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. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    Everything Everywhere is ultimately too much of a good thing, a novel idea driven to the point of exhaustion.
  2. Fear
    In the end, Fear offers the most beguiling kind of plea for tolerance, via antic suggestion that any other behavior is strictly for dolts whose mob mentality makes them look very stupid indeed. It’s a lesson that goes down easily with this much deadpan charm and skill on tap.
  3. The Adam Project
    The movie is a total trifle, but it’s often a diverting one — a wide-eyed sci-fi adventure with a screwball buoyancy.
  4. Offseason
    Though thinly conceived overall with not much philosophy to back its daunting visuals, Offseason still offers some genuinely spine-tingling images and sounds that will keep midnight audiences on their toes until the end.
  5. Turning Red
    Irresistibly cute and thoroughly unashamed of its own silliness, Turning Red may be second-tier Pixar, but the emotions run every bit as deep as in the studio’s best.
  6. Huda's Salon
    On the whole, Abu-Assad is less successful in braiding the respective tales of Reem and Huda through Eyas Salman’s editing. But eventually the seams show and clumsy jumps between the two locations feel strangely episodic, losing Huda’s Salon some of the urgency it has claimed in its earlier moments.
  7. The Weekend Away
    Ultimately there are a few twists too many, pushing the story into a realm of excess contrivance. There’s not enough time or nuance to lend numerous narrative turnabouts plausibility.
  8. Asking for It
    In execution (and there are precious few of those), Asking for It is too much like its cardboard heroines: edgy on the outside, empty within. It’s the “Charlie’s Angels” freeze-pose of rape-revenge movies.
  9. Mother Schmuckers
    The Guits’ provocation is about as amiable as something so abjectly appalling can be, though it’s perhaps a few jaw-dropping shocks (or a few uproarious belly-laughs) short of the cult status it seeks.
  10. This Much I Know to Be True
    This remarkable performance documentary may be for the Nick Cave-curious exclusively, but for them (us) it is close to essential.
  11. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    It’s the fastest, funniest “Madea” movie in quite some time.
  12. The Batman
    This grounded, frequently brutal and nearly three-hour film noir registers among the best of the genre, even if — or more aptly, because — what makes the film so great is its willingness to dismantle and interrogate the very concept of superheroes.
  13. Servants
    Servants is briskly shaped at just under 80 minutes, yet its alien-historical world-building is effective enough that you emerge from it feeling both out of time and out of breath: Any longer, and all humanity would bleed out of this earthly-but-ethereal conspiracy drama entirely.
  14. Big Gold Brick
    Everything and everyone lurches about in a desperate bid to be hilariously weird, and the effect is to make the proceedings feel hopelessly strained, as if they know that there’s nothing funny going on and thus must compensate via out-there quirkiness and constant mugging.
  15. The Automat
    The Automat taps into so many resonant aspects of what America used to be that to watch it is to be drawn into an enchanting and wistfully profound time-tripping reverie.
  16. Creation Stories
    As directed by Nick Moran in obvious imitation of executive producer Danny Boyle’s most hyperbolic style, scripted by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, this apparently loose interpretation of the subject’s memoir becomes a hyperventilating “Behind the Music” caricature, all familiar flash and precious little substance.
  17. Three Months
    Writer-director Jared Frieder’s feature debut feels like the LGBT equivalent of “Juno”: snappy and refreshingly nonjudgmental in dealing with the consequences of a risky one-night stand.
  18. The Other Me
    Its cast struggling against material with little real-world or emotional logic, the attempted “surreal” elements uninspired both conceptually and aesthetically, this is a misfire whose intentions are as murky as its results are hapless.
  19. Taurus
    This is about as valiantly unflattering as vanity projects get. The bad news is that the wispily tragic character of “Cole,” his alienated, self-destructive but wildly popular alter ego, hardly seems worth Baker’s extensive efforts.
  20. The Last Bus
    For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes
  21. The Burning Sea
    The movie has every right to be fiction, but the heart of its drama lies in its patina of plausibility.
  22. Against the Ice
    To reduce a titanic struggle for survival in one of the most inhospitable climes on earth to such by-the-numbers drama is in many ways akin to standing on a jagged frozen peak, gazing across blizzard-assailed permafrost plains to crumbling white cliffs and ice shelfs beyond and thinking “Snow.”
  23. The Novelist's Film
    Ultimately, The Novelist’s Film defends the idea of drift and hiatus, of time spent idling to hear your own thoughts, in their own sweet time.
  24. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    It would be generous to call the film a continuation of the “Chainsaw” saga. It’s more like a blood-soaked but unscary footnote.
  25. Dog
    Dog is a lowbrow but by no means lazy crowd-pleaser, one where the fun Tatum and company took in making it translates directly to the pleasure we take in watching.
  26. Taste
    Lê Bảo’s rich film reaches further back too, beyond the politics of globalization and migration, beyond even culture, into a pre-ethnographic past, to see us as trapped animals, paradoxically dehumanized by the sunless concrete ugliness of human civilization.
  27. Robe of Gems
    The problem, then, is that too much of this is dispiriting without also being enlightening — the view Gallardo takes is almost that of a bird’s eye, showing much from an emotional remove but revealing little beyond surface-level horrors and characters so numb to it all that we’re left with little choice but to feel the same way.
  28. Rimini
    This is not, in the end, a tale of hubris brought low, or even of a tacky life staring down a long lens at a tawdry, dwindling death. Instead it’s a chilling parable about the sins of the father becoming the punishments of the son, and about the moral arc of the universe bending, across generations, toward the coldest justice imaginable.
  29. Alcarràs
    The film balances a bristling political conscience against its tenderly observed domestic drama.
  30. Peter von Kant
    Everything in Fassbinder’s rightly canonized movie is fake, except the emotions. In Ozon’s loving, diverting but inessential homage, everything is real except the bitter, glycerine tears.
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