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. I Called Him Morgan
    It’s fitting that Kasper Collin’s excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage.
  2. Frantz
    Frantz plays like classic melodrama, and has certain charms.
  3. Denial
    For all the powerful relevance of its subject, Denial, directed by Mick Jackson from a script by David Hare, never finds its grip. It’s a curiously awkward and slipshod movie that winds up being about nothing so much as the perverse, confounding eccentricities of the British legal system.
  4. Catfight
    That it succeeds more often than not is due in no small part to Heche and Oh, who are wonderfully unafraid to make their characters deplorable people, and also able to invest their downfalls with sincere pathos, complicating any schadenfreude one might be expecting to find.
  5. Carrie Pilby
    Limply cute, with underdeveloped subplots and secondary characters, this sitcomish dramedy shares the source material’s primary fault: For a story about a supposed genius, it’s not all that clever or complicated.
  6. Lion
    Fortunately for Davis, he’s got a terrific cast, chief among them the pair of charismatic actors who split the lead role.
  7. Jackie
    Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.
  8. Una
    Needless to say, Una is not an easy film to watch, in part because it deals with not just the act of pedophilia (never depicted outright) but also its consequences, exposing the raw wounds still seething long after the inappropriate relationship has ended.
  9. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    "Southwest of Salem” proves a portrait of individual tragedy, and an indictment of a system willing to let prejudice cloud its judgment — and, also, to avoid admitting its own wrongdoing.
  10. A Family Affair
    This deceptively artless, journal-style film has no need for any carefully sculpted twists; rather, it’s the sheer unpredictable perversity of human nature that takes the breath away at key points in Fassaert’s unsettling, perhaps unsolvable, inquiry.
  11. The Vessel
    Cuban-American writer-director Julio Quintana’s feature debut has an understated formal loveliness that helps offset its more heavy-handed allegorical inclinations.
  12. Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
    There are bad movies, and then there are worse movies, and then there are full-bore misfires such as Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
  13. Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids
    Demme proves he’s still a wily master of the craft, and the director’s work here makes this more than just a fans-only proposition.
  14. Tanna
    The pic weaves fascinating details of tribal life into a universally accessible and emotionally affecting romantic drama.
  15. Chuck
    The film is most thoughtful, and sometimes even painful, as a study of the pitfalls (and pitiful rewards) of local celebrity.
  16. The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez
    'Aranjeuz” has less of a pulse than the already inert “Every Thing Will Be Fine."
  17. Deepwater Horizon
    For a movie in which you can’t follow what’s going on for 75% of the time, Deepwater Horizon proves remarkably thrilling.
  18. Barry
    You could almost watch Barry even if you’d never heard of Barack Obama: The movie is simply interested in what it looks like when a guy who’s got this much going for him has a piece missing.
  19. American Pastoral
    Groping for grand tragedy and finding only actorly melodrama, shooting for political contrarianism but landing instead on reactionary conventionalism, American Pastoral is as flat and strangled as its source is furious and expansive.
  20. All I See Is You
    Look past the gimmick, and all that remains is an overly arty study of a lopsided marriage in which super-attentive husband James (Jason Clarke) actually seems to prefer when his wife Gina (Blake Lively) can’t see — and another opportunity for Lively to prove that she’s more than just a pretty face.
  21. The Age of Shadows
    If anything, the film is most indebted to classic cloak-and-dagger movies, in which sharp, richly succinct dialogue and plenty of atmosphere seem effortlessly carried along by the force of magnetic personalities.
  22. The Assignment
    Nobody — not even viewers willing to settle for good, unclean B-movie fun — is done any favors by something as crude as (re)Assignment, which gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny “Oh no! I’m a chick now!!” gender-change narrative hook.
  23. The Disappointments Room
    There is more mood than matter to be sampled in “The Disappointments Room,” a spooky psychological thriller — or, perhaps, a psychological thriller with spooks — that is initially intriguing but ultimately, unfortunately, lives down to its title.
  24. Blair Witch
    Setting up a number of promising kinks in the now-standard found-footage formula, as the seemingly spooked forest begins to close in its hapless victims, Blair Witch disappointingly casts most of them aside for a finale that does little to advance the series’ existing mythos.
  25. Eternity
    Éternité is a meditative, gorgeous-looking film imbued with such gentle sensitivity that it’s difficult to dislike. Yet the experience of watching it is much like sitting in an opulent garden café on a glorious spring morning, waiting for a meal that never arrives.
  26. Sing
    While there are no profound life lessons to be found in these subplots, Jennings and his cast manage to deliver a steady supply of laughs, while respecting one of Illumination’s core principles: It’s OK to be silly.
  27. A Monster Calls
    We’ve heard the same lesson countless times before in other movies, and though it’s certainly impressive to see Conor’s anxieties manifest themselves in such a stunning Ent-like being, as monsters go, Bayona’s creation is all bark and no bite.
  28. Level Up
    As it episodically flirts with absurdism, black comedy, and other offbeat flavors, Level Up seems to be simply trying on different attitudes without owning them.
  29. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    “Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.
  30. Scarred Hearts
    Emanuel’s likeability (more apparent in the film than in Blecher’s novel) unquestionably helps bridge the extended running time, and Solange is a fascinating character, liberated yet still drawn to the scene of her hospitalization. The film also has a sense of humor...but the project never quite comes together.
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