith’s documentary is at once accessible and formally daring, echoing its subject’s style while simultaneously celebrating her radical achievements. It’s an enlightening nonfiction portrait of a feminist pioneer that, in this #MeToo era, should strike a timely chord.
  17. Sea of Shadows
    Told with straightforward investigative nous and a judicious teardrop of anguished sentimentality, the film makes a virtue of its many clashing participants: journalists, scientists, activists, navy officials and fishermen, each with a slightly different stance on the matter.
  18. Mike Wallace Is Here
    He left behind enough tape from both ends of the microphone that Belkin is able to create his entire documentary with old footage, juiced by retro imagery of broadcast air waves and vintage dials and knobs.
  19. Always Be My Maybe
    Perhaps the best sequences are multi-purpose. They’re both funny and genuine, add a bubbly buoyancy through deft wit and charm, and tweak genre conventions.
  20. Invisible Life
    Anyone already familiar with Aïnouz’s work will know to expect a florid sensory experience, but even by the Brazilian’s standards, this heartbroken tale of two sisters separated for decades by familial shame and deceit is a waking dream, saturated in sound, music and color to match its depth of feeling.
  21. Ma
    You can’t take Ma seriously. It’s a squalid formula picture that’s too busy connecting dots, hitting beats, engineering situations designed to make you squirm. But you will squirm.
  22. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    You won’t feel cheated; at stray moments, you’ll feel the wonder. But for every high point, there’s a moment when the thrill threatens to leak away.
  23. The Poison Rose
    It’s just a sad, unimaginative affair in which an impressive lineup of talented names goes to waste before our eyes.
  24. On a Magical Night
    On a Magical Night is whimsically cute, provocative in a coy way, and more than a little in love with itself.
  25. Alice and the Mayor
    A movie so enamored by its self-perception of cleverness that even policy wonks will find it hard to muster enthusiasm.
  26. In Bed With Victoria
    If anything, what Triet has done is demonstrate that people are allowed to be complicated — and at times contradictory. And the tidy Hollywood ending betrays the fact that Victoria’s problems have less to do with sorting out who’s in her bed than what’s in her head.
  27. Sibyl
    Triet’s chic, blackly comic psychodrama piles up bad decisions like so many profiteroles in a croquembouche, admiring the teetering spectacle of its chaos as it goes.
  28. Oh Mercy!
    Although Desplechin claims his main interest is to get inside the two women’s characters, pushing away moral absolutes about guilt and innocence (yes, “Crime and Punishment” is a key influence), the couple come off as the least interesting people on screen.
  29. It Must Be Heaven
    Whimsical and wistful yet infused with a yearning for the stability of place.
  30. Tommaso
    A movie that’s a loosely structured ramble can work, and about half of “Tommaso” feels more vital than anything Ferrara has made in a while. But the film should have been shapelier and 20 minutes shorter, with a more focused dramatic psychology.
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