Variety's Scores

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For 17,758 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 17758
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17758
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17758
17758 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Extra Geography
    A film that mines reserves of tenderness in young female angst and cluelessness with loving empathy.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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).
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. Mercy
    The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. The Best You Can
    An optimistic film that feels truthful about aging, even if it doesn’t say anything we haven’t heard before.
  31. 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.
  32. Primate
    The movie is funny as only a bloody disgusting formulaic-but-halfway-clever slasher film can be.
  33. 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.
  34. Greenland 2: Migration
    Greenland: Migration is a dystopian dud. It’s like the boring middle section of a picaresque disaster film, minus the showy kickoff and catchy climax.
  35. 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.
  36. 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.
  37. 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.
  38. 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.
  39. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    “Search for SquarePants,” while it has amusing moments, is mostly SpongeBob treading water.
  40. David
    Faith, “David” has in spades; soul, not so much.
  41. 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.
  42. 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.
  43. 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.
  44. 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.
  45. 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.
  46. Oh. What. Fun.
    Director Michael Showalter’s yuletide anthem for unheralded matriarchs fumbles severely, delivering bland comedic hijinks, insufferable characters and generic conundrums.
  47. Fackham Hall
    The movie, in its mud-on-the-doily way, is amusing enough to get by. But it never shocks you into laughter.
  48. 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.
  49. 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.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  52. 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.
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. 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.
  56. 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.
  57. Outerlands
    Elena Oxman’s Outerlands is a film of great cinematic sleight of hand.
  58. 100 Nights of Hero
    It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but a drag.
  59. 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.
  60. Man Finds Tape
    Hall and Gandersman compel enough interest to pull viewers through, even if they may find the fadeout less than satisfying.
  61. 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.
  62. 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.
  63. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness. No, the movie isn’t dumb fun. It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film.
  64. Marty Supreme
    One of the year’s few masterpieces.
  65. 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.
  66. Happy Holidays
    Copti and cinematographer Tim Kuhn shoot each interaction with an up-close, handheld intimacy that not only magnifies the subtle, powerful performances of the cast (many of them first-time actors), but welcomes the viewer into each scene, as though it were a complicated family reunion.
  67. Cutting Through Rocks
    The film’s irascible but deeply principled subject — thirty-something divorcee Sara Shahverdi — gives the film its energy, though its lulls aren’t quite as purposeful. However, despite feeling drawn-out, the doc features occasional bursts of visual panache that help emphasize its underlying story.
  68. Wicked: For Good
    The emotions are real; everything else is movie magic, representing where we now stand — at the apex of artificiality — for better or worse.
  69. The White House Effect
    Engrossing as well as damning.
  70. Newport & the Great Folk Dream
    Newport & the Great Folk Dream is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power.
  71. Come See Me in the Good Light
    Come See Me in the Good Light, is very good on the existential. But Gibson and Falley are even more generous in sharing their journey through the medical morass.
  72. 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.
  73. The Alabama Solution
    The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.
  74. Belén
    Belén might never regain the vivid rage and terror of its opening minutes, but Fonzi’s film ends up carrying viewers on its own wave of pride and upright conviction, ultimately delivering the hope its promises
  75. Sarah's Oil
    The period detail is impressive, the storytelling is engrossing, and the overall impact is pleasantly enjoyable.
  76. 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.
  77. 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.
  78. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.
  79. Tyler Perry's Finding Joy
    It’s Perry’s version of a holiday movie and a connect-the-dots love story, but it’s cliché-driven in such a minimal way that it almost makes you yearn for the Perry movies that can feel like a long night of channel surfing all rolled into one.
  80. I Wish You All the Best
    The pleasant, polished drama provides a compassionate take on a high schooler undergoing considerable change, its only debit being the arguably too-neat depiction of that transitional circumstance.
  81. The Plague
    Drawn from experience and benefiting from some standout performances among its well-selected young cast, The Plague has a familiar coming-of-age narrative, but stranger, subtler undercurrents of creeping dismay at the men these boys will become when, at this formative age, cruelty chlorinates the water they swim in.
  82. Selena y Los Dinos
    This definitive doc about Selena feels comprehensive and illuminating, thanks to candid family interactions found in home movies from their earliest performances at their restaurant, recordings of local Texas TV station appearances, and eventually images captured on the road while traveling in a makeshift tour bus.
  83. The Currents
    This is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction
  84. Cactus Pears
    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.
  85. Predator: Badlands
    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.
  86. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
    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.
  87. 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.
  88. Hedda
    Not everyone knows Ibsen going in, but that needn’t diminish the satisfaction of watching “Hedda Gabler” so vividly reinvented.
  89. 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.
  90. Influencers
    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.
  91. 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.
  92. Coexistence, My Ass!
    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.
  93. The Love That Remains
    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.
  94. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    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.
  95. Song Sung Blue
    Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.
  96. Regretting You
    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.
  97. 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.
  98. 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.
  99. Köln 75
    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.
  100. Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
    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.
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