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. Dachra
    Originality may indeed be scarce in writer-director Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s debut narrative feature. Yet this gory goulash of city slickers, creepy yokels, editorial jolts and cannibalism largely transcends its derivative basic elements, thanks to his astute, richly atmospheric handling.
  2. Tiny Tim: King for a Day
    The last act of Tiny Tim: King for a Day is about Tiny’s descent, which the film portrays with a haunted majesty worthy of a Larry Karaszewski/Scott Alexander biopic.
  3. Scales
    With its glittering black-and-white cinematography, immersive sound design, eerie score and creepy reveal, the film taps into something primal and chilling, with the taut first third particularly strong. But the narrative’s momentum and clarity dissipate in the middle and final sections even as the visuals continue to impress. Still, the boldly inventive Scales marks Ameen as a talent to watch.
  4. The Price of Freedom
    The Price of Freedom is an absorbing, disturbing, and scrupulously well-researched documentary.
  5. The Phantom
    A fascinating and ultimately infuriating documentary.
  6. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    The result is a well-meaning but somewhat granola, partly engaging yet disorganized documentary, one that searches for an imprecise story and struggles to keep its chief ambitions afloat.
  7. The Witches of the Orient
    For all the film’s playful artistry, the effect is more scattershot.
  8. Fear Street Part Two: 1978
    Fear Street in general and the 1978 chapter in particular are at their best when forging their own path, which makes it a shame when they’re too reluctant to walk it.
  9. Larry Flynt for President
    Larry Flynt for President tells a story so wild that the documentary plays as a succulent time machine of sordid 1980s mishegas.
  10. Annette
    In this particular cocktail, Carax is boiling lead to Sparks’ soda-pop fizz, sucking all the fun from the root-beer float. What does go well with the French auteur’s honesty-insisting earnestness is Adam Driver’s over-committed lead turn.
  11. First Date
    More concerned with paying homage to ’90s-era Quentin Tarantino than telling a contemporary coming-of-age tale with believable stakes, co-helmers Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s debut feature First Date saddles a young couple not with a romantic night out, but with a haphazard all-nighter crime-comedy that’s mostly unfunny and free of convincing suspense.
  12. The God Committee
    While The God Committee routinely resides on the precipice of preachiness, Stark’s script (via St. Germain’s source material) avoids one-note sermonizing and characterizations at most turns, instead maturely investigating the messy intersection of medicine, morality and commerce.
  13. Dance of the 41
    Its final beat, like the entirety of its fabulous, tragic final act, is as masterful as it is heartbreaking. As a whole, though, it remains too stilted, like a painstakingly staged tableau vivant of late-19th-century Mexico and the patriarchal power structures that undergirded it.
  14. Till Death
    Even as the twists and turns get ever more preposterous . . . Dale’s direction and Fox’s commitment go a long way toward making Till Death a glossy, entertaining lark. Just maybe not one with anything of substance to say about marriage as its cheeky title suggests.
  15. America: The Motion Picture
    No aspect of history is off-limits here, the result being a grab bag of references, battles, and jokes that are constantly trying to one-up each other in terms of absurdity.
  16. Long Story Short
    Though the high-concept relationship movie frequently trips over its own well-meaning sentiments, the sweet, earnest performances and sharp technical craftsmanship deliver a blissful feeling when the material comes up short.
  17. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb, sometimes tedious, sometimes fun civilization-vs.-aliens showdown.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The One and Only Dick Gregory
    The first-rate doc, written and directed by Andre Gaines, is a reminder to anyone familiar with Gregory of the breadth and prescience of his work; to the uninitiated, it will be an eye-opener.
  19. 7 Days
    In the future, audiences may tire of movies about COVID-19. For the moment, however, 7 Days arrives as a funny, modest charmer.
  20. The Forever Purge
    As a satirical demagogic action movie, The Forever Purge is blatant, bare-bones, and entertainingly brutal.
  21. Fear Street Part One: 1994
    “Fear Street” may look like countless horror movies that have come before, but it’s desperately trying to be original, and that may pay off in the two installments to come.
  22. The Boss Baby: Family Business
    The film itself, unfortunately, is generally less interesting than the business matters behind it, a thoroughly competent affair that tosses in just enough off-the-wall elements to liven up a fairly basic retread of the original’s formula.
  23. Prime Time
    In “Corpus Christi,” Bielenia was electric, but then he had Mateusz Pacewicz’s great script to work with. Here, he retains some charisma in a hard-working performance, but it’s not enough to singlehandedly provide this screenplay with meaning.
  24. Brighton 4th
    The tender screenplay by Boris Frumin captures characters living in the new world in much the same fashion as they did in the old. It also offers a touching showcase for Levan Tediashvili, a non-professional actor and real-life wrestler.
  25. Black Widow
    Black Widow is very much about the origin of Natasha — her skills and her identity. The movie features just enough kinetic combat to give a mainstream audience that getting-your-money’s-worth feeling, but right from the opening credits (built around a dreamy slow-mo cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), most of it has a gritty, deliberate, zap-free tone that is strikingly — and intentionally — earthbound for a superhero fantasy.
  26. Settlers
    n the ranks of cinematic journeys to Mars, Settlers ranks among the less fancifully and lavishly invented, yet it’s all the more effective for its earthly restraint: You can change the planet, Rockefeller suggests, but humanity stays pretty much the same.
  27. Mary J Blige's My Life
    There’s a valedictory glossiness to the film that sometimes underserves the warts-and-all power of the work in question – as a fan-centric retrospective, it hits plenty of the right notes; but as a chance to more thoroughly explore a complicated, still-influential landmark, it never digs quite deeply enough.
  28. LFG
    The documentary makes a strong case for just how remarkable a team they are. While LFG doesn’t divulge the elusive recipe, it ladles what one teammate called the group’s “special sauce.”
  29. Lansky
    Keitel . . . infuses his performance here with more than enough lion-in-winter gravitas to dominate every moment he is on screen, and quite a few when he isn’t, which in turn is sufficient to propel Lansky through stretches when the passing of time is felt, and the budgetary limitations are obvious.
  30. The Ice Road
    Just about every possible peril turns up to thwart their mission en route, making for an increasingly implausible action movie that will entertain most viewers, but also perhaps make them feel a bit played for fools.
  31. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    If terror is not particularly sought after, there is still sufficient tension, and downplaying the story’s fantastical aspect in favor of psychological conflicts lends the whole a persuasive pathos.
  32. Wolfgang
    As Wolfgang, directed by David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), entertainingly captures, Puck tumbled into innovations that became more influential than anyone, including him, might have expected.
  33. Good on Paper
    Containing razor-sharp witticisms about feminine intuition, gendered sexual politics and relationships (both platonic and romantic), it excels beyond its self-deprecating title.
  34. Ailey
    Ailey, directed by Jamila Wignot, doesn’t always answer the questions you expect it to. It can be a tantalizing watch, but it’s a poetic and meditative documentary that often skimps on the nuts and bolts.
  35. No Man of God
    Individual moments are gripping, and Kirby’s performance puts its queasy hooks in you, but the film, overall, has a scattershot momentum until the last act, set in 1989, when Bundy is about to be executed.
  36. Les Nôtres
    Les Nôtres” remains — right up to its tight, repressed ending — a deeply disquieting, superbly performed evocation of a very banal sort of evil.
  37. Sweat
    With her eerily flawless image and pathological narcissism, it would be all too easy to make Sylwia a monstrous figure of fun — yet the more circumstances turn against her, the more nuance and moral curiosity von Horn and Koleśnik find beneath her hyper-contoured surface.
  38. No Sudden Move
    No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.
  39. Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation
    It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.
  40. Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road
    Even if you think you know it all, “Long Promised Road” is an affectionate and satisfying movie, sentimental at times but often stirringly insightful, a collection of pinpoint testimonials to Wilson’s artistry by such authoritative fans as Springsteen and Elton John, and a movie that lets the enchanting qualities of Wilson’s music cascade over you.
  41. Werewolves Within
    Maintaining a lean sense of suspense throughout, the scribe fashions all her characters with memorable attributes and plenty of social observations, yielding a compelling range of suspects none of which you can write off entirely.
  42. Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer
    [An] insightful, chilling, often elegant documentary.
  43. Sweet Thing
    A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.
  44. A Crime on the Bayou
    [An] engrossing, flavorful document.
  45. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    Coming away from “Just a Girl,” it’s impossible not to be convinced that Moreno is the rare screen legend who found a way to stick the Hollywood landing.
  46. 12 Mighty Orphans
    It’s all engineered to pay off in familiar ways, though the movie isn’t quite as predictable as you might think.
  47. Fatherhood
    It transitions Hart from playfully scowling cutup to earnest heartfelt actor, and it does so in a way that, at times, is genuinely touching, even as the audience can see every sanded-down conflict and market-tested beat falling into place.
  48. Luca
    Luca, set in Italy in the ’50s, is modest to a fault, and at times it feels generic enough to be an animated feature from almost any studio. But it’s a visually beguiling small-town nostalgia trip, as well as a perfectly pleasant fish-out-of-water fable — literally, since it’s about a boy sea monster who longs to go ashore.
  49. Gaia
    Gaia’s resourceful visuals, however, aren’t matched by equivalent nimbleness in the writing; after a time, the storytelling feels more anemic than enigmatic.
  50. Akilla's Escape
    Williams’ effortless, near-otherworldly presence gives Akilla’s Escape all the grace and mystique it requires; the film strains a little too hard for its own.
  51. At the Ready
    An unsettling, often tender and thoroughly well-timed film.
  52. Sabaya
    Sabaya is remarkable not least for how cleanly Hirori excises himself from it, careful to not get in between the viewer and these devastating stories with their 10 different flavors of heroism.
  53. Ma Belle, My Beauty
    In this triangulated love story there is more roiling it than just desire. Although the central characters reflect the vast array of LGBTQ folk, the movie isn’t a coming-out tale. . . . These characters are in the midst of their lives, with many of the duties and emotions that come with that.
  54. Wish Dragon
    Wish Dragon delivers a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view, and that’s plenty.
  55. The Amusement Park
    Shot on delightfully grainy 16mm and featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors, the film is so alluringly disorienting that, by its end, some viewers will find themselves struggling to remember how this fever dream started.
  56. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    The film presents a psychological, almost novelistic portrait of how Bourdain evolved as a person during the years of his celebrity.
  57. Gundala
    Gundala packs a few too many characters and side-stories into the mix but as the first entry in a planned series it’ll do very nicely.
  58. Queen Bees
    A lightweight but likable comedy.
  59. Awake
    Awake is bonkers in a fun way from time to time . . . but gives the distinct impression that the most interesting crises are happening off screen.
  60. The Misfits
    The movie feels like both an advertisement for this posh, ultra-modern oasis and a late-20th-century smear of the people and culture one might expect to find there.
  61. Skater Girl
    It’s as uplifting and threadbare as a feel-good viral video stretched to feature length, yet Makijany’s ability to rally the troops, get solid performances from first-time actors, and simply get the film made is worth a genuine cheer.
  62. La Dosis
    It’s all more involving than it is frustrating. That’s thanks in large part to the nuanced performances of the leads, whose work ensures that at least the first half of the term “psychological thriller” feels well-realized here.
  63. Sublet
    With two screenwriters (including the director) and three script editors credited, it may be a classic “too many cooks” situation, as the whole structure is as risk-free and standardized as a TV film, though newcomer Niv Nissem provides a freshness that papers over the conventionality of it all.
  64. Infinite
    The more you start to nitpick this movie, the more innumerable its plot holes appear, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.
  65. Holler
    The film’s texture is in the details. There’s nothing glamorous about this kind of subsistence, and nothing invented.
  66. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    So is it, you know, fun? At times it is; at others it’s exhausting. Let’s call the whole thing fun-xhausting.
  67. Dinner in America
    Beyond finding a godsend in Gellner, Rehmeier gets good mileage from nearly the entire supporting cast. They grasp the slightly warped humor he’s aiming for here, hitting a suitable range of comedic notes from the deadpan to the broadly farcical.
  68. Asia
    From Daniella Nowitz’s muted, intimately lit lensing to the plaintive, judiciously used piano strains of Karni Postel’s score, every formal element of Asia serves to illustrate and enrich the tricky, evolving relationship at its center — brushing, rather than milking, the viewer’s tear ducts along the way.
  69. Super Frenchie
    Beyond Giraud’s calculations about wind and cliff-edge-to-floor ratios, his thoughts about fear reflect a generous nature and should speak to decidedly earthbound yet unnerved folks. He wants people to dream big.
  70. Monuments
    There’s not a lot here that’s wholly new, and the film’s tone of melancholy, offbeat uplift signals from the outset that we shouldn’t expect any grand revelations. Instead its pleasures come in smaller packages.
  71. Dancing Queens
    There’s an interesting film to be made about women cracking the drag scene, shuffling through complex layers of gender identity and identification, but this innocuous feel-good trifle hasn’t exactly found it.
  72. Grace and Grit
    The film unfortunately anchors itself in an exploitative mode, insincerely using terminal illness as inspirational fodder.
  73. Edge of the World
    Where Edge of the World distinguishes itself is in its evocative visuals of Borneo’s unspoiled beauty (courtesy of cinematographer Jaime Feliu-Torres) and the lived-in intensity of Meyers. If the film can’t help but feel like a relic from a bygone era, that’s ultimately part of its appeal.
  74. Flashback
    The movie’s pileup of dislocating side-swipes from any tangible here/now is intriguing and well-crafted to a degree many genre fans will find exciting. But others will be justified in wondering if all this stylish, increasingly frenetic sleight-of-hand obscures scant substance.
  75. Hero Mode
    A lively saga about a young coding wizard who’s charged with saving his family’s gaming business, this celebration of old- and new-school creativity doesn’t break novel ground in any respect. Fortunately, though, its good humor, spry pacing and likable performances should appeal to its pre-high-school target audience.
  76. Sequin in a Blue Room
    Van Grinsven is conscious of consequences, but more interested in exploring the newfound freedoms that technology offers queer self-discovery.
  77. Two Gods
    There’s solemn respect here for the fragile interior peace of others: This restrained, humane film seems most interested in how that serenity is reflected back into the world.
  78. Plan B
    Plan B is a girls-behaving-badly all-night-long road-trip comedy that’s built on a formula chassis, but it’s fast and funny, with a scandalous spirit, and it’s got a couple of lead performances that, if there’s any justice, should have the town talking.
  79. Paper Spiders
    What begins as a wry tale of a maturing family in bittersweet flux spirals unpredictably into a study of living with extreme mental illness, as experienced by both the afflicted and their gradually alienated nearest and dearest.
  80. Shepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog
    Overall, Roth crafts a resonant picture, purposefully threading in themes centered on identity and degradation with a sensitive, deft touch. Where it falters in properly contextualizing its pervading sentiments, it often finds resilient strength in the smart parallels between animal and human.
  81. American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally
    Clumsy, campy and kitsch, but also deadeningly dull for long stretches.
  82. Two Lottery Tickets
    Two Lottery Tickets is an existential-absurdist, dirty-kitchen-sink vision of ordinary lives that’s just funny and invigorating enough to hit a note of truth.
  83. State Funeral
    Both as film and as history, State Funeral stands as a canonical work.
  84. Carnaval
    Director Leandro Neri’s lighthearted romantic comedy delivers hijinks and a few sweet sentiments about having the courage to embrace destiny. Nevertheless, its broad comedy and thoughtful themes aren’t completely cogent, due to a lack of properly motivated character developments and questionable scenarios.
  85. Caveat
    Mc Carthy serves up a generically foreboding premise and pulls off several efficiently traditional jump scares in this variation on a haunted-house formula, but it’s the shape-shifting mind games of his own narrative that most unnerve the viewer, as seemingly fixed plot points of who is under threat — and when, and why, and so on — keep darting out of sight.
  86. Oslo
    Rogers’ stage play is a smart, mature piece of writing, but one that transfers rather clumsily to the small screen, in part because its makers don’t show quite the same confidence in their audience’s intelligence.
  87. Spirit Untamed
    Very little of Spirit Untamed lives up to what the studio is selling.
  88. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    The new film lacks that kinetic haunted-house element. It’s the most somber and meditative and least aggressive of the “Conjuring” films. It’s out to deepen the series’ portrait of the Warrens, and damned if Patrick Wilson, with his gentle tenacity and Pat Boone grin, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine the psychic in high Victorian collars and embodies her gift with a feverish purity, don’t succeed in making Ed and Lorraine the coziest fighters of evil the movies have ever seen.
  89. Apocalypse '45
    The hell we see here isn’t heightened; it’s graphic and terrifying. Yet the greatest terror may be that it was necessary. Apocalypse ’45 is a haunting document of men who fought their way through hell to save all of us.
  90. Blue Miracle
    Julio Quintana’s likable family film misses nary a cornball trick in Hollywood’s underdog-drama playbook, and just about pulls it off.
  91. Moby Doc
    It omits a crucial detail of the “Play” success story (that the album took off through the licensing of songs for commercials — not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it captures the astonishing ride to icon status it put Moby on. He didn’t stop drinking and drugging; that would take years. But he found a groove he could stay on, even after the mega-sales cooled.
  92. Cruella
    The director, who brought a wicked edge to pop-culture redux “I, Tonya” a few years back, has rescued Cruella from the predictability of the earlier “101 Dalmatians” remakes and created a stylish new franchise of its own in which a one-time villain has been reborn as the unlikeliest of role models.
  93. Playing with Sharks
    If the tone of the film is uniformly admiring, Taylor is often critical of the younger woman who appears in these frames, frankly expressing regrets and self-recrimination about those less enlightened days when sub-aquatic hunting was her bread and butter.
  94. In the Heights
    Like its source, the movie is a blast, one that benefits enormously from being shot on the streets of Washington Heights.
  95. Sound of Violence
    The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.
  96. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
    In this bright, engaging film, Kerr’s story is faithfully and lovingly preserved, though its tougher, quirkier details are mollified by a layer of palatable movie gloss.
  97. Seance
    Seance proves a disappointingly boilerplate retro slasher that’s pedestrian on every level from concept to execution.
  98. P!nk: All I Know So Far
    All I Know So Far is a singular portrait of the larger-than-life rock rebel as life-size mom.
  99. A Quiet Place Part II
    It can be hard to believe that both the sequel and the instant-classic 2018 original were produced by Michael Bay, a filmmaker who has pushed the moviegoing experience to ear-splitting extremes, since Krasinski so effectively embraces the opposite strategy: Less is more, suggestion can be scarier than showing everything, and few things are more unnerving than silence.
  100. F9: The Fast Saga
    Considering that F9 is Lin’s fifth “F and F” film and his first one in eight years, it goes through the motions with more energy than intoxication.
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