Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 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 2.4 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Amazon Women on the Moon
    Amazon Women on the Moon is irreverent, vulgar and silly and has some hilarious moments and some real groaners too.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paris Blues
    Within its snappy, flashy veneer is an undernourished romantic drama of a rather traditional screen school.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Comancheros
    The Comancheros is a big, brash, uninhibited action-western of the old school about as subtle as a right to the jaw.
  4. Roger Waters: Us + Them
    A sonically superior if sometimes draggy affair that earns its stripes by affirming the timelessness of Waters’ thematic concerns and proving that fresh material doesn’t have to be the medicine we’re forced to swallow to hear the classics.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shivers
    A silly but moderately effective chiller about creeping parasites that systematically (and comically) 'infect' an entire highrise population with nothing less than sexual hysteria.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Babes in Toyland
    Walt Disney's first live-action musical, a lavish translation to the screen of Victor Herbert's operetta, Babes in Toyland, is an expensive gift, brightly-wrapped and intricately packaged. But some of the more mature patrons may be distressed to discover that quaint, charming Toyland has been transformed into a rather gaudy and mechanical Fantasyland. What actually emerges is Babes in Disneyland.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Strongest Man in the World
    The students of Medfield College unintentionally zap the laws of nature with unexpected and sometimes hilarious results.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
    Good looking production is above average family entertainment, enhanced to great measure by zesty, but never show-off, direction by Robert Butler, in a debut swing to pix from telefilm.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Journey of Natty Gann
    More a period piece of Americana than a rousing adventure, The Journey of Natty Gann is a generally diverting variation on a boy and his dog: this time it's a girl and her wolf.
  10. Fiddlin'
    Even filmgoers with little taste for these arcane sounds may enjoy the doc, if only for the chance to spend an hour and a half in the company of so many prodigies who’ve put down their phones in the service of taking up catgut.
  11. Bloody Marie
    Given their evident talent for packaging (as opposed to content), Hillege and van Driel might next consider doing something of a more purely genre-based nature, where depth or its lack thereof won’t matter much.
  12. Badland
    A solidly crafted piece of work that, despite its leisurely pacing, manages to infuse a respectable amount of fresh vigor into clichés and conventions common to shoot-’em-ups set during the post-Civil War era.
  13. Redoubt
    If it all made sense, would it still be art? Ironically, the trouble with Redoubt is that it’s not obtuse enough. It’s the first Barney film audiences won’t have trouble sleeping after — or through.
  14. Rookie of the Year
    A warm, comic "what if" yarn, it's rife with humor and sentimentality but is just one run away from the game-winning score.
  15. Line of Duty
    High on energy if low on credibility.
  16. Feast of the Seven Fishes
    This easily digestible “Feast” is unlikely to join the holiday viewing canon, but the particularity of its focus on the eponymous, American-fried immigrant tradition is welcome: Any Christmas film that teaches us how to correctly soak baccala is more useful than most.
  17. Crown Vic
    A respectable if non-revelatory cruise through a familiar terrain of mean streets and men in blue.
  18. Lost in America
    While listening to the kids, Rainwater makes sure we see the humanity and future potential in each and every one, treating his subjects with the respect they deserve.
  19. Angelfish
    This easy-to-take film’s pleasures, then, lie chiefly in its relaxed evocation of place and time. Set in 1993, though it could just as easily work in a contemporary setting, Angelfish wisely doesn’t go all in on period kitsch, though music and costuming are both deployed to evoke a pre-internet, arguably gentler era of youth.
  20. Shooting the Mafia
    Not quite a fleshed-out personal study, nor fully a meditation on what Battaglia’s camera sees, this intriguing but frustrating film finally makes the case for letting the photographer’s pictures tell their story.
  21. The Craft
    Four gifted and attractive actresses struggle hard to lend a semblance of dramatic coherence to The Craft, a neatly crafted film that begins most promisingly as a black comedy a la Heathers, but gradually succumbs to its tricky machinery of special effects. Still, young audiences, particularly women, are likely to connect with this energetic high-school tale about the vengeful empowerment of rebellious misfits.
  22. Code 8
    Code 8 is better than a mere calling-card film, though one senses a desire to check all the boxes of fan expectation and professional packaging rated higher than the kinds of personal expression that might have lent it a more memorable idiosyncrasy.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Prophecy
    Daring and unique on the one hand, but hard to swallow on the other, Prophecy is a fantasy thriller about murderous angels waging a war on Earth. First-time director Gregory Widen deserves a pat on the back for attempting risky balancing act.
  24. The Call of the Wild
    For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.
  25. Locusts
    A watchable if familiar rural melodrama.
  26. The Matrix Resurrections
    Essentially a greatest hits concert and a cover version rolled into one (complete with flashback clips to high points from past installments), the new movie is slick but considerably less ambitious in scope than the two previous sequels.
  27. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    A detailed yet paint-by-numbers study of the living legend who believes in the necessity of making good trouble as an instigator of societal change.
  28. Only Cloud Knows
    Schematic and manipulative as it is, as a kind of team-effort between the New Zealand Tourist Board and whatever the Chinese equivalent of Hallmark is, Only Cloud Knows is, in the moment, undeniably effective at jerking tears.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boys in Company C
    The Boys in Company C is a spotty but okay popcorn trade drama about five young Marines and how their lives were changed by duty in the Vietnam war. Laden with barracks dialog and played at the enlisted man's level, the Raymond Chow production, directed well by Sidney J. Furie, features strong performances by some very fine actors.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black Widow
    Lacking the snap and sharpness that might have made it a firstrate thriller, Black Widow instead plays as a moderately interesting tale of one woman's obsession for another's glamorous and criminal lifestyle.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    1900
    Bertolucci’s ambitious generational canvas is elaborately constructed.
  32. Disturbing the Peace
    It’s basic action entertainment of a somewhat old-fashioned ilk, giving viewers exactly what they expect in a borderline-hokey yet satisfying way.
  33. And Then We Danced
    Gifted as both a thrilling dancer and a nuanced actor, Gelbakhiani’s magnetic presence goes a long way toward papering over some of the more timeworn plot elements . . . and the film should make audiences clamor for more vehicles that feature his seemingly effortless ability to radiate joy.
  34. Sylvie's Love
    More even than Declan Quinn’s sumptuously old-school cinematography and the throwback styling and stock footage exteriors that deliberately mimic the Technicolor romances of old, it’s the fresh-faced naiveté of the storytelling that feels so anachronistic.
  35. Spenser Confidential
    The film even pokes fun at itself in the process, fully aware that Spenser Confidential isn’t meant to be taken as seriously as Wahlberg’s last few movies — and just as well, since irreverence plays well on Netflix.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Sherlock Holmes
    Young Sherlock Holmes is another Steven Spielberg film corresponding to those lamps made from driftwood and coffee tables from redwood burl and hatchcovers. It’s not art but they all serve their purpose and sell by the millions.
  37. Irresistible
    Irresistible scores points yet feels behind the curve. You wish it were a bold satirical bulletin, or maybe just Stewart’s pricelessly amusing version of a Christopher Guest movie. Instead, the film is a lot like a politician: It makes a big show of leading the viewer, but without rocking the boat.
  38. Escape from Pretoria
    Francis Annan’s film works effectively as a straight-up jailbreak thriller, well-oiled in greasy B-movie tradition. It’s when it shoots for more historical import that it falls somewhat short.
  39. Raya and the Last Dragon
    A lot of the storytelling is clumsy, rushed or inelegant, but the movie’s timely message of unity and trust still resonates because the filmmakers figured out such a satisfying ending — albeit one that ties things up a little too neatly: so much world-building in service of a one-off. Is this overloaded origin story really the last we’ll see of “The Last Dragon”?
  40. Rebecca
    For about three-quarters of the running time, Rebecca does a respectable job of navigating between respect for the source and establishing its own distinct identity. And then, at precisely the moment where it stands to make a few enlightened improvements . . . this Rolls-Royce of an adaptation veers off the road.
  41. The Night House
    Though this tale of a new widow’s apparent haunting gets progressively lost in a narrative maze that’s complicated without being particularly rewarding, director David Bruckner suffuses the action with enough dread and unpleasant goosings to make this an above-average genre exercise.
  42. The Nowhere Inn
    As a ballad about a rock star’s soul, The Nowhere Inn is a fun riff performed on flimsy strings.
  43. Fear Street Part One: 1994
    “Fear Street” may look like countless horror movies that have come before, but it’s desperately trying to be original, and that may pay off in the two installments to come.
  44. Miss Juneteenth
    Miss Juneteenth richly captures the slow pace of ebbing small-town Texas life, even if you might wish there were a bit more narrative momentum to pick up the slack in writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ first feature.
  45. House of Cardin
    Lively as an overview of Cardin’s creative and commercial achievements, House of Cardin is considerably vaguer when it comes to his personal life and legacy.
  46. Surge
    As an experiment in steering a potentially tight thriller entirely by one character’s irrational whims, it’s abrasively compelling, even if the go-go-go plotting doesn’t withstand closest scrutiny.
  47. The Courier
    Ironbark’s hook is that it’s based on true events, and the underlying history deserves to be shared.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Jewel of the Nile
    As a sequel to Romancing the Stone, the script of The Jewel of the Nile is missing the deft touch of the late Diane Thomas but Lewis Teague's direction matches the energy of the original.
  49. Beast Beast
    Beast Beast’s plot twist is a swing at gravitas that disrupts the balance of Madden’s naturalistic character study. This is the way teen life is, Madden says, until suddenly the film accelerates from reality to sensationalism, and trades humanity for pulp.
  50. Blast Beat
    Blast Beat cares far more about testing the limits of the family’s togetherness, and while the resolution doesn’t have the sweetness of a pop song, Arango is happy to settle for heavy metal discordance.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Foxes
    Foxes is an ambitious attempt to do a film relating to some of the not-so-acceptable realities among teenagers that ends up delivering far less than it is capable of.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tank
    James Garner’s persona gives the events a soft, human, and at times bemused edge.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cherry 2000
    A tongue-in-cheek sci-fi action pic which owes a considerable debt to the Mad Max movies, Cherry 2000's greatest asset is topbilled Melanie Griffith, who lifts the material whenever she's on screen.
  54. We Summon the Darkness
    We Summon the Darkness is a psycho thriller that pulls the bloody rug out from under you, and does it in a shivery sly way.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big Top Pee-wee
    Very little of this is interesting or amusing on paper, which must have been a real challenge to director Randal Kleiser, who ably keeps all the surrounding players in tune to whatever it is that Herman’s up to at any given moment.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Coca-Cola Kid
    The mix of earthy symbolism, offbeat eroticism, the picaresque and the rough-and-tumble social, rather unpolitical satire now seems poured from a bottle that has been left uncapped overnight.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fool for Love
    Robert Altman directs a fine cast with all the authority and finesse a good play deserves, so it's too bad the play fooled them all. Sam Shepard's drama of intense, forbidden love in the modern West is made to seem like specious stuff filled with dramatic ideas left over from the 1950s.
  58. Hooking Up
    In spite of its tweaks to gender roles, the duo’s sexcapades and Snow’s spirited performance, Hooking Up doesn’t offer much by way of surprise, which doesn’t mean that as the odd, amiable couple head toward their personal reckonings, you won’t find yourself rooting for them. Separately and together.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Agnes of God
    Fonda’s relentless interrogating, mannered chain-smoking and enforced two dimensionality cause her to become tiresome very early on. She remains a brittle cliche of a modern professional woman. Bancroft gives a generally highly engaging performance as a religious woman too knowledgeable to be one-upped by even the craftiest layman.
  60. Only
    An absorbing post-catastrophe drama.
  61. Extraction
    Extraction isn’t the smartest movie you’ll see during lockdown, but it’s liable to be the most kinetic — assuming you have Netflix, since it’s the service’s big tentpole of the season, a dumbed-down bit of blow-uppy distraction that’s every bit as entertaining as the equivalent pyrotechnic offering from a theatrical motion picture studio might have been.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fever Pitch
    Weak script, poor acting and miscasting aside, it's the power of the subject that makes this an enjoyable ride. Writer/director Richard Brooks thoroughly researched the Territory of the compulsive gambler and captures the obsession with almost a documentary eye.
  63. The Flood
    A relatively modest, low-key tale about global refugee issues that are usually portrayed in a higher dramatic key, The Flood makes a somewhat underwhelming first impression. But it gradually overcomes that to arrive at a potent (if still quiet) cumulative impact, bolstered by strong performances from leads Ivanno Jeremiah and Lena Headey.
  64. Banana Split
    The director, Benjamin Kasulke, is a veteran cinematographer who brings the L.A. settings a spangly glow, but he stages too many scenes with generic “punch.” I wish he’d played against the comedy instead of italicizing it, and that he’d come up with some pop-music epiphanies and ditched the film’s cloying synthesizer score.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The River
    Stripped down to the bare essentials few people actually ever come into contact with, pic remains a rather private ordeal observed from the outside looking in. There is a victory at the end, but not a sense of lasting triumph.
  66. Fatima
    While not especially artful, Fatima honors those who stand by their convictions. That its role models are children makes the message all the more remarkable.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    City Heat
    City Heat is an amiable but decidedly lukewarm confection geared entirely around the two star turns.
  68. Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street
    All this certainly constitutes an intriguing footnote to horror cinema history. But Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen’s film could’ve used more distance from its principal interviewee, a producer here.
  69. Undine
    There’s a stylistic and narrative elegance to Petzold’s approach, with its clean lensing and repeated use of a single piece of music (the rolling piano Adagio from Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974), that suggests restraint, where a queer filmmaker might have propelled things into camp territory. In a way, it’s a shame that Undine stops short, since the material feels thin, and the statement as murky as the lake to which the camera ultimately returns.
  70. Charlatan
    Caught between a respectful tribute to Mikolášek’s medical achievements and a more salacious examination of his moral transgressions — with a tender if speculative gay romance propped somewhere in between — it’s an ambitious portrait of human imperfection that doesn’t strain to arouse much affection for its subject in the audience.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Small Affair
    No Small Affair is an okay coming-of-age romance [from a screen story by Charles Bolt] in which the believability of the leading characters far outweighs that of many of the situations in which the script places them.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Reform School Girls
    Every character is a caricature, from the rifle-toting, Bible-quoting warden (Sybil Danning) to the lineup of lovelies who parade as reform school girls. Pat Ast, as the cantankerous and corpulent head matron, and Williams play their rotten roles to the hilt and get most of the juicy lines.
  73. Sublet
    With two screenwriters (including the director) and three script editors credited, it may be a classic “too many cooks” situation, as the whole structure is as risk-free and standardized as a TV film, though newcomer Niv Nissem provides a freshness that papers over the conventionality of it all.
  74. Archive
    The sleek result, like the scientist’s hi-tech Frankenstein creation, impressively looks and sounds the part, without quite having a soul of its own. That’s enough to make Archive a compelling calling card for the British freshman, with the promise of more advanced models to come.
  75. Inside the Rain
    Inside the Rain is so fresh and audacious in so many ways that it’s a bit of letdown when it leans heavily on the cliché of the Gold-Hearted Hooker — or, in this case, the Gold-Hearted Porn Actress and Part-Time Escort — to provide Benjamin with inspiration, emotional support, and, most important, a female lead for his film.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Still of the Night
    It comes as almost a shock to see a modern suspense picture that's as literate, well acted and beautifully made as Still Of The Night. Despite its many virtues, however, Robert Benton's film [from a story by him and David Newman] has its share of serious flaws, mainly in the area of plotting.
  77. Phoenix, Oregon
    The sort of movie a lot of us need right now. It’s an undemandingly enjoyable and reassuringly predictable dramedy in which nothing, not even the sourball attitudes of its comically unpleasant malcontents, ever is allowed to get out of hand or unduly strain credibility. But it also is too playfully spiky and unaffectedly down-to-earth to come across as bland pablum.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Spirits
    High Spirits is a piece of supernatural Irish whimsy with a few appealing dark underpinnings, but it still rises and falls constantly on the basis of its moment-to-moment inspirations.
  79. There's Something in the Water
    If There’s Something in the Water isn’t the most sophisticated treatment of the issues it scrutinizes, it nonetheless makes a very convincing case for protections against environmental harm being applied equally to all members of society.
  80. Screened Out
    Why watch Screened Out? Because it shows you something you didn’t know.
  81. Elephant
    The herd’s endless quest to find water becomes a repetitive (and rather dry) theme. And to the extent that super-square anthropomorphic Disney filmmaking isn’t merely a form but a skill, I never felt overwhelmingly close to Gaia or Shanti or Jomo. The Disney nature films have always had a certain hermetic quality, but this one feels more sealed-off than usual.
  82. Fatherhood
    It transitions Hart from playfully scowling cutup to earnest heartfelt actor, and it does so in a way that, at times, is genuinely touching, even as the audience can see every sanded-down conflict and market-tested beat falling into place.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Enter the Ninja
    Enter the Ninja represents an unusual hybrid action film, an Italian Western-type story filmed as a contemporary Japanese martial arts action film in the Philippines. Results are pleasant though unspectacular.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Ninja
    Revenge of the Ninja is an entertaining martial arts actioner, following up Enter the Ninja (1981) but lacking that film's name players and Far East locale.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Salvador
    The tale of American photojournalist Richard Boyle’s adventures in strife-torn Central America, Salvador is as raw, difficult, compelling, unreasonable, reckless and vivid as its protagonist.
  86. Nobody
    Nobody is a thoroughly over-the-top and, at times, loony-tunes entry in the live-and-let-die vengeance-is-mine genre. Is it a good movie? Not exactly. But its 90 minutes fly by, and it’s a canny vehicle for Odenkirk, the unlikeliest star of a righteous macho bloodbath since Dustin Hoffman got his bear trap on in “Straw Dogs.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silent Movie
    The slender plot of Silent Movie [from a story by Ron Clark] is basically a hook for slapstick antics, some feeble and some very fine (notably a wonderful nightclub tango with Anne Bancroft). Harry Ritz, Charlie Callas, Henny Youngman, and the late Liam Dunn are standouts.
  88. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    The origin story was the charm, but the sequel is hobbled by a less buoyant hero and bland villains.
  89. Elvis
    Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ricochet
    Screenplay [from a story by Fred Dekker and Menno Meyjes] offers unusually good dialog for the smooth-talking Washington and a number of scenes to savor. Pic threatens to become truly absorbing as Lithgow’s brilliant revenge scheme unfolds, but Ricochet soon abandons cleverness in favor of spectacle.
  91. Planet of the Humans
    There’s nothing particularly elegant about the way Planet of the Humans arrives at that downbeat thesis. Though well-shot and edited, the material here is simply too sprawling to avoid feeling crammed into one ungainly package even narrator Gibbs admits “might seem overwhelming.”
  92. The Man from Toronto
    A throwback buddy action-comedy that offsets its run-of-the-mill sense of humor with a pair of appealing leads.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
    An Arabian Nightish saga told with some briskness and opulence for the childish eye, yet ultimately falling short of implied promise as an adventure spree.
  94. Becoming
    Far more than the memoir, the film presents a manicured version of the way Michelle Obama sees herself — and yet, even such a carefully image-managed impression can be telling, since it diverges so significantly from the way the world perceives her.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Phantom of the Opera
    Phantom of the Opera is far more of a musical than a chiller, though this element is not to be altogether discounted, and holds novelty appeal.
  96. 7500
    For its first half, 7500 is briskly effective in a cold-sweat sort of way, carrying its audience from a smooth takeoff to the first signs of disturbance to swiftly cranked all-out terror with the kind of nervy efficiency you can admire without exactly taking pleasure in it. In more ways than one, however, Vollrath’s technically adroit film has trouble sticking the landing.
  97. Take Me Somewhere Nice
    Take Me Somewhere Nice has fun with the ride yet feels too derivative to leave much of an impression beyond a few vibrantly colored images.
  98. Dads
    It’s mostly a vanilla documentary with no real destination, but one with plenty of cuteness to go around.
  99. Lorelei
    Writer-director Sabrina Doyle’s fable-like tale of working-class Americans on the fringe navigates its elusive waters with compassion and care, even when it veers into some predictable shallows from time to time.
  100. Stage: The Culinary Internship
    At just 78 minutes, this bustling, absorbing doc hasn’t quite enough time to entirely draw us into the lives and perspectives of its likable human subjects: We’re given sketched-in backgrounds and familial food histories, but their personalities remain somewhat elusive.
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