Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Cabrini
    Little insight is gained from what’s on screen.
  2. Glitter & Doom
    Frenetic, repetitious and simplistic, it relies heavily on the stylized spectacle of the song numbers and lyrics to bolster the disappointing drama.
  3. First Time Female Director
    Though its loose, improvisatory feel is suited to the material, most of its humor feels like the first draft of a better film — as though the entire movie consists of what should have been deleted scenes.
  4. Y2K
    It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.
  5. The Queen of My Dreams
    It does little to separate itself, thematically or stylistically, from a now repetitive form of “third culture” storytelling.
  6. Red Island
    Its autobiographical elements are keenly felt, as Campillo grapples intelligently not just with the blind spots of his personal past, but those of his national heritage.
  7. Babes
    With Adlon there to spot them, Glazer and Buteau trust-fall into their respective parts, potentially unlikable qualities and all. At times, the pair get so filthy, you may not believe your ears. But strength, as the saying goes, comes from the mouth of babes.
  8. Road House
    The action in Road House is beyond brutal; at moments, it’s vicious. Yet if the movie is far more violent than your average action film, in its slightly crackpot bare-knuckle way it’s also more humane.
  9. Imaginary
    Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.
  10. Damsel
    What matters most is whether we believe Brown in the role, and the “Stranger Things” star has no trouble embodying the kind of quick-thinking independent mind it takes to survive such an adventure.
  11. Ricky Stanicky
    Cena makes it impossible to imagine another person in the part. He’s game to go big, which fits Rod’s frustrated-actor persona, while also having the capacity to play vulnerable and sincere.
  12. Kung Fu Panda 4
    Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.
  13. Amelia's Children
    A climactic tilt into a fight for survival remains sharply rendered by Abrantes, but it unfolds towards a forecast destination. The film’s evocative edge is gone.
  14. Outlaw Posse
    Outlaw Posse proceeds at something a bit slower than a full gallop, and incorporates more subplots than it can adequately do justice. But it never feels dull, thanks in large measure to the game performances of well-cast supporting players in an ensemble.
  15. Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World
    The film’s attitude seems to be: Come for the pierogis and goulash, stay for the humanitarian valor. Fair enough, but I wish the movie had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.
  16. The Greatest Love Story Never Told
    The Greatest Love Story Never Told, the third part of her album-cycle media offensive, delivers precisely the revelatory perspective that its counterparts lack.
  17. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    Far more than a showcase of his talent and productivity, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus lets Sakamoto deliver an elegy, and in the process, an autobiography of his creative journey, as captured through the precision and poetry of director Neo Sora’s camera.
  18. As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial
    Not unlike its subject, the documentary’s power, beauty and complexity lie in Harper’s use of rhetoric and lyricism.
  19. The Roundup: Punishment
    The Roundup: Punishment minimizes unnecessary originality, while gloriously maximizing the opportunities for Lee to crack wise, or look aggrieved and a little bored, as though he’s just remembered he needs to do laundry, all while his meaty forearms land a flurry of sledgehammer punches so rapid their recipients, often quite literally, do not know what hit them. This, truly, is cinema.
  20. Pepe
    De los Santos Arias sends us on an uncategorizably odd journey down the river of his noodling, needling imagination in a rickety canoe that keeps on capsizing, upended by another sideswiping reference, another jarring change of scene and timeframe or yet another stretch of borderline incomprehensible narration from Pepe himself, a creature who is as surprised as we are that he has suddenly acquired language.
  21. The Empire
    Despite fun trappings . . . the actual conflict in the film boils down to a series of very simplistic binaries: good and evil, sacred and secular, female and male, one and zero, being and nothingness.
  22. A Traveler's Needs
    If Huppert’s endearingly scatty, offhand performance lends proceedings a veil of comfy familiarity, however, A Traveler’s Needs nonetheless finds the indefatigable Korean auteur at his most puckishly cryptic.
  23. No Other Land
    Given the conditions of its production, No Other Land would be vital even in a more ragged form. But the filmmaking here is tight and considered, with nimble editing (by the directors themselves) that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself.
  24. Crossing
    With Crossing, writer-director Levan Akin wants to open our eyes to the easily overlooked.
  25. Black Tea
    The film aims for woozy sensualism but falls way short on the ambient richness and X-factor chemistry required to sell such an essentially confected exercise.
  26. Dahomey
    Dahomey is a striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living.
  27. Mea Culpa
    Perry knows what he’s doing. He can’t possibly think any of this is believable for one second. But it could be fun to discuss its outlandishness over a few glasses of wine.
  28. Lubo
    The story of the stolen children was a secret way too long buried to be thus buried once more within a movie that is, simply, way too long.
  29. Another End
    Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.
  30. Stopmotion
    Masterful as he is at creating the stuff of nightmares, Morgan (as well as co-writer Robin King) is much less assured handling the character actions, psychology and dialogue outside his heroine’s fevered psyche.
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