Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Black '47
    Daly’s characterful, slow-burn tale is a well-crafted experiment in grafting genre onto disregarded history.
  2. 306 Hollywood
    306 Hollywood is best when it gets either very scientifically dry, or reaches beyond its liminal cuteness into ambitious visual poetry.
  3. The Oath
    Here’s a project that had the nerve to address these tensions in a megaplex environment, only to squander them on a standoff it pretends could be so glibly resolved.
  4. Night School
    Night School has a handful of laughs, but it’s a bloated trifle that, at 111 minutes, overstays its welcome.
  5. Overlord
    Even at its most suspenseful, when Jed Kurzel’s cello score stabs at the eardrums, Overlord feels familiar, a collage of cinematic nightmares checking off its influences.
  6. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    The pull of Garry Winogrand’s photographs is that they dissolve the line between art and life.
  7. Tea with the Dames
    A wholly delightful talkathon.
  8. The Song of Sway Lake
    The Song of Sway Lake never finds a thematic center around which to pivot its action.
  9. The Last Suit
    [A] touching, albeit occasionally heavy-handed, drama.
  10. Call Her Ganda
    With access to only one side of its central conflict, and a scattershot approach that skims over key details and points of interest, this well-intentioned documentary leaves audiences feeling like they’re only getting part of a much larger story.
  11. Smallfoot
    It’s messy and distressingly unmemorable, which is a shame since there are no shortage of great Looney Tunes-level cartoon gags wasted along the way, including an ingenious rope bridge sequence worthy of golden-age Warner Bros. animation.
  12. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    While not terribly original, it would be fair to call the movie inventive, like one of those eccentrics who’s constantly pestering the patent office with what he thinks are fresh ideas, only to discover that someone else got there first.
  13. Teen Spirit
    Teen Spirit is too tidy, concocted, and safe. It longs to channel the high of great pop, but as a movie it lacks the ecstatic imagination to do what great pop does. It never soars.
  14. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    While always attractive, the look conveys a level of non-spontaneous construction that often takes away from the potency of hard, brutal reality.
  15. Unbroken: Path to Redemption
    It would be unfair, and not entirely accurate, to dismiss “Path to Redemption” as irredeemably dull and without merit.
  16. The Dawn Wall
    It’s a riveting and spectacular documentary.
  17. A Boy. A Girl. A Dream.
    If Basir and Samantha Tanner’s screenplay ultimately feels like less than a full meal, its intelligence and restraint — particularly in resisting the lure of a heavier-handed message — are nonetheless admirable.
  18. The Command
    Vinterberg’s Kursk occasionally lands an emotive blow but only in its more fictionalized stretches, while it pulls its punches with the thorniest and most provocative elements of the real story, an instinct that unduly submerges much of the real horror and lasting consequence of this tragically, enragingly, heartbreakingly bungled incident.
  19. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    What could have been a powerful ode to the impact that movies have in shaping our identities — and by extension, the reason broken people are drawn to the profession, through which they hope to reach others like themselves — becomes an over-the-top celebration of Dolan himself.
  20. Don't Leave Home
    The result is a diverting-to-a-point curio whose nice atmospherics and good performances ultimately don’t add up to quite enough to satisfy the constructs of horror, allegory, satire — or anything else.
  21. Smuggling Hendrix
    [A] delightful, droll, and intelligent comedy, which captures the absurdity and tragedy of a complicated political situation with a consistently light touch.
  22. Hold the Dark
    Boasting the sort of shocking brutality and unnerving menace that has become Saulnier’s signature, Hold the Dark is also a strangely seductive film, and one that understands the difference between simple plot resolution and catharsis, leading us on a journey into Alaska’s frigid heart of darkness that poses more questions than it answers.
  23. The Basement
    There’s a big twist at the end, but like everything else here, it aims for a shock effect that the film is simply too clumsy and psychologically far-fetched to pull off.
  24. Bel Canto
    Between its minimal setup and frantic denouement, the middle stretch of this pleasingly multilingual movie sags shapelessly, as the hostages and even their captors gradually bond across cultural and linguistic barriers, with music — of course — as the language that binds them.
  25. The Land of Steady Habits
    No matter how much you want to like the film, something is missing: a spark, a shimmer, a thrust of discovery.
  26. Shadow
    Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou’s breathtakingly beautiful Shadow is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time.
  27. Quincy
    Stretching to more than two hours, Quincy stumbles into some pacing problems as it goes, and considering the sheer number of turns the man’s life took, one wonders if a miniseries might have served him better.
  28. The Quietude
    Boasting a trio of actresses at the top of their game and cinematography that constantly impresses with its confident yet unshowy fluidity, the movie deftly enters into the bosom of a family harboring multiple secrets, encompassing the personal and political.
  29. Our Time
    Die-hard acolytes will argue that the camerawork transcends or even complements the storyline; most everyone else will wonder what happened to an auteur whose work was awaited with such eager anticipation.
  30. The Nightingale
    Kent’s elemental revenge tale attains a near-mythic grandeur over the course of its arduous, ravishing trek. Some stricter editing wouldn’t go amiss, particularly in a needlessly baggy, to-and-fro finale, but it’s a pretty magnificent mass of movie.
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