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. Sieranevada
    [Puiu] manages to weave a tapestry — or family quilt, if you will — in which deception and the hopeless search for truth is judged both on the micro level (as in extramarital affairs) and a more global scale (which is where questions of Romania’s Communist past, 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo fit into the picture), and where disturbances in either sphere ripple out into the world at large.
  2. The Salesman
    For a healthy stretch, The Salesman is even more low-key, minimal, and contained than the earlier Farhadi films. Yet the writer-director’s technique is just as assured as before. Every shot is in place, every line leading to an outcome that feels quietly up for grabs.
  3. Risk
    Running a short 84 minutes, Risk offers considerable insights into Assange, but seems to omit as much as it reveals.
  4. The Red Turtle
    Michael Dudok de Wit’s hypnotizing, entirely dialogue-free The Red Turtle is a fable so simple, so pure, it feels as if it has existed for hundreds of years, like a brilliant shard of sea glass rendered smooth and elegant through generations of retelling.
  5. Paterson
    Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.
  6. Neruda
    Surprises always come at the end of Pablo Larraín’s films, when everything suddenly comes together and the audience sits in the cinema feeling both illuminated and floored. Neruda is no different, representing the director at his stunning best with a work of such cleverness and beauty, alongside such power, that it’s hard to know how to parcel out praise.
  7. The Last Face
    The Last Face would have been a better movie if it had an actual screenplay, rather than the bare-bones one credited to Erin Dignam.
  8. Ma' Rosa
    As in most of the director’s repertoire, he portrays working class family relations with unpretentious warmth. Boasting a simple, coherent plot shot with real-time, handheld verismo, it’s a work of understated confidence.
  9. I, Daniel Blake
    I, Daniel Blake is one of Loach’s finest films, a drama of tender devastation that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity that goes right back to the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.
  10. The Handmaiden
    It’s sybaritic, cruel and luridly mesmerizing.
  11. Gimme Danger
    Gimme Danger has an ironic tone for a Stooges portrait: dutiful and engrossing, but not electric or crazy.
  12. From the Land of the Moon
    Of course, Cotillard is your first call if you want an actress to suffer exquisitely, but the issue is her character Gabrielle is essentially a nightmare of self-involvement, whose emotional torture is very difficult to get invested in since she herself has already bought all the shares.
  13. Aquarius
    Aquarius is a character study as well as a shrewd meditation on the needless transience of place and the way physical space elides with our identity.
  14. It's Only the End of the World
    Here, in cinema’s most unpleasant genre (the dysfunctional family gathering), Dolan has found a way to exasperate and exhaust his audience, but he has also achieved a completely unexpected catharsis at the end of an agonizing hour and a half.
  15. Hell or High Water
    Hell or High Water is a thrillingly good movie — a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.
  16. Personal Shopper
    This reunion between Kristen Stewart and the director who gave her one of her best-ever roles in 2014’s “Clouds of Sils Maria” is a broken, but never boring mix of spine-tingling horror story, dreary workplace drama and elliptical identity search, likely to go down as one of the most divisive films of Stewart’s career.
  17. American Honey
    Part dreamy millennial picaresque, part distorted tapestry of Americana and part exquisitely illustrated iTunes musical, “Honey” daringly commits only to the loosest of narratives across its luxurious 162-minute running time. Yet it’s constantly, engrossingly active, spinning and sparking and exploding in cycles like a Fourth of July Catherine wheel.
  18. Loving
    Nichols’ film is seemingly less interested in its own glory than in representing what’s right, and though it features two of the best American performances of the past several years, from Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga (neither of whom are American, hailing from Australia and Ethiopia, respectively), its emotional impact derives precisely from how understated they are.
  19. The Neon Demon
    The Neon Demon is a tease. It starts off as a relatively scannable, user-friendly thriller, but it turns out to be a movie made by a macabre surrealist gross-out prankster.
  20. Margarita with a Straw
    Overall, Margarita, With a Straw is an unexpected delight of charm and substance.
  21. The Unknown Girl
    Though what we get is largely exemplary: a simple but urgent objective threaded with needling observations of social imbalance, a camera that gazes with steady intent into story-bearing faces, and an especially riveting example of one in their gifted, toughly tranquil leading lady Adèle Haenel. What’s missing...is any great sense of narrative or emotional surprise.
  22. Toni Erdmann
    The film takes precisely as much time as it needs for its muddled, maddeningly human characters, played with extraordinary courage and invention by Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller, to find their way into each other, and so into themselves.
  23. Paths of the Soul
    Filmed in simple documentary fashion and performed with immaculate conviction by a non-professional cast, the pic, helmed by Zhang Yang (“Shower,” “Getting Home”) is a stirring study in faith and spirituality that will inspire many viewers to think about big and small questions of life.
  24. Pervert Park
    The documentary broadens well beyond a portrait of this particular facility to address the underlying causes of these crimes and to question how society might more constructively deal with the issues, where offering counseling to abuse victims becomes as important as, if not more so than, persecuting their abusers.
  25. Nuts!
    This now-obscure historical chapter can’t help but be silly in the retelling, and Lane surrenders whole to that silliness.
  26. The Darkness
    At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.
  27. Journey to the Shore
    Fans of Kurosawa’s earlier psycho-thrillers may desire more eeriness and visual panache, but those who’ve accepted the helmer’s conscious change of tune and pace should be gently touched.
  28. Kill Zone 2
    Helmer Cheang and action director Li Chung Chi offer an impressive array of rock-’em-sock-’em setpieces — including a battle royale at a cruise ship terminal, and grand finale in a Hong Kong high-rise — and the performances, especially those by Wu, Koo and Zhang, are thoroughly attuned to the movie’s overall tone of fever-pitched martial-arts noir melodrama.
  29. ma ma
    Julio Medem’s film is a smiling-through-tears saga whose generally tasteful execution can’t ultimately salvage a whopping load of maudlin contrivance, all designed to burnish the halo around St. Penelope.
  30. The Other Side
    Whereas Minervini’s previous pics seemed to radiate a warm empathy toward his subjects — perhaps merely a manifestation of his open-minded curiosity toward the extreme cultural difference he found peering into the less explored corners of Southern culture — The Other Side feels far more shocking in its portrayal.
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