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. Clara Sola
    Mesen’s delicate yet earthy, thoughtful yet sensual movie never tips its hand as to whether Clara’s abilities are real or imaginary — indeed it makes the line between fact and fantasy seem as nonsensical as it might to a horse — and it pays off in one of those obscurely uplifting endings.
  2. Hit the Road
    Like this extraordinary, ordinary family, latticed together by love yet supremely alive in their own individual hearts, Panah Panahi is not just part of a tradition, but his own filmmaker, finding new resonances in territory so familiar its power to surprise should have been thoroughly exhausted by now, but that here feels like a whole new universe.
  3. The Braves
    Without any modulation in the brazen, head-on-collision presentation, once the story takes a turn for the sappy, there is really nowhere for any subtlety or subtext to hide.
  4. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    Vitaletti’s storytelling, and ability to drum up tension or scares, is less potent here than his attention to evoking a general climate of close-minded religious hypocrisy.
  5. Deception
    Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception is a strange, stifling but frequently intriguing attempt to find a cinematic match for the literary voice of Philip Roth, from his autofictional 1990 novel of the same name.
  6. Mark, Mary & Some Other People
    Rosenfield and Law are such a likable duo — he clownish and earnest in equally uninhibited fashion, she brazen and fierce with an underlying sweetness — that the film remains amusing and spry even as it coasts along a path that will feel familiar to most rom-com fans.
  7. Clean
    Obvious and derivative in borderline-shameless fashion, it’s a B-movie knock-off with little originality and even less flair.
  8. Yakuza Princess
    While it generally lacks dramatic oomph and the story is confusing at times, Yakuza Princess delivers plenty of visual excitement.
  9. Wars
    There’s no obvious release or relief here, however: Ducharme’s is an untidy reckoning, as solemn and reticent as the film surrounding her.
  10. Every Single Minute
    Hníková’s absorbing, intelligent, subtly provocative film resolutely avoids passing judgment on the wisdom of raising a boy in the bubble of his parents’ undivided attention; just see if you can do the same.
  11. Everybody's Talking About Jamie
    The songs are nearly all bouncy, look-at-me numbers intended for Jamie and his inner circle . . . . But there’s one new addition that makes all the difference: an original number called “This Was Me,” a terrific ’80s-style anthem (performed by Grant and Frankie Goes to Hollywood lead singer Holly Johnson) that provides younger audiences with some much-needed queer history.
  12. The Year of the Everlasting Storm
    Here we have seven escape routes, each one reconnecting us to a world inevitably transformed by the pandemic — a world where art lives on.
  13. Vacation Friends
    Vacation Friends does earn a fair share of guffaws with its familiar mix of R-rated raunch and feel-good sentiment, and it’s lightly amusing to see the well-cast players breathe a satisfying degree of fresh life into a predictable scenario that recalls “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” “What About Bob?” and a dozen or so similarly contrived comedies.
  14. He's All That
    While it’s possible to make the formulaic and familiar resound fantastically, that concept has evaded these filmmakers here. Neither bland regurgitation nor innovative retelling, the remake falls somewhere in between, suffering greatly by not establishing a more distinctive identity.
  15. The Macaluso Sisters
    To imagine the decades-long catch-and-release sweep of a single lifespan and condense it into one sub-90-minute film is a feat; to do so about multiple interconnected lives without losing definition is even more impressive.
  16. Who You Think I Am
    Who You Think I Am is a surprise package that plays its trump cards with shrugging insouciance, yielding giggles and gasps in equal measure, sometimes at once.
  17. Anne at 13,000 ft
    Anne at 13,000 ft might look like mumblecore, but it plays as a psychological horror and a ticking-clock thriller that morphs into a wild, windswept tangle of incipient, but never quite arriving tragedy.
  18. Surge
    As an experiment in steering a potentially tight thriller entirely by one character’s irrational whims, it’s abrasively compelling, even if the go-go-go plotting doesn’t withstand closest scrutiny.
  19. Candyman
    The new Candyman references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.
  20. When I'm a Moth
    Timlin bears a good-enough resemblance, and gives as much of a rounded performance as she can. But this conception provides no insight into any real HRC, past or present, and seems trite even as a fictionalized act of hostility toward whatever she represents to the filmmakers. Which is, in a word, murky.
  21. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    Like virtually every stand-alone MCU movie to come before, “Shang-Chi” does a fine job of presenting its hero as a relatable everyman during the first half before spiraling off into bombastic, brain-numbing supernatural mayhem for the final act.
  22. La Civil
    This is a gripping and heartbreaking film that goes out with a whimper that hits harder than any kind of bang it could’ve mustered.
  23. Habit
    It’s an embarrassing vanity showcase that’s deliberately campy without actually being fun, and whose stalled-adolescent “transgression” may only appeal to a few actual adolescents.
  24. The Seer and the Unseen
    Without trivializing the matters at hand, The Seer and the Unseen tempers complex national interests with droll human ones.
  25. The Protégé
    There’s precious little in The Protégé that audiences haven’t seen before in some form or another, but that’s hardly a liability, since the script recombines those familiar elements in such entertaining ways, counting on Q, Jackson and Keaton to make these stock characters come alive.
  26. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
    In Last Man Standing, Broomfield comes close to answering the questions — of guilt and recrimination — that have hung over these murders for too long.
  27. Sweet Girl
    Aided by Steven Price’s enthusiastic score, Mendoza’s vigorous direction keeps things speeding along, and Momoa is such a charismatic presence — whether sensitively interacting with Rachel (skillfully embodied by Merced) or inventively snapping an adversary’s neck — that the proceedings’ lack of realism works to its advantage.
  28. The Meaning of Hitler
    We go into The Meaning of Hitler craving that millimeter of insight, of intrigue and revelation. And the film provides it. It ruminates on Hitler and the Third Reich in ways that churn up your platitudes.
  29. Zeros and Ones
    What Zeros and Ones does do — deliberately, calculatedly, in the kind of messy intuitive manner that’s been the director’s signature of late — is reproduce the general state of unease and insecurity that’s plagued most of us during lockdown.
  30. Reminiscence
    Reminiscence plays like a perfectly calibrated two-hour mirage of things we’ve seen before.
  31. Demonic
    At one point, a character in a coma is referred to as having Locked-In Syndrome, which means that she’s still aware of her surroundings but is totally unable to move. By the end of Demonic, you’ll know just how she feels.
  32. The Kissing Booth 3
    There’s plenty of fan service (including a whole new list for Elle and Lee to exhaust), but also a late-arriving sense of identity that gives this junk-food sequel just enough nutritional value to help its young audiences reconsider how to determine their own post-high school priorities.
  33. Bernstein's Wall
    What the documentary captures, profoundly, is that Leonard Bernstein was a fierce hedonist who worked hard to live the life he wanted.
  34. Ida Red
    What holds Ida Red together and gives it solidity is the relationships between Wyatt, Jeanie and Darla, which might not be entirely original but they don’t need to be thanks to good ensemble performances, with Hartnett very much at ease and Hublitz making an impression in her biggest role to date.
  35. Not Going Quietly
    Along with his editor Kent Bassett, Bruckman weaves these events together rather conventionally yet thoughtfully, making plenty of room for Barkan’s home life and appealingly chipper character that he somehow manages to maintain through all his battles.
  36. Crime Story
    Worse things have happened to Oscar winners, but it’s still unfortunate to see both Richard Dreyfuss and Mira Sorvino flailing in the inept muddle of Crime Story.
  37. The Lost Leonardo
    The Lost Leonardo is the first art-world documentary I’ve seen that captures what art becomes once it goes through the looking glass of greed: not just a commodity, but a way of transferring and manipulating power. It’s enough to make the Mona Lisa stop smiling.
  38. Days
    I confess my incapacity for his particular strain of slow cinema for two reasons: First, to let audiences know that it’s OK to be frustrated by the experience — you’re not alone. And second, so you might appreciate what it means that Days worked on me. Instead of leaning in, as I’m wont to do with challenging movies, I settled back into my chair and let the rhythm wash over me, lull me into its relaxing embrace.
  39. Don't Breathe 2
    In the case of Don’t Breathe 2, one reason the movie, for all the operatic (and often absurd) grisliness of its second half, isn’t quite as good as the original is that the original didn’t have a trace of that franchise self-consciousness.
  40. The River
    The River, concludes a trilogy consisting of “The Mountain” and “The Valley,” and while it’s his most objectively beautiful feature yet, it also gives nothing away, demanding a heightened engagement with both his artful mise-en-scène and his nation’s psychological state.
  41. The Last Matinee
    The Last Matinee is less effective as a straight horror film than it is as a self-conscious genre homage, providing excitement more of the eye-candy design than the visceral ilk. Still, it’s adequately diverting fare for those who’ll grok its somewhat insular appeal.
  42. Petite Solange
    Ropert’s understanding of how children furtively watch the adults around them, soaking up the friction, is well-observed and the best thing in this otherwise insipid film that perversely discards any shred of naturalism for an outdated and phony ingenuousness. Even the performances are airless, and consequently there’s no emotional investment in a family whose rapport is so clunkily established.
  43. Escape from Mogadishu
    Ryoo ramps things up impressively once all hope of protection from local forces evaporates. Audiences are treated to half an hour of top-class car chases and shootouts as the group attempt to make it safely across town and onto a rescue flight.
  44. Materna
    The film is formally beautiful almost to a fault, giving it a schematic quality that’s at odds with its roiling emotions.
  45. Rose
    Though the storied actress’ personality offers moments of charm and occasional depth, a weak, cliché-riddled script reduces almost everyone to a maximum of two characteristics.
  46. Hinterland
    As impressive as Homefront is in the way it envisions a distorted world, its fully-realized digital design is all exterior display, whereas Expressionism at its best transforms disturbed psychological states into a nightmarish reality.
  47. Respect
    Though Respect can feel a little soft in the drama department, it delivers the added pleasure of hearing Hudson re-create Franklin’s key songs, from the early jazz standards she covered for Columbia to her reinvention of the Otis Redding single that lends the film its name.
  48. PAW Patrol: The Movie
    Any crass consumerism is eclipsed by disarming, demonstrable themes and meaningful sentiments woven throughout the film’s textured fabric.
  49. Whirlybird
    The doc is a fascinating insight into how individual choices can shape the news.
  50. Free Guy
    Free Guy is a lot of fun, despite the fact that Levy and the screenwriters seem to be changing the rules as they go.
  51. Beckett
    It’s intriguing to see Filomarino experiment with the formula and exciting to imagine where his career might go from here.
  52. All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997)
    Despite its doctoral dissertation-style title, “All the Streets Are Silent” lacks a thesis: less a sociological study of the rapper-skater convergence than a celebration of a very specific type of guy in a very specific fragment of space and time.
  53. The Last Mercenary
    You could call the film a slightly absurd corruption thriller, an action movie with not enough action, or a by-the-numbers father-son bonding movie. Yet here’s what’s weird about it. The Last Mercenary thinks it’s a comedy, but not because anything in it is actually funny.
  54. Vivo
    Vivo is strategically contrived to hit audiences’ pleasure spots, blending a grown-up-friendly story of a Latin-music couple whose careers took them in separate directions with all the hyper-caffeinated comedy action the kiddos expect from the medium. Plus, the songs build on one another, hooking in your head and snowballing as the movie develops.
  55. Mosquito State
    Mosquito State gradually allows its mise-en-scène to swamp its human narrative, not that the latter offers us much to care about anyway. As far as we’re concerned, the mosquitoes can have it all.
  56. Fauna
    With a breezy 70 minute runtime, Fauna is a delightful puzzle of a film. Even as it leans heavily into its metafictional conceits, laying bare just how much of its second half, for instance, is pure fantasy (or is it?), Pereda’s actors find ways of unearthing emotionally wrenching moments.
  57. Lorelei
    Writer-director Sabrina Doyle’s fable-like tale of working-class Americans on the fringe navigates its elusive waters with compassion and care, even when it veers into some predictable shallows from time to time.
  58. Twist
    Carol Reed’s “Oliver!,” now 53 years old, feels more authentically youthful and vibrant than this try-hard “how do you do, fellow kids” exercise.
  59. Resort to Love
    To say that Resort to Love is slight would be akin to snatching a romance novel out of your closest friend’s hands while she sits reading and sipping a margarita on a beach. Why would you do that? It’s summer. Leave the girl her pleasures.
  60. Ride the Eagle
    The movie’s seriocomic consideration of how messy familial, sexual and professional relationships can be should have a well-nigh universal resonance.
  61. The Boy Behind the Door
    It’s another effective use of a simple premise and modest means to create a nicely nerve-jangling thriller.
  62. The Suicide Squad
    The Suicide Squad is cunningly scuzzy, disreputable fun.
  63. Sheep Without a Shepherd
    A story like this can’t help seeming far-fetched at times but the emotional stakes are so high and the plot so pacy and intricately woven that most viewers will gladly suspend disbelief and enjoy a ride packed with hair-raising close calls and narrow escapes.
  64. Jungle Cruise
    It’s like watching a romantic comedy while strapped to a roller-coaster with a VR headset on. Jungle Cruise is at once a love story, a made-for-4DX action movie, a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style fairy tale featuring a ghostly conquistador (Edgar Ramirez) and his pewter-armored henchman with digital snakes slithering through them, and God knows what else.
  65. Lamb
    No matter how pure your intentions nor how real your pain, these ancient myths all teach us, debts always come due, and the chilling denouement of Jóhannsson’s dark, deliberate debut suggests that is what Lamb is: a modern-day take on some ancient, pre-Disneyfication fairy tale or a nursery rhyme with a sinister history encoded into its Spartan melody.
  66. Fully Realized Humans
    Fully Realized Humans solidifies its central dynamic through alternately jokey and heartfelt dialogue that rings true, and via its leads’ sure-footed performances as committed partners grappling with a crazed stew of issues involving control, doubt and masculinity.
  67. Broken Diamonds
    It strikes not a single authentic chord, and that also goes for the lead performance of Ben Platt, whose overdone theater-kid turn further dooms the material’s stabs at humor and pathos.
  68. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
    Painstakingly conceived and teeming with raw, unbridled energy, Eyimofe offers a sumptuous, keen-eyed look at modern Lagosian life.
  69. In Front of Your Face
    Hong’s film and his radiant star are not made for melancholy, and so instead they laugh — at the absurdity of hoping for some castle in the air when there’s so much life all around you, always, right in front of your face.
  70. The Green Knight
    As a movie, The Green Knight feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry.
  71. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    It’s a functional piece of exploitation — an efficient little crime-porn snuff-thriller potboiler. It’s like a fast-food meal that makes you think, “Okay, that wasn’t good for me, but I got what I paid for.” A film like this one is a junk-franchise burger: tasty, processed, and basically fake.
  72. Last Letter from Your Lover
    Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible — and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison.
  73. Old
    Old, like most Shyamalan movies, has a catchy hook along with some elegant filmmaking gambits. But instead of developing his premise in an insidious and powerful way, the writer-director just keeps throwing a lot of things at you.
  74. Jolt
    Once again displaying the kinetic grace, authoritative physicality and heavy-duty footwear that have made her a cult favorite for fans of the “Underworld” franchise, Beckinsale is fun to watch in both the real and fantasy fight sequences that take up much of the briskly paced Jolt.
  75. Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    Snake Eyes, as directed by Robert Schwentke (“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”), has style and verve, with a diabolical family plot that creates a reasonable quota of actual drama. The movie is also a synthetic but infectiously skillful big-studio hodgepodge of ninja films, wuxia films, yakuza films, and international revenge films.
  76. Stuntman
    In the end, both documentary and the jump itself feel like ambitious vanity projects that are admirably accomplished, yet feel a little hollow in the raison d’être department.
  77. France
    Dumont has studied the media enough to get in a few genuinely effective jabs, though it’s hard to engage with the half of France that concerns itself with her private life since she’s such a cold and inscrutable character.
  78. Homeroom
    The Oakland students — and director Nicks — rise to the demands of overlapping crises. With its vibrant if abbreviated portraits and final scenes of burgeoning activism, Homeroom suggest that kids may not be alright, but they are very much on the case.
  79. Three Floors
    Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature.
  80. A Chiara
    Carpignano’s focus here on 15-year-old Chiara (a radiant Swamy Rotolo . . . is a natural way of prepping the audience’s sympathies, but he aims beyond easy generational assumptions, and even more noticeably than in his sophomore work, he’s imbibed some lessons from Martin Scorsese (who also exec produced that earlier film) in refusing to presume a judgmental stance.
  81. The Story of My Wife
    Divided into seven quirkily titled chapters which are only useful as a kind of interminable countdown, “Story” falls into every trap of the over-reverential adaptation: individual scenes go on too long, there are far too many of them, and everyone sounds like they’re reading when they speak.
  82. The Restless
    It’s not one of those filmmaking-as-therapy grudge sessions, but a wrenchingly fair-minded look at complicated family dynamics.
  83. Petrov's Flu
    Through its heady stew of impulses and influences, however, Petrov’s Flu is cinema to the breathless last, riding the camera like a bucking horse as single shots carry us between locations, eras and states of mind — the thrilling, messy work of a man released.
  84. Paris, 13th District
    A silky, soulful black-and-white tapestry of single millennials seeking connection.
  85. Nitram
    In its quiet respect for the victims’ dignity, its uniformly outstanding performances and in apportioning responsibility only to those who shirked their responsibilities, and deploying a grief-struck compassion toward everyone else, Nitram may come to be recognized as one of the finest exemplars yet of the mass-shooting movie — inasmuch as we can stomach having an entire genre built around the phenomenon.
  86. Memoria
    In Memoria, the disruptive sounds Jessica hears are a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed.
  87. The Divide
    The characters can be so grating, watching The Divide feels like sticking your head in the garbage disposal. But as unwieldy as the multi-tentacled narrative can be — just think of the logistics required to stage it! — the experience adds up to something unshakeable.
  88. Casablanca Beats
    It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.
  89. Blue Bayou
    Blue Bayou holds little back as it rails against the cruelties and hypocrisies of American immigration law to stirring effect — though this emotional pile-driver of a film could stand to trust more in the undeniable power of its core story.
  90. Between Two Worlds
    The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.
  91. Great White
    Though boasting a few adequate action sequences, and foregoing the more gonzo schlockiness of peer projects like The Meg and Shark Night, the film’s human characters make for drab company, leaving one with little to do but admire the scenery, waiting for dinnertime.
  92. Fear Street Part Three: 1666
    Fear Street Part 3: 1666 isn’t just the best of the Netflix horror trilogy; it also recasts the prior two entries, “1994” and “1978,” in a more favorable light by deepening the mythology and underscoring just how crucial it is to watch all three chapters consecutively.
  93. Gunpowder Milkshake
    Men have been gorging on righteous, blood-splattering pulp action rides like this one for decades, and if women are now looking for the equivalent, Gunpowder Milkshake fits the bill. Its message is that there are a lot of Bills to kill.
  94. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions
    Part of the problem is that since everything is at so incessant a fever pitch, suspense flattens rather than builds, and we don’t care much about characters who spend nearly all their time yelling instructions at each other.
  95. The Story of Film: A New Generation
    There’s room for infinite points of view behind the camera, as well as among those who do the watching. Offering the tools for unpacking potentially challenging movies, Cousins teaches people how to be better spectators — not by telling them the right way to watch, but by encouraging them to engage more deeply with what they see.
  96. How to Deter a Robber
    With low stakes and even lower energy, writer-director Maria Bissell’s feature debut isn’t sure if it’s a thriller with amusing elements or a comedy of criminal absurdity. What it winds up being, therefore, is neither, stuck in a dull middle ground that will please no one.
  97. Casanova, Last Love
    Whatever the truth, there’s nothing in Jacquot’s vision of Charpillon to inspire devotion. There have been other unlikely Casanovas, yet the best of them conveyed not just the man’s charm but a depth of intelligence. Lindon’s downturned eyes have always exuded a world-weariness that fits with his characters, but there’s no spark here, no understanding of the man’s aura.
  98. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    Space Jam: A New Legacy is chaotic, rainbow sprinkle-colored nonsense that, unlike the original, manages to hold together as a movie.
  99. Red Rocket
    Everything in Red Rocket happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours.
  100. Titane
    With Titane, audiences occasionally just have to give themselves over to the movie’s demented momentum, taking whatever perverse pleasure they can from Ducournau’s willingness to push the boundaries
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