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. Role Play
    The players are deft enough that a little more wit in the writing would have surely been well-served. (Nighy in particular makes much of relatively little.) And while briskly handled, none of the ideas here are fresh enough for Role Play to score points on narrative or character unpredictability.
  2. Lift
    Practically every scene is a cliché, every line of dialogue an echo of a better one you’ve already heard in a better film.
  3. Public Speaking
    Intermittently amusing and surely interesting, "Lebowitz" falls victim to the classic faux pas of overstaying its welcome.
  4. The Beekeeper
    The Beekeeper is the best kind of bad movie — which is to say, it’s the sort that puts entertainment ahead of pretentiousness, embracing the laughter sure to accompany such an unapologetically stupid, ultra-violent premise.
  5. Mean Girls
    You can rest assured that Mean Girls, the movie musical, sticks close to the spirit and to the letter of the movie that updated and mythologized the culture of gossip and backstabbing for a new generation. The new movie nudges the material into our own era in a handful of ways.
  6. Salaar: Part 1 – Ceasefire
    At 174 minutes long, with nested flashbacks overflowing with exposition, the movie has lengthy stretches that can feel like a chore. However, each extraneous segment eventually converges in some of the most exhilarating and cathartic on-screen violence Indian cinema has to offer.
  7. Amerikatsi
    Eventually, the two opposing modes of visual storytelling at its core (one distinctly intimate, the other distant and observational) come into explosive contact like matter and antimatter, as the idea of art metaphorically gazing back at its viewer takes distinctly literal form.
  8. To Kill a Tiger
    To Kill a Tiger depicts a shining, poignant example of the difference individuals can make in altering the social fabric.
  9. Robot Dreams
    Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.
  10. The Painter
    While most performers are fine within the material’s limitations, principal villains Avgeropoulos and Montesi are notably underwhelming.
  11. Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia
    It’s a competent yet uninspired overview of events.
  12. Night Swim
    Everything is at once telegraphed and derivative.
  13. In the Shadow of Beirut
    Despite so much cause for grief, what’s striking about the protagonists is their cordiality and resilient hopefulness.
  14. Good Grief
    Levy’s funny-sad contemporary drama acknowledges the supportive dynamic that Marc plays in Thomas and Sophie’s lives, even as it centers the gay best friend for a change — not so different from the one he played in “Happiest Season.” All three characters feel well rounded and real, especially in their imperfections.
  15. The Crime Is Mine
    It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine.
  16. My Love Affair with Marriage
    With My Love Affair with Marriage, animator Signe Baumane creates another dense personal narrative that expresses complicated concepts and ideas in images.
  17. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The movie, with all that combat, is staged on an impressively grand scale by the returning director, James Wan, but at the same time there’s something glumly standard about it.
  18. Anyone But You
    Anyone But You is a rom-com for the age of antipathy. It is, in many ways, as prefab as a lot of the rom-coms of the ’90s and aughts, but there’s something zesty and bracing about how it channels the anti-romanticism of the Tinder-meets-MeToo generation.
  19. Migration
    At least the backgrounds are eye-catching, as a waddle of mallards crack jokes amid beautiful fall foliage.
  20. The Color Purple
    Barrino’s soul-felt R&B sensibility lends itself to the role, and the patience it took to reach this point mirrors Celie’s long path to finding herself. Barrino may have embodied the character on Broadway 15 years earlier, but the moment is now right, and everyone else in the terrific ensemble seems to have fallen into place around that choice.
  21. The Boys in the Boat
    The Boys in the Boat is a gentleman’s sports movie, with Clooney working hard to make one “like they used to.” He brings it off, even if there’s a lingering quaintness to it all.
  22. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    “Rebel Moon,” while eminently watchable, is a movie built so entirely out of spare parts that it may, in the end, be for Snyder cultists only.
  23. The Family Plan
    Each setpiece is composed and paced much like the last, which only amplifies the sense of Dan as some kind of unflustered, largely unsympathetic man-machine, paused only by the script’s fleeting interpersonal conflicts.
  24. Apolonia, Apolonia
    Gazing upon great art often clears our minds, sharpens our thinking and invites new ideas in; in Apolonia, Apolonia, tracing the long-term push-pull of someone else’s artistic process appears to do the same for the woman behind the camera.
  25. Mami Wata
    Even if narratively Mami Wata never fully reaches a satisfactory apex, its images remain utterly enthralling.
  26. The Iron Claw
    A perfect movie for this moment.
  27. Tiger Stripes
    From the exuberant credits and opening sequence through to the end, Tiger Stripes is the work of a confident new talent whose next work will be eagerly awaited.
  28. Inshallah a Boy
    Inshallah a Boy moves like a sleek thriller, but is full of the unsolved mysteries and dangling question marks of real life.
  29. The Three Musketeers - Part I: D'Artagnan
    Dumas was a master of the serial form, and this version of “The Three Musketeers” manages to preserve that thrill-to-thrill sensation. The experience leaves you wanting more, though it’s probably better suited to binge-watching in its entirety.
  30. Animal
    Contrastingly notable for their absence are emotional depth, narrative cogency or non-scatological humor — lacks that much ultra-violence and a surprising amount of sexual content can only distract from so much over such a long, bombastic, shallow course.
  31. Little Richard: I Am Everything
    Little Richard: I Am Everything, directed with supreme love and insight by Lisa Cortés, is the enthralling documentary that Little Richard deserves.
  32. Concrete Utopia
    It’s a fractious, blood-soaked drama about the will to survive that feels like “Earthquake” crossed with “Lord of the Flies.” What’s gripping is that you watch it and think, “If I were in this movie, what would I do?”
  33. Bad Press
    Following events over the course of several years, this cautionary tale has an impact not unlike watching the rise of similar anti-transparency policies and politicians elsewhere of late: dismaying, yet with all the lurid appeal and colorful personalities of any juicy public scandal.
  34. Wonka
    “Wonka” makes you feel good, but it never makes you levitate.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    It’s satisfying without being indulgent, but most of all, it’s a monument to Beyoncé’s status as one of pop’s most enduring figures, and everything it takes to get there.
  36. Silent Night
    Silly as it might be, Silent Night gives audiences reason to get excited about the Hong Kong innovator once again, ranking as one of the few bloody Christmas counterprogrammers since “Die Hard” that feels worthy of repeat viewing down the road.
  37. Good Burger 2
    It’s the lame jokes and repetitive dialogue that keep it from landing any laughs. The cast is essentially left stranded, mugging for the cameras as they desperately try to compensate for the undercooked script.
  38. Genie
    The funny moments in Genie, and there are a handful of them, emerge mostly from McCarthy just tossing off lines with her dislocating insouciance.
  39. Godzilla Minus One
    Despite a few lapses into lumpy melodrama, Yamazki’s thoughtful script holds firm and is dotted with delightful humor at just the right moments.
  40. American Symphony
    For this warm and lovely film’s most natural audience, which will most likely be families struggling with illness, the documentary’s final inconclusiveness may feel like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony.
  41. Another Body
    A groundbreaking, creepy, fascinating, and important documentary.
  42. The Mother of All Lies
    The Mother of All Lies is an astonishing work whose maturity comes from El Moudir’s wide-eyed approach to her family history, where memory and history are quite literally reduced to playthings in order to process the unspeakable events they conjure up.
  43. Orlando, My Political Biography
    With Orlando, My Political Biography, Preciado has crafted a towering manifesto that’s as nimble in presenting abstracted gender theorizations as it is in capturing moving emotional truths (credit here must also go to the film’s dynamic editor, Yotam Ben David).
  44. Dashing Through the Snow
    Howery’s line readings sound improvised, and that’s a good thing. He’s the ebullient, fast-talking spark plug of a formula comedy with a cheap engine, though one that putters along harmlessly enough.
  45. Leo
    However immature Sandler’s sense of humor may have been in the past, he seems to have a pretty good handle on what makes kids tick. The movie can be making potty jokes one minute and delivering practical advice the next, wrapping with the sensible suggestion to “find your Leo.”
  46. Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later
    The sequel provides an ever-maturing understanding of the tension between labels and identities, between a changing self, an expanding queer “community” and the broader society.
  47. Wish
    Wish self-consciously packs 85 years of animated magic into a portable Disney fable. Does that make it a summation or a pastiche? A movie marbled with pop history or overstuffed with Easter eggs? One that launches the next Disney century or is stuck in the last one? Maybe all of the above.
  48. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain
    It’s a diverting enough entertainment from a group that has repeatedly proven itself to be capable of much more.
  49. Best. Christmas. Ever.
    Lambert and screenwriters Todd Calgi Gallicano and Charles Shyer turn in a multi-faceted tale that blessedly never devolves into a one-dimensional story about two competitive, smart women sniping at each other while their clueless families watch from the sidelines.
  50. Lee
    Even at her character’s most vulnerable, the Oscar-winning actor presents Lee with an edge of defensiveness, her guard never fully down, likely tied to a traumatic event in childhood.
  51. The Tuba Thieves
    Without the rigidness of a concrete story, O’Daniel is able to command the medium in an invigorating manner. Though it requires that audiences surrender to its unconventional tactics, the reward is the opportunity to rediscover the familiar with a fresh set of eyes and ears.
  52. Thanksgiving
    Thanksgiving follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have.
  53. Napoleon
    Dense without feeling rushed, then done without ever having really sprung to life, Napoleon seems determined to cover a great deal of ground over its not-insignificant running time.
  54. A Normal Family
    The whole matter seems so morally ambiguous that it makes for an unpredictable ride, right up to the film’s abrupt but darkly poetic smash ending.
  55. The Accidental Getaway Driver
    Unfortunately, the script — co-written by Lee and Christopher Chen — leaves a lot to be desired, squandering the old-school appeal of the true-crime drama for a dull and overlong mood piece in which nothing much happens and no real sense of danger ever registers.
  56. Stamped from the Beginning
    It lulls the audience into thinking it’s only providing historical context. Yet by the end, it reveals the myths, the distortions and the made-up fallacies that have been presented as truth for centuries. And that is the most radical thing it could have done.
  57. Leo
    Kanagaraj hails from the Michael Bay school of excess, using dramatic camera moves (like the oft-repeated trick where he pushes in on a character’s back as that person turns to glower toward the audience) and clever cutting to give the entire feature the energy typically reserved for a 2½-minute trailer.
  58. It's a Wonderful Knife
    The genre slant promised by the title seems to be less of a tonal responsibility than an excuse to abruptly break out into the occasional suspense set piece.
  59. The Stones and Brian Jones
    It’s clear the filmmaker has never lost that besotted hero worship. The Stones and Brian Jones digs deep into the Jones mystique, trying to make the case for him as a misunderstood “genius.”
  60. Journey to Bethlehem
    Journey to Bethlehem is first and foremost a family movie, and though its music sounds a little too early-aughts to become a classic, it fills a crèche-shaped niche in the current theatrical landscape, with nearly six weeks to clean up before Christmas.
  61. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    We all know where this is headed — Snow’s destined to become Panem’s authoritarian “president” — but there’s still enormous room for surprise and debate, even among readers of Collins’ prequel.
  62. The Marvels
    The director, Nia DaCosta (who made the intriguing remake of “Candyman”), stages the action efficiently, but she doesn’t center the narrative; the film is a series of goals in search of a higher mission.
  63. Showdown at the Grand
    While seldom going for big laughs, the film never takes itself too seriously, allowing its story to occupy the realm of cineaste fantasy.
  64. At the Gates
    Aiming to be a tense drama about trust, the film struggles to balance the personal and cultural stakes at the heart of its neat conceit.
  65. Subject
    It’s easy to form an opinion about the subject of a great many docs, but unsettling to realize how little we know about how they were treated.
  66. What Happens Later
    Meg Ryan not only dazzles before the camera in What Happens Later, but behind it as well, as director and co-writer. Through the prism of one former couple’s relationship woes, this effervescent, enlightened romantic comedy explores our innate need for reconciliation within ourselves and with each other.
  67. The Marsh King's Daughter
    The movie is being marketed as a “psychological” thriller, but psychology is what it doesn’t have. It’s more like “Cape Fear” reduced to a “Predator” sequel.
  68. In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
    In the Court of the Crimson King is really about as good as rock documentaries get, in capturing the essence of a group of musicians and how they relate to each other, the world and a muse whose demands result in literal and figurative calluses.
  69. Freud's Last Session
    So many movies are either mindless or completely disinterested with engaging the intellect of their audiences that Freud’s Last Session offers a welcome bit of brain stimulation — but does far less for the soul.
  70. Five Nights at Freddy's
    Faced with a flat script and uninspired direction, the actors can’t save Five Nights at Freddy’s.
  71. Suitable Flesh
    There’s no lack of effort here, but too often Suitable Flesh just feels effortful, rather than the outrageous good time aimed for.
  72. Leave the World Behind
    Per Howard Hawks’ too-easy rubric, “A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes,” this one’s a keeper. The best scene may be the last.
  73. Old Dads
    For a first movie, Old Dads shows promise. Bill Burr is onto something about how the new culture of control messes with the heads of ordinary people. Next time, though, he should channel the rage instead of flaunting it.
  74. Evolution
    So heavy until now, the movie ends on a soaring note of optimism.
  75. Close Your Eyes
    Erice’s first feature in 31 years — and only his fourth overall — arrives as something between a desert oasis and a mirage: a shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality, to the point that his latest feels almost dreamed into being.
  76. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    Scripted by “Chicken Run” alums Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, along with newcomer Rachel Tunnard, the sequel doesn’t offer many surprises plotwise, but is consistently amusing in its dad-jokey kind of way.
  77. The Kitchen
    Even at its shakiest, however, “The Kitchen” gets by on the steam of its own fury, and on its tender depiction of a trampled underclass staving off defeat through small, everyday acts of care and empathy.
  78. Dear Jassi
    The two characters at the center of Amit Rai’s screenplay are superficially defined beyond their all-consuming devotion, and that lack of nuance and texture makes for some flat stretches across a leisurely 134-minute runtime — though a shattering finale, staged with brilliant formalist rigor, leaves the most lasting impression.
  79. The Magic Flute
    There's not much magic left in Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute. Relocating the 1791 opera to WWI and adopting a hard-edged approach that worked for "Hamlet," Branagh has wrought a "Flute" for high-end aficionados only. Lavishly mounted and well sung, but thin on charm and spontaneity, pic is likely to hit a bum note at general wickets.
  80. Plan C
    Urgent and unvarnished, Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary Plan C is an early entry in what might be considered post-Roe cinema, focusing less on pro-choice ideology than on the practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea.
  81. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    For most fans, this show isn’t so much about watching her career flash before their eyes — although there’s that — but their own roller-coaster lives. It’s sort of Broadway, kind of psychotherapy/church, and all too well-executed.
  82. Reality Winner
    It’s an involving, empathetic if one-sided portrait.
  83. Strange Darling
    Writer-director JT Mollner flips the script on this tired genre, crafting the cleverest thriller of its kind in a while with a mighty assist from a pair of killer performances by co-leads Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner. Best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, Strange Darling demands a bit of patience, but it also rewards it.
  84. Ex-Husbands
    Ex-Husbands . . . is likable enough in intention, but flounders en route to its destination. Not unlike its befuddled protagonists, who can’t seem to translate meaning well into doing well.
  85. The Exorcist: Believer
    The Exorcist: Believer, in its superficially competent and poshly mounted way, feels about as dangerous as a crucifix dipped in a bottle of designer water.
  86. Wildcat
    It’s emotionally exhausting, but audiences come away with a sense of her legacy, as well as an appreciation for the adversity she faced (and, to a lesser degree, a sense of the criticism that has been leveled against her).
  87. Daddio
    Every aspect of Daddio is designed to spark conversation. But it’s sweeter and more satisfying than you might expect, especially as Hall pays off ideas introduced early in her script.
  88. Finestkind
    If you choose to focus on the family connections, then it’s clear that Helgeland has something to say.
  89. Brightwood
    Awkwardly enamored by the thin novelties of its sci-fi trappings, Brightwood doesn’t possess the imagination to blossom beyond them, occupying an unflattering intersection of modest production resources and unrefined form.
  90. Story Ave
    [An] affecting debut feature.
  91. A Silence
    The film’s first half-hour keeps our emotional investment at bay as we work out the precise geometry of the characters and their unhappy histories. But there is a gasping power to its staggered reveals, and a searching sadness to the emerging family portrait that outweighs the film’s shock factor.
  92. The Successor
    Taken literally, The Successor is a chilling thing to watch. Step back and imagine what it’s saying on a metaphorical level, and it’s clear that writer-director Xavier Legrand has crafted one of the most damning depictions of patriarchal power imaginable.
  93. Un Amor
    Making no cozy compromises in its portrayal of a young woman socially and sexually exploited by rural patriarchy — while still foregrounding the consuming strength and autonomy of her desire — it’s a tricky balancing act that mostly works, thanks also to a crackling lead performance by Laia Costa.
  94. Reptile
    Reptile comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.
  95. Foe
    Foe wants to end with a big “Whoa.” Instead, it leaves us going “Huh, interesting” and “Whuuut?” at the same time.
  96. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    "The Caine Mutiny,” for all the tinkering, remains a warhorse of a play. And that’s both a good and a limited thing. The way Friedkin has directed it, it certainly plays.
  97. Heist 88
    It’s a crime film that finds little joy in criminality, crammed with characters who’ve been backed into a corner, hindered by an overarching morality that doesn’t match the material.
  98. Dancing in the Dust
    Dispensing with heavyhanded symbolism, Farhadi tells the tale engrossingly and with a lot of physicality through the two main actors.
  99. Saw X
    The torture set pieces in the “Saw” films are lavish gifts of baroque horror presented to the audience. They are, quite simply, the reason we came. Tobin Bell, with his stare of pitiless wisdom, is also a draw, but “Saw X” raises the issue of how much of John Kramer’s hand-wringing is too much. In the eyes of a lot of “Saw” fans, hand-wringing < hands cut off with mechanized garden shears.
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