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. Is God Is
    Both wildly entertaining and viciously upsetting, this remarkable debut boldly reaps what others have sown.
  2. The Travel Companion
    Even as it dabbles in toe-curling cringe comedy, The Travel Companion is ultimately too genial a work for such tonal extremes.
  3. Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is a concert film that doesn’t look and feel like other concert films. It’s a true experience, because of a combination of the show itself and the way that Cameron has filmed it.
  4. The Last One for the Road
    You don’t leave The Last One for the Road with the feeling that you have seen something life-affirmingly original. But there is still a sense of disarming comfort in the film’s down-to-earth demeanor, and Giulio’s rewarding if predictable arc.
  5. Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC
    In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.
  6. Swapped
    On the story level, Swapped is simple to a fault, yet there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, but on that score it’s visually ravishing and actually rather touching.
  7. Blue Film
    Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.
  8. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
    A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.
  9. Two Pianos
    The melodrama begins at such a high pitch in Desplechin’s latest, you might think it has nowhere to go but down, yet this earnestly inflamed tale of art, grief, betrayal and all-consuming amour on steroids keeps finding new, hysterical ways to surprise.
  10. The Sheep Detectives
    The filmmakers have lightened and brightened their source material to a kid-friendly degree — even the English countryside, as glisteningly shot by George Steel, has never looked less overcast. Yet there’s wisdom amid the silliness, as the story gently makes a case for the necessity of grief, mindfulness and mortal awareness, even in a life otherwise unburdened by adult human responsibility.
  11. Apex
    Kormákur’s film doesn’t trade in surprises, but offers more than enough heart-in-mouth action spectacle to compensate.
  12. Colours of Time
    Colours of Time doesn’t want to surprise so much as to please, and the multiple, largely antagonist-free storylines are just charming enough to keep the absence of real conflict from becoming a problem.
  13. Faces of Death
    Faces of Death is “ambitious” trash, with the courage of its own gaudy thematic grandiloquence.
  14. DJ Ahmet
    The sort of film that urges one to tell everyone about it so that they too can bask in its wondrous pleasures, “DJ Ahmet” is a revelation in that it seamlessly straddles the line between laugh-out-loud crowd-pleaser and art-house gem with affecting gravitas.
  15. The Drama
    You’ve got to say this much for Kristoffer Borgli: In The Drama he’s an original, like the bastard stepchild of Dogme 95 and “Wedding Crashers.”
  16. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
    The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.
  17. The Fox
    The issue becomes throwing in a little too much, both for the characters and for writer-director Dario Russo, who may have a few too many good story ideas to fully flesh out. Yet, he delivers a promising and imaginative feature debut.
  18. Brian
    That such a hefty topic can be used to create such breathless, eye-watering comedy without tipping into self-indulgence — and without robbing the film of its most meaningful drama — is practically a miracle.
  19. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead.
    Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is an extended pilot, however, it’s a pleasingly cinematic one: unresolved and ragged with small open wounds, but self-contained in its fevered, filling-to-burst energy.
  20. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
    With its many references, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice takes a cue from its lead character Nick, who sees the past as something to build on rather than recycle, and ends up delivering quite a good time.
  21. Kill Me
    There are times when the film can feel weighted down by its clever framework. Externalizing the steps of deeply internal emotional progress Jimmy and Margot make with one another’s help can occasionally seem like a separate pursuit from satisfying genre expectations when it really does appear there’s a killer on the loose. However, the approach proves fresh more often than not.
  22. Power Ballad
    What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.
  23. The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel
    "The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is totally worth seeing, but the film feels like an indirect act of contrition, which may be why it turns into an overdone lament.
  24. I Love Boosters
    It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.
  25. Marc by Sofia
    Marc by Sofia isn’t particularly penetrating or eye-opening on Jacobs as an artist, businessman or human being, but it is a pleasant and casually glamorous hang.
  26. Closure
    With a standout central protagonist and an urgent quest that is every parent’s nightmare, the film plays like a thriller but manages to deliver honest and piercing emotions at almost every sequence along the way.
  27. Barbara Forever
    Barbara Forever stands as a confident feature documentary for its filmmaker, yet also as a singular artistic statement after Hammer that should add new admirers for her work.
  28. Gugu's World
    Gugu’s World is such a crowd pleaser that it deserves to be seen widely by audiences. They’ll be in for a real treat.
  29. Happy Birthday
    Goher, a screenwriter and producer making her feature debut, proves herself to be a director-writer of uncommon sensitivity.
  30. Midwinter Break
    Midwinter Break does nothing earth-shattering (it remains wee), but the movie touchingly colors in how it might be possible for two people to know each other too well and also not well enough.
  31. Dreams
    At times, the dramatic tension is so strong, “Dreams” could almost be a thriller.
  32. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
    "The Immortal Man” serves as a handsome reminder of what always felt quite cinematic about the series — both in its beefy-but-pulpy storytelling and its robust, well-patinated production values.
  33. For Worse
    For Worse might be a tiny step among its kind, but it still feels like a leap for its thoughtful auteur, ultimately celebrating new beginnings as an ageless milestone.
  34. An American Pastoral
    Edler and editor Barbara Bascou maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by foregrounding human convictions and frailties amid a surfeit of increasingly ugly rhetoric.
  35. Our Hero, Balthazar
    It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.
  36. Hoppers
    Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.
  37. Idiotka
    Popov delivers a boisterous tale of a woman coming into her own, told with real humor and heart.
  38. Late Shift
    In its cool, propulsive procedural tracking of ward activity, Late Shift quite sufficiently makes its point regarding the monumental challenge and value of Floria’s work, and that of thousands like her.
  39. American Doctor
    It is a necessary watch because it dares its audience not to look away, forcing the question not only of whose story is told, but whose deaths matter and make headlines.
  40. Rose
    At once armored, guarded and intensely vulnerable, Hüller’s performance is the human factor here — a volatile, unpredictable element, but one nonetheless attuned to the film’s meticulous shaping and mise-en-scène.
  41. Yellow Letters
    At its core is the kind of cinema that has long sustained the medium at large: the family drama. But it’s presented here with invigorating flourishes that encircle the story within specific moments in time, while also granting it a stirring dramatic transcendence. The scope of its ambition is met, at every turn, by deft control over what is witnessed, and how.
  42. The Ballad of Judas Priest
    If you think The Ballad of Judas Priest, from co-directors and Priest fans Tom Morello and Sam Dunn, is going to be anything other than an ode to everything that’s great about the British headbangers, you’ve got another thing coming.
  43. Joe's College Road Trip
    In Joe’s College Road Trip, Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s wildly, deliriously profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon.
  44. Paul McCartney: Man on the Run
    Neville’s movie serves as a splendid jukebox, offering rapid-fire clips that bowl you over anew with just how rapidly McCartney’s own synapses were firing on ingenious hit after hit.
  45. How to Make a Killing
    It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turning his pin-eyed handsomeness into a mask of yuppie treachery.
  46. Redux Redux
    Boasting a brawny aesthetic and the kind of loopy logic where it’s fun to fill in the gaps, the high-concept thriller gives a different take on the arc of history bending towards justice.
  47. Crime 101
    Crime 101 is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways.
  48. Butterfly
    Striking and often unpredictably moving — before an ungainly third act that frays into a profusion of endings — Søimer Guttormsen’s film places a lot of trust in its leads, erstwhile “Worst Person in the World” co-stars Renate Reinsve and Helene Bjørneby, to sell its wild swerves in mood and perspective. Both are up to the task.
  49. Arco
    Arco looks at once fantastical and recognizable, removed just enough from what we know in our present, but grounded on familiar, childlike amazement.
  50. Wuthering Heights
    For nearly two centuries, Brontë’s book has been a romantic fantasy for readers. Fennell treats it as an erotic one as well, leaning into all that is sensual.
  51. GOAT
    In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.
  52. Exit 8
    Like the game, which is popular as kind of a one-off without much replayability, Exit 8 is designed to divert for a short time and does so enjoyably, with Kawamura proving a most judicious assessor of just how little backstory, plot explanation and character development he can get away with and still keep us engaged.
  53. Take Me Home
    This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.
  54. Frank & Louis
    It’s a script and a production tightly built around its performers, both superb individually, but most importantly, warmly attentive to each other on screen, and capable of sharing a silence.
  55. The Friend's House Is Here
    The Friend’s House Is Here is defined not by the many constraints that it battled during its production, but by the artistic vision of the resulting work.
  56. American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez
    Alvarado’s doc is standard in construction but lively in tone, reflecting his subject’s engagement with the sociopolitical challenges faced by Chicanos in the 20th century.
  57. Lady
    If her filmmaking style is relatively straightforward, it’s a rich, raw sense of place that gives this Sundance entry — premiering in world dramatic competition — vitality and danger.
  58. The Musical
    Like its eminently problematic anti-hero, The Musical says its piece with conviction to spare, and a welcome streak of cat-among-the-pigeons danger rarely found in contemporary American comedy.
  59. Soul Patrol
    [A] haunting, revelatory documentary.
  60. Once Upon a Time in Harlem
    Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”
  61. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
    It’s the kind of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves.
  62. Leviticus
    This outstanding debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella organically marries blood-curdling fright with incisive social commentary.
  63. Chasing Summer
    There’s real wisdom to Chasing Summer, which Shlesinger and Decker offset with a handful of steamier-than-you’d-expect sex scenes.
  64. The Oldest Person in the World
    Delightfully insightful ... Whatever comes next (and the movie makes a beautiful kind of peace with not knowing), Green has given his subjects an incredible gift: the kind of immortality only cinema can provide.
  65. One in a Million
    This long-game project gives remarkable dimension and particularity to the kind of migrant story often only told in journalistic generalities — showing, year on year, how time heals some wounds, opens others, and creates plenty of its own.
  66. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
    Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.
  67. Extra Geography
    A film that mines reserves of tenderness in young female angst and cluelessness with loving empathy.
  68. Saccharine
    Saccharine proves James’ gifts are better served by more independent means, even if it falls short of the emotional and dramatic heft that gave “Relic” equal genre and arthouse appeal.
  69. The Wrecking Crew
    What you see in the key art and the first-look impression you get from the teaser and trailers is a clear and accurate indicator of what you’ll get in the film. And for many action movie fans that’ll do just fine.
  70. Union County
    Life has a way of getting complicated when you introduce temptation, and though Union County can be frustratingly simple at times, the stakes are life and death.
  71. Zi
    If the film weren’t so arresting to look at, it could often be absorbed with eyes closed: If its larger message is elusive, Zi advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace.
  72. Send Help
    What’s so much fun about Send Help, beyond its twisted B-movie premise and refreshing disinterest in anything more highfalutin than handing Linda a chance to turn the tables, is how unpredictable it manages to be for most of their time on the island (except for that darn ending).
  73. Josephine
    While some might find it triggering, “Josephine” dares to confront the life-shattering intersection of sex and violence in our culture, facing the toughest of “adult situations” with clear eyes.
  74. The Invite
    The Invite is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.
  75. I Want Your Sex
    Hoffman and Wilde’s commitment makes the film feel more important than it is. It’s better to think of this either as pure, irreverent escapism or a guiltless pleasure.
  76. The History of Concrete
    With The History of Concrete, John Wilson takes the least interesting subject imaginable — the dull gray composite used for sidewalks, overpasses and that great big church in “The Brutalist” — and crafts what’s likely to be the most entertaining documentary of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
  77. Mercy
    The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
  78. Fiume o morte!
    Substantial ideas underpin all the flippant historical cosplay, as Bezinović — himself a Croatian — ponders D’Annunzio’s reputation on either side of the Italo-Croatian border, and in turn the long-term societal effects of failed despots being either romanticized or forgotten entirely.
  79. I Swear
    Written and directed by Kirk Jones (“Waking Ned Devine”), the film wrestles enthusiastically and mostly successfully with the potential pitfalls of making a funny yet respectful project about a condition that sometimes lends itself to laughter, even as it wreaks havoc with Davidson’s life in serious ways.
  80. I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not
    If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won’t be disappointed.
  81. Shuffle
    It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.
  82. Lucky Lu
    Norm Li’s photography perfectly suits the tone, neither romancing the locations of Lu’s life nor making them look condescendingly squalid. And his aesthetic keeps pace with Brendan Mills’ excellent editing.
  83. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    For genre aficianados, it’s bold, mind-bending work which satisfies that so-often-frustrated craving: for a zombie movie with brains.
  84. The Best You Can
    An optimistic film that feels truthful about aging, even if it doesn’t say anything we haven’t heard before.
  85. Magellan
    The spirit of slow cinema is alive and languid in this stunningly mounted, politically rigorous work, which confronts any viewers hoping for a sweeping biographical romp with a frank post-colonial perspective, thoroughly and violently dismantling any romanticized legacy trailing the eponymous Portuguese navigator.
  86. Primate
    The movie is funny as only a bloody disgusting formulaic-but-halfway-clever slasher film can be.
  87. Holding Liat
    The camera’s non-interventionist nature becomes vital. The visual approach embodies the Beinin family’s loss of control, and the growing uncertainty around them and what they believe.
  88. The Housemaid
    The Housemaid is one of those movies you go with. It’s too stylized, too entertainingly extreme, for you to get hung up on whether it all tracks.
  89. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The new movie, for all its inevitable Breathless Technological Advances, doesn’t feel as visually unprecedented as the last one did. If anything, though, it’s a better film — bolder and tighter, with a more dramatically focused story — and it certainly has its share of amazements.
  90. Europe's New Faces
    What Sam Abbas, as director, cinematographer and editor, does here is to disarmingly present the situation in snippets that give the audience all the details of crossing from Libya to Italy, including elements both harrowing and mundane. In so doing, he engenders empathy and understanding for these displaced people and their struggle, taking a humanist approach rather than an abstract one.
  91. Remake
    Remake is extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement and still-unresolved confusion.
  92. Dust Bunny
    The strength of the performances and the filmmaker’s smart handling of ambiguity (is there or is there not an actual monster at play here?) do enough to keep one engaged.
  93. A Poet
    Its tone shifts from absurdist to serious to satirical and back again. This odd mix should not work, but Soto pulls it off with a sure hand and precisely exacting storytelling. That it succeeds in being both funny and poignant makes A Poet even more of an achievement.
  94. Dry Leaf
    Defiantly peculiar and only a little overlong at three hours, Dry Leaf is a joy for devotees of the strange, singular and sometimes transcendent. It’s a movie to ride shotgun alongside, with the windows down on a lazy trip to nowhere in particular, that ends up taking you everywhere in particular.
  95. Outerlands
    Elena Oxman’s Outerlands is a film of great cinematic sleight of hand.
  96. Endless Cookie
    Underneath the lowbrow fart jokes and images of caribou mating, the Scrivers’ Endless Cookie honors the legacy others left behind through their experiences so that it can help each new generation piece together their understanding of the embattled present.
  97. A Sad and Beautiful World
    For his evocative and wistful romance to yield its intended effect, writer-director Cyril Aris’ biggest ask of the viewer is to surrender to the serendipitous nature of the couple’s connection — a request that is later supported with a concept that expands the film’s magical realist vein. Contrived by design, the premise eventually earns enough goodwill for one to play along.
  98. Little Trouble Girls
    This is a striking statement of intent from its Slovenian writer-director — there’s an airy delicacy here that invites comparisons to early Céline Sciamma, but with its own raw, restless edge.
  99. Marty Supreme
    One of the year’s few masterpieces.
  100. Zootopia 2
    These movies are comedies first and crime-film homages second, but it’s their tertiary value as social commentary that makes the franchise so indispensable: Behind the laughs are teachable moments.
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