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. Lucky Strike
    Lucky Strike isn’t a raw combat drama so much as a lone-wolf genre film, something that feels tidier and maybe safer. Lurie stages it with skill; it’s not like what happens is predictable. But it’s not enthralling either.
  2. Finnegan's Foursome
    He’s trying to stay true to his world (all the Irish chop-busting and piss-taking), but he hasn’t grown as a filmmaker. Then again, maybe that’s not so important. He doesn’t hit long drives, but by the end of Finnegan’s Foursome the ball is in the cup.
  3. Voicemails for Isabelle
    For all its otherwise precision-engineered sweetness, “Voicemails for Isabelle” doesn’t find its way there. Which is a shame, because Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson — two reliably likable actors, alike in age, genre credentials and button-cuteness — do everything in their power to make you believe.
  4. The Wave
    Even at its most formally playful, the film is marked by an earnestness of tone that makes it feel like work, especially given a two-hour-plus runtime that exposes the repetitiveness of its rhetoric and the sparseness of its drama.
  5. O Horizon
    The gauziness of the thesis here is matched by the generality of the characters and their lives.
  6. Honeyjoon
    The movie delivers subtext aplenty, overflowing in ways that help overcome its reserved exterior and make for an unobtrusive comedy-drama that, on occasion, comes close to working.
  7. Unidentified
    It’s the rare movie whose every artistic intention can be easily identified, but whose emotional effects are never discovered.
  8. México 86
    As a study of how the World Cup sausage is made, the film could go deeper and dirtier; as a crowdpleaser about the business of crowdpleasing, it’s more or less on point.
  9. Scary Movie
    It’s jammed with spoof-genre history, but that makes it feel more exhausting than exhilarating. It’s a top-heavy satirical party that’s become so meta it’s meh.
  10. Masters of the Universe
    It’s a nostalgia trip that never quite belongs to the present, and never rouses any real, cherished memory of the past.
  11. The Last Viking
    A madcap ride that is diverting but never quite enjoyable, the film finds the silliest and grisliest extremes of the Jensen formula this time fighting each other more than they balance each other out.
  12. Victorian Psycho
    The governess is thoroughly ungoverned in “Victorian Psycho,” a grisly ostensible horror comedy from director Zachary Wigon that’s neither frightening nor funny enough to pass muster — and not quite outrageous enough to garner the kind of notoriety it’s aiming for, either.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Breadwinner
    The comedian’s 'Mr. Mom' update offers a few opportunities to chuckle, but the gags mostly fall flat.
  14. The Birthday Party
    The overlap of the two households, which offers an exciting narrative possibility, peters out with predictable cynicisms, while the climax is borderline comedic in its forced symbolism about family bonds.
  15. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
    In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality.
  16. Full Phil
    It’s middle-drawer mishegas — though part of what’s sort of fun about it, and also interesting (even when it gets overdone), is that the director, in this case, is truly coming on like he has something to say.
  17. Cantona
    Enjoyable but mostly surface-level as it recounts the highs or lows (it’s sometimes debatable which is which) of his career while maintaining a respectfully awed distance from his inner life, it’s a film for fans that could mint some new ones — given Cantona’s own still-irresistible presence as a talking head and storyteller.
  18. Ashes
    The film plays out like a tale where too much has been relegated to the margins and left between the cuts, where the performances shine but their emotional foundations have been laid in reverse.
  19. Ladies First
    Rather than stirring a debate, or even inspiring deeper cultural introspection, Sharrock and her collaborators deliver a trifle. For a satire about progress, “Ladies First” relies on far too many ideas from the past — cinematic even more than cultural.
  20. The Black Ball
    The Black Ball does not come or go quietly, which is largely its point: If the film wants for subtlety and serenity, there is also something quite poignant about its narrative and stylistic maximalism, honoring any number of queer ancestors who never got to live out loud.
  21. The Unknown
    With all due apologies to any real-world sufferers of supernatural body-switching, who perhaps regard the film’s high-mindedness as a welcome corrective to the condition’s flippantly comedic treatment in pop culture more generally, the real unknown of The Unknown is the reason behind making a body-swap movie feel so wholly disembodied.
  22. Orphan
    There’s much horror here, and much beauty, but little meaningful tension between the two.
  23. Moulin
    It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but one that doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon, given the linearity and literal nature of its approach to human anguish. At over two hours in length, its points are made with clarity before being repeated ad nauseam.
  24. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
    I found “The Mandalorian and Grogu” to be fun in a slightly flat way. But because the movie has so little pretense, it’s basically an invitation to wallow in the lite “Star Wars” nostalgia that’s there in every frame.
  25. Sheep in the Box
    Kore-eda’s attitude toward what he’s showing us is so lackluster and noncommittal that it’s hard to know how to react to any of it.
  26. Paper Tiger
    The movie is engineered to be seen as “powerful.” Right now, though, I’d say that he’s an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.
  27. Gentle Monster
    Gentle Monster is a meticulously plausible depiction of the dissolution of a family under the most trust-annihilating of circumstances, but that is all it is.
  28. Parallel Tales
    The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel in such a sodden way. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Grey
    Ritchie goes relatively easy on the joy-of-killing stuff, at least until the climax, and there’s an engaging couple of minutes en route thanks to the simplest, cleanest action filmmaking the film has to offer: a chase involving motorcycles, police cars and some proficient editing.
  30. Butterfly Jam
    Balagov, however, remains the star attraction of “Butterfly Jam,” his fluent, adventurous command of sound and image keeping the film interesting even when not much is happening on screen, and tangibly atmospheric when the narrative pendulum swings too far in the other direction.
  31. Nobu
    The movie often brushes past what might have been its most intriguing moments in favor of an unobtrusive hagiography. It approaches dramatic rigor and visual intrigue in only the briefest of scenes, often far too late into its runtime.
  32. Remarkably Bright Creatures
    Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.
  33. Mortal Kombat II
    Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot, is still an old-school video-game trash extravaganza: all sound and fury and flying bodies and jargony world-building, propped up by a sludgy excuse for a story.
  34. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Tears of the Azure Sea
    The series’ fourth season is still being rolled out through the summer, making “Azure Sea” play like a long-weekend getaway as opposed to a true feature-length fable. The fans are sure to clock in for its extra nuggets of lore, but there are few reasons for a non-Slimehead to take the plunge.
  35. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    The film's chief pleasures are those of practiced professionals doing their job, and doing it well. None of the stars here is slacking, and their combined, easily resumed chemistry ensures that this sequel, for good long stretches, feels like old times — even if it's hard to imagine fans of its predecessor cherishing repeat viewings to quite the same extent.
  36. Deep Water
    Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.
  37. Michael
    Simply put, this is not a movie about Michael Jackson’s dark side. Yet the surprise of “Michael” is how well it plays, and what an engrossing middle-of-the-road biopic it is. It’s basically an ’80s-TV-movie version of the Michael Jackson story with sharper acting and snazzier photography. It
  38. Roommates
    By turns tenderly observed, improbably dark and perkily sitcom-esque, it’s certainly erratic, and uncertainly much else.
  39. Couture
    Jolie, drawing on a family history of cancer for which she herself underwent preventative surgeries, gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to. Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together.
  40. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
    Brashly violent, clattery and pleasingly untied to any direct predecessor, the result is more generic than its braggy auteur claims might promise, but there’s a lot here for gorehounds to feast on.
  41. Balls Up
    A mostly pretty innocuous affair — give or take some par-for-the-course ethnic stereotyping and at least one close-up involving a prosthetic glans — it’s neither good nor bad to any memorable degree, not as riotous as it could have been but not devoid of low-hanging laughs either.
  42. Outcome
    A generally brittle, distant affair, Outcome largely saps Reeves of his genial, unaffected charisma, leaving him to play the carapace of a man who’s lost any real sense of who he is when not in character.
  43. You, Me & Tuscany
    You, Me & Tuscany passes the time painlessly enough, but it’s never quite the escape it wants to be: It’s packaged so familiarly and so cautiously, we hardly believe its celebration of free, restlessly wandering impulse.
  44. Touch Me
    In trying to do too much, the filmmakers end up with much less than they could have.
  45. Tow
    Tow is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.
  46. Pretty Lethal
    Pretty Lethal is a wonderfully original idea, but its execution falls flat.
  47. They Will Kill You
    The twists of its premise soon end up souring it conceptually, resulting in rapidly-diminishing returns, with derivative formal flourishes that largely recall other, better films. It is, by the time its credits roll, completely exhausting.
  48. Pizza Movie
    Pizza Movie is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.
  49. Hokum
    Buoyed by Scott’s level-headed turn — he doesn’t transform into a scream king — Hokum is a proficient horror exploit, which hinges on atmosphere instead of gore, even if its many frightening threads feel disjointed, like rooms in distinctly different hotels.
  50. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
    “Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.
  51. Reminders of Him
    Reminders of Him is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.
  52. Project Hail Mary
    Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.
  53. A Magnificent Life
    Magnificent as Pagnol’s achievements may have been, it’s a pity that the decades-spanning account of one of France’s greatest storytellers didn’t make for a better story unto itself.
  54. The Bride!
    It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.
  55. Scream 7
    Simply put, Scream 7 isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).
  56. Rosebush Pruning
    Rosebush Pruning makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle. Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty.
  57. Solo Mio
    The directing brothers Charles and Daniel Kinnane have worked with James before (“Home Team”) and know what they have in the ridiculously amiable star. They also know there’s more, if not depth, soulfulness to his talents. In the place of pratfalls, they’ve found a kind of sheepish charm and hurt.
  58. Wicker
    The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.
  59. The Weight
    While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, The Weight has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement.
  60. In the Blink of an Eye
    Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.
  61. Shelter
    None of these elements feel very fresh, least of all in Ward Parry’s formulaic screenplay. But they’re executed with sufficient slick professionalism to make for a passable if unmemorable diversion.
  62. Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!
    While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.
  63. The Gallerist
    The intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases.
  64. Buddy
    Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.
  65. Idiots
    Sure, the case can be made for this contrast between scatological humor and serious insight working as a mirror for how quickly a person’s reality can shift from joy to sorrow, but the overall effect is puzzling.
  66. undertone
    Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.
  67. Carousel
    In short, Carousel is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others.
  68. The Moment
    I actually think The Moment should have pushed further into crackpot satirical extremes. In that case, it wouldn’t have been a movie that featured a “real” version of Charli xcx. But it might have made you laugh more, because it would have been genuinely outlandish rather than just unconvincing.
  69. Clika
    Its rags-to-riches-to-near-ruin storytelling is simplistic, the celluloid craftsmanship B-grade, the acting nothing to write home about. Still, there’s a sense of a fertile cultural moment being captured for posterity, however routinely.
  70. Giant
    It leaves a lot to the audience to figure out about Hamed beyond what’s publicly known, as it’s clearly more interested in Ingle. While far from being a knockout, the film lands enough solid punches to leave a mark.
  71. People We Meet on Vacation
    What keeps things diverting, and sometimes even interesting, is the genuine but necessarily tentative chemistry between its stars, one staging an all-out charm offensive and the other projecting a flintier allure.
  72. The Dutchman
    The Dutchman exists in a tense space between reverence and reinvention. It is an adaptation so aware of the power and legacy of Baraka’s text that it never fully trusts its own instincts. The result is a film that provokes thought more than feeling, one that invites discussion, while denying audiences the emotional dimension that might have driven home its relevance.
  73. We Bury the Dead
    Its strengths also ensure that no matter how rote “We Bury the Dead” becomes, it remains at least watchable for most of its runtime, even as it ignores its most fascinating ideas in favor of safe, familiar ones.
  74. The Great Flood
    There’s a lot to look at here, and nary a dull moment. Still, the cumulative impact is less than “great” — hobbled by too many confused, confusing layers in an overstuffed second half.
  75. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    “Search for SquarePants,” while it has amusing moments, is mostly SpongeBob treading water.
  76. David
    Faith, “David” has in spades; soul, not so much.
  77. Anaconda
    The movie could have really used some of that anarchic, industry-skewering “Tropic Thunder” energy. The only risk taken here was asking Sony — plus any surviving members of the original cast — to poke fun at themselves, which only goes so far when the film has no fangs.
  78. Art College 1994
    In re-creating life out of life, Liu is quite successful; whether he makes it into drama is another question. Like its characters, Art College 1994 gives the impression of having just too much time on its hands.
  79. Fackham Hall
    The movie, in its mud-on-the-doily way, is amusing enough to get by. But it never shocks you into laughter.
  80. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    Hewing closer to the 1984 template, it’s an improvement on that film — not a particular high bar to reach — though a somewhat mixed bag overall.
  81. Troll 2
    It’s slick and fun in just the same way the earlier film was. Though given the parting promise of a third installment, one hopes Uthaug and writer Espen Aukan come up with some new twists — inspiration is beginning to run a little thin here.
  82. H Is for Hawk
    It’s a rare privilege to spend so much time with Helen and her charge, and the footage of Mabel (filmed by Mark Payne-Gill in the wild and DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen in dramatic scenes) hunting pheasants and so forth mesmerizes. But there’s arguably too much of it, dominating the film’s slightly excessive run time.
  83. Goodbye June
    There’s a lot of acting here, little of it peak-form for the talent involved, though the ensemble lifts and colors Anders’ sometimes heavy-handed dialogue.
  84. Merv
    Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to its charming premise, spending most of its runtime chasing its own tail with pointless jokes and dog-related puns that are only mildly amusing, along with an undercooked love story that doesn’t know how to steal our hearts.
  85. 100 Nights of Hero
    It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but a drag.
  86. Man Finds Tape
    Hall and Gandersman compel enough interest to pull viewers through, even if they may find the fadeout less than satisfying.
  87. Keeper
    The mood is low-key and naturalistic, yet a streak of trippy weirdness keeps intruding. And here’s the thing: The weird parts don’t add up. That’s likely by design, but that doesn’t make it good.
  88. Violent Ends
    Writer-director John-Michael Powell maintains a likably low-key interest in the local flavor of his home state, but it’s small potatoes in terms of personality. His self-serious approach proves a terminal match for his crime yarn’s familiar, simplistic plotting.
  89. The Running Man
    It hangs together and mostly obeys the rules of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet it’s clear that what drew Wright to the project was his infatuation with the sci-fi sociology of a retro-future USA.
  90. The Wrecker
    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.
  91. Stitch Head
    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.
  92. Anniversary
    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.
  93. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    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.
  94. The Choral
    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.
  95. Shelby Oaks
    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.
  96. The Woman in Cabin 10
    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.
  97. Bad Apples
    Ultimately, this odd, wicked little amorality tale winds up siding with no one: The children are indeed the future, we’re left to conclude, but will they make it any better than the present?
  98. TRON: Ares
    While it was exciting to see what “Tron” might look like in the 21st century, the brand gets in the way of Ares’ internal evolution. However fascinating it might be to watch him “level up,” what audiences expect — and what Rønning delivers — are cycle races and dynamic gladiator battles.
  99. Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl
    At once a punchy celebration of Swift’s artistry and a piece of promotion that just exposes aspects of the album that may not wear so well over time.
  100. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
    2+2 = 5 is a movie that very much leans toward chronicling the brutality and violence of despotic regimes, and is less interested in exploring how they toy with your brain.
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