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. Super Troopers 2
    Super Troopers 2 is an aggressively lame and slobby comedy full of cardboard characters and in-your-face naughty jokes that feel about as dangerous as old vaudeville routines.
  2. Alex Strangelove
    It’s hard to dislike Alex Strangelove; one just wishes the film didn’t lean in quite so insistently to be petted.
  3. This Is Our Land
    The film is so calculated in its plotting that it loses some of its chill.
  4. This Is Home: A Refugee Story
    This Is Home gestures toward a more detailed, heterogeneous understanding of these war victims as human beings, characterizing its four chosen families in detailed, individual terms, and listening attentively to their varied expressions of ambition and concern for their new future.
  5. Baja
    Blandly competent in assembly, Baja has only pedestrian comic ideas, and even those aren’t executed well.
  6. The Wife
    The Wife is Close’s film from start to finish, and several of the supporting performances fail to rise to her level, with Pryce and Slater the only ones who manage to impress in her orbit.
  7. Bye Bye Germany
    There’s a storybook complacency to Garbarski’s filmmaking (indeed the literal translation of the German title is “Once Upon a Time in Germany”) that gives us the impression that all this is snow-globe history, put away behind glass on a shelf somewhere.
  8. Mercury
    The movie is a mess, yet once the thriller plot kicks in, you do start to absorb it as a “silent” film, tuning into the visual atmosphere of stalker fear and rusty chemical entropy.
  9. The Judge
    Greater attention to how and when information is revealed would make “The Judge” a far more valuable film.
  10. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    If only the music and lyrics were more memorable, then “Jeannette” might have delivered on its potential. But Dumont has a stiff, fixed-camera style that deprives the story of its transcendence.
  11. Come Sunday
    Marston, working from Marcus Hinchey’s sensitive and remarkably nuanced script, invites measured introspection from both his characters and the audience.
  12. Aardvark
    The film can never quite decide what it wants to be — wounded-inner-child drama, quirky comedy, quasi-thriller, all the above — and its good ideas never quite gel, or lead toward sufficient narrative revelation.
  13. Krystal
    Though Macy is an odd fit to direct (coming at the talky script like it was a madcap piece of theater), the wonky tone is all screenwriter Will Aldis’ invention.
  14. The Broken Tower
    Though clearly besotted with Crane’s poetry, the writer-director-star never achieves full immersion in the man’s life or work; the sense is of people playing a very cerebral game of dress-up.
  15. Rampage
    Peyton delivers a unified-looking whole, in which the visual effects integrate well with stage and location work.
  16. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    The movie isn’t scary, it isn’t gripping, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t fueled by any sort of clever compulsion. It’s just a strangely arduous exercise that feels increasingly frantic and arbitrary as it goes along.
  17. Blaze
    Blaze, which leaps around in time, telling Blaze Foley’s story by zeroing in on a handful of disparate moments, is beautifully made. It’s an organic slice of life — raw and untidy, deceptively aimless but always exploratory.
  18. 6 Balloons
    You can’t help feeling that something terrible will happen at any moment, unless something worse happens first.
  19. What We Started
    Though it offers a decent enough primer on dance music history, it’s so eager to play all the hits that it never quite settles into any particular groove.
  20. Back to Burgundy
    Though not a documentary, this gorgeous French family saga benefits enormously from Klapisch’s natural curiosity, informed by research (he participated in a harvest in order to observe its nuances) and elevated by his insistence that they film over the course of a full year, so as to capture the impact of the seasons on both viticulture and its human stewards.
  21. Pyewacket
    It’s the rare horror film that’s actually more effective in psychological terms than in suspense ones.
  22. That Summer
    Almost exclusively composed of 16mm footage shot in 1972 and lost until now, Göran Hugo Olsson’s fascinating documentary recounts the summer when Lee Radziwill and photographer Peter Beard decided to record Radziwill’s reclusive aunt and first cousin, hiring the Maysles and shooting in and around Grey Gardens while workers fixed the place up.
  23. The Gardener
    Chabot’s film is not “The Garden,” but The Gardener and as a portrait of the man behind Quatre Vents, unlike the gorgeous flora, it never blossoms.
  24. Lowlife
    Prows and company don’t simply play the often outrageous (and occasionally grisly) content for tasteless sensationalism, comic or otherwise. They treat it with an interesting, empathic yet slightly detached tone somewhere between the respectful and the droll.
  25. Mrs. Fang
    This is a merciless film, and whether the process of teasing its meaning out for yourself feels like a punishment or a reward will depend entirely on your patience and your point of view.
  26. Spinning Man
    Spinning Man, like a film noir turned into a video game, winds up crafting a rickety atmosphere of deception out of the question of guilt or innocence. The result keeps you guessing, but it forgets to keep you caring.
  27. The Humanity Bureau
    Director Rob W. King and screenwriter Dave Schultz’s engaging effort has enough standard genre elements to satisfy more open-minded sci-fi fans, and its political-allegory angle is ultimately quite potent without becoming too heavy-handed.
  28. Summer in the Forest
    Wright satisfies in providing a glimpse of an alternative community and lifestyle that appears near-idyllic without being painted in terms that are too sentimental or cute.
  29. The Miracle Season
    Even if you see through the benign (manipulative) strategies of The Miracle Season, which isn’t hard to do, resistance is futile. You will surrender. You’ll feel the tear on your cheek, the lump in your throat, the reverent huggy glory of it all.
  30. The Gospel According to André
    “Gospel” is Novack’s first solo feature, though she co-directed “Eat This New York” with husband Andrew Rossi, whose “Page One: Inside the New York Times” she also produced, and she seems to have an implicit understanding that shot composition is every bit as important in a documentary as in a narrative feature.
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