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. Senior Year
    If Alex Hardcastle’s effortfully high-spirited Netflix feature isn’t exactly good, it’s still good enough to provide reasonable throwaway fun, thanks much less to the material than to a cast that elevates it when they can.
  2. Firestarter
    The whole thing plays like “Logan” done in the worst humdrum rhythmless made-for-streaming generic style, the lighting flat, the soundtrack heavy with John Carpenter’s old-school one-man-at-the-synthesizer horror music, because if you took that sound of processed dread away you wouldn’t have much else.
  3. Top Gun: Maverick
    Hardly anything in Top Gun: Maverick will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do.
  4. The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks
    While best enjoyed by the already converted, it provides enough showbiz insight and interpersonal drama to entertain newbies.
  5. The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
    This is dark, squalid, squinting-through-the-keyhole stuff, and it can make a film like The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe sound like a guilty-pleasure piece of true-crime trash, one of those glorified tabloid-TV exposés with a patina of investigative credibility. In fact, it’s a very good film.
  6. Lux Æterna
    Let’s be clear: Lux Æterna is a glorified Saint Laurent commercial. That’s the tweet-length analysis. But there’s more to it than that.
  7. Hello, Bookstore
    Hello, Bookstore is a salute to the sacramental qualities of art that are threaded through everyday life.
  8. Sneakerella
    Heartening sentiments about gaining confidence, the passionate pull of artistic expression and the ingenious meta context of the narrative’s underpinnings help buff away the scuff marks, making for a surprisingly satisfying reboot of a tired but timeless classic.
  9. Men
    The leaves are so green, the tone is so ominous, and the men are so … Rory Kinnear-y that audiences are all but guaranteed to leave this folk-horror bizart-house offering feeling disturbed, even if no two viewers can agree on what bothered them about it.
  10. The Takedown
    Leterrier manages a few modestly exciting chase scenes, including one that begins in a laser tag course, continues through a bowling alley and a go-kart track, and ends in a crowded supermarket. And his two leads are agreeably amusing and for the most part engaging throughout the film.
  11. Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story
    To paraphrase an admonition from a classic Rolling Stones album: This movie should be played real loud. And in venues where people can, if they choose, get up and dance.
  12. Vinyl Nation
    The clichéd word that’s most bandied about by vinyl enthusiasts really does apply to the movie that’s been made about it: “warmth.”
  13. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is a ride, a head trip, a CGI horror jam, a what-is-reality Marvel brainteaser and, at moments, a bit of an ordeal. It’s a somewhat engaging mess, but a mess all the same.
  14. Crush
    What’s jarring in Crush is the absence of some requisite dose of youthful mischief, a sense of stakes and perhaps even a lightly scandalous touch, integral to the spirit of many of the genre staples Cohen and co-writers Kirsten King and Casey Rackham attempt to revive on their own terms.
  15. Vortex
    Vortex doesn’t let us off the hook. Gaspar Noé never does. But if he did, he might transcend his “Behold, you will know the dark side” brand.
  16. 365 Days: This Day
    It’s piping hot trash.
  17. Anaïs in Love
    Some might wonder what Anaïs in Love really has to say for itself; the film, perhaps, objects to the idea of young women like its cheerfully confused heroine having to explain themselves at all. Either way, this zephyr-blown dandelion of a movie isn’t going to break a sweat to get its message across.
  18. Memory
    In the end, “Memory” isn’t terribly convincing, but it’s at least trying for something more serious than most.
  19. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    Fellowes gives us an affectionate group hug, which is effectively what these encore visits amount to.
  20. The King's Daughter
    It was on this film that Scodelario met Walker. The couple are now married, which suggests there’s a “happily ever after” to be found somewhere in this froufrou film maudit.
  21. Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain
    Estevan Oriol’s entertaining, energetic, better-than-it-had-to-be documentary Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain offers a more complete picture of this massively popular yet often underestimated grou
  22. The Earth Is Blue as an Orange
    It’s when the film’s natural and metatextual components overlap and disrupt each other that The Earth Is Blue as an Orange is most arresting.
  23. Bad Roads
    Although the various episodes don’t quite add up to a strong narrative whole, they do gain extra resonance from current events in this troubled region.
  24. Charlotte
    What might have seemed a familiar if sad drama in live-action form benefits from this relative novelty of presentation, which lends a certain universality, as well as heightened viewer access, to Salomon’s story. But the rather pedestrian animation here also makes Charlotte a bit of a disappointment.
  25. Marvelous and the Black Hole
    A set-your-watch-by-it riff on the unlikely-friendship-helps-two-lonely-people formula, this time involving a troubled schoolgirl and a stage magician, it is however so nicely performed and takes such honest pleasure in the flourishes of its little magic show, that only a hard heart would mention that the palmed coins and hidden cards of its construction were visible all along.
  26. Stanleyville
    With a firm commitment to its alluringly offbeat premise and a grounding lead performance from Susanne Wuest, this indie oddity is an enjoyable descent into the absurd despite an apparent lack of interest in answering most of the questions it raises.
  27. The Innocents
    This superior chiller is both a satisfying genre exercise and a minute observation of the process by which young children acquire morality; its most striking aspect may just be the empathy Vogt displays for his 7- to 11-year-old stars, and the extraordinary juvenile performances that empathy brings out.
  28. Eiffel
    Bourboulon hatches a second-rate romance, rather than detailing the rich, real-life drama that swirled around Eiffel’s controversial endeavor.
  29. Father
    Will Nikola, like Job, regain some measure of grace if he stoically endures enough suffering? The barely discernible uptick of optimism that closes the powerful but grueling Father is a small mercy in suggesting he might
  30. White Building
    Even just the rooftop of this vast, scabbed Phnom Penh apartment complex seems to have a thousand stories to tell — it’s perhaps little wonder that Neang’s melancholic, perplexed, slightly ponderous feature debut gets a little lost navigating them.
  31. The White Fortress
    The sad, wise heart of Drljača’s small, impressively controlled film condemns neither of them, but instead understands what horror stories and fairytales have in common: both are narratives in which the characters have no control, and are instead propelled by forces far bigger than they are, toward destinies they were born into that they cannot avert.
  32. Bloody Oranges
    Few movies swap genres halfway through, and even fewer do so successfully. “Bloody Oranges” does both.
  33. Islands
    It is indeed a good movie, and quite an honest one, yet its setup is so ripe for cut corners and heartwarming chintz that I was almost surprised to see it sidestep the diagram I was expecting. I bet other viewers will have the same reaction.
  34. The Cellar
    Writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s latest lacks the thick atmospherics that might have punched across a sketchy screenplay, which falls short in expanding the premise of his 2004 short “The Ten Steps.”
  35. Choose or Die
    While there have been worse-crafted, even more routinely formulaic Netflix horror efforts, this one takes the cake for sheer whateverness of barely-there plot, concept, character detailing and so on.
  36. The Tale of King Crab
    It’s an old-fashioned literary fable, spiked with shots of grimacing men with sunburned faces blasting one another with shotguns that wouldn’t be out of place in a Sergio Leone movie.
  37. Meet Me in the Bathroom
    If it’s sometimes a little rough around the edges and not always structurally coherent, well, the same was true of these bands.
  38. Under the Influence
    Under the Influence is a very absorbing, very disquieting, very meaningful-for-our-time documentary.
  39. a-ha: the Movie
    As a movie with the title A-ha: The Movie should do, this one, directed by the Norwegian filmmaker Thomas Robsahm (with Aslaug Holm as co-director), tells you everything you need to know about the career of A-ha, even as it leaves out most of their personal lives.
  40. As They Made Us
    Despite an eager-to-please ending that tries too hard to redeem the elderly Frays, Bialik’s movie still offers up hope, humor and above all, keen observations on grief in the wake of those who’ve damaged us in ways both tangible and veiled.
  41. Murina
    Murina is rife with symbolism, but it’s a mark of Kusijanović’s command — an astonishing quality for a first-time feature director — that the recurring motifs and metaphors are worn so lightly and feel so organic to the film’s microcosmic universe.
  42. Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
    Part John Ford, part Sam Fuller, the film’s old-fashioned approach is oddly impressive: To tell this kind of story in such blunt-edged, straightforward style is a distinctive choice when the temptation to veer into revisionist war-is-hell commentary, Malickian nature-study or Herzogian descent-into-madness bombast must have been strong.
  43. Father Stu
    Father Stu is not your everyday Hollywood religious odyssey — it’s closer to “Diary of a Country Cutup.” It’s a surprisingly sincere movie about religious feeling, but it is also, too often, a dramatically undernourished one.
  44. The Northman
    In most respects, Eggers is a unique artist with strong, singular ideas of how to script, stage and pace his films, and while The Northman is nothing if not a signature addition to a most original oeuvre — no one but Eggers would or could have reimagined “Hamlet” thus — it lacks the element of surprise that made “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” feel like instant classics.
  45. La Mami
    Amid its textured, occasionally conflict-scarred portrait of female community, La Mami is rife with sharp, tacit socioeconomic criticism of an unequal, patriarchal society in which making joyless business out of pleasure is the best hope many women have.
  46. Metal Lords
    In a film that sings the praises of heavy metal music and reveres those who create it, Metal Lords stumbles in its ability to truly rock.
  47. Infinite Storm
    If it falls a bit short as human drama, however, Szumowska’s latest — a 180-degree turn from her last, the excellent Polish allegorical tale “Never Gonna Snow Again” — is fully satisfying as an appreciation of Nature as magnificent adversary.
  48. All the Old Knives
    I’m glad to report that All the Old Knives is a minor but engrossing genre movie: tightly wound, more or less rooted in the real world, with taut dialogue and espionage gambits that fall just this side of contrived. It’s not John le Carré, but it’s not thinly patched together pulp either.
  49. DIO: Dreamers Never Die
    Don Argott and Demian Fenton’s film belongs more to the realm of fan service than crossover pic, but it’ll attract curious souls from other corners of the rock world who don’t mind the devil being in two hours’ worth of details.
  50. Spin Me Round
    Is this supposed to be some kind of sitcom? A thriller? A provocative #MeToo statement on sexual dynamics in the workplace? Yes, all of the above, it turns out.
  51. To Leslie
    It’s a downbeat diary that hooks us by taking the form of an addict’s picaresque. For two hours, we don’t know where Leslie is going to land next any more than she does, and that lends the film a searing, unvarnished quality.
  52. Better Nate Than Ever
    Funny, vibrant, yet schmaltzy to a fault, this Disney Plus family film can carry a tune, but falters in crafting a runaway hit.
  53. A Night of Knowing Nothing
    Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia’s shimmery, poetic essay doc A Night of Knowing Nothing, it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories.
  54. RRR
    The movie is such an irresistible and intoxicating celebration of cinematic excess that even after 187 minutes (including intermission or, as the title card announces, “InteRRRval”), you are left exhilarated, not exhausted.
  55. Ascension
    It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of her project, and it’s Kingdon’s work as editor that makes Ascension such a remarkable achievement. She organizes all these disparate scenes into a logical upward progression, and even though we seldom know where we are or who exactly we’re observing, these foreign situations are relatable, engaging and often unforgettable.
  56. The Rose Maker
    Pierre Pinaud’s short but unhurried film benefits immensely from the warmly flinty presence of Catherine Frot (“Marguerite”) in the lead, lending a sense of purpose and personality to a character without much color on the page.
  57. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    While “The Secrets of Dumbledore” doesn’t exactly embrace simplicity, the screenplay — no longer credited to Rowling alone, but co-written by stalwart “Harry Potter” adapter Steve Kloves — feels far more focused. Happily, the execution proves that much easier to follow.
  58. The Bubble
    Judd Apatow made a movie. A very bad movie.
  59. Morbius
    Morbius is a movie in which it’s clear that no one ever sent the script back for a rewrite with the instructions, “Please add a script.” As in: Add spice, add dialogue, add something so that the movie plays like more than a barely colored-in diagram.
  60. Babi Yar. Context
    Babi Yar. Context has power but falls short of the director’s greatest works, largely because his span here is considerably longer, and in consequence the focus suffers.
  61. The Bad Guys
    Cheery and diverting as The Bad Guys is, it has all the emotional weight of a few crisp, stolen Benjamins.
  62. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    An hour and a half would’ve been a perfectly fine run-time, whereas at two hours and change, “Sonic 2” wears out its welcome well before it turns into yet another phone-it-in franchise entry.
  63. The Contractor
    Being a solid cut above average is good enough, given so much formulaic mediocrity among thrillers cluttering the streaming market.
  64. You Are Not My Mother
    Steeped in local folklore, it lets mythic and mind-based terrors exist side by side, allowing the viewer to interpret and believe what they will. This leeway comes at no cost, however, to its effective atmospherics, which sink into the bones like an unexpected twilight chill.
  65. Measure of Revenge
    A mess from start to finish, this would-be thriller about a mother seeking vengeance (Melissa Leo) never comes close to raising the pulse but does raise more than a few eyebrows along the way.
  66. The Girl and the Spider
    Few directors could get away with giving audiences so little context or plot, but the Zürchers succeed in piquing our curiosity, which is all one really needs to sustain a film.
  67. How to Survive a Pandemic
    Smart, humane and gripping even as it rakes over events all too fresh in our memories, How to Survive a Pandemic ends with plenty yet to be discussed and explored: It provides a road map to survival, but doesn’t suggest we’ve all made it just yet.
  68. Ambulance
    Ambulance is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.
  69. Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (a SOUR film)
    A decently baked slice of fan service that still seems like it might be arriving a little too soon.
  70. Slash/Back
    Innuksuk approaches everything with such a generous, supportive spirit, it seems churlish to focus on shortcomings in a film with so much personality. ... "Slash/Back" seems bound to find a cult following, but it will mean the most to Inuit audiences, for whom standing up to invaders is more than just another genre-movie cliché.
  71. Sheryl
    "Sheryl" tells these anecdotes, and others, in a swift and captivating fashion, with the director, Amy Scott, in engaging command.
  72. Windfall
    Blending the oddball sensibility of McDowell and regular co-writer Justin Lader with the nastier genre smarts of “Se7en” scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, this low-key Netflix holds to its intriguing promise for a crisp 90 minutes, though even its climax is muted by design.
  73. Soft & Quiet
    Soft & Quiet is deeply unpleasant to watch, but that’s the point.
  74. It Is In Us All
    If as a thriller, the cryptic It Is in Us All, doesn’t thrill quite enough, as an examination of the kind of perverse death-obsession that unloved, unhappy, estranged boys can develop, it is a darkly provocative and promising debut mood-piece from Campbell-Hughes.
  75. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    Bodies Bodies Bodies, with its restless camera movement and improv-style acting and general overdramatic rambunctiousness, is like “And Then There Were None” staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.
  76. Master of Light
    The light here emanates from Morton. His curiosity about art, about his place in the world after his incarceration, makes visible the darkness he’s experienced.
  77. Panama
    One thing leads to another, at a pace that somehow feels frenetic and ponderous all at once.
  78. Umma
    Oh aces her leading role with customary aplomb, and Stewart makes for a game scene partner, but Shim’s economical-to-a-fault screenplay rarely allows them enough downtime to fully flesh out their characters.
  79. Love After Love
    Love After Love goes through the motions of classic, rousing melodrama but not the emotions.
  80. Cheaper by the Dozen
    This new adaptation’s noteworthy commentary on poignant, timely issues is often eclipsed by predictability, superficial character development and inconsistent pacing.
  81. Deadstream
    What keeps the film from being anything more than an enterprising but minor diversion is that, with Shawn being is such a loud comic character from the get-go, scares and laughs alike don’t have much space to build. Winter gives his all, entertainingly so. But the performance is also dialed too high, too soon, its ultimate payoff diminished because we’ve already had so much of this protagonist screaming, bragging and sniveling.
  82. Deep Water
    This erotic thriller is still sexy and plenty entertaining, mind you, but it’s just not very useful insofar as what it says about real relationships.
  83. I Love My Dad
    [Morosini] holds back the personal stuff you can tell a stranger but not your dad — the kind of material good comedians build their shows around — making the result feel like a sitcom more than a brutally honest movie.
  84. Josep
    The strong subject matter as well as the eponymous subject’s storied life makes one wish for a longer running time than 72 minutes.
  85. Jane by Charlotte
    Gainsbourg doesn’t cram the film with all that much material, and spares her mom the embarrassment of showing her personal clutter. She essentially goes easy on Birkin, asking intimate questions but settling for shallow answers.
  86. X
    X is a wily and entertaining slow-motion ride of terror that earns its shocks, along with its singular quease factor, which relates to the fact that the demons here are ancient specimens of humanity who actually have a touch of…humanity.
  87. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    Turns out, this movie isn’t so much about space as it is about time travel, or more specifically, taking Linklater and his followers back more than half a century.
  88. Gold
    As a lone drifter guarding a precious quarry in deadly desert conditions in a faintly futuristic nowhereland, [Efron's] good, as anyone’s who been paying attention should expect. Beyond that, it’s a somewhat arid exercise.
  89. After Love
    Spare and pared-back in all respects ranging from performance to its clean, airily-lensed aesthetic, After Love carries bulky baggage with an elegant lightness, leaving its audience with further unpacking to do.
  90. 32 Sounds
    Full to bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity, 32 Sounds is a uniquely mind-expanding plunge into a dimension of the human experience so many of us take for granted, a rare and rewarding sonic journey with the potential to enrich our lives.
  91. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    It’s a commercial comedy that has a delirious good time poking fun at Nicolas Cage, celebrating everything that makes him Nicolas Cage — and, in the end, actually becoming a Nicolas Cage movie, which turns out to be both a cheesy thing and a special thing.
  92. The Lost City
    Even at the movie’s masks-on SXSW Film Festival premiere, The Lost City was a breath of fresh air: the kind of breezy two-hour getaway that doesn’t take itself too seriously, delivering screwball banter between Bullock and Tatum — a guilty-pleasure treasure hunt that pretends to be more progressive than it really is by alternating between who’s saving whom.
  93. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    Everything Everywhere is ultimately too much of a good thing, a novel idea driven to the point of exhaustion.
  94. Fear
    In the end, Fear offers the most beguiling kind of plea for tolerance, via antic suggestion that any other behavior is strictly for dolts whose mob mentality makes them look very stupid indeed. It’s a lesson that goes down easily with this much deadpan charm and skill on tap.
  95. The Adam Project
    The movie is a total trifle, but it’s often a diverting one — a wide-eyed sci-fi adventure with a screwball buoyancy.
  96. Offseason
    Though thinly conceived overall with not much philosophy to back its daunting visuals, Offseason still offers some genuinely spine-tingling images and sounds that will keep midnight audiences on their toes until the end.
  97. Turning Red
    Irresistibly cute and thoroughly unashamed of its own silliness, Turning Red may be second-tier Pixar, but the emotions run every bit as deep as in the studio’s best.
  98. Huda's Salon
    On the whole, Abu-Assad is less successful in braiding the respective tales of Reem and Huda through Eyas Salman’s editing. But eventually the seams show and clumsy jumps between the two locations feel strangely episodic, losing Huda’s Salon some of the urgency it has claimed in its earlier moments.
  99. The Weekend Away
    Ultimately there are a few twists too many, pushing the story into a realm of excess contrivance. There’s not enough time or nuance to lend numerous narrative turnabouts plausibility.
  100. Asking for It
    In execution (and there are precious few of those), Asking for It is too much like its cardboard heroines: edgy on the outside, empty within. It’s the “Charlie’s Angels” freeze-pose of rape-revenge movies.
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