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. The Principle
    It’s easy to see a skewed argument in the making.
  2. Boychoir
    Boychoir may be soft, but it’s not run-of-the-mill TV-movie treacle, offering just enough edge to lend credibility.
  3. Salvation Army
    Transitioning his story to the screen, Taia retains the bare bones but strips away warmth and insight, without any fresh perceptions that would compensate.
  4. Mortdecai
    There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.
  5. Strange Magic
    A thoroughly derivative and unengaging fantasy.
  6. We'll Never Have Paris
    A sporadically amusing, more often grating romantic comedy.
  7. The Boy Next Door
    The film’s initial formulaic competence gives way to outright preposterousness rather quickly, hinging on idiot-plot character motivations.
  8. I
    Star Chiyaan Vikram delivers a knockout three-pronged performance, but this cinematic bravura is offset by underdeveloped scripting, flatly one-dimensional villains and overdone lone-hero-vs.-swarms-of-murderous-attackers setpieces.
  9. Vice
    Conveying zero grit, atmosphere or texture (exterior shots are repetitively bathed in cobalt blue), and gathering little in the way of force or dramatic momentum, “Vice” barely engages with its potential ideas beyond the most blandly expository, bullet-ridden level.
  10. Loitering with Intent
    Loitering With Intent is essentially a 75-minute hangout movie, which would work better if the characters were worth hanging out with.
  11. Spare Parts
    Even though it’s easy to identify all the recycled elements — bits and pieces of several inspirational-teacher scenarios, ranging from “To Sir, With Love” to “Stand and Deliver” — in this “based on a true story” concoction, there can be no denying the feel-good effect of the finished product.
  12. Ex Machina
    Ex Machina turns out to be far wittier and more sensual than its coolly unblemished exterior implies; it’s a trick that mirrors Ava’s own apparent Turing-test-defying evolution.
  13. Medeas
    A primal tragedy rendered with exquisite imagery and very little dialogue or exposition, Andrea Pallaoro’s Medeas is a striking debut feature that will fascinate some viewers and exasperate others.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Guitar Mongoloid
    One of the quirkiest Swedish films of recent memory, “The Guitar Mongoloid” has all the makings of a cult classic.... A dark, but also humorous, depiction of a society with lonely people and sudden outbursts of violence.
  15. Play
    Pic is a little too pleased with its own evenhanded presentation of liberal moral conundrums, but there’s no gainsaying Ostlund’s remarkable achievement in coaxing entirely naturalistic perfs from his young core cast
  16. Involuntary
    Perfs, by a mixture of non-pros and little-known thesps, are impressively naturalistic and spontaneous. Ostlund has a knack for comedy, although his script, co-written with Erik Hemmendorff, is a little opaque about where it stands on the morality of each strand’s situation.
  17. When Marnie Was There
    Yonebayashi’s open-hearted tale, more than any other Ghibli offering, could conceivably have worked just as well in live-action, and yet the tender story gains so much from the studio’s delicate, hand-crafted approach.
  18. Joy of Man's Desiring
    Static, strikingly composed documentary stretches are interspersed with actors playing workers who voice a variety of complaints, appreciations and parables that deliberately, even pointedly, fail to encompass the sense of being there amid the unfolding spectacle.
  19. The Wedding Ringer
    A well-cast but clumsily assembled buddy-for-hire comedy that increasingly smacks of desperation as it approaches its big-day climax.
  20. Wild Card
    As usual, Statham gets a lot of mileage out of his droll, ever-present scowl, but as in “Heat,” the movie’s disparate narrative strands never really come together, and the climactic showdown feels pretty anticlimactic.
  21. Match
    Without sacrificing the piece‘s warm comic undertones, this minimally adapted theatrical piece remains richer and far more thought-provoking than a typical night at the movies — if only the entire cast were as strong as Stewart.
  22. Blackhat
    The film is a snarl of contradictions, starting with the discrepancy between Mann’s obsessive demand for realism and the consistently implausible screenplay.
  23. Gangs of Wasseypur
    The love child of Bollywood and Hollywood, Gangs of Wasseypur is a brilliant collage of genres, by turns pulverizing and poetic in its depiction of violence.
  24. Phoenix
    Because Petzold is such a gifted storyteller, with the lean, driving narrative sense of the film noir masters, he also keeps those twists and turns chugging smoothly along, building to a climax so expertly orchestrated that one imagines he started with it in mind and worked the rest of the movie backward from there.
  25. Something, Anything
    Marked by an affecting and understated performance from newcomer Ashley Shelton, this lovely drama tends toward the over-emphatic at times, but overall demonstrates a warm, subtle intelligence in the way it captures a person’s growing sense of dislocation from the traditional pressures of marriage, family and career.
  26. Vessel
    The film is an intriguing story passionately told, shot through and through with activist zeal, although a greater deal of distance might have allowed it to make a stronger case.
  27. Effie Gray
    This admirable, watercolor-delicate tale of individual feminist emancipation never quite blooms into living color, hampered by spotty casting and Richard Laxton’s overly deliberate direction.
  28. It's All So Quiet
    The character development here is understated but beautifully laid bare by a quartet of top actors.
  29. Let's Kill Ward's Wife
    [A] torturously unfunny exercise, which doesn’t even rise to the level of competent misogyny.
  30. Preservation
    Preservation ultimately impresses as an arrestingly suspenseful thriller that takes clever narrative twists and turns while moving through familiar territory.
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