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. Gay Chorus Deep South
    Rather than simply preaching to you-know-whom, director David Charles Rodrigues ... succeeds in humanizing the individuals on both sides.
  2. A Dog's Journey
    One wishes the film were a bit more inventive with its dog’s-eye view: the odd ground-level action shot aside, there isn’t much to cinematically suggest how animals see the world differently.
  3. The Silence of Others
    Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s straightforward but emotionally acute documentary works as both a thorough history lesson and a work of contemporary activism.
  4. Swallow
    A bold and unconventional thriller made real by the evolution of lead actress Haley Bennett ... Is it exploitative? Yes, to an extent that’s true. ... But, as in such Alfred Hitchcock classics as “Spellbound” and “Marnie,” with their facile psychoanalytic interpretations of compulsive and/or hysterical behavior, the approach can be quite effective in revealing the gender dynamics of the times.
  5. Lost Transmissions
    It doesn’t sentimentalize Theo’s illness (much) or pull back from how disconnected he can be. “Lost Transmissions” may even sound like it deserves props for its straight-up, objective view of mental illness. Except for one small detail: That stance ends up removing the basic dramatic motor of the film.
  6. Yesterday
    In Yesterday, [Boyle and Curtis] reduce the Beatles to the ultimate product by declaring, at every turn, “These songs are transcendent!” And it’s the fact that they keep telling us, rather than showing us (i.e., with musical sequences that earned their transcendence), that makes Yesterday, for all the timeless songs in it, a cut-and-dried, rotely whimsical, prefab experience.
  7. A Regular Woman
    Much more accomplished and watchable than Hormann’s previous film about a real-life crime, “3096 Days,” “A Regular Woman” owes much to its fine cast and impeccable technical package.
  8. Plus One
    [A] winning film ... Genre fans won’t want to miss it.
  9. The Place of No Words
    While occasionally wearisome in its fragmented structure ... Webber’s film navigates the vast notion of grief gently and with seriousness.
  10. Framing John DeLorean
    An adventurous hybrid. ... It shouldn’t work, but it does.
  11. Run
    The film, effective on its own unassuming terms, seems to cut out with some distance left to run.
  12. Rewind
    Watching the movie is like staring at a blurred image of the past that gradually, over 86 minutes, comes into terrifying focus.
  13. Scheme Birds
    Superb ... An alternately lyrical and gut-punching coming-of-age study.
  14. Savage
    An above-average action thriller.
  15. El Chicano
    The problem here isn’t the fairly apparent budgetary limits — it’s the limitations of style and imagination.
  16. House of Hummingbird
    A touch overlong, “House of Hummingbird” doesn’t leave the most powerful emotional mark. Still, it lands on a poignant aftertaste through Kim’s serene attentiveness to the rhythms and details of everyday life ... with a peaceful style reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-eda.
  17. Tolkien
    The film – stately, well-acted, and ultimately unsubstantial – dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration.
  18. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    Though consistent with the game (with a few extra but obvious twists thrown in for good measure), the story of “Detective Pikachu” doesn’t allow nearly enough Pokémon-related action, while the quality of the computer animation (by Moving Picture Co. and Framestore) falls far short of the basic level of competency audiences have come to expect from effects movies.
  19. The Kill Team
    Those familiar with this story won’t find any novel twists here, but Krauss astutely conveys the literal and moral quagmires produced by such military situations.
  20. Bolden
    Pritzker and Rothschild’s script feels like such a composite of jazz biopics that its only in the performance sequences, parceled out stingily amid the misery, in which Bolden really comes alive.
  21. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
    The enterprise would be something to celebrate if the movie itself weren’t so flawed, not just in scholarly terms but in her mania for visualizing seemingly every phone call she made in the hunt for Guy-Blaché material. Sadly, all these problems overwhelm Green’s noteworthy success in tracking down previously unknown documents and photos.
  22. Funan
    The last half hour of Funan is so heavy that the film effectively plays more as tragedy than as triumph, all the more impactful for being true.
  23. The Intruder
    The Intruder offers few surprises of any sort.
  24. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    Laced with colorful stories. ... The movie is mostly content to be a portrait of Ronstadt the artist, and it’s more than satisfying on that front.
  25. Good Posture
    [A] roughly drafted feature debut that manages to be just affable enough.
  26. Come to Daddy
    Moderately funny and strangely dated ... The blend of tired jokes and body horror here seems entombed in amber, as every lacerated scalp, loudly broken limb, and use of the C-word makes it feel that much less original.
  27. UglyDolls
    UglyDolls is “Trolls Lite,” and the way things work I have no doubt we’ll be seeing a movie in the next few years that’s “UglyDolls Lite.” Yet this is still a winsomely appealing and joke-happy bauble for kiddies.
  28. Georgetown
    It’s downright tricky to maintain the tone Waltz is going for here, but the story is consistently outrageous enough to keep us guessing, and Redgrave goes a long way to offset the lunacy of it all. ... But instead of getting more interesting as it goes on, Waltz’s performance grows tiresome.
  29. Meeting Gorbachev
    We might have hoped for a more sparky encounter, but Meeting Gorbachev, though consistently engaging, is less a fireworks display than a fireside chat, and so feels curiously like an opportunity missed.
  30. Tell It to the Bees
    Within the film’s modest scale, the period trappings feel apt, and its aesthetic packaging is attractive enough. But particularly for a movie largely about repression, “Bees” is so full of forced emotions that it teeters on the brink of cliche-riddled camp.
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