Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Tantura
    The film is a record of what went on during the War of Independence — a much uglier and more brutal story than Israel has ever wanted to acknowledge. The film includes graphic testimony, and it comes from the most authoritative sources possible: those who fought in the war and lived it — the Palestinians, but also the Israeli soldiers themselves.
  3. Spoiler Alert
    Throughout, Spoiler Alert shows a maturity toward modern relationships, whether straight or queer, that’s refreshing and instructive. Unfortunately, too much of the movie simply doesn’t work.
  4. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    By forcing Puss to contemplate his priorities, the sequel more than justifies its own existence, while paving the way for how his path meets the big green guy’s.
  5. A House Made of Splinters
    This is a predominantly observational affair, marked by unusual tenderness and human interest, shot with a camera that feels all but invisible to its subjects — belying the director’s delicate, precise approach to light and framing.
  6. To the End
    To the End keeps its large canvas entertaining and informative. Even so, it preaches enough to the choir that this documentary can hardly serve as an introduction for those belatedly coming to terms with its central issues.
  7. Strange World
    Great as the people and places they explore may be, however, the relatively unimaginative story consigns this gorgeous toon to second-tier status — a notch below director Don Hall’s earlier “Big Hero 6” — instead of cracking the pantheon of Disney classics.
  8. Poker Face
    This Australia-shot mix of intrigue, soap opera, thriller and tearjerker never quite gels, despite enough surface gloss and cast expertise to hold attention.
  9. Bantú Mama
    At once an intimate portrait of a makeshift family and a treatise on motherhood and motherlands, Bantú Mama is a quiet achievement.
  10. Disenchanted
    Obvious in its comedy, at once overblown and undernourished in its fantasy, Disenchanted, at times, is like a kiddified “Don’t Worry Darling” crossed with “Cinderella Strikes Back.” At others, it’s a light show in search of a movie. The visual effects are all swirling sparkles and sprouting vines, but the real problem is that the film has a pandering impersonality, along with the busy skewed logic of a metaverse.
  11. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    The film is meticulously evenhanded and revealing.
  12. 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.
  13. Joyland
    Tartly funny and plungingly sad in equal measure, this is nuanced, humane queer filmmaking, more concerned with the textures and particulars of its own intimate story than with grander social statements — even if, as a tale of transgender desire in a Muslim country, its very premise makes it a boundary-breaker.
  14. Slumberland
    Slumberland is stronger at conjuring elaborate dream worlds than it is at crafting a satisfying emotional foundation, which is generally true of Lawrence’s past projects as well.
  15. 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.
  16. Nothing Lasts Forever
    Kohn has created the rare documentary that transforms the way we understand the world, questioning so many of our core beliefs, including the very notion of what is “real.” Through it all, diamonds won’t lose one iota of their sparkle, but you’ll never look at them the same way again.
  17. Retrograde
    There’s not a dull shot in the entire movie, which is remarkable, considering how little actual action Heineman films.
  18. Falling for Christmas
    Its subversive spirit, female-forward smarts and sweet sentimentality remix the formulaic and festive, making all things merry and bright.
  19. Incredible But True
    Incredible but True is a fun little trinket that unmistakably comes from Dupieux’s far-out perspective, but if you find yourself chiming more than usual with its quixotic quandaries, who’s to say whether that’s because Dupieux has mellowed, or because the past couple of years have driven us all so nuts that now we’re meeting him halfway.
  20. Spirited
    For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much exactly as they’d expect, but that doesn’t mean Spirited can’t still surprise.
  21. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    “Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.
  22. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    Examining the bone-breaking work that being a mother can be, Garza Cervera’s tale is most thrilling for the ways it refuses any tidy answers about a woman’s place and wallows (and finds plenty of terror) in the ambiguities therein.
  23. Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
    It’s far from the first music doc to reveal that it can be lonely at the top, but it is among the few to convey that there are no easy answers for that when mental illness is at the root. Of all the portrayals of pop superstars that have been produced in-house in recent years, “My Mind & Me” is probably the one with the least celebratory third act … which is something to celebrate.
  24. Prey for the Devil
    Rather good actors do indeed keep a straight face, as does the film overall. And Stamm’s jump scares aren’t bad, as they go. He hasn’t made a very suspenseful movie, but he’s avoided both dullness and unintentional laughs.
  25. Terrifier 2
    Terrifier 2 is essentially a series of grotesque homicidal set pieces stitched together into a threadbare narrative of midnight funhouse clichés.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. Run Sweetheart Run
    Nothing gels, as the film careens from cartoonishness to violent peril to attempted satire to sentimentality and so forth, all of it hyperbolic and inorganic.
  29. Peaceful
    The film is too emotionally blunt not to wring tears (or at least a solid lump in the throat) where required, though they don’t always feel artfully earned. Either way, at over two hours, it’s a long trudge toward an inevitable end.
  30. Scarlet
    Smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work.
  31. 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.
  32. The Stranger
    The Stranger confirms that Wright has arrived, even if his treatment sometimes feels more oblique and self-consciously arty than the material demands.
  33. The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile
    There are remarkably few serious hiccups along the way in achieving the career reclamation Carlile envisions for Tucker at the start. But any heightened sense of drama isn’t really necessary when it comes to the pleasures of spending time with two such strong musical personalities in what amounts to a documentary two-hander, fully justifying tagging the younger artist’s name onto the film’s title as an awkward but fitting addendum.
  34. The School for Good and Evil
    Sure, it’s a “Harry Potter” rip-off, but had Feig taken the time to let the film breathe, it might have stood on its own. Unlike Hogwarts, where fresh surprises lay waiting around every corner, this school seems to exist in concept only — and not a particularly good one at that.
  35. Black Adam
    The surprisingly serious-minded (but still plenty pulpy) project deprives Johnson of his greatest superpower — his sense of humor — while giving the now-straight-faced star a chance to play a character with some interesting contradictions.
  36. The Same Storm
    It’s an often-touching time capsule of a harrowing moment in which rampant death and police brutality, white privilege and surging activism answered the call of so much grief.
  37. She Said
    Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.
  38. Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.
  39. The Other Tom
    The film’s intimate scenes of mother-son discord are remarkable, played with raw, nerve-pushing testiness by two first-time actors.
  40. My Father's Dragon
    [A] winningly sweet-natured, visually transporting adaptation.
  41. Rosaline
    There’s something fresh about the story’s unwillingness to pit a woman’s romantic quests against her career goals.
  42. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema.
  43. 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.
  44. 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.
  45. Last Flight Home
    It is a tribute, a grappling with mortality, an exercise in self-surveillance, a messy home movie, a brief account of aviation history and a lesson in letting go and grief.
  46. Luckiest Girl Alive
    Because of its unwieldy aspects, primarily those shoe-horned into the climax, its simplistic conclusion draws ire instead of the inspired elation these filmmakers crave.
  47. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
    For all the purity of its pedigree, and as agreeable and lightly touching as it sometimes is, I wish that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile didn’t still seem, at heart, like a likable movie that had come out of the processor.
  48. 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.
  49. Marlowe
    A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir.
  50. Hellraiser
    The new Hellraiser works as metaphor, as flesh-annihilating spectacle. Yet it doesn’t work as a story.
  51. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    The results, balancing overfamiliar warm-and-fuzzy growing-up saga and halfhearted horror revenge tale, evaporate quickly from the mind — there’s little cumulative force that might linger. Yet at the same time, Hancock does an admirable job keeping this hour and three-quarters polished and engaging, maintaining consistent viewer interest even if the ultimate reward underwhelms.
  52. Till
    It would take a tough constitution not to be moved by Till, although that doesn’t necessarily make it great drama.
  53. Please Baby Please
    Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar.
  54. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    Though this ’80s-set horror-comedy takes an old-school approach to capturing the horrific happenings, the stunts are lackluster and the comedic hijinks are a tiresome bore. With very little interest conjured from the filmmakers to properly develop their characters, there’s little incentive to stay interested.
  55. Walk Up
    Existing sharply in such a naturalistic register that they scarcely seem scripted at all, all the film’s interactions are still so cleverly designed that despite being blurry with alcohol or attraction or self-analysis, they all highlight the funny, sad truism that no one human can ever really know what it’s like to be another.
  56. 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.
  57. 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.
  58. Sr.
    Sr. packs a wallop in the end, when it comes time for father and son to say goodbye.
  59. The Girl with a Bracelet
    The Girl With a Bracelet comments intelligently on our culture’s propensity to sex-shame and emotionally instruct young women in particular — points which stand regardless of whether shedunnit or not.
  60. Dalíland
    It’s both a highly entertaining movie and, by the end, a haunting one. It revels in Dalí’s artifice even as it mercilessly peels away his layers.
  61. Smile
    Smile will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie.
  62. 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.
  63. Sidney
    The film isn’t groundbreaking, but its subject most certainly was, and Hudlin has the good sense to get out of the way and give Poitier the spotlight, which shines all the brighter through the eyes of the talents who followed in his footsteps.
  64. The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales
    This engaging economics lesson, bolstered by articulate experts and amusing animated sequences, would be right at home in high school and college classrooms. Heck, it would be a nice addition to Disney Plus, breaking up all the hagiographic puff-pieces on offer there.
  65. My Imaginary Country
    While in formal terms it’s more of a standard, reportage-based doc than any of his recent essays, it is also the rarest of projects: one in which a venerated member of an older generation of political activists communicates a fervent admiration for his younger counterparts and a deep, grateful optimism for the future they are building.
  66. Devotion
    Director JD Dillard dazzles with see-it-in-Imax airborne sequences, but the meat of the film focuses on the friendship between Brown (“Da 5 Bloods” star Jonathan Majors) and his white wingman, played by Glen Powell, the “Hidden Figures” actor who most recently appeared in “Top Gun: Maverick.”
  67. The Enforcer
    Reaching for the grandiose, it never grasps anything beyond the generic.
  68. V/H/S/99
    Here, nothing stands out: The best episodes are merely good enough, and the worst just tiresome.
  69. The Swimmers
    At a bloated 134 minutes . . . your brain may well start to prune, the way fingers do when they spend too much time in water.
  70. Raymond & Ray
    Raymond & Ray is curiously alienating despite the two A-listers in the driver seat, some decent chuckles to spare and a handsome, cinematic finish courtesy of DP Igor Jadue-Lillo.
  71. Other People's Children
    Zlotowski’s deft, perceptive original screenplay is keenly attuned to the cutting emotional impact of a passing remark or overheard jab, and the unintended microaggressions that parents occasionally toss at their child-free peers.
  72. Master Gardener
    Master Gardener is all fingers and thumbs for much of its running time, kept sporadically in order only by the stern, trusty presence of Edgerton himself.
  73. Saint Omer
    Saint Omer challenges accepted ideas of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity — and even of what cinema can be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t accept those accepted ideas.
  74. We
    Diop’s small but potent act of subversion, in choosing disparate lives and moments that could seem linked by a railway line and nothing more, is not just to enlarge the idea of who is meant by the collective French “We.” It is also to reclaim the selection process for inclusion within that tiny, divided pronoun.
  75. Good Night Oppy
    For large segments of its running time, Good Night Oppy is more than just a documentary; it’s an animated film as well — and a hugely entertaining one at that.
  76. Sweetheart
    It’s good of its type — just not quite good enough to linger once the lights have come up.
  77. Allelujah
    It didactically calls out governmental hypocrisy while exposing corrupt elements and inefficiencies within the precious institution itself. It hedges its bets politically between nostalgic keening for a kinder, fairer Britain of old and advocating for a top-down socialist makeover. It wavers tonally between cozy comedy and head-on polemic.
  78. Monica
    Conceived with uncommon sensitivity toward the interior lives of its characters, as well as to the shifting codes of trans representation, “Monica” is a film about making amends.
  79. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    [Corbijn's] creation of this delightful doc as an acolyte, if hardly copycat, will be a boon for an audience that grew up pondering the mysteries of the twisted monolith on Zeppelin’s “Presence” cover; LP porn, if we can call it that, could come to no finer culmination.
  80. Emily
    O’Connor’s well-modulated debut doesn’t pretend to be a faithful recreation of the facts of the Brontës’ lives. Instead it succeeds on a much trickier level, giving us a psychologically vivid Emily who did not write “Wuthering Heights” because a real-life romance unlocked her passionate nature, but whom we’d love to imagine having had such a grand affair, because she was always the woman with “Wuthering Heights” inside her.
  81. Confess, Fletch
    There’s more than one way to get a job done — whether it’s solving a murder, recovering priceless art or repainting an old van — and Fletch’s strategy is guaranteed to be more original than whatever the next guy would try.
  82. Goodnight Mommy
    Watts, a veteran of the genre despite never quite being a scream queen, is delightfully disturbing in a role that requires her to mask her character’s true nature as well as her face.
  83. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” lumbers and meanders, and not just because the structure isn’t there. What we’re seeing, on a human level, is only half-interesting and rather slipshod. Like “Green Book,” “Greatest Beer Run” is based on a true story, but what Peter Farrelly responded to in that story translates, this time, into a token “relevant” boomer nostalgia that hasn’t been fully thought through.
  84. No Bears
    If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, No Bears is where he slams on the brakes.
  85. 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.
  86. The Good Nurse
    What lingers most about it is a sense of selfless compassion, the kind that Amy possesses when she painfully reminds herself of the good buried within inexplicable evil. Watching her try to summon that good makes for a quietly devastating finale, one that’s thoroughly earned by the soulful film that precedes it.
  87. 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.
  88. A Jazzman's Blues
    A Jazzman’s Blues overflows with melodrama, yet it isn’t staged broadly. It’s closer to Perry’s version of a Douglas Sirk film, one that takes a romance and heightens it until the complications are growing and twisting around it like vines.
  89. The Silent Twins
    Layering one wild formal flourish over another — from macabre stop-motion animation to elaborately choreographed musical fantasies — to channel the inner lives of two young women who communicated only with each other, keeping the rest of the world outside their circle, it’s a swing for the fences that sometimes, almost by design, spins out of control.
  90. 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.
  91. Catherine Called Birdy
    The movie wouldn’t have worked half as well had Dunham not discovered Ramsey, a “Game of Thrones” veteran soon to be seen in HBO’s “The Last of Us.” The young actor has a face one might find in a medieval Madonna portrait and a rowdy contemporary sensibility that makes her instantly relatable.
  92. The Fabelmans
    Spielberg’s a born storyteller, and these are arguably his most precious stories.
  93. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    Even more than the first “Knives Out,” “Glass Onion” is a thriller wrapped in a deception tucked inside a riddle. It is, of course, a murder mystery with multiple suspects, but it’s one that comes with byways and flashbacks and bells and whistles, not to mention two whodunit homicides for the price of one.
  94. The Woman King
    It’s stirring but slightly stodgy, designed to stand the test of time.
  95. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    What’s profound, and incendiary, about “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is the way that Laura Poitras excavates the story of how deeply Nan Goldin’s photographs are rooted in trauma.
  96. Bros
    Bros is confident enough being about queer characters that it doesn’t have to make them all likable.
  97. A Compassionate Spy
    The film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling.
  98. 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.
  99. The Inspection
    Pope gives a career-igniting performance.
  100. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    “Weird,” it turns out, isn’t a real biopic. It’s a movie that does to the biopic form what Weird Al did to songs like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Beat It” — imitates it, razzes it, throws mud at it, turns it inside out. And all with supreme affection.
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