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. Soul on a String
    Chinese director Zhang Yang (“Shower,” “Sunflower”) eschews the thrill of propulsive duels for a discursive allegorical approach, serving up picturesque visuals, highland-dry humor, and karmic plot twists.
  2. It Comes at Night
    It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.
  3. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    An amiable, fast-paced entry that should win over fans.
  4. Legion of Brothers
    Its up-close portrait of heroic dedication in extreme situations has the dramatic immediacy and air of privileged access to impress both hawks and doves.
  5. Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    A powerful and important documentary.
  6. Afterimage
    While this grim story is one worth telling, it’s a pity that in relating the bum’s-rush Strzeminski got in later life, Wadja couldn’t have communicated more of what sustains his legacy as a great artist and innovator.
  7. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    The movie is diligent and, to a degree, absorbing — a legal/business saga that’s also the story of a family in crisis.
  8. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, directed by Daniel Raim, is a passionate and beguiling movie-love documentary that shines a light on two of the unsung artisan heroes of Hollywood.
  9. Katie Says Goodbye
    Even if first-time writer-director Wayne Roberts is sympathetic to the plight he’s chosen for the protagonist, his film never burrows deep enough under her skin to make the string of miserable scenarios connect in a meaningful way.
  10. AWOL
    Deb Shoval’s uneven first feature demonstrates greater assurance in conveying a sense of place (the filmmaker’s native northeastern Pennsylvania) than it does with narrative and character development.
  11. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.
  12. Icaros: A Vision
    This trippy work maps the intersections of West and East, body and spirit, faith and terror with beguiling grace.
  13. The Last Shaman
    At once superficial and overblown, this documentary also often feels downright phony.
  14. The Wedding Plan
    The film nicely plays with the standards of romantic comedy.
  15. Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web
    A giant data dump of diverse archival and interview materials shaped into an admirably cogent if cluttered two-hour whole, “Caught” provides a fascinating albeit extreme illustration of the intersection between fame, greed, copyright and technology in the internet age.
  16. The Challenge
    Loathe to mar his exquisite package with the least hint of vulgar commentary, Ancarani arrives at something that is at once luxuriously alluring and a little too like an advertisement for luxury products — dazzling, aloof, uncritical and fatuous.
  17. The King's Case Note
    Beginning brightly with goofy slapstick, irreverent humor and a dastardly plot to overthrow the monarch, the film squanders its early success in a second half marred by pedestrian pacing and ho-hum action scenes.
  18. Unlocked
    An anonymously enjoyable espionage thriller that, for purposes of memory, all but self-destructs the second the closing credits begin to roll.
  19. Tomorrow Ever After
    The movie’s one recurring joke stems from watching Shaina catch strangers off-guard, and it starts to wear thin by around the one-hour mark, when things start to turn dark.
  20. Illicit
    Illicit is too tepid to qualify as an erotic thriller, or even a guilty pleasure, and the performances range from over the top to tiresomely obvious.
  21. Everyone’s Life (Chacun sa vie)
    Everyone’s Life contains a few of the most effective individual scenes in the director’s recent filmography, as well as some of the most befuddling.
  22. 32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide
    Gripping and discomfiting, this first directorial feature by the veteran editor is the kind of diaristic inquiry that can seem self-indulgent but here sports a fearlessness that transcends vanity — at times it’s downright unflattering.
  23. Becoming Who I Was
    The endearing, guileless personalities of the two principals constitute much of the film’s appeal.
  24. Forbidden Games: The Justin Fashanu Story
    The short, mercurial, sometimes self-defeating life of professional soccer player Justin Fashanu is so packed with drama that “Forbidden Games,” Adam Darke and Jon Carey’s documentary about him, often feels like a narrative feature — one that engrosses even as its complex central figure defies full understanding.
  25. Brimstone & Glory
    Mixing sheer spectacle with modest but pleasing human-interest threads, Viktor Jakovleski’s first directorial feature is a poetical, entrancing documentary.
  26. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    It’s mostly interested in the off-kilter but natural chemistry of its leads, who despite their differences come across as comrades who genuinely care about each other, and whose bond is solidified by their shared hangups.
  27. Natasha
    A pair of rich central performances, an authentic eye for its second-generation immigrant milieu and a novelist’s comfort with ambiguity allow Natasha to modestly transcend its overpopulated genre.
  28. Violet
    Devos depicts stages of grief not as a series of emotions but as an evolving alchemy of perception that surrounds the protagonist, distorting time, space, color and light in patterns of dislocation, muffling the synapses that connect sounds and images.
  29. The Drowning
    Whatever suspense it musters feels artificial, manufactured in the first half by withholding information all the characters already possess from the audience, and in the second by adding more curlicues and flourishes to the elaborate plot at the expense of nourishing the milquetoast characters.
  30. Snatched
    The movie’s mother-daughter jokes are like firecrackers with damp fuses.
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