Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. The Square
    The Square is journalism, but Noujaim’s agenda is greater than mere reportage.
  2. Le Week-End
    Bittersweet, charming yet often very thorny.
  3. Man of Tai Chi
    There’s little in the way of drama, character depth or mise-en-scene to distract from Tiger Chen’s technically dazzling display of human combat in Keanu Reeves’ helming debut.
  4. Winter Nomads
    Von Stuerler’s debut showcases nature, but its real theme is its subjects’ engagement with their work.
  5. Price of Gold
    A scrappy portrait of half a dozen renegade gold-diggers.
  6. Enemy
    Ultimately, the enigmatic surface conflict — in which a man must contend with his own carbon copy as rival — proves to be the film’s own worst enemy, for its dark, David Lynchian allure proves almost too compelling, obscuring the material’s deeper themes.
  7. Sal
    While Sal means to honor its subject, it’s too clunky and amateurish to really illuminate him.
  8. Zero Charisma
    Affectionately captures the tail end of a culture in which specialized dice, character sheets and hand-painted figurines were the gateway to elaborate flights of imagination.
  9. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Sophisticated cutting brings out the story’s complex emotional undercurrents, though “Breakdown’s” less convincingly scripted second half sputters more often than it shines.
  10. The Colony
    Utterly routine futuristic horror-thriller The Colony substitutes the term “ferals” for plain old zombies (the modern, fast-moving kind), and that’s about it for originality.
  11. Shepard & Dark
    The ups and downs of a decades-long friendship are charted with warmth and sensitivity in Shepard and Dark.
  12. Metallica: Through the Never
    A definitive document for anyone who’s ever hoisted the devil-horn fingers in metalhead solidarity.
  13. Inequality for All
    Covering a broad swath of liberal economic theory in brisk, simply stated fashion, Inequality for All aims to do for income disparity what “An Inconvenient Truth” did for climate change.
  14. Big Sur
    Michael Polish’s Big Sur offers an elegantly muted take on the midlife ennui of Kerouac’s autobiographical 1962 novel.
  15. The Last Days on Mars
    While it earns high marks for Jon Henson’s production design, this murkily derivative sci-fi-horror entry sets its sights disappointingly low in terms of story and ideas.
  16. Great Expectations
    Working from a tightly compressed screenplay by David Nicholls, director Mike Newell strikes the beats of a deservedly oft-told tale with dour competence but little in the way of dramatic inspiration or visual flair.
  17. Baggage Claim
    Chemistry you can fake, but charm is far harder to pull off, and Baggage Claim never quite succeeds on that front.
  18. I Spit on Your Grave 2
    Gore and nastiness are plentiful, but they’re just wearyingly gratuitous rather than truly shocking.
  19. I Am Breathing
    Not so much harrowing as achingly reflective.
  20. My Lucky Star
    Wholesome, effortless entertainment that runs smoothly enough but seldom takes one’s breath away in the romance department.
  21. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    A thoughtful, detailed chronicle of the Fed’s origins, responsibilities and shifting monetary policies.
  22. Battle of the Year
    So fatally frontloaded with endless training montages, awfully written, indifferently acted drama, sports-film platitudes and jaw-dropping product placements that only the hardiest of viewers will make it through to the payoff.
  23. First Cousin Once Removed
    A fascinatingly fractured glimpse into a disengaged mind and a biopic-in-reverse of its subject, quite unlike any documentary seen before.
  24. The Unknown Known
    Ranging over familiar material, but made vivid by Morris’ fecund associations and invigorating stylistic flourishes.
  25. Locke
    This ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise.
  26. How I Live Now
    Wisely sticks to its protagonist’s p.o.v. while avoiding a longer view of the calamitous events around her, making up in emotional immediacy what it lacks in broad dramatic sweep.
  27. Child of God
    The crazed intensity of Franco’s filmmaking, while duly evocative of Haze’s primitive state, is ultimately too hectic and unmodulated for anything to burrow deep and stay there.
  28. The Armstrong Lie
    Director Alex Gibney delivers not just a detailed, full-access account of his subject, in all his defiance, hubris and tentative self-reckoning, but also a layered inquiry into the culture of competitiveness, celebrity, moral relativism and hypocrisy that helped enable and sustain his deception.
  29. Abuse of Weakness
    Of all living actresses, only Huppert could capture nuances that alternately elicit sympathy and fierce sexual attraction to a recent stroke victim.
  30. Miss Violence
    Avranas’ film employs an irony-free meter that certainly distinguishes his work from that of Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and lends the film’s most explicitly severe sequences of domestic and sexual abuse a kind of cumulative numbing power.
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