Variety's Scores

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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
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  1. Dual
    Dual is in fact a fairly astute comedy. The laughs come not from jokes so much as sharp jabs of truth — wince-inducing insights into the subjects most movies won’t touch, like our fear of death, intimacy and being forgotten.
  2. Call Jane
    The female empowerment message comes through loud and clear in “Call Jane,” especially in Banks’ performance. What’s missing from the picture is the threat of discovery, the dangling sword of Damocles that might chasten anyone taking so much responsibility on themselves.
  3. Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick, in its quick verbal exchanges, its naked sexuality, its general air of busting taboos as if they were oversize balloons, is recognizably a Lena Dunham movie. But it’s the first one of her projects in which the parts don’t quite add up, because it seems as if what we’re watching hasn’t been so much created as contrived.
  4. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Cha Cha Real Smooth works overtime to be an honest movie, and it also works overtime to ingratiate itself. In a sense, it accomplishes both aims, but I’m not sure that they entirely go together.
  5. Breaking
    Boyega is the most interesting thing about the movie — specifically, the way he portrays this tragic, psychologically damaged individual fighting for what matters to him — although it’s also noteworthy for featuring Michael Kenneth Williams’ final performance as the hostage negotiator.
  6. Fresh
    Fresh comes across as a carefree bit of bloody fun. But there’s considerably more going on beneath the surface, and the allegory is open-ended enough to hit a range of viewers on different levels.
  7. Fire of Love
    Fire of Love, which has been directed by Sara Dosa with a discursive, let’s-try-it-on lyricism, is like one of Werner Herzog’s documentaries about fearless outliers, only this one is touched with romance.
  8. When You Finish Saving the World
    To When You’re Finished Saving the World, being good is exhausting and miserable, and aspiring to be good is even worse. Joy exists only to be taken away.
  9. A Love Song
    A Love Song should resonate with those who seek truth more than incident from their movies.
  10. Emergency
    Emergency, in its racially aware way, turns into something that feels not unlike an ’80s comedy. It has winning flashes of wit, of observation, of telling satire. But it’s fundamentally about the situation.
  11. New York Ninja
    The on-screen actors’ raw hamming is nicely complemented by the voice performers’ relatively deadpan contributions, which only render the dialogue and situations even more absurd.
  12. The Tiger Rising
    Designed for maximum corniness, The Tiger Rising peppers its action with enough references to God, upturned-to-the-heavens gazes and warm enveloping light to make clear its function as a homily.
  13. WarHunt
    A wink here or a smirk there, and the whole kit-and-caboodle could have collapsed into laughable nonsense way before “Warhunt” finally does run off the rails. You still might chuckle from time to time, but not as often as any plot synopsis might lead you to expect.
  14. The Royal Treatment
    Takes expected genre trappings and infuses them with unexpected delights, creating an enlightened, enchanting and entertaining feature.
  15. Memory Box
    Through an ingenious blend of image and music, Memory Box opens channels that allow our own experience to empathetically blend with those of the characters in a mix of imagination and reality.
  16. The Laureate
    Well-acted, nicely crafted and a handsome period piece within modest means, this isn’t the most novel, memorable or intellectually deep enterprise of its type. But it will satisfy viewers looking for a slightly racier variation on “Downton Abbey” terrain.
  17. Courage
    Given ongoing developments, it’s no surprise the film concludes abruptly, and knowing that there’s been no power change in the country so far adds an inherent level of bleakness, yet Paluyan captures the hopes of a population that spans across gender and generations, and there will always be something uplifting about watching people fight peacefully for freedom.
  18. Scream
    The new Scream is about as good as “Scream 2” was — it keeps the thrill of the original “Scream” bouncing in the air like a blood-drenched balloon — but the film is basically a set of variations on a very old sleight-of-hand fear blueprint. Except that it’s now old enough to seem new again.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    Legend, adventure and poetry fuse to make this engrossing, if overlong, film material.
  20. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
    The result is yet another wearisome tale that inelegantly depicts themes like acceptance, understanding and diversity within a saga that has always been rather clumsy with its messaging around such weighty topics.
  21. The Pink Cloud
    Gerbase’s thoughtful, precise little film would have marked an impressive enough arrival under normal circumstances. As it is, it might endure as more era-evocative than many of the intentional pandemic dramas to come.
  22. Poupelle of Chimney Town
    As rich as the visuals can be at times, the music has it beat: Chimney Town may be a small-minded, smoke-choked industrial prison state for most, but to an optimistic loner like Lubicchi, it sounds like a symphony and glitters with possibility.
  23. See for Me
    Skyler Davenport’s lead turn in director Randall Okita’s no-nonsense thriller (which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last summer) will be worth remembering well after the January doldrums have passed.
  24. Belle
    In a sense, movies aren’t so different from the virtual worlds a platform like U offers, and this one promises a special kind of escapism while going out of its way to keep it real.
  25. The Commando
    A talky and lethargic home-invasion thriller, The Commando amounts to an inept crime drama stuffed with banal dialogue and irrelevant supporting characters to pad its feature-length running time.
  26. The 355
    The 355” is a vigorous formula action spy flick with an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire plot that mostly holds your attention, periodically revs the senses, and gives its actors just enough to work with to put a basic feminine spin on the genre. I make a point of that because the film does too.
  27. Munich: The Edge of War
    Immersively crafted but never emotionally involving.
  28. Marx Can Wait
    Straightforward in concept yet psychologically profound, the film draws the audience in with a lingering sadness made more potent by the director’s clear yet unspoken sense of guilt.
  29. Jockey
    Jockey could be seen as a fairly conventional estranged-family drama. As sports movies go, it’s far more radical, showing relatively little interest in the outcome of any particular race. But in either genre, the movie stands apart from — and above — its peers. That’s a testament not only to the performances but also to Bentley’s approach, which begs to be seen on the big screen.
  30. American Underdog
    American Underdog is a thoroughly predictable yet hugely entertaining sports biopic that is bound to please almost anyone who’s not a sourball cynic or a snarky critic.
  31. A Castle for Christmas
    Despite its smattering of shortcomings, A Castle For Christmas is gently disarming, heartening, holiday-themed escapism that’s as satisfying as a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter’s night.
  32. The Velvet Queen
    This elegant, unusual documentary shifts the role of the game-spotter from that of non-violent hunter — in pursuit of one prized target — to passive but duly wide-eyed observer, accepting but also appreciating the limits of our access.
  33. The Matrix Resurrections
    Essentially a greatest hits concert and a cover version rolled into one (complete with flashback clips to high points from past installments), the new movie is slick but considerably less ambitious in scope than the two previous sequels.
  34. Margrete: Queen of the North
    The slower stretches — like the entire first hour — have a tendency to plod, which gives ample opportunity to feast your eyes on Søren Schwarzberg’s grandly gloomy production design and Manon Rasmussen’s superb, elaborate costuming, but also makes the story rather too easy to disengage from.
  35. The Novice
    Isabelle Fuhrman infuses Dall with an ambiguous glower of ambition that’s scary and human.
  36. Mother/Android
    Tomlin’s screenplay deserves credit for mixing things up, introducing new characters and narrative turnabouts. But nothing is again as bluntly compelling as the early going, and despite hardworking principal performances, these characters and their movie lack the emotional depth to pull off an earnestly teary, draggy finale.
  37. The King's Man
    The film oscillates, rather awkwardly, between grandiose cartoon heroics and a kind of dutiful flatness.
  38. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    Returning director Jon Watts — whose bright, slightly dorky touch lends a kind of continuity to this latest trilogy — wrangles this unwieldy premise into a consistently entertaining superhero entry, tying up two decades’ of loose ends in the process.
  39. National Champions
    As timely as last night’s episode of “ESPN Sports Center,” and as riveting as a well-crafted tick-tock suspenser, National Champions adroitly avoids most of the pitfalls common to conventional “message movies” by raising and debating issues in the context of a solid and involving drama that can be enjoyed even by people who couldn’t tell an offside kick from a cheerleader’s cartwheel.
  40. I Was a Simple Man
    All Yogi’s actors work in subtle, effective deference to his natural command of atmosphere and place: This is a film where Hawaiian rainfall has as prominent and evocative a voice as any human presence, and where the growth of a tree marks time as clearly as the deepening crevices in a character’s face.
  41. Don't Look Up
    Don’t Look Up plays like the leftie answer to “Armageddon” — which is to say, it ditches the Bruckheimer approach of assembling a bunch of blue-collar heroes to rocket out to space and nuke the approaching comet, opting instead to spotlight the apathy, incompetence and financial self-interest of all involved.
  42. Being the Ricardos
    The dialogue in Being the Ricardos has the blunt directness, dagger wit, and perfectly cut corners of Sorkinese ­­— a sound that might be described as hardass Talmudic screwball. Beyond that, though, the entire movie is a piece of thrillingly stylized compression. It gets a real head of steam going, a hurtling energy and anxiety that rides on everything Lucy is feeling.
  43. Wolf
    A shockingly dull look at a fascinating disorder affecting humans who believe they were born into the wrong species.
  44. Last Shoot Out
    It’s a marked improvement over Feifer’s own “Catch the Bullet,” released just last September — and it features a ferociously nasty turn by Bruce Dern in a role that recalls a character from yet another golden oldie, Walter Brennan’s vicious Old Man Clanton in “My Darling Clementine.”
  45. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    It establishes its own identity, occasionally improving upon its cinematic predecessor enough to make it a worthwhile watch.
  46. Torn
    Though Torn flirts with filmmaking-as-therapy, it doesn’t dig discomfitingly deep.
  47. Betrayed
    Handsomely mounted and deftly dramatized, it’s an agonized study of suffering and treachery, and no less valuable — or powerful — for being regrettably familiar.
  48. West Side Story
    There are scenes in Spielberg’s version that will melt you, scenes that will make your pulse race, and scenes where you simply sit back and revel in the big-spirited grandeur of it all.
  49. Nightmare Alley
    A gorgeous, fantastically sinister moral fable about the cruel predictability of human nature and the way entire systems — from carnies and con men to shrinks and Sunday preachers — are engineered to exploit it.
  50. A Boy Called Christmas
    “Christmas” is a cut above the usual holiday dross.
  51. Lady Buds
    While the personalities spotlit here are easy to root for, what emerges is less an upbeat look at female enterprise than yet another case of corporate money and political mechanizations killing off community-based small businesses to further enrich their deep-pocketed, invasive new rivals. It’s an ultimately depressing trajectory, though the film itself remains engaging and well crafted.
  52. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
    In any decade, the film’s bevy of unexplained details, dropped subplots, paper-thin characterizations and fright-free mayhem would disappoint.
  53. House of Gucci
    House of Gucci is an icepick docudrama that has a great deal of fun with its grand roster of ambitious scoundrels, but it’s never less than a straight-faced and nimbly accomplished movie.
  54. Prayers for the Stolen
    The film may be called “Prayers for the Stolen,” but it is much more a heartbroken lament for the circuits that are broken when the stealing happens, and for the spaces the stolen leave behind.
  55. Children of the Enemy
    An abundance of earnestness is hardly a fatal flaw in a story as innately complex and moving as this one, especially once it moves beyond its most obvious crescendo, and instead of bowing out in a note of relief and resolution, dares to re-complicate the situation.
  56. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice Pizza delivers a piping-hot, jumbo slice-of-life look at how it felt to grow up on the fringes of the film industry circa 1973.
  57. Encanto
    Encanto is a lively, lovely, lushly enveloping digitally animated musical fairy tale.
  58. Sing 2
    True to their brand, Illumination has engineered another easy-to-swallow confection designed to maximize audience delight, whether on first or fortieth viewing, although this time, there’s almost zero nutritional value.
  59. Love It Was Not
    The result of long years of research, Love It Was Not is remarkable not only for its unusual central story and unique creative execution, but also for its extensive eyewitness testimonies.
  60. Bruised
    Impressive as Berry’s commitment to the role can be, there’s a mirthless predictability to the whole ordeal. This pro-forma sports drama, which clearly means so much to its creator, unfolds pretty much exactly as you’d expect, leaning hard on pathos, when what it really needs is personality.
  61. Mayor Pete
    Mayor Pete shows us the trial by fire of it all, and also the jubilant grind.
  62. Swan Song
    Spinning a winning, delicate love story would be almost impossible if not for the performances of the leads. Ali and Harris have impeccable chemistry, making us feel the profundity and stakes of their romantic relationship.
  63. Simple as Water
    A graceful, touching sampler of dilemmas few viewers are likely to have experienced, even as they become ever-more-common reality for the less fortunate in many nations.
  64. tick, tick...Boom!
    What’s refreshing about the debuting director’s approach is that it feels relatively egoless. His style is playful and energetic, often intercutting between multiple threads within a given song or scene, but it doesn’t feel as if Miranda is calling attention to himself so much as trying to open up the show.
  65. Untitled Dave Chappelle Documentary
    In the end, this is the movie — not “The Closer” — that deserves the widest possible audience.
  66. Amira
    The portrait of Palestinian identity it finally presents is so superficial and regressive that its saving grace is that it’s also very difficult to believe.
  67. Labyrinth of Cinema
    Opening with a riotous bombardment of sound and image that risks confusing and losing some viewers even as it sends others into rapturous delight, Labyrinth of Cinema then makes sense of the chaos and emerges as a touching plea for peace and an exuberant celebration of the artifice and transformative power of cinema.
  68. Heart of Champions
    As inspirational college sports movies go, Heart of the Champions doesn’t go, or row, nearly far enough off the beaten path. It’s every bit as boilerplate as its generic title might indicate.
  69. The Peacock's Paradise
    [An] aggravatingly wispy and precious film.
  70. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
    It’s a small, impressionistic, oddly heartfelt movie about beauty, stardom, adoration, exploitation, and loss. Oh, is it ever about loss.
  71. One Shot
    One Shot manages to avoid seeming an overly schematic technical stunt. The mayhem depicted isn’t always fully convincing, but it does have a certain live-wire edge.
  72. Uppercase Print
    In Uppercase Print, the fangs of the past are sharp, but muzzled.
  73. Beans
    Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.
  74. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    Clifford the Big Red Dog becomes a rowdy chase film — as agreeable as Clifford himself, as simultaneously cute and in-your-face, and as genially random in its ability to create chaos.
  75. Love Hard
    With its prevailing sentiments on dating in the digital age feeling more than a decade old, and themes centered on honesty and shallowness ringing hollow, this feature is fairly forgettable.
  76. Playground
    Wandel’s immersive, impressive debut is rigorous in its resolute focus on one little girl fighting a lonely, frightened battle for her future selfhood, in which what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the shape and measure of her developing soul.
  77. The Deep House
    The tension provided by dank claustrophobia and threat of suffocation, as air supplies dwindle, makes this house a very scary place to be.
  78. Dangerous
    Dangerous is a bits-and-pieces action thriller with a fluky premise and a lead actor good enough to embody it. Made in the slipshod, overlit style of a straight-to-streaming potboiler, it’s not a rip-off so much as a film built out of spare parts from other movies, to the point that it never fully becomes itself.
  79. Dead & Beautiful
    A middling horror-thriller and social satire that opens with an intriguing premise but never probes its cashed-up characters deeply enough to create gripping drama from the heightened hedonism or existential crises they experience after acquiring new powers.
  80. The Last Forest
    Rather than taking a detached anthropological tour of the community, Bolognesi lets the Yanomami present themselves in their own words and on their own terms, thus enlivening everything from their mealtimes to their mythology.
  81. Red Notice
    A fun, fast-paced and frequently amusing divertissement.
  82. Night Teeth
    The dark-side-of-the-L.A.-club-scene premise has potential, but the movie turns out to be a cut-and-paste thriller without any night-world bloom to it.
  83. Becoming Cousteau
    Becoming Cousteau, Liz Garbus’s ardent and transporting documentary, is one of those movies that puts a life together so beautifully that you feel it heightening your awareness of everyday things.
  84. Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen
    It’s a performance film, a delectable slice of nostalgia, and a testament to how one gorgeously raucous rock ‘n’ roll moment can reverberate through the decades.
  85. All Is Forgiven (2007)
    While its succession of emotionally loaded moments never crystallize into a vivid whole, the strong performances and highly effective use of music should put audiences in a forgiving mood.
  86. Sisters
    [A] generations-spanning yet emotionally and visually flat familial movie.
  87. Finch
    Despite the bleak backdrop, Finch manages to stay true to the fuzzy ring of its basic idea, delivering a family-friendly movie that is big-hearted, comfortingly traditional and bolstered by a genuine love of dogs.
  88. Speer Goes to Hollywood
    A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants.
  89. Golden Voices
    [A] neatly observed, rueful Israeli dramedy.
  90. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    On some level, every “Paranormal Activity” film is about monsters caught on camera, but in this one the demons remain scariest when they’re sight unseen
  91. Roh
    Emir Ezwan’s directorial debut is a spare, eerie tale rooted in folk superstitions that are rendered credibly vivid by its thick yet subtle atmospherics.
  92. Only the Animals
    Ultimately, Moll’s film is a cautionary tale for the lonely among us, a reminder that one step away from idealizing romance lies the risk of becoming a fool for love, which just might get you killed.
  93. Army of Thieves
    Army of Thieves is one of those bombastically blithe and fanciful Netflix action movies, in this case with a romantic heart.
  94. Eternals
    Zhao’s sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She’s a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch.
  95. Warning
    This is sci-fi cinema of a relatively subtle, intriguing stripe, without the usual emphasis on fantastical or action imagery. Still, it’s slickly engaging enough to please more open-minded genre fans, and brainy enough to attract those who want something other than another laser shoot ’em up.
  96. The Phantom of the Open
    The jokes write themselves, though in The Phantom of the Open, screenwriter Simon Farnaby and director Craig Roberts make them sweeter and spryer than they could have been, while a wide-eyed, bucket-hatted Mark Rylance plays Flitcroft with abundant generosity of spirit.
  97. Four Hours at the Capitol
    The imagery of destruction and assault is powerful on its own terms; it’s in building the story of the participants’ motives and actions that Four Hours at the Capitol falters, making what could have been a definitive document into a deeply flawed one.
  98. Gensan Punch
    "Gensan” lands solid punches for the rights of disabled athletes and excels with its depiction of rigorous training and fierce combat. But we learn very little about the fighter’s life when he’s not wearing gloves.
  99. The Tsugua Diaries
    Whether wholly performed or partially authentic, The Tsugua Diaries wittily evokes the volatile mood swings of lockdown — how concentrated time with the same people can yield either irritation or intensified closeness from day to day, particularly in a sticky-hot summer haze.
  100. Hard Luck Love Song
    Instead of persuasive verisimilitude and compelling character development, we get scene after scene of Jesse waiting for something, anything.
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