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. Lovesong
    Lovesong makes a virtue of restraint as it traces a complex emotional history in two parts, and innumerable (and sometimes quite literal) shades of gray.
  2. Dina
    The connection they share isn’t the kind that would pass for conventionally romantic, and yet, theirs is a compelling love story all the same — one the filmmakers follow with open minds, focusing on the lead-up to and days immediately following their wedding.
  3. War on Everyone
    While his American competition practices the right to remain silent, McDonagh writes his clever, coal-black heart out, delivering another firecracker script.
  4. The Lure
    This kooky-monster escapade is never less than arresting, and sometimes even a riot.
  5. To the Bone
    It’s not an easy sit, nor a terribly entertaining one, but in the hands of writer-director Marti Noxon, it delivers painful insights in a relatively fresh way.
  6. Patti Cake$
    In the end, it’s the ensemble’s collective attitude, plus the palpable chemistry between Patti and her friends, that defines the experience, not the stock desire to be discovered. Though if Patti Cake$ really did exist, this movie would certainly make her star.
  7. Newness
    The trouble with Newness — and the reason it’s shot in such a clinical vérité fashion — is that it’s a thesis movie, heady and ambitious yet overly thought out.
  8. My Happy Family
    Providing certain vivid detail but rather lacking in vitality, Ekvtimishvili’s screenplay is stronger on sociology than drama.
  9. Marjorie Prime
    Though it mostly resists contrived “opening-out” devices, and preserves the decidedly low-tech visualization of the play’s sci-fi premise, Michael Almereyda’s well-cast film never finds a suitably complex cinematic language for its tangle of intellectual and emotional ideas.
  10. Manifesto
    Audiences needn’t be intimidated: Manifesto may not adhere to any conventional narrative structure, but it’s compulsively watchable all the same
  11. The Hero
    Haley and Basch have mistaken what the AARP calls “movies for grownups” for a kind of mushy feel-good pablum, throwing together a handful of familiar clichés in the hope that Elliott’s charm will carry the day.
  12. Golden Exits
    Many will accuse Perry of navel-gazing here, but that’s partly the point: Golden Exits means to frustrate, even to abrade, in its coolly articulate portrait of cosseted people who want for nothing and vaguely desire everything.
  13. God's Own Country
    Skipping some of the more predictable narrative obstacles we’ve come to expect from the coming-out drama, this sexy, thoughtful, hopeful film instead advances a pro-immigration subtext that couldn’t be more timely amid the closing borders of Brexit-era Britain.
  14. Dayveon
    The more Dayveon attempts to up the dramatic and moral stakes of its narrative, the less persuasive it is as idiosyncratic, indigenous storytelling.
  15. Don't Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl!
    Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl! aims for poetry yet, like its ridiculously clumsy title, manages only an odd mix of magical realism with over-heated Lynchian touches.
  16. Kung Fu Yoga
    As the leading man, Chan keeps the ball rolling with an assortment of neat acrobatic tricks and martial arts sparring, but his days of life-risking physical exertion is over.
  17. Brigsby Bear
    Rather than milking the outre premise for broad comedy, everyone involved strives to keep the characters and situations grounded and warm.
  18. Axolotl Overkill
    Hegemann deserves considerable praise for avoiding the standard pitfalls of both the neophyte director and the writer-turned-filmmaker: Her movie is not overly wordy, and is anything but over-explained.
  19. Crown Heights
    Crown Heights doesn’t break much new ground, and it takes a while to find its footing, but thanks to strong, unshowy performances from Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha, the film does project the feelings of helplessness and frustration that come from fighting against such an immovable object.
  20. Lost in Florence
    Bland even for the armchair traveler, “Lost” is as inoffensive as a picture-souvenir booklet, and equally unmemorable.
  21. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
    A few individual scenes of hand-to-hand and foot-to-face combat are undeniably exciting, and Jovovich once again impresses with her kinetic athleticism. Overall, however, the repetitiveness and occasional incoherence of the nonstop action leave the audience exhausted for all the wrong reasons.
  22. City of Ghosts
    What City of Ghosts does best is to humanize those who’ve suffered most from the conflict in Syria, educating us through both outrage and compassion.
  23. The Polka King
    When it comes to the film’s overall success, these wildly amusing situations take a back seat to the contributions of an excellent cast.
  24. Pop Aye
    This bucolic escape from big-city life is anchored by a solid script filled with characters who, despite reaching the end of the road, find ways to make peace with the world.
  25. The Yellow Birds
    The film keeps acting like it has something big to tell us; it plods and broods with self-importance. Yet in almost every crucial way, The Yellow Birds is a flat and listless piece of moviemaking, a monotonous indie dirge.
  26. Beatriz at Dinner
    Hayek’s performance, by the end, grows unexpectedly moving. Yet Beatriz at Dinner is a little tidy. It seizes and charms without soaring.
  27. Beach Rats
    Writer-director Eliza Hittman has a sensitive ear for the way adolescents reveal themselves through evasion: It’s a tension crucial to this anxious, tactile, profoundly sad study of a young man’s journey of sexual self-discovery and self-betrayal.
  28. Whose Streets?
    Whose Streets? is not a movie intended for those seeking an explanatory recap, let alone “balanced” analysis, of the original case itself. What it does offer, however, is a pulse-taking of one community’s response — variably constructive, occasionally chaotic — to perceived institutionalized abuse by law enforcement.
  29. Trophy
    Trophy’s wealth of conflicting facts, figures, and arguments routinely force one to re-calibrate their feelings about the issues at hand. The result is a lament for both the animals at the center of so many crosshairs, and for a modern world seemingly only capable of saving lives by taking them.
  30. The Last Word
    Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.
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