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. Legend
    For all Hardy’s expressive detail and physical creativity, Helgeland’s chewy, incident-packed script offers little insight into what made either of these contrasting psychopaths tick, or finally explode.
  2. Spotlight
    Like so many films consumed with the minutiae of daily journalism, Spotlight is a magnificently nerdy process movie — a tour de force of filing-cabinet cinema, made with absolute assurance that we’ll be held by scene after scene of people talking, taking notes, following tips, hounding sources, poring over records, filling out spreadsheets, and having one door after another slammed in their faces.
  3. The Transporter Refueled
    The Transporter Refueled comes up strong where it counts, with frequent bursts of ludicrously implausible yet coherently directed mayhem.
  4. Beasts of No Nation
    While Fukunaga creates Agu’s world with an extraordinary attentiveness to detail, he hasn’t quite found a way to approximate the novel’s radically childlike perspective, or to bridge the gap between this child soldier’s psyche and our own.
  5. Everest
    Kormakur doesn’t make the mistake of exalting his subjects as extraordinary individuals, or suggesting that they were obeying some sort of noble higher calling. Everest is blunt, businesslike and — as it begins its long march through the death zone — something of an achievement.
  6. Creep
    A slow-burning found-footage suspenser with some mildly clever twists and a knockout payoff.
  7. War Room
    It’s easy to laugh at the arrant contrivances and heavy-handed dialogue in the script penned by Alex and Stephen Kendrick. But it’s even easier to admire the persuasive sincerity and emotional potency of the lead performances by Shirer and Stallings, who do not transcend their material so much as imbue it with conviction.
  8. Welcome to Leith
    The conflict between different notions of freedom, law-enforcement problems, and an atmosphere of escalating violent threat make Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker’s documentary as engrossing as a fictional thriller.
  9. Finders Keepers
    [A] hysterical, insightful and genuinely empathetic documentary.
  10. When Animals Dream
    When Animals Dream lacks peasants bearing flaming torches to hunt down Frankenstein’s monster outside the terrorized village. But it also lacks the depth to avoid seeming just as corny, albeit in a dressed-up, self-consciously important way.
  11. The Golden Dream
    Though it takes some work to engage with the characters at first, the journey makes a powerful impact.
  12. Home Run Showdown
    Home Run Showdown serves up an uninspiring premise — a competition among little-leaguers to catch the most outs at a home run derby — and goes downhill from there.
  13. Butterfly Girl
    Although limited in scope, the feature documentary debut of TV news veteran Cary Bell benefits greatly from the infectious personality of its subject, Abigail Evans.
  14. Turbo Kid
    There’s a good-naturedness to the whole enterprise that makes it pleasing despite its lack of truly inspired moments.
  15. We Are Your Friends
    We Are Your Friends” has its heart in the right place, and it’s shrewd and cuddly enough to get a few likes. But it would be an infinitely better movie if it sustained the sort of trancelike sonic ecstasy that turns fans into fanatics.
  16. No Escape
    Grittily propulsive filmmaking and solid performances from Owen Wilson and Lake Bell aside, there’s no escaping the movie’s hand-wringing manipulations and pandering sense of privilege.
  17. The Park Bench
    Hayden and Perez do their best to generate sweetness and spark, but the obstacles separating these characters are as contrived as the cliches that animate them.
  18. The Curse of Downers Grove
    Although it’s being marketed as a horror film, The Curse of Downers Grove turns out to be something else — a messy hash of teen soap opera, stalker thriller and whatnot whose titular, possibly supernatural aspect is basically irrelevant.
  19. One & Two
    There are simply too many loose ends to distract us, and too much empty air in which audiences can’t help but poke holes.
  20. The Iron Ministry
    While cerebral in intent and planning, the pic doesn’t feel overly straitjacketed by theory and offers unexpected moments of amusement.
  21. Being Evel
    An exercise in hero worship that doesn’t shy away from its subject’s least admirable traits, “Being Evel” attempts to deliver a complex portrait of a man who preferred to be seen as a self-styled myth
  22. The Boy
    So little happens in The Boy, and so little suspense is effectively built around its central figure, that by the time things finally do heat up the movie has flatlined too completely for us to care.
  23. Sinister 2
    A retread of such brainless, shameless lameness that it’s hard to imagine anyone begging for another installment.
  24. Hitman: Agent 47
    Insofar as Hitman: Agent 47 is about anything, really, it’s about the pleasures of being on location — from the gratuitous image of Ware taking a dip in a five-star-hotel swimming pool to the sight of Singapore’s staggering Gardens by the Bay.
  25. The Second Mother
    The script is executed with enough naturalism to ward off complaints of contrivance — all the way up to a tidy, but quite satisfying, denouement.
  26. American Ultra
    Too often plays like an earnest yet unsatisfying adaptation of a cult graphic novel, with most of the charm lost in translation.
  27. Learning to Drive
    It’s no stretch for Kingsley to project stiff dignity and forthrightness, but that familiarity works against him here, despite his every effort to give the character a human pulse. Clarkson, expert at bringing authenticity to the most inauthentic material, gets to show far more range.
  28. Guidance
    The modest pic’s laughs get bigger as it goes along, and so does its surprising warmth.
  29. Paulette
    Politics aside, however, the movie delivers on the inspiration of its premise, featuring just the sort of laughs one hopes for.
  30. Air
    This first feature for videogame designer/writer Christian Cantamessa has an intriguing premise and two capable stars, none of which is utilized as memorably as one might hope.
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