Variety's Scores

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:
17760 movie reviews
  1. This is the sort of numbskull non-entertainment that considers it worthwhile to fly in a martial-arts superstar like Jet Li and have him sit around firing a machine gun, pausing every so often to deliver the most awkward line readings of his career.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    An above-average martial-arts actioner that reinforces Donnie Yen’s “Man With No Name” ambience.
  2. Neither a particularly good movie nor the pop-cultural travesty that some were dreading.
  3. Fittingly, though, given the uniformly regurgitated feel, the projectile-vomit effects are superb.
  4. It’s the trench imagery itself that’s the primary attraction here, and it proves more than worth the wait.
  5. Despite all that it withholds, The Strange Little Cat ultimately proves a far more revealing form of family portrait.
  6. Unfortunately, Drunktown’s Finest too often suffers from stilted performances and scripting.
  7. A slender but polished dramedy.
  8. Boseman is an empathic presence, and nothing he does smacks of mimicry. He feels Brown from the inside out, the way Brown felt his own distinctive rhythms, and even when the movie itself seems to be on autopilot, Boseman never leaves the captain’s chair.
  9. A film that should but doesn't get under your skin and give you the creeps.
  10. An enjoyable if never electrifying record of his Unity Through Laughter stand-up tour.
  11. The sophomore effort from Jake Paltrow (“The Good Night”) gets so bogged down in its primal tale of murder and revenge that the most intriguing elements become little more than futuristic window dressing.
  12. Scrumptious as it all is, it hurts to watch chefs so committed to excellence in a movie so content to settle for attractive mediocrity.
  13. Director James Gunn’s presumptive franchise-starter is overlong, overstuffed and sometimes too eager to please, but the cheeky comic tone keeps things buoyant — as does Chris Pratt’s winning performance as the most blissfully spaced-out space crusader this side of Buckaroo Banzai.
  14. A dismally stupid and sexist romantic comedy.
  15. Writer-director Jonathan English’s dank-looking film delivers enough amputations, decapitations and other instances of rusty-bladed gore to distract undiscerning genre fans stuck between seasons of “Game of Thrones,” but serves no other obvious purpose.
  16. While the filmed stage performances are among the pic’s most galvanizing sequences, their inclusion underscores how flat Gibney’s combination of archival footage and talking-head interviews otherwise plays.
  17. The adaptation lacks a strong enough sense of modulated construction, making for a tedious sit. One of the biggest problems, though, is the performances.
  18. It’s a grandly staged, solidly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure movie that does something no other Hercules movie has quite done before: it cuts the mythical son of Zeus down to human size (or as human as you can get while still being played by Dwayne Johnson).
  19. Giddily recycling everything from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Matrix” to yakuza actioners and National Geographic documentaries, it’s a garish, trippy, wildly uneven and finally quite disarming piece of work, graced by a moment-to-moment unpredictability.
  20. As an exercise in sustained claustrophobia, the movie is not without its grisly accomplishments. Its effectiveness lies not in those moments when its characters are struck down without warning, but rather in the lingering sense that death has slowly, quietly taken up residence among them.
  21. The film’s vacuous characters and inherent vanity have become awfully grating
  22. The story distinguishes itself from other anime offerings through its attention to both visual and emotional realism.
  23. Maria Sole Tognazzi’s ultra-sedate romantic comedy A Five Star Life is full of aesthetic sophistication and luxurious ambiance, but its pleasures are all secondhand, and the whole endeavor is too starved of incident to really stick in the memory.
  24. Nicely shot, atrociously written, shoutingly acted and intrusively scored (to classical selections and the heavy synth accompaniment of Fall on Your Sword), this roundelay of misery drowns itself in cliche after cliche.
  25. At the very least, Kite could have given Jackson some scenery to chew.
  26. At a time when the world offers us no shortage of examples of what actual religious persecution looks like, for a film to indulge in this particular brand of self-righteous fearmongering isn’t just clueless or reckless; it’s an act of contemptible irresponsibility.
  27. Whenever Firth and Stone are onscreen together, the movie sings; the rest of the time it’s never less than a breezy divertissement.
  28. For all the philosophical and metaphorical shortcomings of his script, however, DeMonaco is an efficient orchestrator of action.
  29. With even less plot than in previous installments to get in the way of its inventive 3D dance scenes, this fifth pic delivers on spectacle... but lacks in chemistry.

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