Variety's Scores

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:
17847 movie reviews
  1. It’s to the film’s credit that it creates a sense of high-stakes peril despite us knowing the rough outcome from the get-go, and largely without simplifying its moral dilemmas into straightforward choices between heroism and villainy.
  2. Though the deaths are diverse and fairly gory (Brennan Jones designed the special makeup f/x), “4/20 Massacre” isn’t very scary. It is, however, lively and well-enough crafted, with decent performances.
  3. If Considine doesn’t seem to know his characters as intimately as he did in his debut, however, he still knows acting inside out. It’s his unguarded conviction in the lead — and that of a superb Jodie Whittaker as his devoted but devastated wife — that finally lands Journeyman a victory on points, if not quite a knockout blow.
  4. It’s a movie that’s resourcefully accomplished on comparatively slim means, and less choosy fantasy action fans will find things to enjoy in its foamy cocktail of vampires, kickboxing and neo-noir.
  5. It’s a sleekly witty action opera that’s at once overstuffed and bedazzling.
  6. The portrait it paints is sure to confound and infuriate in equal measure. Far from simply a snapshot of a discussion about race, Brownson’s documentary is a riveting account of self-sabotage, misplaced priorities, and obstinacy run amok.
  7. Woman Walks Ahead offers dimension to its leading lady, but holds its Native characters to the same old surface stereotypes. Such a movie is a step in the right direction, but farther behind than it seems to realize.
  8. Nothing this absurd should be this boring.
  9. More antic and likable than it is laugh-out-loud funny, Adventures in Public School is handled with skill on modest means.
  10. The real achievement is how the film captures and holds a mood that develops and expands, with a yearning for what was and what might have been.
  11. Noble intentions are derailed by deeply confused execution in writer-director Deon Taylor’s Traffik, which attempts to marry cheap genre thrills with an unflinching depiction of the horrors of international sex trafficking, only to cheapen the latter and cast a grimy pall over the former.
  12. Real, inspired strangeness — not to mention laughs, and an actual point — prove elusive here, while the musical elements feel so inessential they might be excised entirely without notable loss. Wanderland deserves credit for trying something different. But such an effort shouldn’t end up so innocuous and inconsequential.
  13. If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.
  14. The film is sufficiently intelligent and entertaining to engage most grown-ups and, no kidding, fascinate history buffs.
  15. An incredibly precise actor who understands exactly how to play to the camera, conveying volumes via even the slightest microexpressions, Kingsley navigates the tricky mix of humor, horror, and deep-seated regret that make this man, if not exactly ordinary, then relatable, at least.
  16. Undemanding yet never quite effortless, agreeable yet never quite engrossing, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society has fewer stumbling points than its loopy title, but that title sticks for longer than the rest of it.
  17. A gripping, stranger-than-fiction account of a real-world medical conspiracy, the film begins as a human-interest story and builds to an impressive work of investigative journalism into how and why they were placed with the families who raised them.
  18. “Pick” is brisk and pleasant, but not terribly involving or memorable.
  19. It’s a commendable departure, even if you can sense the helmer struggling to get the lay of the land at certain intersections in this heartfelt tale of an impoverished brother and sister seeking roundabout justice when she’s imprisoned for attempted murder.
  20. While trying to save her from being considered as merely an inspiration to the great men around her, the script inadvertently reinforces this impression.
  21. Thanks to some likable performances from Jason Sudeikis, Elizabeth Olsen and Ed Harris, it’s an entirely watchable if entirely by-the-numbers throwback to the sweet-and-sour Sundance-style indie films of yore. But there’s a blurry boundary between “vintage” and simply “passé,” and Kodachrome is too often caught on the wrong side of that line.
  22. What sets I Feel Pretty apart is the inspired premise that Renee’s transformation takes place entirely in her head, while those around her are left befuddled by her sudden change of attitude — a concept that begs the question of why our society encourages women to second-guess their self-image in the first place.
  23. 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.
  24. It’s hard to dislike Alex Strangelove; one just wishes the film didn’t lean in quite so insistently to be petted.
  25. The film is so calculated in its plotting that it loses some of its chill.
  26. 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.
  27. Blandly competent in assembly, Baja has only pedestrian comic ideas, and even those aren’t executed well.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.

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