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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    • 70 Critic Score
    Ponniyin Selvan: Part I
    Ponniyin Selvan: Part One boasts great battles on land and sea. The spy-vs.-spy nature of the story suggests a 12th-century Bourne movie, interspersed with song and dance.
  2. Sanctuary
    This is a terrifically nasty thriller about seizing control, over others and over oneself. Wigon proves to have a great grasp on it, as well; his assuredness is half of the film’s success.
  3. Hypnotic
    This slick mix of special effects and practical ingenuity puts Affleck in a fun position, and the slightly grizzled star’s still got the clench-jawed charisma to pull it off. [Work in Progress SXSW 2023]
  4. Clock
    Jacknow’s genuinely disturbing imagery crawls under our skin, lingering long after the tense, bleak finale.
  5. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    Unlike other filmmakers, who make it feel like we’re sitting back and watching someone else get to play, Gunn keeps the surprises coming, so audiences are actively engaged throughout, trying to manage multiple storylines and the ever-changing loyalties between characters.
  6. Peter Pan & Wendy
    Where “Peter Pan” was a phenomenon, this straight-to-streaming version is but a shadow, scampering off and trying to have fun on its own.
  7. Nuclear Now
    The case it makes for nuclear power is sober, grounded, journalistic. But don’t take my word for it — seek the movie out. It demands and deserves to be seen.
  8. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
    It’s prosaic and conventional and a touch stolid, but it stays true to the facts and the spirit of the man (he’s both sinner and saint), and the saga they add up to is singular in the history of sports.
  9. Love to Love You, Donna Summer
    The interviews are illuminating; Summer’s family members speak of her with complicated reverence, and with an appreciation for the currents of despair that she nurtured in private.
  10. Ear for Eye
    This abrasive, exhilarating film is out to candidly say its piece, to identify and evoke the world as Tucker Green sees it, and doesn’t much care if viewers agree or not.
  11. Unrest
    A gorgeously playful oddity glimmering with insight into ideology, photography, cartography, telegraphy, celebrity, solidarity, the flow of capital, the unruliness of time and the somehow noble lunacy of trying to tame such a massive concept into a brass doodad small enough to fit in a waistcoat pocket
  12. Ride On
    A sappy but enjoyable slice of family fun that has a nice horse doing wacky tricks for the younger viewers and for parents and older fans, is a gently meta, valedictory canter through the paddock of Chan’s previous achievements.
  13. Cherry
    Confronting that larger crisis directly is not the goal here. Though “Cherry” dips a toe in those troubled topical waters, it does so only gingerly, preferring instead to spin an uncomplicated, timeless tale about a woman coming into her own.
  14. Carmen
    This flamenco-inspired Carmen is often strangely shy about its terpsichorean impulses, with dance sequences functioning as isolated, somewhat haphazard setpieces rather than as a consistent storytelling medium.
  15. A Tourist's Guide to Love
    Funny, poignant and simultaneously progressive and regressive, it may not add up to five-star escapism, but it’s a jovial jaunt worth taking.
  16. Ghosted
    The movie is a romantic action comedy that starts off light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a dead-weight spectacle of wretched excess.
  17. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    This adaptation, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (“The Edge of Seventeen”), seems uneasy putting funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is.
  18. Chile '76
    What begins as a muted marital melodrama slowly boils into a restrained political thriller, with an ease and skill all the more impressive in a first feature.
  19. Plan 75
    Plan 75 might have been a risible exercise in emotional manipulation if not for the sensitive tone with which Hiyakawa approaches all of her characters.
  20. To Catch a Killer
    The worst thing you can say about To Catch a Killer is that it’s so adeptly executed in all departments that one is disappointed it ends up feeling a tad generic. It’s engrossing, sometimes exciting, yet never fully free from an overall sense of derivation.
  21. Quasi
    Given that this project is piloted by Broken Lizard, it’s clear that “Quasi” is meant to be a comedy, but there are enough long stretches where no jokes are even attempted that you’d be forgiven for thinking that laughs were only an incidental goal.
  22. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    In “The Covenant,” Guy Ritchie tells a story of two men, but he’s really giving this war that never succeeded a kind of closure. He uses the power of movies to coax out the heart that fueled our actions, and that made our loss so hard to bear.
  23. Hilma
    Hallström mostly strikes a nice balance between approachability and mystique, between the definitive and the abstract, getting a huge amount of help from his daughter Tora’s open and warm performance in her first leading role.
  24. Praise This
    Director Tina Gordon crafts a musical that’s carried through by a charming cast and highly entertaining ensemble performances.
  25. The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die
    Where “Seven Kings Must Die” is most interesting, however, is in its approach to religion, sexuality and culture. While it’s tempting to see our current era as unprecedented in its social blending of diverse faiths and identities, early medieval England gives contemporary Western society a run for its money in this respect.
  26. The Plains
    Skilfully creating an engaging and likable protagonist without fully showing his face until the three-hour running time has all but elapsed, David Easteal’s first feature is a thematically rich and quietly compelling portrait of a man at the crossroads.
  27. The Lost Weekend: A Love Story
    “The Lost Weekend” is a compelling movie and a valuable puzzle piece, but it’s only pretending to be the whole puzzle.
  28. Jason Isbell: Running with Our Eyes Closed
    Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed.
  29. Mafia Mamma
    A fun fish-out-of-water farce with “Godfather” DNA and a clever female-empowerment kick, Mafia Mamma makes inspired use of Collette, who’s never better than when playing women we oughtn’t to have underestimated.
  30. Wild Life
    Sidestepping thornier questions of optics and ownership, Wild Life ultimately takes the side of nature over politics, and most viewers will follow suit.
  31. The Pope's Exorcist
    The Pope’s Exorcist still exerts a lurid B-movie pull, in part because Australian genre stylist Avery demonstrates some command of fire-and-brimstone theatrics, but mostly thanks to Russell Crowe: As the film’s version of Father Amorth by way of Damien Karras, the slumming Oscar champ props up proceedings with just the right balance of gruff, paternalistic credibility and wry, self-mocking irony.
  32. Renfield
    Cage’s Dracula, sipping blood out of a martini glass, is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.
  33. Beau Is Afraid
    Three hours doesn’t feel at all reasonable for such an uneven collection of sketches.
  34. Chupa
    The director could use a bit more practice working with kids, who give stiff and slightly unnatural performances here (Ciarra seems the most comfortable on camera), to say nothing of the so-so visual effects, which favor cute over convincing where the CG chimera is concerned.
  35. The Innocent
    This film is a slightly slipperier customer than a topline summary would suggest, with tonal shifts that shouldn’t work, but somehow do.
  36. On a Wing and a Prayer
    Like “Soul Surfer” before it, On a Wing and a Prayer clearly aims to appeal to audiences seeking faith-based entertainment; but just because its story is based on events that are technically true, that doesn’t mean that ticket buyers should be subjected to a version of them that’s executed too predictably to believe.
  37. Wolf Children
    Embracing the patient, poetic style of such Japanese masters as Ozu and Mizoguchi, Hosoda sees no need for the manic energy and manufactured conflict of other recent toons.
  38. Somewhere in Queens
    Somewhere in Queens is a low-stakes slice of life for much of its runtime, with most of the actual conflict stemming from a questionable decision Leo makes to ensure his son’s success. That doesn’t necessarily make it feel slight, however, as the film is such an affectionate love letter to the Italian American families who populate the eponymous borough that you don’t mind simply sharing the dinner table with them.
  39. The Five Devils
    The “Ava” director is more ambitious than successful this time around.
  40. Judy Blume Forever
    Celebrating youthful experimentation and midlife renewal alike, Judy Blume Forever strips its subject’s work of any dated aura of danger, inviting everyone to the party.
  41. Paint
    In its dry deliberate way, Paint skewers something all too real: a certain kind of toxic self-deluding male myopia.
  42. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds.
  43. Prom Pact
    The film is an exemplar of its genre, one that honors its forebears while also acknowledging and attempting to correct their more glaring faults.
  44. Murder Mystery 2
    Sandler and Aniston mesh; they made you believe in Nick and Audrey’s cantankerous marriage, and in the love percolating just beneath the fighting. If what Nora Ephron devised was a clever Xerox of the rom-com, “Murder Mystery 2” is a Xerox of the Xerox, powered by a whodunit plot that’s a cheesy light parody of itself played just straight enough to work.
  45. Kill Boksoon
    Kill Boksoon, like its heroine, could do with learning that there’s more to life than being highly efficient in execution.
  46. Late Night with the Devil
    Though not quite a slam-dunk — its sum impact is more pleasingly ingenious than indelible — Late Night With the Devil definitely reps a personal best for the Cairnses.
  47. What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?
    Searchingly directed by John Scheinfeld (“The U.S. vs. John Lennon”), What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? is a tasty and urgent piece of rock history, but in a strange way the film never comes close to answering its own question.
  48. The Thief Collector
    The Thief Collector is a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime. It’s also a portrait of art and obsession. But by the time it makes you say “Oh. My. God.,” it’s a movie that has used art to touch something essential about how strangers — or maybe I should just say the downright strange — walk among us.
  49. Furies
    Despite a routine plot and some abrasive tonal shifts, this tale of a motherly mentor turning three damaged young women into deadly assassins is packed with exciting action and boasts fine performances from four killers bound by blood, bullets and all manner of deadly weapons.
  50. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    “Money Shot,” with a no-fuss journalistic evenhandedness, makes the case that the reaction against the site, though most of it came from an unassailable moral place, may have been out of balance — that it wound up hurting sex workers without actually doing anything tangible to help the victims of trafficking.
  51. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
    Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is like that.
  52. A Good Person
    It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it.
  53. Raging Grace
    Raging Grace strikes a skillful balance of sociopolitical commentary and conventional yet effective spooky stuff, and maintains that equilibrium after Zarcilla flips the script in regard to motivations and assumptions.
  54. Air
    Air reveals how an exceptional Black athlete leveraged his talent and the power of being pursued by a bunch of white men in suits, to change the game. Not just basketball, but the whole field of celebrity endorsements.
  55. Joy Ride
    The movie may not be “Bridesmaids”-level brilliant, but it’s got more than a couple hall-of-fame-worthy comedy set-pieces.
  56. Self Reliance
    Johnson delivers a silly and frequently surprising why-we-need-people parable that leans on laughs in lieu of peril.
  57. Problemista
    For all his funny ideas, it doesn’t feel like Torres has a consistent world view, and the movie is poorly organized and unwieldy as a consequence.
  58. The Magician's Elephant
    While the movie itself is more whimsical than magical, it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.
  59. William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill
    The documentary captures how Shatner, as he began to make a career out of performing his public legend, merged his very identity with that of the hambone thespian inside him.
  60. If You Were the Last
    Hooray! A romantic comedy that revives the screwball formula where two people talk themselves silly — and we only had to go to the end of the solar system to make it happen.
  61. Down Low
    Hopelessly shallow Down Low is still light-years ahead of mainstream movies (including last year’s “Bros”) as debuting feature director Rightor Doyle delivers what an entire contingent of queer audiences have been asking for all their lives: namely, a comedy that’s as raunchy and inappropriate as the jokes they make among themselves.
  62. A Disturbance in the Force
    To be sure, the fans will appreciate it a lot more than casual viewers. But it’s also an irresistible hoot for anyone with fond memories of star-studded 1970s musical/variety TV specials.
  63. Inside
    Inside has an intriguing premise and an actor who makes whatever’s thrown at him intriguingly watchable. What it lacks is sufficient sense of who this character is, and a resonant enough narrative to justify being locked up together.
  64. Rye Lane
    Short, sweet and sparky, Raine Allen-Miller's immensely likable debut doesn't reinvent the wheel, but instant chemistry between stars Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson keeps it spinning.
  65. Boston Strangler
    A distant cousin to “Zodiac,” with splashes of “Seven” mixed into its homages, this thriller falls short of its influences yet carves out a small space of its own. It makes a searing indictment of the sloppy, sexism-laced police work that might’ve resolved the case, and pays tribute to the two women who broke the investigation wide open.
  66. Evil Dead Rise
    In keeping with “Evil Dead” tradition, there’s also an abundance of bloody mayhem that increases exponentially until a hugely satisfying and splatterific climax.
  67. Tetris
    Tapping into late-1980s nostalgia — including the launch of the handheld Game Boy console — the movie doubles as a nifty history lesson, reminding audiences of just how tense things were between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.
  68. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    The origin story was the charm, but the sequel is hobbled by a less buoyant hero and bland villains.
  69. Full River Red
    With a twist-packed plot to match its labyrinthine location, Zhang’s fast-paced film motors along nicely as an engaging “Knives Out”-style whodunnit before stumbling a little in the protracted final act.
  70. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.
  71. Bottoms
    Bottoms is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect.
  72. Righteous Thieves
    Director Anthony Nardolillo and writer Michael Corcoran’s film strikes a pose of sly ingeniousness throughout that is uncorroborated by any actual cleverness, surprise, wit, tension, thrills or much else you’d hope for in a high-end-heist tale.
  73. Flamin' Hot
    Inspiration and entertainment can make corny bedfellows, but Longoria pulls it off, to the extent that a moment of faith when Richard and Judy pray doesn’t feel preachy, but a reflection of their priorities.
  74. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.
  75. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    It’s at once cheesy and charming, synthetic and spectacular, cozily derivative and rambunctiously inventive, a processed piece of junk-culture joy that, by the end, may bring a tear to your eye.
  76. Chang Can Dunk
    Chang Can Dunk doesn’t go the way you’d expect, and that’s a good thing.
  77. 65
    Anchored by another in a series of committed performances from Adam Driver and an ensemble of suitably menacing prehistoric beasts that chase him for just over 90 minutes, Beck and Woods’ adventure delivers requisite thrills even if its creativity seems stuck in the distant cinematic past.
  78. A Little White Lie
    Director Maren doesn’t trust Shannon to convey this inner monologue via his performance — just one example of the film’s plodding lack of wit or sophistication.
  79. Ithaka
    Laura Poitras’s 2017 documentary “Risk” was a close-up portrait of Assange, shot during his early years of infamy and as fascinating, in a squirmy way, as Assange himself. “Ithaka” is less about the man than the cause — how the continued prosecution of Assange fits into the issue of free speech. It’s a more morally clean-cut watch. But it’s a lot less dramatic.
  80. Scream VI
    Scream VI, while it goes on for too long, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a homicidal shell game that‘s clever in all the right ways, staged and shot more forcefully than the previous film, eager to take advantage of its more sprawling but enclosed cosmopolitan setting.
  81. 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.
  82. Le Spectre de Boko Haram
    he nonfiction film is a clear-eyed look at how everyday life and the accompanying humdrum tasks go on despite the threat of violence at any moment.
  83. The Year Between
    The result is a useful mix of the pseudo-random and finely honed that refuses to hand-wring over Clem’s travails, yet simultaneously makes an upbeat case for her emerging from them intact — even if she’ll never exactly be Miss Congeniality.
  84. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.
  85. Children of the Corn
    Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.
  86. Perpetrator
    Operating at a strange remove from modern reality, it seems to belong more to the teen experience of a couple of decades ago, the very era from which so many of its reference points hail.
  87. On the Adamant
    On the Adamant is most moving when it stands back, letting its most disenfranchised subjects talk, or shout, or sing.
  88. Tótem
    Rich with detail while also being intensely specific to the large middle-class family it observes, Avilés’ lifelike and lived-in second feature alternates among roughly half a dozen characters, inviting audiences to pick their own points of identification in the ensemble.
  89. Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything
    Outside those charged moments of hands-on connection, however, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything is something of a slog, hampered by escalating dramatic obviousness and thin characterization
  90. The Shadowless Tower
    As The Shadowless Tower ambles onward, it reveals its arcs of change not in dramatic showdowns or sudden revelations, but in ellipses, in the occasional mysterious fold in chronology and, most rewardingly, in the casual, unforced repetition of certain motifs.
  91. Music
    Whatever its frustrations, they are outweighed by the pleasures on offer in this scintillating example of film’s uncanny ability to transcend itself, to operate on planes above, below and in between the images and soundscapes of which it is composed.
  92. Superpower
    Too often, the film’s well-meaning reportage is muddled with needless vanity sequences of the actor-director as an on-the-ground trailblazer, as the film fashions the impression that Penn himself — as much as any news agency — is a vital courier of the horrific events around him to Western audiences.
  93. Limbo
    Limbo joins a long line of fine Australian films taking to the desert to disinter racial trauma, to rebury the bones with more care and awareness, but also enduring fury.
  94. Afire
    It’s the film’s great, disorienting structural risks, its humoring of human untidiness and confusion, that make it so subtly thrilling and moving.
  95. Ambush
    If it’s not a film that rivals the quality or seriousness of Vietnam War movie standard-bearers like “The Deer Hunter” or “Full Metal Jacket,” Ambush ultimately delivers more credible adventure than the cartoonish bombast of their knockoff competitors (then or since) — and more than a handful of genuine thrills.
  96. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    Paine and his crew do muster some decent action, set in places you’d hardly expect (like crowded Piccadilly Circus), but scenery only goes so far to disguise the utter preposterousness of Cross’ script.
  97. Suzume
    Come for Shinkai’s skies, stay for the feels.
  98. Kiss the Future
    In a sense, Kiss the Future is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out.
  99. Linoleum
    Consider this review primarily as an encouragement: Stick around. Your patience will be amply rewarded.
  100. Smoking Causes Coughing
    It’s a film of fragmentary but funny rewards — funnier still, most likely, if accompanied by smoking of a different kind.
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