Variety's Scores

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:
17760 movie reviews
  1. Blockers isn’t really about these girls losing their virginity. It’s about how they seize control of their destinies, one triumphantly lewd zinger at a time.
  2. A Quiet Place is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.
  3. The sequel’s worst enemy is its lead actor Wang Baoqiang, who dials up his bumbling, bragging and vulgar persona Tang Ren to intolerable levels.
  4. Even if the ending falls something short of memorable, Juggernaut still holds attention as a strong, well-acted effort that effectively walks the line between dysfunctional family drama and revenge thriller.
  5. The Hurricane Heist is...a perfect storm of deliriously watchable inanity and ineptitude. It may be a strong early candidate for the worst movie of 2018, but don’t let that deter you – bad movies this fun don’t come along every day.
  6. There are moments when the film has the ability to absorb us, however fleetingly.
  7. RBG
    This spry celebration reveals that the real Ginsburg is neither beast nor badass, but an even-tempered, soft-spoken mediator—not typically the traits that inspire rousing high-fives, but qualities that honor the slow, uphill slog of positive change.
  8. Dull, flavorless, and fundamentally incurious, “The Outsider” is a clueless misfire, the cinematic equivalent of a study-abroad student showing off the kanji forearm tattoo whose meaning he never bothered to learn.
  9. Riedelsheimer is well-matched to Goldsworthy’s methods and interests.
  10. 1:54 intends to be a straight-shooting social drama about the multifaceted problem of bullying in the digital age, but it’s out of touch with how real teenagers think and act and communicate. It’s a modern film that feels like a relic.
  11. Thoroughbreds doesn’t look or sound anything like other teen-centric movies, but this is hardly a surface-only character study.
  12. It’s Eric Bana, cast as a fictionalized composite of various white-supremacist apartheid criminals, who comes closest to electrifying proceedings in what’s at heart a one-room two-hander, unconvincingly padded and populated for the big screen.
  13. There’s an old-school, B-movie snap to much of the proceedings, which Nash Edgerton modernizes without imposing too flashy a style upon the material. It’s pulp, plain and simple, delivering on the chance to watch depraved characters navigate unseemly situations.
  14. There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.
  15. A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless, and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes.
  16. The doc is all talk and little action, with most of the first hour of this 75-minute pic focused on DiMaggio chatting about the good old days, as well as his stand-up plans and what tonal approach he should take — the nuances of crafting a set — rather than genuinely working toward those goals.
  17. The first live-action adaptation of the phenomenally popular Japanese manga created by female author Hiromu Arakawa proves to be a mixed bag of eye-catching visuals and uneven storytelling — rushed and choppy at times, and draggy and repetitive at others.
  18. One emerges from Breaking Point stunned and moved, with the realization that the Ukrainians are fighting for themselves, as they have for centuries, but also that they’re now fighting for all of us.
  19. Hong Kong action-director Dante Lam’s Operation Red Sea is war propaganda that comes off as antiwar, a patriotic film so carried away by its own visceral, pulverizing violence that patriotism almost becomes an afterthought.
  20. Shirkers isn’t about Cardona, but about Tan reclaiming the film and the story that he had taken away from her. Her energized, rough-hewn documentary style doesn’t seem that far removed from her lost debut, but she and her friends have enough perspective to look back at that period in their lives with touching fondness and good humor.
  21. The movie is avidly told and often suspenseful, but it’s really a fascinating study of how corruption in America works. It sears you with its relevance.
  22. The movie doesn’t have the budget or imagination to permit subplots.
  23. All the new Death Wish is truly committed to is getting a rise out of the audience. It’s a first-person-shooter fantasy. The film’s only real view of justice is that it’s a blast.
  24. The modest rewards in Finding Your Feet are ones of sprightly human chemistry rather than great narrative discovery, of all-round good humor rather than outright hilarity.
  25. Midnighters is brisk and eventful. Yet as a thriller driven by constantly worsening straits, it’s not as cleverly twisty as it would like to be, nor are the well-played characters granted enough dimensionality for their dynamics to be all that surprising or convincing.
  26. Most of Oh Lucy! passes by breezily, and in different hands this could easily be a crowdpleasing comedy...but when Hirayanagi opts to plunge deeper, you realize the darkness has been there waiting all along.
  27. Levine, who wrote the script, knows how to stage an energized intellectual battle, but adapting “The Blue Angel” to a 21st-century setting turns out to be a distinctly musty and unrewarding idea.
  28. It’s an ideal showcase for the four leads, who are given the latitude to create fully human characters.
  29. Even when the film’s eccentricities feel too choreographed, it manages to deliver its preordained uplift with good-humored charm.
  30. [Geoghegan] allows his film’s message about intolerance and oppression to emanate naturally from the action, thereby letting the proceedings gradually transform into a revisionist fantasy of defiance, expulsion and vengeance.

Top Trailers