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. Everything Is Copy
    Anything but a morose tale of a bright light snuffed out far too soon, Bernstein’s documentary is an inspiring heartstring-tugger.
  2. Creative Control
    A contemplative tone, a zigzagging narrative, superb widescreen black-and-white cinematography and an infusion of dry humor make it feel genuinely fresh.
  3. Hyena Road
    This is the kind of movie where a major development in a character’s personal life instantly telegraphs his ultimate fate in the trenches.
  4. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    The tension is rooted in psychology rather than gimmickry, and evinces a command of craft that feels old-fashioned in the most refreshing possible sense.
  5. The Meddler
    With no car chases or artificial villains to get in the way, and no treacly contrivances to force unearned emotions, the bright, vaguely sitcom-styled movie is free to make audiences feel good on its own genuine terms.
  6. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    Although “Allegiant” does recapture the original film’s sense of constantly discovering and adapting to fresh information, audiences no longer identify with anyone in particular.
  7. Emelie
    This potentially lurid material is lent considerable ballast and believability by the excellent work of its trio of child actors.
  8. Colliding Dreams
    Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s excellent history of the changing faces of the ideology that built the State of Israel offers a careful antidote to the shrill entrenchment that attends the very mention of Zionism.
  9. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of minute observations rather than grand revelations, less concerned with butterfly-effect consequentiality than the variable human foibles that can turn a bad day into a good one.
  10. Trapped
    Powerful material doesn’t automatically yield a timeless or artistic documentary, and for better or worse, Trapped is an op-ed aimed squarely at the present moment in an enduring national conversation.
  11. From Vegas to Macau III
    Single-handedly killing a once internationally beloved, one-of-a-kind Hong Kong genre that Wong himself invented, the filmmakers have so mangled their material to suit mainland criteria that they’re left with a string of moronic gags barely held together by cheapskate production values.
  12. The Monkey King 2
    Certainly less of a dud than the director’s inane original, this follow-up is even more tyke-oriented, but at least it’s a livelier yarn and boasts a slick upgrade in visual effects.
  13. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    A sparely plotted, low-key but ultimately rewarding slice of South Dakota reservation life.
  14. London Has Fallen
    For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.
  15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances.
  16. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.
  17. Marguerite
    This splendid satire benefits...from “The Singer” director Giannoli’s gift for striking just the right tone with such tricky material.
  18. The Final Project
    The Final Project does feel like a student film, though not in a way that benefits its own found-footage conceit.
  19. Cabin Fever
    Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.
  20. Sweet Bean
    Just as An itself seems on the verge of flying away, however, Kawase rewards her audience with an unapologetically contrived but effectively eye-moistening surge of feeling.
  21. Gods of Egypt
    This is by any measure a dreadful movie, a chintzy, CG-encrusted eyesore that oozes stupidity and self-indulgence from every pore. Yet damned if Proyas doesn’t put it all out there with a lunatic conviction you can’t help but admire.
  22. Fatima
    This poignant slice-of-life proves as modest in length (78 minutes) as it is generous in rueful insight and emotional complexity.
  23. A Strange Course of Events
    Too often the pic feels as if it’s killing time to pad itself out into feature length.
  24. The Other Side of the Door
    The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy’s weekend lineup, The Other Side of the Door brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.
  25. A Quiet Passion
    [Davies'] most mannered and least fulfilling work to date, A Quiet Passion boasts meticulous craft and ornate verbiage in abundance, but confines Cynthia Nixon’s melancholia-stricken performance as arguably America’s greatest poet in an emotional straitjacket of variously arch storytelling tones.
  26. Barney Thomson
    Thompson elevates and enervates every scene she’s in.
  27. The Brothers Grimsby
    Baron Cohen’s unflinching ability to play dumb is still good for a few chuckles, making some of the film’s funniest moments out of its most innocent quips.
  28. The Mermaid
    Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid defies the time-worn nature of its material, concocting pure enchantment with the director’s own blend of nutty humor, intolerable cruelty and unabashed sweetness.
  29. Becoming Mike Nichols
    If the material feels inadequate for a freestanding doc, that’s no fault of Nichols, who’s on playful, perspicacious form.
  30. Risen
    Whether or not it triggers a craze for divinely inspired detective stories, Risen makes a decent case for itself as the “Columbo” of the genre: It’s amiable, creaky and not remotely predicated on the element of surprise.
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