Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,760 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 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    Everything Everywhere is ultimately too much of a good thing, a novel idea driven to the point of exhaustion.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. Mother Schmuckers
    The Guits’ provocation is about as amiable as something so abjectly appalling can be, though it’s perhaps a few jaw-dropping shocks (or a few uproarious belly-laughs) short of the cult status it seeks.
  20. This Much I Know to Be True
    This remarkable performance documentary may be for the Nick Cave-curious exclusively, but for them (us) it is close to essential.
  21. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    It’s the fastest, funniest “Madea” movie in quite some time.
  22. The Batman
    This grounded, frequently brutal and nearly three-hour film noir registers among the best of the genre, even if — or more aptly, because — what makes the film so great is its willingness to dismantle and interrogate the very concept of superheroes.
  23. Servants
    Servants is briskly shaped at just under 80 minutes, yet its alien-historical world-building is effective enough that you emerge from it feeling both out of time and out of breath: Any longer, and all humanity would bleed out of this earthly-but-ethereal conspiracy drama entirely.
  24. Big Gold Brick
    Everything and everyone lurches about in a desperate bid to be hilariously weird, and the effect is to make the proceedings feel hopelessly strained, as if they know that there’s nothing funny going on and thus must compensate via out-there quirkiness and constant mugging.
  25. The Automat
    The Automat taps into so many resonant aspects of what America used to be that to watch it is to be drawn into an enchanting and wistfully profound time-tripping reverie.
  26. Creation Stories
    As directed by Nick Moran in obvious imitation of executive producer Danny Boyle’s most hyperbolic style, scripted by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, this apparently loose interpretation of the subject’s memoir becomes a hyperventilating “Behind the Music” caricature, all familiar flash and precious little substance.
  27. Three Months
    Writer-director Jared Frieder’s feature debut feels like the LGBT equivalent of “Juno”: snappy and refreshingly nonjudgmental in dealing with the consequences of a risky one-night stand.
  28. The Other Me
    Its cast struggling against material with little real-world or emotional logic, the attempted “surreal” elements uninspired both conceptually and aesthetically, this is a misfire whose intentions are as murky as its results are hapless.
  29. Taurus
    This is about as valiantly unflattering as vanity projects get. The bad news is that the wispily tragic character of “Cole,” his alienated, self-destructive but wildly popular alter ego, hardly seems worth Baker’s extensive efforts.
  30. The Last Bus
    For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes
  31. The Burning Sea
    The movie has every right to be fiction, but the heart of its drama lies in its patina of plausibility.
  32. Against the Ice
    To reduce a titanic struggle for survival in one of the most inhospitable climes on earth to such by-the-numbers drama is in many ways akin to standing on a jagged frozen peak, gazing across blizzard-assailed permafrost plains to crumbling white cliffs and ice shelfs beyond and thinking “Snow.”
  33. The Novelist's Film
    Ultimately, The Novelist’s Film defends the idea of drift and hiatus, of time spent idling to hear your own thoughts, in their own sweet time.
  34. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    It would be generous to call the film a continuation of the “Chainsaw” saga. It’s more like a blood-soaked but unscary footnote.
  35. Dog
    Dog is a lowbrow but by no means lazy crowd-pleaser, one where the fun Tatum and company took in making it translates directly to the pleasure we take in watching.
  36. Taste
    Lê Bảo’s rich film reaches further back too, beyond the politics of globalization and migration, beyond even culture, into a pre-ethnographic past, to see us as trapped animals, paradoxically dehumanized by the sunless concrete ugliness of human civilization.
  37. Robe of Gems
    The problem, then, is that too much of this is dispiriting without also being enlightening — the view Gallardo takes is almost that of a bird’s eye, showing much from an emotional remove but revealing little beyond surface-level horrors and characters so numb to it all that we’re left with little choice but to feel the same way.
  38. Rimini
    This is not, in the end, a tale of hubris brought low, or even of a tacky life staring down a long lens at a tawdry, dwindling death. Instead it’s a chilling parable about the sins of the father becoming the punishments of the son, and about the moral arc of the universe bending, across generations, toward the coldest justice imaginable.
  39. Alcarràs
    The film balances a bristling political conscience against its tenderly observed domestic drama.
  40. Peter von Kant
    Everything in Fassbinder’s rightly canonized movie is fake, except the emotions. In Ozon’s loving, diverting but inessential homage, everything is real except the bitter, glycerine tears.
  41. The Passengers of the Night
    An airy, low-key drama that doesn’t suffer for its lack of narrative tension, The Passengers of the Night further proves the old adage about the journey mattering more the destination.
  42. Nobody's Hero
    Moonlighting as a broad bedroom farce, this heavily plotted but oddly low-energy film winds up too distracted and diluted to score as a vital political satire.
  43. The Line
    As with nearly all great drama, The Line is about conflict, although this particular narrative feels downright radical in the way it rejects aggression as an acceptable means of resolving problems.
  44. Before, Now & Then
    Before, Now & Then moves with its own dreamy cadence, with narrative developments washing over the film like waves. Closing your eyes once it’s over, you might even experience the sensation of having been in the water all afternoon as those gentle waves lapped over you — and longing to return to them.
  45. The Outfit
    If you’re picturing shades of Kubrick’s “The Killing,” but with better clothes, fewer bullets and a self-effacing English fellow quietly trying to defuse the situation, you wouldn’t be far off.
  46. Coma
    As difficult as it can be to tell what’s real and what’s not here, it’s even more difficult to care: “Coma” seems to have poured out of Bonello stream-of-consciousness style, and analyzing it is about as rewarding as trying to make sense of the half-remembered dream your friend won’t stop talking about.
  47. Dark Glasses
    While it wouldn’t exactly be accurate to say that Dark Glasses was worth waiting a decade for, a world in which Argento continues working till the bitter end is preferable to one in which we don’t have movies like this at all.
  48. Both Sides of the Blade
    Denis’ latest sees her applying her usual rigorous form and psychological curiosity to material that tends to inspire more generic directorial treatment, teasing out a rich, nuanced exploration of female desire from the fault lines of an ostensibly simple narrative.
  49. Uncharted
    Uncharted is a lively but thinly scripted and overlong mad-dash caper movie, propelled by actors you wish, after a while, had more interesting things to say and do.
  50. Flux Gourmet
    To call “Flux Gourmet” an acquired taste would be an understatement. It’s really more of an elaborate inside joke by Strickland on the peculiar relationship between artists and the institutions that fund, develop and encourage their folly.
  51. Superior
    Superior feels like a John Dahl movie given a “Twin Peaks” vibe on a Hal Hartley budget, with just the odd dash of Old Hollywood thrown in for good measure, like the deliberately “Rear Window”-aping, flashbulb-popping finale.
  52. The Pact
    This well-dressed midcentury period piece keeps teasing a darker, more perverse take on a familiar story of cross-generational creative mentorship. Yet despite a performance of unnerving severity by Birthe Neumann as the rancorous Blixen, the film remains too polite and light on incident to deliver on that promise.
  53. The In Between
    The movie is at its best during the flashback scenes detailing their genuinely tender romance. It fares less well when they are separated and inhabit different realms.
  54. Bigbug
    The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future.
  55. Supercool
    This energetic spin through high school antics redolent of everything since “Ferris Bueller” is colorful and amusing enough to entertain viewers looking for a familiar mix of bad-taste gags in a squeaky-clean suburban setting.
  56. The Fabulous Filipino Brothers
    It would be unfair to expect an amusing but slight comedy like this one to serve as a substantial political statement. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for any movie that reminds us, in a heartfelt but unassuming way, that we are many, but we are one.
  57. Blacklight
    If you approach it with sufficiently lowered expectations, and have fond memories of the ’70s paranoid dramas that obviously inspired director and co-writer Mark Williams, this might be your house-brand jam.
  58. Marry Me
    The bar for rom-coms is not high, and this one, ludicrous as it often is, inches over the bar. But I would no more call it a good movie than I’d pretend fast food is high in nutrients.
  59. The Sky Is Everywhere
    The Sky Is Everywhere finds director Josephine Decker indulging in affectation overload in an effort to imbue her adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s young-adult novel with uplifting magic. Whereas individual moments might work on their own, however, the “Madeline’s Madeline” auteur’s latest never provides its romantic tale with room to breathe, so intent is it about operating with maximum whimsicality.
  60. Procession
    Procession is, in its own elegant and uneasy way, an inspiring film, idealistically invested in cinema itself as a medium for confession, confrontation and self-expression, not least when Greene hands over the camera to other filmmakers in need of its power.
  61. I Want You Back
    Despite some pacing issues and predictable plotlines, the film keeps us wholeheartedly engaged with well-drawn, well-performed characters, grounded shenanigans and sweet, sentimental commentary on heartache.
  62. Kimi
    It’s a welcome reminder that less, in the movies, can sometimes be more.
  63. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
    Donji’s screenplay finds an ideal balance of gentle humor and life-affirming drama.
  64. Death on the Nile
    It’s a moderately diverting dessert that carries you right along. It never transcends the feeling that you’re seeing a relic injected with life serum, but that, in a way, is part of its minor-league charm.
  65. Catch the Fair One
    Catch the Fair One is activist filmmaking at its most compelling. Before you run away from the notion, consider this: It doesn’t feel like this tough, relentlessly dark thriller is trying to push some kind of political point, even if so many of its creative choices succeed in doing exactly that.
  66. Moonfall
    Sure, Moonfall is all kinds of stupid, but it’s a heckuva lot funnier than Adam McKay’s all-star satire. I had a blast, and would gladly saddle up for a second viewing.
  67. Jackass Forever
    You can only hope, for these dudes’ sakes, that “Jackass” isn’t forever. But for now it’s earning its yucks, and its yuck.
  68. Lucy and Desi
    A nimble and fascinating documentary.
  69. Summering
    Nostalgia may be the strongest emotion engendered by this breeze-blown dandelion seed of a film, which nods to the bittersweet complexities of growing up and confronting adulthood, but never gets as far as fully dramatizing them.
  70. The Janes
    In sticking to the facts, it remains plenty rousing.
  71. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
    Riveting ... Kennedy not only builds a case against Boeing but offers an object lesson in the tragic consequences of corporate greed and hubris.
  72. Utama
    [A] sublime, quietly elegiac feature debut.
  73. The Territory
    This short, sharply crafted Sundance premiere makes an impact with both its bleak, blunt messaging and its muscular formal construction, as the turf war in question takes on the heated urgency of a thriller.
  74. Leonor Will Never Die
    Escobar is after something deeper than parody. She wants audiences to question how fictional strongmen have been idealized as real-world saviors.
  75. I Didn't See You There
    I Didn’t See You There is affecting even when it shuts us out, coming across as the sincere, frustrated expression of someone who’s tired of explaining himself and his position even to a sympathetic audience.
  76. Navalny
    The film flashes back to the poisoning, and it could be the most sickening and calamitous suspense-thriller episode you ever saw.
  77. The Exiles
    Columbus and Klein present a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives. The results are untidy and unbalanced, but derive considerable energy from that eccentric approach.
  78. Resurrection
    It winds up several stops north of bonkers, in a finale that shoots for transgressive, psycho-biological role-reversal, but plays like 1994’s Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Junior” given a torture-porn makeover.
  79. Nanny
    Jusu meticulously calibrates the interactions between her characters, revealing a nuanced understanding of race and class relations.
  80. The Princess
    A perfectly timed, compulsively watchable once-over-lightly documentary. ... After all [the recent] dramatic treatments, it’s galvanizing to see the real story laid out exactly as it happened — or, more precisely, as it happened and as it was presented to the public, those being, quite often, two very different things.
  81. Nothing Compares
    [An] incisive and poignant documentary ... Sinéad O’Connor was a fire that went out too fast. "Nothing Compares" makes you see it’s still burning.
  82. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    Palm Trees and Power Lines finds a truth, one it wrenches out of an experience.
  83. La Soga: Salvation
    Despite the mayhem, the film remains curiously inert, unable to generate even the B-grade buzz of a lower-tier Liam Neeson paycheck picture.
  84. In the Forest
    This quasi-horror tale of bickering vacationers running afoul of disturbed locals strings together various well-worn clichés with a notable lack of suspense, plausibility and style, while excelling in the realm of characters behaving like complete idiots.
  85. A Taste of Hunger
    The result certainly isn’t fast food, but neither is it fine dining.
  86. Home Team
    Kevin James is at once the film’s most obvious brand signifier and its most surprising asset: As a heavily fictionalized Payton, his surly hangdog energy gives this corndog of a movie what flavor it has.
  87. The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild
    While there are certain shots that provoke an emotional pull, whether that be fear, sadness or wonderment, there’s a synthetic quality to them. It leaves us yearning for a full immersion into this world of make-believe. Environments lack depth and dimension, coming across flat and uninteresting.
  88. You Won't Be Alone
    The film’s last act brings everything full circle in a way that should satisfy both horror and art-house audiences, but then the movie, like its protagonist, is never content to be just one thing.
  89. Watcher
    Watcher, if it has an agenda beyond being a fun, shivery, fish-out-of-water chiller, is not so much a manifesto to Believe All Women as it is a reminder to all women watching to at least believe ourselves.
  90. Speak No Evil
    The director shoots and cuts almost every scene so that the most innocuous action seems charged with the expectation that something awful is about to erupt, cranking viewer tension to an unpleasant degree.
  91. Something in the Dirt
    The bargain Benson and Moorhead make with audiences goes something like this: If we buy in, then we can participate in what often feels more like an elevated form of play than some attempt to compete with slick, studio product.
  92. Master
    Not all of Diallo’s thematic queries land, and at times, she weakens her ideas by over-explaining them. Nevertheless, her fearless interrogation resonates like a penetrating scream you can’t unhear.
  93. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    Writer-director Adamma Ebo’s indie comedy (produced by sister Adanne) should tickle those who share her skepticism of organized religion — especially the profit-oriented variety — but doesn’t go much deeper than the 15-minute short film on which it’s based.
  94. Hatching
    Amid the mischievous mayhem that ensues, Bergholm and Rautsi deserve credit for not abandoning Tinja’s mother.
  95. God's Country
    Julian Higgins’ first feature can be taken as a drama with thriller elements or a low-key thriller with atypical dramatic nuance, working either way as a quietly effective balance between genre, social issue and character study elements.
  96. Emily the Criminal
    Despite the fact that the camera rarely backs away from studying Plaza’s wary eyes and tense mouth in close-up, this character piece feels as distanced from its taciturn subject as if it was merely monitoring her on security camera.
  97. Alice
    The power of the film — and of Palmer’s phenomenal performance — is watching Alice grow into her voice.
  98. Bob Spit: We Do Not Like People
    “Bob Spit” is most notable for its formal approach, which intermingles animated interviews of Angeli with a bizarre, at times surreal narrative featuring characters from his comic strips.
  99. Living
    Living isn’t nearly as subtle as it purports to be, although it can feel that way, considering how much these characters hold back — and this, one supposes, is what audiences want from an Ishiguro script.
  100. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    McCormack is fantastic in a role so subtle it could appear flatlined and phony if people aren’t playing attention.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »