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. End of the Road
    Director and cast do their best — well, maybe not their best, but their competent professional duty — with a formulaic, contrived screenplay. Still, the results do no one much credit, landing closer to overripe cheese than taut suspense, or even guilty-pleasure terrain.
  2. Traveling Light
    Traveling Light is an experimental attempt at social commentary that fails to provide any insight, emotion or even entertainment of the most basic kind.
  3. Return to Seoul
    While Chou’s elliptical screenplay gently explodes many preconceived assumptions about the effects of adoption on adoptees, it is too clear-sighted to ignore the fact that whether biology affects identity or not, the mere possibility that such a link exists could exert a powerful attraction on a searching spirit not quite sure what it is searching for.
  4. Blonde
    With a passion that’s inquisitive, nearly meditative, and often powerful, Blonde focuses on the mystery we now think of when we think of Marilyn Monroe: Who was she, exactly, as a personality and as a human being? Why did her life descend into a tragedy that seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it is haunting?
  5. Dead for A Dollar
    Hill wants to “do justice” to each of these people, but the result is that Dead for a Dollar doesn’t have a dramatic core. It has actors we like to watch, doing what they do well (like Waltz playing a civilized badass), but it isn’t structured so that any of their fates gets a rise out of us.
  6. Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
    Leads Kapoor and Bhatt have an excess of charm and style that leaps off the screen and grabs your heart.
  7. Barbarian
    To Cregger’s credit, the sense of dread he creates is the stuff that the very best horror movies are made of.
  8. Clerks III
    Is this all wildly self-indulgent? A bit. Does it feel like the product of a filmmaker with plenty of fresh ideas? Not really. Has Smith lost his fastball as a writer? You could certainly make that case, and the screenplay’s attempts to recapture some of the rapid-fire pop culture references and x-rated musings of the director’s heyday often land painfully wide of the mark. But there’s something strangely poignant about it all the same.
  9. Pinocchio
    Roping a game Tom Hanks into the fold as the kindly woodworker Geppetto, and employing countless digital artisans to recreate the iconic character design of the protagonist to eerily lifeless effect, “Pinocchio” is a lavish yet hollow retread that will surely give the original a boost when it arrives on Disney+ this weekend.
  10. Burial
    Not-quite-horror despite its macabre theme and mood, this sophomore directorial feature for Ben Parker is a handsomely produced period thriller that delivers in terms of action and atmospherics, even if his somewhat convoluted story doesn’t maximally pay off.
  11. The Son
    I watching The Son play out, this family’s tragedy becomes our own, and Zeller’s warning becomes impossible to ignore.
  12. See How They Run
    See How They Run is a retro homage that surprises audiences with giggles and suspense.
  13. 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.
  14. Icarus: The Aftermath
    Incredible and enraging in equal doses, the project plays like a tense spy thriller as Rodchenkov is assigned a security team and shuffled from one safe house to another, while enemies of the state — Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny — are poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok.
  15. Don't Worry Darling
    The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.
  16. After Ever Happy
    When that final “to be continued…” title appears — and never has a girly, curly typeface looked more like a ransom note — it’s by far the most heart-clutching #Hessa moment so far, because we realize we’re still at least one whole movie away from release from our collective captivity to this absolute nonentity of a franchise.
  17. Medieval
    Medieval succeeds as a lively, handsome chunk of history (however freely imagined), with nary a dull moment between densely-packed intrigues, chases and battles.
  18. The Banshees of Inisherin
    The result feels closer than any of his previous films to the barbed, intimate lyricism of McDonagh’s work as a playwright, and more deeply, sorrowfully felt to boot.
  19. Argentina, 1985
    That Argentina, 1985 managed to toggle between such emotionally raw material and more amped-up, tension-driven subplots — as Strassera and his family weather death threats and cars explode in public squares — without seeming callous or dramatically opportunistic is a credit to Mitre, whose grasp on his story is high-key and emotionally immediate, but never glib.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. A Couple
    The final film is elegant and empathetic, but never quite emotionally involving: For all its rich, heightened articulation of a woman’s distress and unrest, the sense of a life being academically magnified under glass never quite leaves the endeavor.
  23. Empire of Light
    In the era when content is king, Sam Mendes still believes in moving pictures. Empire of Light is the proof.
  24. Pearl
    Its distinctive look and oddly appealing antihero (picture Norman Bates as Shelley Duvall might have played him) could actually make this the more popular of the two films.
  25. 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.
  26. The Wonder
    An evenhanded but ultimately preposterous adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, co-written by the author herself (with an assist from Alice Birch).
  27. Athena
    The result is nothing short of an urban war movie, as charismatic characters decide to do something about the outrage people have been expressing toward law enforcement in the real world.
  28. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.
  29. Gigi & Nate
    What happens once the film vilifies the animal rights contingent, however, is an example of how movies can protect their heroes and create their scapegoats (pardon the expression) to the detriment of dramatic complexity.
  30. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    So why is “Bardo,” for all its skill, reach-for-the-stars aspiration, and majestic sweep, such a windy, confounding, and — okay, I’ll just say it — monotonous experience? The movie is full of good things, but it’s three hours long and mostly it’s full of itself.
  31. 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.
  32. TÁR
    The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power.
  33. 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.
  34. The Invitation
    The predictability of events during the film’s first hour of gothic-thriller setup is all the more annoying because of the plodding pace. Evie finally stands up for herself during some modestly clever third-act turnabouts, but, really, that’s not quite enough to regenerate a rooting interest in the character.
  35. Me Time
    The disarray is baffling for the audience, and downright punishing for Hart, whose lead character is forced to shape-shift between scenes, veering from milquetoast to petty to tyrannical to pushed-around.
  36. Samaritan
    Samaritan is basic enough that it often plays like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. But the movie builds to a very good twist, and Stallone, in his way, brings a vibe to it, complete with an ’80s kiss-off line (“Have a blast!”) delivered in a growl so deliberate it practically etches itself into the scenery.
  37. No Way Out
    There’s enough sex and violence here to hold attention for an hour and a half, but the care or conviction to explain why it all happens — let alone why viewers should care — proves elusive.
  38. Emergency Declaration
    Believe it or not, Emergency Declaration was conceived before the pandemic, but it’s just about the most thrilling way a film can capitalize on our fears — of the virus, of flying, of governments making a problem worse — without directly exploiting the international nightmare we’ve all been living lately.
  39. The Harbinger
    The Harbinger disappoints only in that it’s good enough to make you wish it were better — that it left an indelible impression rather than a slightly vague one.
  40. 13: The Musical
    13: The Musical is just catchy enough to make you forget how facile it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.
  41. Fall
    Fall is a technical feat of a thriller, yet it’s not without a human center. It earns your clenched gut and your white knuckles.
  42. Glorious
    Even at 80 minutes, Glorious feels four times too long for what it is.
  43. The Next 365 Days
    Just because almost everyone’s exhausted by this crummy cash-cow franchise, doesn’t mean the franchise is exhausted in turn. The hope that The Next 365 Days will be the last “365 Days” merely because it’s based on the final book is a slim one, especially given how it ends.
  44. Orphan: First Kill
    Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.
  45. Beast
    If you can get past the idea that the two-ton lion threatening Idris Elba and his family in the movie is a singularly frightening combination of ones and zeros, not killer instinct and claws, then Beast is a blast.
  46. Look Both Ways
    While the filmmakers’ heads and hearts are in the right place with their resonant sentiments on taking risks and embracing fate, their execution of narrative basics proves lackluster.
  47. Kirikou and the Men and Women
    A broad-minded but pretty vanilla third film in the French toon series from Gallic helmer Michel Ocelot.
  48. Private Desert
    The film comes alive in its second half, which deepens and complicates the story we thought we were watching, about a disgraced cop trying to run away from the violence that’s set to cost him his job and his reputation. For some, the tender empathy that runs through the film’s latter half may not be enough to offset its choice of sympathetic leading man.
  49. Inu-oh
    Basically, Inu-oh is to Noh as spray-painted graffiti is to traditional Japanese calligraphy.
  50. Rogue Agent
    As a revenge spy thriller of sorts (the kind that seems tailor-made for a TV miniseries these days), “Rogue Agent” is an engaging affair. Much of it is due to Arterton, whose steely performance firmly anchors the film even during its most improbable twists and turns — especially as it careens toward its inevitable conclusion and its all too pat final image.
  51. Secret Headquarters
    With a solid cast, healthy sense of humor and polished visual effects, the film rises above so many of the sub-cinematic slogs littering the streaming fray. Expecting it to be memorable proves to be a big ask from the filmmakers, despite their hunger for a Marvel-style, Amblin-esque franchise starter. Still, the ease with which we forget its blights might just be the project’s real superpower.
  52. 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.
  53. Mack & Rita
    The film does, at minimum, convince us that most people would want to transform into Keaton if given the opportunity.
  54. The Swallows of Kabul
    An involving adaptation of Yasmina Khadra’s elegant literary fiction.
  55. Wedding Season
    It’s a processed confection that has come off the streaming assembly line. Yet if the comedy here is mostly routine, the romance is another thing. It really does work, because the actors don’t just phone in the love story — they dance with it, commit to it, and own it.
  56. Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie
    “Rise” is a serviceable — if also forgettable — entry in the cowabunga canon.
  57. Faith
    Faith is as disciplined and intriguingly opaque as the men and women it studies, attempting to unlock the nature of the group through mesmeric observation of routine and ritual.
  58. The Magician
    A talkative Melbourne hit man and his long-suffering marks are engaging company in "The Magician," an Aussie mockumentary cut from the same cloth as 1992 Belgian cult item "Man Bites Dog." Lacking the latter film's graphic violence, this pic opts for straight-on comedy and largely succeeds. [18 July 2005]
    • Variety
      • Posted Aug 4, 2022
  59. Easter Sunday
    Instead of character and chemistry, the film employs a series of running gags meant to support the star’s likability and not compete with his wisecracks.
  60. Alex's War
    So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age vérité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality.
  61. Mija
    Castro’s debut feature deals with heartache and vulnerability but also shimmers with joy and genuine insight.
  62. Prey
    As an alien-attack thriller, Prey is competent and well-paced, though with little in the way of surprise. But the journey of Naru lends it a semblance of emotional coherence that most of the “Predator” films have lacked.
  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. Image of Victory
    Its consideration of how storytelling and visual images can be weaponized makes it a tale with great resonance for these times.
  65. All Man: The International Male Story
    Telling a straightforward tale about this queer-skewing business, “All Man” opens up inquiries on how masculinity has been packaged for the American consumer, straight and gay alike.
  66. On the Line: The Richard Williams Story
    In “On the Line,” Williams has his say. Unsurprisingly, he’s frank, occasionally funny, but also vulnerable, not least because he’s growing frail, having suffered from health issues.
  67. Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC
    “Nightclubbing” is a raw inside slice of punk nostalgia and punk history.
  68. The Blue Caftan
    The Blue Caftan dares to imagine a world where there’s room for both appreciation of the old ways and room to evolve.
  69. Luck
    While the new studio’s debut can’t touch “Toy Story,” it’s an auspicious start for a talented group of storytellers.
  70. Bullet Train
    Bullet Train feels like it comes from the same brain as “Snatch,” wearing its pop style on its sleeve — a “Kill Bill”-like mix of martial arts, manga and gabby hitman movie influences, minus the vision or wit that implies.
  71. We Met in Virtual Reality
    We Met in Virtual Reality is a warmhearted, often humorous look at the sociology of such spaces. It can’t really be described as vérité — more fly-on-the-virtual-wall filmmaking.
  72. Instinct
    For anyone who’s forgotten the extent of van Houten’s skill set, actress-turned-filmmaker Halina Reijn’s impressive, icily disciplined debut feature Instinct provides a fearsome reminder.
  73. Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
    “Dreaming Walls” sets out to capture not the history of the Chelsea, or even the experience of the people who’ve lived there, so much as the afterglow of the Chelsea. The aging residents it shows us can check out anytime (or get kicked out), but they can never leave.
  74. Joyride
    Joyride needs some deft actors driving it, and it has lucked out: An up-for-anything Olivia Colman and scrappy newcomer Charlie Reid make for an unlikely but appealing buddy duo.
  75. Paradise Highway
    Gutto demonstrates welcome restraint and a meticulous avoidance of anything that resembles exploitation, relying on indirect yet impactful allusions to keep us constantly aware of the mortal stakes involved. All in all, this is a singularly promising debut for a first-time feature filmmaker.
  76. Honor Society
    This stylishly bouncy teenage romp mostly reaps the rewards of its fearless gambles, not least its willingness to treat teenagers as in-progress humans with a dark side.
  77. Purple Hearts
    This glossy but gloopy Netflix original is primarily out to serve its leading lady’s legions of fans, some of them perhaps young enough not to have seen it all before.
  78. Blue Island
    While there is no shortage of frontline footage of arrests and protestors clashing with police, most of the running time is dedicated to placing recent events in historical and deeply personal contexts.
  79. 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.
  80. Gone in the Night
    What at first looks like a standard missing-person suspense tale turns out to have a more complicated agenda — but it is so haphazardly advanced and clumsily articulated, the film itself seems to be fumbling around for a cohering structure or mood.
  81. Earwig
    Earwig teeters on the brink of ennui for most of its taxing two-hour running time, asking us to care about characters the film hasn’t really defined.
  82. Alone Together
    The film’s low-key charms, such as they are, aren’t restrained by adherence to formula so much as its myopic worldview.
  83. The Wheel
    Pink, a veteran TV director who takes a rather self-important “a film by” credit on what feels like a first feature (it’s his fifth), shows almost no intuition for how to block or shoot a scene, inserting songs where silence would have been more effective. His clumsiness leaves the actors looking slightly amateurish, despite the strong, vulnerable performances they deliver.
  84. Railway Children
    Effectively piling nostalgia upon nostalgia upon nostalgia into a triple-layered Victorian sponge of particularly English sweetness, this good-natured, resolutely old-fashioned film will likely make any adults who grew up on Jeffries’ original a little misty-eyed.
  85. Free Chol Soo Lee
    It’s a well-crafted enterprise that leaves its human subject a bit of an enigma, albeit one we empathize with enough to feel sorely disappointed that his tumultuous life never arrived at a place of security or peace.
  86. Mr. Malcolm's List
    The deceptions and symmetries are standard, but this is the kind of movie that rises or falls on whether the actors can carry the duplicity — and the innocence — aloft. And the actors here are marvelous: tart, stylish, emotionally vibrant, never more knowing than when they’re being duped.
  87. Anything's Possible
    It still plays a bit too much like a public service announcement — where characters embody and express trans-accepting talking points — and not enough like the funny, sexy teen rom-coms that clearly inspired it.
  88. 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.
  89. They/Them
    It’s so committed to affirmational messages about queer identity not being a choice, a condition or a legitimate motive to get axed by a deranged serial killer that the movie all but forgets to be scary — although enlisting Kevin Bacon as too-genial-to-be-trusted camp overseer Owen Whistler nearly makes it work.
  90. DC League of Super-Pets
    The movie, in its conventional and likable way, knocks the stuffing out of superhero fantasy. Its joke is that a mangy crew of animals doing outlandish CGI magic tricks is essentially what a comic-book movie is.
  91. Three Minutes: A Lengthening
    Stigter’s method is simultaneously creative and forensic, but never sentimental. Working with a digitized copy that bears the blemishes left by the deterioration of the original celluloid, she conjures up exactly what she declares in the subtitle: a lengthening.
  92. 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.
  93. Hypochondriac
    The combination of gay protagonists, mental illness exploration, horror tropes, and surreal elements that gesture toward “Donnie Darko” make for an ambitious mix that holds attention, even if the uneven, somewhat muddled results are ultimately more effortful than insightful.
  94. My Old School
    Like any good con-artist documentary, My Old School keeps its audience guessing, delighted to be deceived — although there’s a degree to which relying on animation cheats us of the question on everybody’s mind: How could so many have fallen for Brandon’s ruse?
  95. Facing Nolan
    Its lack of manufactured drama is one of the most engaging things about it, especially if you are a baseball fan who has ever marveled at the miracle that was, and is, Nolan Ryan.
  96. A Dark, Dark Man
    It’s a deliciously pessimistic testament, for those on its deliberate, low-frequency wavelength, to the power of an unapologetically auteurist, art-house approach to genre.
  97. Not Okay
    Shephard jabs well-placed elbows at modern day media celebrity, where the public’s attention veers in an instant from tutting about death to applauding as Danni does goat yoga.
  98. Nope
    Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement.
  99. Aftershock
    The tried and true way to break viewers’ hearts is to make them care deeply. Aftershock wastes no time in doing just that.
  100. Persuasion
    Cracknell approaches the project with confidence and a clear (if clearly derivative) vision. Her compositions are striking and swooningly romantic at times, though she has a curious idea of Anne Elliot.
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