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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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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?
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Aftershock
    The tried and true way to break viewers’ hearts is to make them care deeply. Aftershock wastes no time in doing just that.
  18. 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.
  19. Good Madam
    A quiet, tightly wound horror film, Bass’ fourth and most briskly accomplished feature might flirt with the supernatural, but finds terror aplenty in social dynamics that, to many a South African, are perfectly ordinary.
  20. She Will
    As a superbly crafted, thematically rich fable, it administers a potent dose of #MeToo vengeance, all while wearing its nasty sense of humor like a red-lipstick grin applied to a perfectly masklike face.
  21. The Gray Man
    What makes The Gray Man exciting — and let’s not beat around the bush: This is the most exciting original action property Netflix has delivered since “Bright” — are the shades the ensemble bring to their characters and the little ways in which the Russos come through where those other films fell short.
  22. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    “Paws of Fury” is an efficient yet underimagined animated fable that barely musters the flavor of a cliché Western comedy.
  23. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women’s power and independence in a world crushed under by masculine will.
  24. Karmalink
    This striking feature debut by U.S. filmmaker Jake Wachtel takes viewers on a fascinating and frequently wondrous expedition to a place where science and metaphysics intersect.
  25. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    Fabian’s film is charming enough, though his attempts at romance remain earthbound as he makes a clean break from the TV version, offering a different interpretation of the character.
  26. Take the Night
    This solid little thriller does a good job balancing character drama and suspense elements, its smooth craftsmanship belying the creator’s newbie status in multiple creative roles.
  27. Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between
    Even though this Netflix original doesn’t condescend to its targeted teen audience, it fails to surmount basic issues dealing with narrative credulity and the outcome’s predictability.
  28. Thor: Love and Thunder
    It’s the mix of tones — the cheeky and the deadly, the flip and the romantic — that elevates “Thor: Love and Thunder” by keeping it not just brashly unpredictable but emotionally alive.
  29. Doula
    Doula ultimately comes across less as an actual comedy and more as a slice of life that’s lighthearted but also low stakes.
  30. Fourth of July
    Fourth of July is a trifle, and a facile, easy-to-watch one. But what it’s offering under the surface feels, in part, like a clandestine defense of Louis C.K.’s transgressions. In about 45 minutes, the family swings from being louts to saints. That’s supposed to be a lesson to us all. It’s not a convincing one.
  31. The Princess
    A smarter script would’ve found ways to work a historical critique (or some “Shrek”-like satire, at least) into its relatively brainless string of set pieces.
  32. Burning Days
    [A] scorchingly smart, superbly crafted thriller, in which the morality is blurry with heat haze, but the real lines that divide society are starkly defined: Out here, you are either corrupt or complicit, or collateral for those who are.
  33. Tigers
    It’s a compelling tale, well cast and directed with vivid intensity by Ronnie Sandahl. Still, the somewhat frustratingly limited insight we get into our hero’s addled head may affect export prospects for a film that is more about psychology than athletics.
  34. Olga
    Even before Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion, Olga was an incredibly strong film, but now, the Kino Lorber release should be considered essential viewing for art-house audiences.
  35. The Man from Toronto
    A throwback buddy action-comedy that offsets its run-of-the-mill sense of humor with a pair of appealing leads.
  36. Press Play
    Greg Björkman’s directorial debut has a catchy hook and atmospheric pull — yet the material leaves far too much underdeveloped, unrealized and incohesive to connect with viewers’ heads and hearts.
  37. Murder at Yellowstone City
    Director Richard Gray’s well-crafted and handsomely mounted indie is as much a solidly constructed mystery as it is it a conventionally satisfying oater, with much to recommend to fans of either genre who rarely get to sample such a mix.
  38. The Story Won't Die
    Braiding the reflections of nine variously affected individuals on the subject, David Henry Gerson’s film successfully keeps the big picture and the smaller canvas in conscientious balance, disrupting overwhelming tragedy with more hopeful flashes of invention and inspiration.
  39. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe
    Good cartoon characters tend to be ageless, and Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is just clever enough not to feel like an anachronism. The duo’s creator and forever naughty guiding light, the writer-director Mike Judge (who also does their voices), flows the characters into the present day without a hitch in style or a stitch in time.
  40. My Fake Boyfriend
    Late-night stakeouts, dinner dates gone awry and greenscreen Cristiano blunders often make My Fake Boyfriend feel like a collection of skits and sketches strung together. Some are very funny and they are led by two very capable performers.
  41. The Black Phone
    It’s a horror ride that holds you, and it should have no trouble carving out an audience, but I didn’t find it particularly scary.
  42. Wild Men
    The wonderful thing about Wild Men, a movie that suggests a dream-team collaboration of Hal Hartley and the Coen Brothers, is that everyone involved takes themselves extremely seriously, even as they behave and speak in ways that cause viewers who get the joke to smile, chuckle and occasionally laugh out loud.
  43. The Sea Beast
    In the end, The Sea Beast is a movie about challenging conventional wisdom and figuring things out for yourself, and that’s a philosophy that worked on both sides of the camera.
  44. The Good Neighbor
    Competent performances and a slick veneer make this revamp go down easily enough. Still, one wishes Rick had placed more emphasis on Hitchcockian suspense, rather than trusting the slow-moving tale will hold us via plot and character complexities that really aren’t particularly evident.
  45. Jerry and Marge Go Large
    The movie is a fable of winning, of beating the house every time, without much of a dark side. In that way, it’s fun; it allows us to coast along on our vicarious desire to get rich by beating the system
  46. The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs
    [A] penetrating study of toxic patriarchy and female identity.
  47. Brian and Charles
    A deceptively unserious movie it may be, but Brian and Charles leaves a serious trace through its pure sense of optimism.
  48. Beba
    An insightful, engaging and all-around affirmational auto-portrait from an Afro-Latina New Yorker with an ear for poetry and an eye for the ineffable, Beba never questions its own right to exist.
  49. Rodeo
    Rodeo is a movie that’s all surface, all present tense, all too-cool-to-be-anything-but-French-vérité gestures.
  50. Father of the Bride
    This remake is loud and exaggerated; it’s more hijinks than heart. (Even the swans that bedeviled Martin have been swapped out for synchronized flamingos.) Audiences looking to shed a tear need not RSVP.
  51. Don't Make Me Go
    The movie’s ending is misguided to the point of being perplexing rather than upsetting, recasting everything that came before it in a less favorable light. That’s a shame, as this father-daughter drama starring John Cho has more than its fair share of touching moments before hitting the roadblock that is its questionable third act.
  52. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    Six months into 2022, it’s the funniest film Hollywood has produced thus far. Audiences know what to expect, and Illumination delivers, offering another feel-good dose of bad behavior.
  53. Vengeance
    In Vengeance, B.J. Novak proves a born storyteller with the rare gift of using a film to say something that intoxicates us.
  54. Lightyear
    Given that it’s a spinoff of the “Toy Story” series, which is the greatest and most sustained achievement in contemporary animation, it should be noted that this is one of those Pixar movies that feels like it has 50 percent Disney DNA.
  55. Poser
    The whole thing is oddly beautiful, absurdly compelling and even freakishly watchable. The general sensation of it approaches the out-of-place feeling of being at a party you don’t quite feel cool enough for. But since you’re already there, why not linger for a few drinks and embrace an intriguing ride outside your comfort zone?
  56. Spiderhead
    Kosinski is a gifted director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. He is not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. The execution is tone deaf.
  57. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    It’s here in the movie’s more fantastical details that Yonebayashi’s imagination runs free — and Studio Ponoc’s potential shines brightest. The world they’ve created may not be logical, but it is intuitive, as Mary adapts to whatever hallucinatory wonder or obstacle the filmmakers can throw at her
  58. Lost Illusions
    This sweeping period drama may be up to its eyeballs in costumes and carriages, but it plays with all the brio and jeopardy of a modern-day gangster movie, featuring hack journalists as its antiheroes.
  59. Halftime
    Halftime justly salutes Lopez’s pride in her achievements, but it’s every bit as much a salute to her brand management.
  60. Jurassic World Dominion
    Of the three “Jurassic World” movies, “Dominion” is the least silly and most entertaining. But that’s not saying much. This “stop to ask if they should” cycle’s human characters were never especially interesting, and why should we trust Trevorrow to suddenly make them so?
  61. The Walk
    The film’s insights about racism come as familiar baby steps.
  62. Funny Pages
    What is doesn’t have, oddly, is any sort of bone-deep reality factor. Almost nothing that happens in Funny Pages is particularly believable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Funny Face
    With a different book and new, added tunes, this is a lightly diverting, modish, Parisian-localed tintuner.
  64. The Roundup
    A slam-dunk entertainment.
  65. The Passenger
    The Passenger doesn’t quite transcend its basic creature-feature premise, yet it does make getting to a familiar destination more fun than many a similar enterprise has managed.
  66. Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko
    A gleaming and delightful anime with a large appetite for tenderness and laughter.
  67. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    Though its weak bounty-hunter plot makes almost no sense, After Blue satisfies that thirsty spot in our psyche too few films succeed in tickling, where dreams are born, hormones churn and logic simply doesn’t apply.
  68. Hustle
    Hustle doesn’t rewrite any rules, but the film’s wholesome seduction is that you believe what you’re seeing — in part because of the presence of players from the aging legend Dr. J to Trae Young to Kyle Lowry and several dozen more. But also because Sandler plays Stanley with an inner sadness, a blend of weariness and resilience, and a stubborn faith in the game that leaves you moved, stoked, and utterly convinced.
  69. Hollywood Stargirl
    Hart and her team have carefully and craftily built the ultimate sequel. The narrative advances the perky protagonist’s internal and external objectives with a gentle yet profound arc; technical contributions complement her journey, both visually and sonically. The film never betrays its lead character in any fashion.
  70. Godland
    [Pálmason's] a cinematic original whose voice grows stronger and more certain with each film.
  71. War Pony
    If Larry Clark had ever found his way onto the Pine Ridge Reservation, he probably would have come away with a film like “War Pony,” which observes its young Native American characters hustling, skating and stealing drugs from otherwise distracted adults.
  72. Revoir Paris
    It’s a modest film with a heart very much on its torn sleeve, given force and ballast by another fine dramatic turn from the hard-working Virginie Efira.
  73. God's Creatures
    The film’s formal flourishes are modest, centering the actors ahead of all else.
  74. Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind
    This is Ethan’s chance to strut his solo stuff. And he does, in a very Ethan Coen way: clever, modest, borderline invisible, but with a kick that sneaks up on you. ... 'Trouble in Mind' plays like an undiluted shot of rock ‘n’ roll moonshine joy.
  75. Tori and Lokita
    Working in their rigorously lyrical drama-as-documentary style, the Dardennes place the audience on the hamster wheel of Tori and Lokita’s lives, in a way that’s both harrowing and immersive.
  76. Showing Up
    In its minimalist quotidian way, Showing Up is a movie made by someone in masterly control of her medium.
  77. Pacifiction
    Pacifiction is a film in many ways about floating, through life and water and power, inviting the viewer to idly drift right along with it.
  78. Mother and Son
    Inspired by the life and roots of her children’s father, Serraille’s original screenplay embeds tacit, national-scale socioeconomic commentary in its intimate domestic story, though smartly avoids making blunt symbols of its sharp, specific characters.
  79. Close
    I am convinced that Dhont has a masterpiece in him. But there’s an immaturity to his movies that he must first overcome. He’s already so close
  80. Broker
    Kore-eda is surprisingly generous toward his characters, nearly all of whom are breaking the law, but whose fundamental decency is brought out when dealing with others in need.
  81. Just 6.5
    The result — a stunning Iranian-style riff on “The French Connection” — is a run-and-gun, Hollywood-caliber cop movie grounded by a clear-eyed assessment of how Tehran’s system works, and all the ways in which it doesn’t.
  82. Enys Men
    Visually and sonically, Enys Men is utterly intoxicating, but a lack of any nourishing interplay between form and content makes it feel like getting drunk on an empty stomach, alone on an island where everything happens at the same time, and nothing really happens at all.
  83. Elizabeth: A Portrait in Part(s)
    It’s a willfully idiosyncratic movie that feels like a strangely fitting final film, since it amounts to Michell’s cockeyed tip of the hat to the monarchy and what it means. You could have a good debate about what, exactly, he’s trying to express in “Elizabeth,” but what I saw is a level-headed adoration that is neither fussy nor old-fashioned, since it’s cut with an acerbic awareness of the absurdity of royalty in the contemporary age.
  84. Zero Contact
    Just when you think this nothing-burger can’t get any more exasperating, it spends a full 10 post-fadeout minutes on final credits.
  85. Hunt
    A twisty, action-packed political thriller — one that keeps you guessing even as it spirals into ever-crazier realms.
  86. Forever Young
    [Bruni Tedeschi] fails to make much of a case for why any of it should resonate with anyone outside this tiny, hermetically enclosed community. ... [An] indulgent, histrionic personal history.
  87. Nostalgia
    Even in its more generic stretches, Martone’s latest feels both inviting and convincingly inhabited, a siren song to the past that confronts us with a violent, unromantic present, paved under with the same old, blood-washed cobblestones.
  88. Leila's Brothers
    The helmer constructs scenes with a bustling documentary energy, studiously avoiding melodramic tropes, even when they might serve to make the narrative more engaging, less unwieldy or simply easier to digest overall.
  89. Holy Spider
    Before a final act dealing with the fascinating social fallout once Saeed’s crimes are known and he becomes, in some quarters including his own household, a hero on a righteous moral crusade, Abbasi’s film hews close to this established template.
  90. We Feed People
    [A] technically polished and emotionally stirring close-up view of celebrity chef José Andrés and his nonprofit World Central Kitchen.
  91. A Taste of Whale
    This solid both-sides-now overview also raises wider questions regarding humanity’s sometimes-hypocritical ethics toward what we eat, where we get it, and how.
  92. Stars at Noon
    Trish is the plum part here, and a sensational Qualley — cycling through a ragged thrift-store wardrobe, with a lavish halo of dark curls that can’t help but recall her mother, Andie MacDowell — grabs it with both callused hands.
  93. EO
    EO is a damning polemic on our relationship to other intelligent species — as free labor, food and companions — as seen through the dewy, wide eyes of a donkey whom we come to adore.
  94. Moonage Daydream
    Watching Moonage Daydream, there are essential facts you won’t hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you’ll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was.
  95. Elvis
    Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained.
  96. Cairo Conspiracy
    What we’re dealing with here is a fairly conventional political thriller — think “House of Cards,” minus the sleek David Fincher aesthetic or much in the way of suspense — set in a world no one has dared to explore on screen before now.
  97. The Eight Mountains
    Stately and serene from a distance, but up close riven with the fissures and follies of a friendship that costs both men so much but gives them even more, the movie, too, is a mountain.
  98. Decision to Leave
    After the world-conquering success of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” and the small-screen domination of “Squid Game,” your new, sublimely accomplished Korean thriller obsession is here, and it is Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave.
  99. Crimes of the Future
    The movie, like so many Cronenberg films, is a gut-twister that is really, just underneath, a painstakingly chewed-over and cerebral experience. It’s an outré nightmare that keeps telling you what to think about what it means.
  100. R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is a slow-motion snapshot of a deeply riven community flying apart in all directions, as though some bomb, detonated years or perhaps even centuries ago, has never stopped exploding.
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