Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Lonely Planet
    While many of the picture’s finer details are in desperate need of ironing out, the wrinkles within these two characters’ lives are compelling enough.
  2. Michael
    Simply put, this is not a movie about Michael Jackson’s dark side. Yet the surprise of “Michael” is how well it plays, and what an engrossing middle-of-the-road biopic it is. It’s basically an ’80s-TV-movie version of the Michael Jackson story with sharper acting and snazzier photography. It
  3. Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive
    Examining the looming shadow of the singer’s 1970s heyday as she embarks upon a new career as a gospel artist, Schechter chronicles the adversity — professional, romantic, even physical — that transformed Gaynor’s chart-topping dance tune into an anthem for female empowerment, the gay community and most of all Gaynor herself.
  4. Lousy Carter
    We’ve all seen movies like “Lousy Carter” before, and this one’s adequate, without being particularly insightful or memorable.
  5. Snack Shack
    Armed with a talented cast, writer-director Adam Rehmeier’s 1991-set feature happily squares itself in a tradition of teenage hedonism and broad learning opportunities, settling into a generic but warm glow.
  6. Another End
    Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.
  7. Amelia's Children
    A climactic tilt into a fight for survival remains sharply rendered by Abrantes, but it unfolds towards a forecast destination. The film’s evocative edge is gone.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Le Samouraï
    It is intermittently successful.
  9. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
    I found “The Mandalorian and Grogu” to be fun in a slightly flat way. But because the movie has so little pretense, it’s basically an invitation to wallow in the lite “Star Wars” nostalgia that’s there in every frame.
  10. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
    It’s not another unhinged Bridget bash — more like a hearts-and-flowers finale.
  11. The Absence of Eden
    While “Absence of Eden” lacks narrative originality, it often dazzles visually.
  12. 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.
  13. Jim Henson Idea Man
    If it’s easy to wish “Idea Man” were as bold as its subject, though, it’s just as easy to be won over by this deservedly heartfelt tribute to him.
  14. Nickel Boys
    For the first hour or so, Nickel Boys feels like the most exciting narrative debut since “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Then Ross tries something bold that doesn’t quite work, and the experiment collapses upon itself.
  15. What You Wish For
    Filmmaker Nicholas Tomnay’s sophomore feature percolates with atmospheric dread and austerity, but only superficially explores the twisted amorality of the 1% and those who service their whims. While not always successful in cooking up tantalizing commentary on human behavior, it offers a decent helping of Hitchcockian intrigue.
  16. The Apprentice
    For its first half, “The Apprentice” is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting. Yet I have an issue with the movie, and it all pivots around the mystery of Trump. I don’t think “The Apprentice” ever penetrates it.
    • Variety
      • Posted May 20, 2024
  17. The Surfer
    The film is trying for something, but it’s also sketchy in the extreme.
  18. M3GAN 2.0
    M3GAN 2.0 is amusing at moments, overblown at others. Here’s hoping that “M3GAN 3.0” is brasher, funkier, crazier.
  19. Beating Hearts
    Beating Hearts never bores, least of all when François Civil and the ever-electric Adèle Exarchopoulos take over as the young lovers’ adult (but far from grown-up) incarnations, while the consistent, cartwheeling kineticism with which Lellouche and DP Laurent Tangy shoot the whole thing is an ongoing rush.
  20. Fluke
    It takes some time, but ultimately “Fluke” turns into a charming, positive message story about love of life in whatever form it assumes.
  21. Everybody Loves Touda
    The film holds back from showing us Touda’s soul in its chaotic, capricious entirety — her life as a single mother, in particular, is rather sketchily drawn — and remains most fixated on her in performance mode, where’s she’s fully in her power.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All That Heaven Allows
    Although this story of a long-suffering woman who, at 40 or so, finds romance with a man between 10 and 15 years her junior, is hardly designed to ignite prairie fires, scripter Peg Fenwick nevertheless has managed to turn the Edna L. and Harry Lee story into a slightly offbeat yarn with some interesting overtones that accent the social prejudices of a small town.
  23. Let the Canary Sing
    Let the Canary Sing does an excellent job of tracing how Cyndi Lauper came to be…Cyndi Lauper. Yet it’s sort of an idiosyncratic movie, because that’s all it does.
  24. Piece By Piece
    Paradoxically, the Lego approach gives the film a far more imaginative visual range than traditional documentaries, even as it robs us of the thing we most want to see: human faces.
  25. Despicable Me 4
    At times, it feels less like a feature than a collection of Looney Tunes-y shorts piled one on top of another.
  26. A Mistake
    This imperfect drama nevertheless engrosses in its exploration of the life-and-death complexities of the healing arts, and how what may appear a simple matter of right or wrong from the outside can be much more trickily nuanced for those actually making fateful decisions.
  27. Heretic
    Go with it, and Heretic can be an entertaining ride. It may not change your mind about religion, but you’ll never think of blueberry pie the same way again.
  28. Find Me Falling
    Kliris negotiates tonal shifts effortlessly: The jokes never undercut the drama as both dovetail neatly into each other.
  29. Kalki 2898 AD
    The aggressively spectacular (and, again, CGI-intensified) action set-pieces are generously plentiful and undeniably thrilling, and the lead players are charismatic enough, or over-the-top villainous enough, to seize and maintain interest.
  30. The Secret of Roan Inish
    John Sayles’ latest marks his entry into family-pic terrain, a crossing that draws pleasant but unexciting results.
  31. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
    The preachier tenor may be welcomed by older patrons, but younger ones might’ve appreciated more humor being retained to prevent restlessness during the last half hour or so.
  32. F1: The Movie
    We go into “F1” excited about being excited, and the film makes good on that. It’s nothing if not an adrenaline high. Yet it’s a high that may leave you feeling a bit empty afterwards.
  33. We Live in Time
    It’s a klutzy way to tell a story, but Crowley is confident that the chemistry between Pugh and Garfield is so compelling, people will want to watch his movie again and again, at which point, Almut and Tobias’ memories will have become our memories, and the sequence hardly matters.
  34. Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie
    It’s not as inspired as grown-ups might want, but innocuous enough for the kids.
  35. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    It may please the faithful, but it’s not quite epic enough to give less devoted viewers the same thrill they once felt from the live-action movies.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Road to Bali
    There’s no story to speak of in the script [from a story by Frank Butler and Harry Tugend] but the framework is there on which to hang a succession of amusing quips and physical comedy dealing with romantic rivalry and chuckle competition between the two male stars.
  37. Into the Wonderwoods
    The sum of all these components results in a film that’s delightful to look at, though not as compelling narratively.
  38. The Friend
    A by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser with a bit more on its mind than your typical canine-centric tearjerker.
  39. The Penguin Lessons
    Peter Cattaneo‘s amiable film adaptation matches the book’s feathery whimsy while reaching for a little more political import. Almost inevitably, it’s best when it’s about the bird.
  40. Apartment 7A
    The movie is largely entertaining, despite being pulled constantly in two directions: as a predecessor to an iconic work and as a distinct beast, with its own gripes against patriarchal norms.
  41. Jurassic World Rebirth
    The movie offers an updated version of the same basic ride Spielberg offered 32 years earlier, and yet, it hardly feels essential to the series’ overall mythology, nor does it signal where the franchise could be headed.
  42. Blink
    The sight loss the children are experiencing is irreversible, and it’s naturally difficult to find the positive angle on that, but their parents are determined to give it their best shot, and the film follows their lead.
  43. The Life of Chuck
    Any romantic notions the film might have are swiftly undone when it starts to explain the disappointing method behind its sleight of hand — until this explanation becomes the magic trick itself.
  44. On Swift Horses
    There’s a current of tragedy running beneath all of the couples here, as the characters create obstacles to their own happiness. It can feel a bit diagrammatic, as if the novelist were setting up impossible loves and then watching them fail. But there’s hope too, and however contrived the last scene may feel, there’s poetry in watching someone betting their future on yet another horse.
  45. The Quiet Ones
    Frederik Louis Hviid’s second feature is an absorbing true-crime tale that readily holds attention for two hours, while lacking the deeper emotional involvement to linger in the mind long afterward.
  46. Hold Your Breath
    The film often does too much, reaching for too many different sources for its attempted thrills and chills, which results in a mostly scattered experience. However, it has a couple of notable strengths. The first is its handful of tense moments.
  47. Elevation
    It’s a reasonably taut post-apocalyptic survival tale that makes up for a lack of original ideas with tight pacing and solid craftsmanship.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Evil of Frankenstein
    In this one Peter Cushing plays the baron with his usual seriousness, avoiding tongue-in-the-cheek, and he is the main prop in the proceedings.
  49. High Tide
    A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.
  50. The Summer Book
    Charlie McDowell makes an equally respectful and respectable stab at the task, capturing some of the wistful, soft-sun warmth of Jansson’s writing — though not quite matching its unassuming poetic depths.
  51. Pedro Páramo
    Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.
  52. Day of the Fight
    The light and shade here is all in Peter Simonite’s splendid, inky-shadowed monochrome lensing; Huston’s visual sense outweighs his screenwriting.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meet John Doe
    The synthetic fabric of the story is the weakness of the production, despite the magnificence of the Frank Capra-directed superstructure.
  54. What Just Happened
    A story very much by, about and for middle-aged men, and with the commercial limitations that implies, this intermittently amusing outing is graced by one of Robert De Niro’s more engaging performances of recent vintage.
  55. Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.
    The filmmaker also makes effective use of some timeworn narrative conventions to build and sustain suspense.
  56. Sister Midnight
    The story soon gets away from Kandhari, leading to a film that enraptures and delights in its first hour but gets so locked in to a singular approach by its second that it’s practically consumed by its own style, rendering it unable to keep pace with the bold ideas at play.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mata Hari
    Though Garbo is sexy and hot in a less subtle way this time, and though the plot goes about as far as it can in situation warmth, the story presents nothing sensational.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    Billy Wilder's enterprise is a strange one because of its shift in directions from quite good satire to straight spy stuff. It is in large part old-fashioned, in that it's mile-wide and ancient-history Sherlock Holmes, but it's also handsomely produced and directed with incisiveness by Wilder.
  59. Novocaine
    In Novocaine, it’s the romance that keeps us going, more than whatever sadistic delight the co-directors take in poking Nathan full of holes, treating him like some kind of Looney Tunes character.
  60. Warfare
    It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.
  61. The Prosecutor
    As a Donnie Yen vehicle that showcases the star’s still-amazing physical skills and moves at a pacy clip for almost two hours, The Prosecutor has the storytelling energy and visual panache to smooth over the rough spots.
  62. A Working Man
    Jason Statham is good at his job, which explains why he keeps booking the same kinds of movies — well, that and the fact that people keep watching them.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Son of Dracula
    This is another in the Universal series of Dracula horror features. It's a good entry of its type.
  64. Atropia
    While both its lampooning of U.S. militarism and its central character drama lack follow-through, the film contains bright comedic sparks in its keen observations about American media.
  65. All That's Left of You
    Spiritually guided by Dabis’ personal and familial memories, the narrative film is sometimes deeply stirring, other times clumsily heavy-handed, often hampered by Christopher Aoun’s bland cinematography.
  66. Folktales
    With the epic, primal beauty of its remote location, Folktales scores high on visual aesthetics, but rates lower on actual content, as the youth characters aren’t as fully-fledged as one could wish and the school experience is not enough of a trial to provide real drama.
  67. Midas Man
    Midas Man is never less than watchable, and it does capture something about Brian Epstein that’s honest and affecting.
  68. Smurfs
    “Smurfs” might be the best of the Smurfs films. It’s an amiable diversion for kids.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Story of Louis Pasteur
    It couldn't have been an easy film to make, and the fact that it holds as much general interest as it does speaks volumes. But the producers couldn't avoid some dull stretches of scientific discourse.
  70. CHAOS: The Manson Murders
    “CHAOS” ends up suggesting that the Manson murders were a grand plot, orchestrated from on high (by the CIA? the Deep State? Nixon?) to turn America against the counterculture. I don’t believe that theory for a second, but there’s one way I think it stays true to the spirit of Charles Manson: It’s pure madness.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    The picture is infinitely better art – indeed, in many passages it is an astonishing fine bit of interpreting a classic, but as popular fare it loses in vital reaction.
  72. Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna
    Mason, a close friend of Hutchins, constructs a propulsive and compelling narrative by skillfully interlacing interviews with people involved in the tragedy — including the OSHA investigator who uncovered a pattern of risky behavior on the “Rust” set — with news footage, police interrogations, and video recorded on cellphones and police minicams.
  73. 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.
  74. Sneaks
    Though the story wears down its tread, strong performances elevate the material. Mackie, Fishburne, Lawrence, Bailey and David all pour a ton of heart into their vocal dynamics, allowing nuanced vulnerability and a bubbly buoyancy to shine through, keeping us tethered to the emotional pull of the picture.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Midnight
    Story [from one by Edwin Justus Mayer and Franz Schulz] is light, but with a good share of humorous moments, many of them of the screwball variety. It's a slender thread, however, on which to tie series of incidents in adventures of a stranded showgirl in Paris.
  76. Nonnas
    Nonnas repeatedly drives home its point about the unifying force of a homecooked meal as an embodiment of community, and even as it overcrowds its narrative pot with too many unnecessary condiments that get lost in the mix, the result is ultimately palatable.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Manon of the Spring
    Manon des Sources is the poignant, but more dramatically wobbly, followup to Jean de Florette, producer-director Claude Berri's risky two-film adaptation of a novel by Marcel Pagnol, who, unsatisfied with his own next-to-last feature in 1952, expanded it as a two-part novel.
  78. Bride Hard
    Once all the toasts are made and the rice is tossed, Bride Hard proves an entertaining marriage of something borrowed (the plot) and something blue (some of the jokes).
  79. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
    “Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.
  80. Deep Cover
    It’s busier than it is funny, more frenetic than dynamic, but watchable enough.
  81. Jay Kelly
    Jay Kelly is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Manxman
    The Hall Caine novel from which this film was adapted is a weak one, but the director has done his best with it.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Juno and the Paycock
    Irish atmosphere of the tenement life incidental to the country is well caught, director Alfred Hitchcock having a flair for sniping the real feeling of the submerged tenth.
  84. Man Finds Tape
    Hall and Gandersman compel enough interest to pull viewers through, even if they may find the fadeout less than satisfying.
  85. The Last Rodeo
    This thoroughly predictable but undeniably engaging faith-based drama is an inoffensively old-fashioned entertainment that, with only minor tweaking, could pass for a Walt Disney Studios release of yore.
  86. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    The film's chief pleasures are those of practiced professionals doing their job, and doing it well. None of the stars here is slacking, and their combined, easily resumed chemistry ensures that this sequel, for good long stretches, feels like old times — even if it's hard to imagine fans of its predecessor cherishing repeat viewings to quite the same extent.
  87. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
    2+2 = 5 is a movie that very much leans toward chronicling the brutality and violence of despotic regimes, and is less interested in exploring how they toy with your brain.
  88. She Dances
    Directed by actor Rick Gomez in his feature filmmaking debut and co-written with actor Steve Zahn, the sweet yet uneven dramedy “She Dances” is a proud family affair both on screen and off.
  89. Frankenstein
    Technically, “Frankenstein” was made for Netflix, and though the streamer will give it whatever theatrical run it’s contractually obliged to honor, the visual effects weren’t rendered for big-screen consumption. Alexandre Desplat’s baroque score, on the other hand, makes up for it in grandeur.
  90. Straw
    Straw is too messy to be “good,” exactly — but it has a bitter relevancy, and it works.
  91. Fixed
    Sacrificing good taste in pursuit of the higher goal — which could be described as joining “Fritz the Cat” in animated infamy — Tartakovsky and co-writer Jon Vitti (a veteran of “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons”) make no apologies for the project’s obscene sense of humor.
  92. The Lost Bus
    The Lost Bus resembles several other Greengrass films in that it’s also slim on character (only one of the kids has a name and personality), but succeeds in plunging audiences into the action — which, in this case, means trying to steer an unwieldy vehicle through hell itself.
  93. Miley Cyrus: Something Beautiful
    In “Something Beautiful,” with the songs employed as catwalk power anthems, you see how Miley Cyrus, in elevating her erotic aura, is trying to be a performer of mystery — to let her beauty singe our eyeballs, to let it vibrate into the cosmos. Yet it’s all a little insular.
  94. A House of Dynamite
    It’s easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.
  95. 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.
  96. Night Always Comes
    It’s a compelling tale of increasingly hazardous desperation, even if the star and her fellow-Brit director Benjamin Caron (oth veterans of royalty drama series “The Crown) aren’t necessarily an ideal fit for this very American, down-and-out milieu.
  97. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    Even as The Wizard of the Kremlin flirts with being a movie of ideas, it flits in and out of things. It rarely stays in one place long enough to let us suck in our breath at how Putin’s Russia heralded what may turn out to be the new autocratic world.
  98. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Infinity Castle
    The film’s humor doesn’t necessarily translate, and the animation style doesn’t come close to the medium’s most artistic work. Beyond the sheer inventiveness of the movie’s made-up martial arts, that leaves the tragic elements, which can be disarmingly effective in giving audiences reason to feel invested in the battles — battles that have only just begun.
  99. Eternity
    Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has at nearly two hours. It’s a bauble that tries to stretch itself into a boutique dream.
  100. Animale
    The filmmaking is at its most successful when it moves away from dialogue-driven sequences and into the more visual, visceral aspects of Nejma’s chosen line of work.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »