Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. Last Shoot Out
    It’s a marked improvement over Feifer’s own “Catch the Bullet,” released just last September — and it features a ferociously nasty turn by Bruce Dern in a role that recalls a character from yet another golden oldie, Walter Brennan’s vicious Old Man Clanton in “My Darling Clementine.”
  2. Munich: The Edge of War
    Immersively crafted but never emotionally involving.
  3. The Bad Guys
    Cheery and diverting as The Bad Guys is, it has all the emotional weight of a few crisp, stolen Benjamins.
  4. Margrete: Queen of the North
    The slower stretches — like the entire first hour — have a tendency to plod, which gives ample opportunity to feast your eyes on Søren Schwarzberg’s grandly gloomy production design and Manon Rasmussen’s superb, elaborate costuming, but also makes the story rather too easy to disengage from.
  5. Bob Spit: We Do Not Like People
    “Bob Spit” is most notable for its formal approach, which intermingles animated interviews of Angeli with a bizarre, at times surreal narrative featuring characters from his comic strips.
  6. The Laureate
    Well-acted, nicely crafted and a handsome period piece within modest means, this isn’t the most novel, memorable or intellectually deep enterprise of its type. But it will satisfy viewers looking for a slightly racier variation on “Downton Abbey” terrain.
  7. When You Finish Saving the World
    To When You’re Finished Saving the World, being good is exhausting and miserable, and aspiring to be good is even worse. Joy exists only to be taken away.
  8. Call Jane
    The female empowerment message comes through loud and clear in “Call Jane,” especially in Banks’ performance. What’s missing from the picture is the threat of discovery, the dangling sword of Damocles that might chasten anyone taking so much responsibility on themselves.
  9. Thirteen Lives
    The movie works, but there has to be a more original way in to the Thai cave rescue story, other than through the main entrance, high-fiving its heroes at every step. For starters, it might have spent a little more time on the “Thirteen Lives” on the line.
  10. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    Writer-director Adamma Ebo’s indie comedy (produced by sister Adanne) should tickle those who share her skepticism of organized religion — especially the profit-oriented variety — but doesn’t go much deeper than the 15-minute short film on which it’s based.
  11. Luck
    While the new studio’s debut can’t touch “Toy Story,” it’s an auspicious start for a talented group of storytellers.
  12. Superior
    Superior feels like a John Dahl movie given a “Twin Peaks” vibe on a Hal Hartley budget, with just the odd dash of Old Hollywood thrown in for good measure, like the deliberately “Rear Window”-aping, flashbulb-popping finale.
  13. Supercool
    This energetic spin through high school antics redolent of everything since “Ferris Bueller” is colorful and amusing enough to entertain viewers looking for a familiar mix of bad-taste gags in a squeaky-clean suburban setting.
  14. Robe of Gems
    The problem, then, is that too much of this is dispiriting without also being enlightening — the view Gallardo takes is almost that of a bird’s eye, showing much from an emotional remove but revealing little beyond surface-level horrors and characters so numb to it all that we’re left with little choice but to feel the same way.
  15. Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (a SOUR film)
    A decently baked slice of fan service that still seems like it might be arriving a little too soon.
  16. Better Nate Than Ever
    Funny, vibrant, yet schmaltzy to a fault, this Disney Plus family film can carry a tune, but falters in crafting a runaway hit.
  17. Infinite Storm
    If it falls a bit short as human drama, however, Szumowska’s latest — a 180-degree turn from her last, the excellent Polish allegorical tale “Never Gonna Snow Again” — is fully satisfying as an appreciation of Nature as magnificent adversary.
  18. Metal Lords
    In a film that sings the praises of heavy metal music and reveres those who create it, Metal Lords stumbles in its ability to truly rock.
  19. Offseason
    Though thinly conceived overall with not much philosophy to back its daunting visuals, Offseason still offers some genuinely spine-tingling images and sounds that will keep midnight audiences on their toes until the end.
  20. The Rose Maker
    Pierre Pinaud’s short but unhurried film benefits immensely from the warmly flinty presence of Catherine Frot (“Marguerite”) in the lead, lending a sense of purpose and personality to a character without much color on the page.
  21. I Love My Dad
    [Morosini] holds back the personal stuff you can tell a stranger but not your dad — the kind of material good comedians build their shows around — making the result feel like a sitcom more than a brutally honest movie.
  22. Deadstream
    What keeps the film from being anything more than an enterprising but minor diversion is that, with Shawn being is such a loud comic character from the get-go, scares and laughs alike don’t have much space to build. Winter gives his all, entertainingly so. But the performance is also dialed too high, too soon, its ultimate payoff diminished because we’ve already had so much of this protagonist screaming, bragging and sniveling.
  23. Ticket to Paradise
    Looking and sounding like it could have been made 20 or 30 years ago, “Ticket” may not contain that much sparkling and sophisticated wit — or indeed many big belly laughs — but delivers sufficient smiles and chuckles to register as an easily enjoyable if unmemorable diversion for audiences seeking simple escapist entertainment.
  24. Amsterdam
    The result has all the red flags of a flop, but takes a strong enough anti-establishment stand — and does so with wit and originality — to earn a cult following. There’s too much ambition here to write the movie off, even if Amsterdam, like the history it depicts, winds up taking years to be rediscovered and understood.
  25. Violent Night
    The movie has no comic-book hook; it’s a trash-compactor genre buffet that smashes together a dozen things you’ve seen before. But that’s the hook. Violent Night is amusing in a few spots, wearying in more than a few others, but to complain about it in the way that I’m doing is to come off as churlish. It’s a movie that feeds the beast.
  26. As They Made Us
    Despite an eager-to-please ending that tries too hard to redeem the elderly Frays, Bialik’s movie still offers up hope, humor and above all, keen observations on grief in the wake of those who’ve damaged us in ways both tangible and veiled.
  27. Senior Year
    If Alex Hardcastle’s effortfully high-spirited Netflix feature isn’t exactly good, it’s still good enough to provide reasonable throwaway fun, thanks much less to the material than to a cast that elevates it when they can.
  28. Don't Make Me Go
    The movie’s ending is misguided to the point of being perplexing rather than upsetting, recasting everything that came before it in a less favorable light. That’s a shame, as this father-daughter drama starring John Cho has more than its fair share of touching moments before hitting the roadblock that is its questionable third act.
  29. White Building
    Even just the rooftop of this vast, scabbed Phnom Penh apartment complex seems to have a thousand stories to tell — it’s perhaps little wonder that Neang’s melancholic, perplexed, slightly ponderous feature debut gets a little lost navigating them.
  30. Jerry and Marge Go Large
    The movie is a fable of winning, of beating the house every time, without much of a dark side. In that way, it’s fun; it allows us to coast along on our vicarious desire to get rich by beating the system
  31. Day Shift
    At heart, though, it’s a knowingly eccentric goof of a movie, to the point that it’s hard, for a while, not to find it agreeable, even as you register what a preposterous piece of fluff it is. Unfortunately, it’s also an arduous piece of fluff. It’s full of blow-you-away action scenes, and it’s also full of rules — a satirical vampire cosmology that’s fun, until it starts to be just convoluted enough to give you a headache, especially when the rules are applied as inconsistently as they are here.
  32. Love in the Villa
    Love in the Villa’s building blocks may be as phony and manufactured as that balcony, but romantics will assuredly see and feel that the sentimental thematic resonance surrounding love and destiny comes from a genuine place.
  33. Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie
    “Rise” is a serviceable — if also forgettable — entry in the cowabunga canon.
  34. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    These days, audiences are so savvy about the tricks at a filmmaker’s disposal that the movie’s greatest achievement is that it seizes our imagination (or perhaps that’s our attention deficit disorder being so brusquely manhandled) and holds it for the better part of two hours, defying us to anticipate what comes next.
  35. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    The film is undeniably overlong, and far more engaging in its first half, which covers Ferragamo’s hard-up Neapolitan beginnings and lively career as a shoemaker to the stars in 1920s Tinseltown with a mixture of romantic evocation and chewy historical expertise.
  36. Armageddon Time
    The movie ends with a rebel gesture that feels too much like…a gesture. It’s the perfect sign-off for a drama that cares, but maybe not enough to see that this kind of caring actually became part of the problem
  37. The Five Devils
    The “Ava” director is more ambitious than successful this time around.
  38. Gang Related
    A good, complex story unravels in disappointingly over-the-top fashion in "Gang Related." Premise, about two homicide cops caught in a trap of their own making, is a grabber that sustains interest for quite a while, and pic's exploration of the gray area where law enforcement and criminality overlap is intriguingly developed.
  39. White Noise
    As a movie, White Noise announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ipcress File
    Pic does not build up to the type of suspense usually demanded of such thrillers.
  41. Hocus Pocus 2
    Hocus Pocus 2 is actually the better made film, even if it amounts to little more than a stealth remake, with strategic decisions about the present-day and old-Salem witch trios being engineered to allow for more sequels, whether or not its star trio return.
  42. My Fake Boyfriend
    Late-night stakeouts, dinner dates gone awry and greenscreen Cristiano blunders often make My Fake Boyfriend feel like a collection of skits and sketches strung together. Some are very funny and they are led by two very capable performers.
  43. Cairo Conspiracy
    What we’re dealing with here is a fairly conventional political thriller — think “House of Cards,” minus the sleek David Fincher aesthetic or much in the way of suspense — set in a world no one has dared to explore on screen before now.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    La Cage aux Folles
    Though predictable, the film has one solid trump in Michel Serrault who makes the more feminine member of the happy couple a very shrewd limning of outsize campy gay attributes that avoid tastelessness.
  45. Close
    I am convinced that Dhont has a masterpiece in him. But there’s an immaturity to his movies that he must first overcome. He’s already so close
  46. The Munsters
    The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way.
  47. My Policeman
    Alas, the older actors don’t have all that much to do (editor Chris Dickens keeping cutting back to McKee reading), but the younger trio are strong, albeit restrained, in their roles. Corrin, so great as a wife betrayed in “The Crown” (they played Princess Diana), could do this role in their sleep, while Styles has the tricky task of making Tom’s betrayal feel tragic for all involved.
  48. Rounding
    While many movies these days feel stretched too thin to sustain their few real ideas, Rounding emerges in the end as a project that ought to have shed some surplus ideas to better focus on a few. Either that, or the compact pacing should’ve been eased to allow them all more breathing space.
  49. Paddington In Peru
    The result isn’t as formally or tonally characterful as the previous films, just as the script, more than before, feels bound to a well-worn template.
  50. Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
    The film, on balance, is cheery, sherbet-colored stuff, bursting with goodwill for all good people. What you remember from it, however, is each scene in which elder malevolence deliciously spoils the party.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Yanks
    Director John Schlesinger has done a beautiful job with both cast and craft in Yanks, a multiple love story set in England in World War II. Yet little that's exciting ever happens in the picture.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Beyond the Stars
    Despite the expense involved, the pic appears not to take itself too seriously. Principal characterizations are skin deep.
  53. Champions
    The performances come with certain limitations (the line readings sound memorized, never spontaneous), but as a whole, the movie makes memorable, three-dimensional characters of its players, and that’s a start.
  54. The Good Boss
    At two hours, rather intricately stuffed with subplots ranging from frivolous to grimly consequential, “The Good Boss” struggles to pick up the pace when required: The laughs are there, but more spaced out than they could be.
  55. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    “Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.
  56. Mack & Rita
    The film does, at minimum, convince us that most people would want to transform into Keaton if given the opportunity.
  57. Thunderbolts*
    As with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, what works here is the uneasy tension within a team that comes together out of necessity, rather than any natural sense of affinity.
  58. City Hall
    City Hall comes awfully close to delivering the goods within a fast-paced thriller framework. At its best, the picture conveys the visceral energy of city politics, in which problem-solving is more common than air. The dilemma for the film is that there are no happy endings, just reelection promises that have as much substance as ether.
  59. Extreme Measures
    This chilling look at emergency room politics wrestles contemporary medical ethics to an unsatisfactory draw. Similarly, its mix of real and exaggerated situations doesn't quite jell, making for a commercial diagnosis that's good but not great.
  60. Celtic Pride
    Not quite a three-pointer, but definitely more than an airball, "Celtic Pride" is an uneven but largely likable basketball-themed comedy that should lay up decent B.O. numbers and perform even better in the homevid arena.
  61. Causeway
    Causeway is a drama of redemption that’s both touching and a little arduous. Just because your characters are suffering doesn’t mean they have to mostly stop talking.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Objective, Burma!
    The film has considerable movement, particularly in the early reels, and the tactics of the paratroopers are authentic in their painstaking detail. However, while the scripters have in the main achieved their purpose of heightening the action, there are scenes in the final reels that could have been edited more closely.
  63. The Royal
    Short on homers but not humility, The Royal won’t vie with any sports flicks for flash, but it doesn’t steep its worthwhile lessons in sanctimony either.
  64. The Swan Princess
    Technically impressive but rather flat and languid storywise, Richard Rich's first feature since leaving Disney only serves to reinforce the stranglehold his old studio still has on the animation market. While a perfectly serviceable confection for small fry, "The Swan Princess" will likely have its neck wrung commercially by all the high-profile competition aimed at the children's/family market this holiday season.
  65. Cats Don't Dance
    Decked out with sharp and colorful design work, some well-drawn characters and six snappy Randy Newman tunes, this first entry from Turner Feature Animation goes down very easily but lacks a hook to make it anything other than a minor kidpic entry commercially.
  66. Quest for Camelot
    A lightweight but likable fantasy that offers a playfully feminist twist to Arthurian legends.
  67. Eye for an Eye
    A B movie that somehow won the lottery and got an A-movie cast and director.
  68. Kirikou and the Men and Women
    A broad-minded but pretty vanilla third film in the French toon series from Gallic helmer Michel Ocelot.
  69. The Rugrats Movie
    Aimed squarely at moppets with minuscule attention spans, “The Rugrats Movie” is a fast and frenetic animated feature that should delight young aficionados of the long-running Nickelodeon TV series.
  70. A Christmas Story Christmas
    A Christmas Story Christmas is like “A Christmas Story” with a softer center, but at least it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve had a glass of eggnog spiked with Long Island Iced Tea.
  71. The Nun II
    In some respects an improvement on its predecessor, in others not, this is finally one more good-enough if unmemorable entry sure to extend the series’ life in lucrative fashion.
  72. The Eternal Daughter
    This slight story examines the mystery of the mother-daughter bond without getting much closer to solving it, and when the mist clears is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.
  73. The Whale
    Most of The Whale simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.
  74. Women Talking
    The whole scenario is designed to get your blood boiling, while the resulting conversation can’t help but instill hope, as Polley gives these women a rare opportunity to reinvent their world.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sea Wolf
    Robinson provides plenty of vigor and two-fisted energy to the actor-proof role of Larsen, and at times is over-directed.
  76. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    In the end, the couple’s chemistry is off the charts, and that’s all that matters — though there’s still a too-tasteful David Hamilton-like quality to it all.
  77. Love Life
    Koji Fukada’s Love Life unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Support Your Local Sheriff!
    Support Your Local Sheriff uses as the basis for its comedy the many cliches that have become part and parcel of the Western genre.
  79. Elemental
    There’s poetry and soul here, but both are watered down by how much the movie seems to be multitasking. With Pixar, sincerity is elemental. The rest risks distracting from what really matters.
  80. Moving On
    Tomlin’s terrific in this mode. The script is as bland as the “cardboard” they serve in her rest-home cafeteria, but she manages to inject it with vinegar and attitude, while embracing the realities of aging.
  81. Maya and the Wave
    Has some gaps in storytelling and contextualization that leave it feeling like a less-than-complete picture of the protagonist’s career to date. Yet the film more than succeeds in its primary goals of providing an inspirational role model plus lots of stupendous surfing footage, a combination that will enthrall most viewers.
  82. Missing
    An improbable escalation of events and more than a few niggling questions about who’s doing what and how renders this screenlife thriller in dimensions that unfortunately resonate better on an intimate, handheld scale than the big screen.
  83. Medusa Deluxe
    This kinetic if not-quite-novel presentation doesn’t entirely patch over the weaknesses of Hardiman’s script, with its exhausting whirl of characters more colorful than they are shaded, and plotting that eventually runs out of compelling diversions from the matter at hand.
  84. Lynch/Oz
    Lynch/Oz is bursting with ideas about it, and about how it colonized the consciousness of David Lynch, but the movie is too pie-in-the-sky to quite make it over the rainbow.
  85. Geronimo: An American Legend
    Neatly turning longstanding genre conventions upside down while working squarely within them, director Walter Hill has fashioned a physically impressive, well-acted picture whose slightly stodgy literary quality holds it back from an even greater level of impact.
  86. Blueback
    The film adopts a somewhat more grownup, realistic, less parabolic tenor, though its ecology-minded narrative remains a bit sketchy for feature treatment — resulting in a pleasant, very handsome-looking movie rather short on dramatic impact.
  87. The Bohemian
    Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic Il Boemo seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.
  88. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
    This is a baleful and unfortunate tale; one feels for Granda, who describes his suicidal ideation at one point. But director Billy Corben’s attempts to connect his collision with the boomer-generation Falwells to the broader story of evangelicals in the United States seems at times like a stretch.
  89. Unicorn Wars
    The visually striking, not-at-all-kid-friendly result is all kinds of wrong: Picture pastel-colored anime bears impaled on the horns of sleek black horses, backlit by raging hot-pink infernos. “The Care Bears” this ain’t, though the comparison can hardly be accidental with this ultra-graphic, Saturday morning cartoon-subverting satire for which irreverent Bronies may well be the ideal audience.
  90. Voodoo Macbeth
    Yes, the film overall is more diverting than stirring. Still, there is a good deal more than novelty value going for this group effort.
  91. Memories of My Father
    Trueba keeps things moving within and between eras in a graceful, affectionate, assured way that’s always enjoyable, even if the film overall seems a bit frivolous given its larger themes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, who produced A Boy Named Charlie Brown, focus most of their attention on the independent beagle who is the despair of his master, Charlie Brown.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Fortune
    The Fortune is an occasionally enjoyable comedy trifle, starring Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty as bumbling kidnappers of heiress Stockard Channing, who is excellent in her first major screen role. Very classy 1920s production values often merit more attention than the plot.
  94. Capturing the Killer Nurse
    Loughren is a compelling character. So are the cops, and so, in his way, is the documentary’s “star,” who we hear on tape (from Graeber’s extensive interviews with him), and who comes equipped with an earnest explanation for why he killed all those people.
  95. The Drop
    The Drop is smarter than it is funny. As sympathetic as Konkle and Fowler are as the beset couple, had the film leaned into its intelligence more, trusting its bleak comedy and affording its other characters a little emotional wiggle room, it may have achieved a more perfect coupling of each.
  96. Loudmouth
    The film, at two hours, still feels padded out with recent history. I would have liked, instead, to see some other dimension of Sharpton — who he is away from the protest marches. “Loudmouth” feels highly controlled, almost overly focused on Sharpton’s political identity at the expense of everything else.
  97. Wide Awake
    Reflecting the zeitgeist of the last decade, with children increasingly having to come to terms with the untimely deaths of parents and friends as a result of AIDS and other illnesses, Wide Awake tackles its issues with an admirably uncompromising honesty, though it suffers from being dramatically obvious. [16 Mar 1998, p.64]
    • Variety
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    36 Hours
    Based on Roald Dahl’s Beware of the Dog and a story of Carl K. Hittleman and Luis H. Vance, it provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of high military intelligence at work.
  99. Maybe I Do
    To be fair: Maybe I Do is undemanding, painless and pleasantly diverting, and has the saving grace of never trying too hard for a cheap laugh. There are quite a few undeniably funny lines, many of them made all the more amusing by the perfect-pitch delivery of the pros in the cast.
  100. Twisters
    Staring up at the tornadoes in Twisters, I felt like I’d already seen something exactly like them — and that when it comes to footage of actual tornadoes, I’d already seen something more incredible. Twisters, fun as parts of it are, is a movie where reality ultimately takes a lot of the wind out of its gales.
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