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.
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