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. Kékszakállú
    It takes an uncommon talent to keep the mundane from seeming inert, and through Solnicki’s lens, the absence of outer conflict doesn’t mute the turmoil within.
  2. Generation Startup
    Generation Startup is too blurry about the grass-roots wheeling and dealing it shows.
  3. Closet Monster
    Canadian writer-director Stephen Dunn’s first feature treads no new ground in basic outline. But the risk-taking confidence with which he weaves in sardonic magical-realist elements, not to mention his unpredictable yet assured approaches to style and tone, make this a most auspicious debut.
  4. I.T.
    Brosnan is very effective at playing Regan as a wary technophobe who has become too comfortable with his power and success.
  5. Land of Mine
    Zandvliet’s script and direction avoid milking an innately loaded situation for excess melodrama or pathos, sticking to a discreet economy of approach that accumulates considerable power.
  6. The Eyes of My Mother
    Pesce’s spare script doesn’t seek to obscure, but its quiet, matter-of-fact handling of drastic dramatic events will catch some off-guard.
  7. Trespass Against Us
    It’s hard to say what the title of Trespass Against Us actually means, but then it’s hard to know what anything in this movie thinks it’s about. Even Ed Wood would have said, “Needs work.”
  8. Audrie & Daisy
    [A] powerful, well-crafted documentary.
  9. Chicken People
    An illuminating and amusingly entertaining look at the thriving subculture of competitive poultry breeders.
  10. Rats
    Rats is that rare breed of nature doc, one designed not to foster greater empathy for a misunderstood species, but rather to exploit our preexisting fears of the filthy critters in question.
  11. Colossal
    Colossal takes diminishing advantage of an amusing premise, one that seems made for satirical treatment yet is executed with an increasingly awkward semi-seriousness the characters aren’t depthed (or likable) enough to ballast.
  12. Storks
    In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.
  13. Amanda Knox
    A gripping and incisive documentary.
  14. Belle Épine
    Unfolding with the disjointed logic of a bad dream, the pic never catches emotional fire — though not for lack of trying by fast-rising young star Lea Seydoux, who shows her range in a defiantly unglamorous performance.
  15. Finding Altamira
    [Banderas] acquits himself admirably with his restrained yet subtly detailed portrayal of an intelligent man subjected to the stings of intolerant attitudes and professional jealousies.
  16. The Untamed
    While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.
  17. A United Kingdom
    These two are meant to be together, as the film’s clever title suggests, though all the truly interesting things they accomplished happen only after that reunion.
  18. Their Finest
    Their Finest is the sort of crowd-pleaser that knows the difference between satisfying its viewers and flattering them, all the while showcasing surprising performances from Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin, and an entirely unsurprising one from Bill Nighy — a master scene-stealer pulling off yet another brazen heist.
  19. The Secret Scripture
    A classic case of a literary adaptation capturing the high-gloss trappings of its source without getting a handle on its story or themes, The Secret Scripture is like a nicely decorated Craftsman home built on a foundation of Jell-O, with a toilet where the kitchen sink should be. It looks nice on first glance, but spend any time there, and things start to get messy.
  20. Queen of Katwe
    The film’s strongest assets are undoubtedly its actors.
  21. The Promise
    The events being considered deserve better than a sloggy melodrama in which the tragedy of a people is forced to take a back seat to a not especially compelling love triangle.
  22. Planetarium
    Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.
  23. Never Ever
    It’s Roy, having written herself a part for which many actresses would patiently wait, who does the heavy lifting here: Playing a woman who’s either losing her mind or playing dangerously at it, with as much attention paid to body language as befits her character’s artistic calling, she makes a revelatory, slightly otherworldly impression.
  24. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea feels like a first draft, the one that needed to be written before the second draft added flesh and blood.
  25. Mascots
    It lopes along, merrily but a bit slack, always reminding you of the earlier Guest films, and then it works up a bit of a fizz in the competition.
  26. Lady Macbeth
    An impressively stark, narratively ruthless Victorian chamber piece that feels about as modern as its crinolines will permit, William Oldroyd’s pristine debut feature slowly reveals a violent moral ambiguity that needles the mind far longer than its polite period-piece trappings suggest.
  27. From What Is Before
    The fragile interplay of nature and civilization is best expressed in the way Diaz frequently sets the stage for each scene, allowing us to absorb the contours and details of every location before ever so gradually introducing human characters, looking small and ant-like, into the frame.
  28. A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery
    A major disappointment from a major filmmaker, Diaz’s latest super-sized tapestry of historical fact, folklore and cine-poetry is typically ambitious in its expressionism — but sees the helmer venturing into the kind of declamatory, didactic rhetoric that his recent stunners “Norte, the End of History” and “From What Is Before” so elegantly avoided.
  29. The Woman Who Left
    This occasionally transcendent opus finds Diaz’s formal powers — not least his own incisive monochrome lensing — at full strength.
  30. The Edge of Seventeen
    It’s a teen movie that starts off funny ha-ha but turns into something more like a light-fingered psychological thriller. The drama is all in Nadine’s personality, in how far she’ll go to act out her distress.
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