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. London Road
    There’s an over-compensatory fussiness to its most elaborate formal conceits, with the gradual shifting of the pic’s palette from desaturated December grays to iridescent oil-pastel tones a crude symbolic device.
  2. The Commune
    For Vinterberg, this uneven but nonetheless absorbing pic at least marks a return to characteristically bristly territory.
  3. The Alchemist Cookbook
    This unclassifiable miniature involving a man in a trailer in the woods trying to contact the Dark Lord is as funny and distinctive as it is near-plotless.
  4. As the Gods Will
    There’s a confused sci-fi element and a perfunctory nod to society’s benumbed attitude toward violence, but really, the pic is just an excuse for more splatter from a director who, as always, knows his target audience.
  5. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    Whatever literary talent Leroy was praised for shouldn’t have been so quickly forgotten and dismissed by those who’d once championed it. However, that praise was won under false pretenses — and while you can criticize Leroy fans for claiming to love the writing when they really fell in love with the myth it came packaged in, you can’t blame them for feeling ripped off.
  6. The Blackout Experiments
    The result is interesting enough, but feels a bit overextended at feature length considering the limited insight afforded.
  7. The Love Witch
    The fact that the films that serve as her models often sported the same flaws doesn’t excuse this fairly poker-faced spoof’s sometimes borderline-torpid pace and disappointing fade-out.
  8. For the Plasma
    Only faintly touching upon notions of intuitive collaboration and inspiration, For the Plasma wanders about as if it’s in a fog, ultimately to the point of pointlessness.
  9. Summertime
    Summertime celebrates the unique couple’s chemistry, allowing their smiles to convey the transformative effect they have on one another.
  10. The Girl King
    It’s hectic, unsubtle, borderline cartoonish.
  11. The Violators
    This study of adolescent desire and alienation across class lines takes its time nurturing a tensely ambiguous relationship between its two young female leads — alertly played by newcomers Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis — only to squander a measure of that intrigue on a blunt third-act twist.
  12. Train to Busan
    Train to Busan pulses with relentless locomotive momentum. As an allegory of class rebellion and moral polarization, it proves just as biting as Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi dystopia “Snowpiercer,” while delivering even more unpretentious fun.
  13. Sand Storm
    The director juggles different points of view with aplomb, and her strong script addresses with impressive subtlety the gap between what people say and what they do under extreme pressure.
  14. Sea Fog
    This directing debut by helmer-scribe Shim Sung-bo echoes Bong’s trademark cynical vision of human nature, but the characters lack dimensionality and psychological depth.
  15. Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    "Hillary’s America” is a slow-motion seizure of ideological rancor, served up in the filmmaker’s trademark style of wide-eyed schoolbook infamy. The only novelty here is that there’s been a subtle shift of emphasis in the D’Souza vision. It’s now really all about him.
  16. Star Trek Beyond
    It’s a sturdily built movie that gets the job done, and it’s got a likable retro vibe.
  17. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    Those expecting insight into Robbins’ life or career, let alone the overall self-help industry, will be disappointed by this atypically non-investigative Joe Berlinger documentary.
  18. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    It’s a unique, associative blend of sounds and images that aims to convey details as well as underlying truths about Frank’s life. Unfortunately, it also often leaves one feeling aesthetically pummeled to the point of exhaustion.
  19. Demon
    Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.
  20. Rebirth
    The pitfall of a tantalizing set-up is that it requires a sterling payoff to match — a recipe for disappointment born out by Rebirth, whose premise-establishing early passages lead only to underwhelming revelations.
  21. How He Fell in Love
    Mature and moving in its navigation of convoluted, conflicting desires, it’s an indie as assured in its silences as it is in its speeches.
  22. Ghostbusters
    While both funnier and scarier than Ivan Reitman’s 1984 original, this otherwise over-familiar remake from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig doesn’t do nearly enough to innovate on what has come before.
  23. Five Nights in Maine
    Attempting to naturalistically capture the hugely internal process of mourning, but rarely managing to offer much of an opening into that process, Curran’s tasteful, challenging yet ultimately inscrutable debut feature never quite lives up to the caliber of her fine cast.
  24. Men Go to Battle
    Striking in its evocation of a demanding time and place, this intimate drama about individual and national transformation heralds the arrival of an arresting new filmmaking voice.
  25. The Dog Lover
    It’s a prosaic piece of muckraking, shot in a functional flat visual style, but it grazes a nerve.
  26. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Sometimes bloody good fun is enough. It’s as good a reason as any for making this sunny, silly rallying cry for irresponsibility, and a better one still for watching it.
  27. In Order of Disappearance
    Schemes like this have a way of spiraling out of the characters’ control, but Moland and Aakeson maintain a firm grasp on the pacing, progressively building both carnage and suspense as the situation escalates toward a Mexican standoff of which even Sam Peckinpah would be proud.
  28. Under the Sun
    While at about the two-thirds mark, Under the Sun begins to seem a bit attenuated, its obvious (if only implied) points already made, the ending is a stunner.
  29. The Infiltrator
    Bryan Cranston gives the most authentic and lived-in performance as an agent pretending to be a criminal that I have ever seen.
  30. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    What’s funny and winning about Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is that it’s a comedy of equal-opportunity raunch, where everyone in sight is right at home inside the animal house.
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