Variety's Scores

For 17,757 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:
17757 movie reviews
  1. This is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction
  2. It eventually takes on radiant form, with emotional complexities born out of characters walking around the truth, if only because euphemisms are the only language they have.
  3. In the end, “Badlands” is about the value of teamwork and learning that “alpha” and “apex” don’t mean the same thing where Predators are concerned.
  4. Hassona is both fashionable and immensely talented (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the more we see of her over the movie’s 110 minutes, the more devastating it becomes that we will never meet her, or never truly get to know her.
  5. This tale of mob-related malfeasance and solo vengeance in Vegas is slick but thoroughly ridick. However, it’s pacy and colorful enough that those in the mood for a deep-fried knuckle sandwich with extra cheese may have fun.
  6. Not everyone knows Ibsen going in, but that needn’t diminish the satisfaction of watching “Hedda Gabler” so vividly reinvented.
  7. Stitch Head, while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to.
  8. The indictment of narcissistic online culture is still little more then an excuse for glam intrigue, and our not-infrequently-lethal anti-heroine’s motivations remain just as cloudy as they were last time. But a good time in enviable vacation spots is guaranteed, with ghoulish demises for many principal figures here served up like caviar on sashimi.
  9. Even as it thrusts itself into an electrifying, bloodied thriller of a final act, the film doesn’t land any of its social commentary: Its satire remains much too obtuse, its parable much too diffused.
  10. While there is nothing hilarious about these topics, Eliassi and Coexistence, My Ass do the impossible and deliver radical ideas through humor. Rarely has comedy felt this serious and urgent.
  11. Wise and lyrical and strange, The Love That Remains thrives on its profound understanding of each family’s individual oddness, and the incremental confusion with which growing children regard their parents, as their elders grow smaller and more flawed by the day.
  12. The look and feel owes an obvious debt to the beloved films of Studio Ghibli, which have offered some of the most iconic representations of wartime Japan and its long, fraught recovery period. “Little Amélie” starts from a place of (mostly endearing) solipsism and builds empathy and emotional depth as it goes.
  13. Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.
  14. The line between a good soap opera and a bad soap opera can sometimes be razor-thin. Regretting You walks the line for a while but lands on the wrong side of it.
  15. Unfortunately, the piece ends up laid low by a climax that peters out by taking itself too seriously, but the film’s totality is still made worthwhile by its central performances.
  16. Art counts for a lot more than patriotism to Guthrie, and the happy surprise of Nicholas Hytner‘s film — despite its twee, veddy English trappings — is that it largely takes his side.
  17. You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy Köln 75, but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.
  18. It turns out to be a very good film — canny and honest and unexpectedly moving. But it’s layered with a thick and sugary frosting of adoration.
  19. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is an unapologetically irreverent, wildly inventive, end-is-nigh take on the time-loop movie — call it “Terminator 2: Groundhog Day” — except that here, Rockwell’s dizzy protagonist knows what it takes to stop the cycle.
  20. If you’re a big Ozzy fan, you probably already love him for being brave enough to go out and meet his public one last time, against what we can now see from this film were nearly all odds. But the greater bravery might have been going on camera repeatedly for this doc, and allowing himself to convey that old age is not for the faint-hearted, even as it renders you fainter of heart.
  21. The movie devolves into something inexact and thoughtless, without anything distinct to recenter it. It’s hardly a sin for cruelty to be the point, especially in horror. But you have to at least land your punches.
  22. A funny, rueful valentine to the fine art of the farewell — the smaller ones that litter our lives and the big final one at the end.
  23. This mix of found-footage, missing-person, demonic-possession and other stock narrative hooks too often feels like a compendium of ideas from other movies Frankenstein’d together, with too little effort put towards finding a personality of its own.
  24. There’s humor in every detail, much of it skewing to the sordid, if not downright scatological, end of the spectrum, from exploding buttocks to anthropomorphic hairballs.
  25. The movie strives to apply logic, inviting laughs (which are not unwelcome in the tense genre), but ultimately succeeds by devising a formula where two threats — ghosts and serial killers — come calling.
  26. It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s an inner softness to it, a slightly pandering quality.
  27. The sleek production design, symphonic score and performances from a killer ensemble act as a life preserver, making the shenanigans at sea a little less choppy.
  28. Loktev’s immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together.
  29. A slow-burning, increasingly incensed unraveling of a horrific murder case underpinned by colonialist privilege and prejudice, it too demands patience of its viewers — though it rewards them with steadily rising emotional impact and a long view of Latin American history that transcends any true-crime trappings.
  30. “Because I Believe” is as lovely to listen to as it is to look at.

Top Trailers