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. New Order
    Essentially picking up where “The Joker” left off, this ultra-provocative case of speculative fiction promises a view of what change might look like, only to succumb to a deep sense of cynicism as the scope of the film becomes unmanageable.
  2. The Disciple
    Tamhane patiently constructs his characters out of small details, relying on his audience to pick up on small changes and muted shifts of tone that signal the passage of time and Sharad’s interior journey.
  3. Dear Comrades!
    Meticulous and majestic, epic in scope and tattoo-needle intimate in effect, this scrupulous recreation of the lead-up to and aftermath of the Novocherkassk massacre six decades ago is excoriating proof that not all filmmakers are made sloppy or slipshod by anger. Some are made ever more righteously, icily precise.
  4. One Night in Miami
    King turns One Night in Miami into a real movie, staging it with a flowing visual confidence and vibrant emotional flair that gives it a fly-on-the-wall authenticity.
  5. Nomadland
    For those on Zhao’s wavelength, the movie is a marvel of empathy and introspection.
  6. Ammonite
    Ultimately more symbolic than satisfying, the project leaves one grateful that two stars of this caliber would take on such a story, while wishing their efforts had left us with a more resonant artifact.
  7. The Devil All the Time
    The Devil All the Time shows us a lot of bad behavior, but the movie isn’t really interested in what makes the sinners tick. And without that lurid curiosity, it’s just a series of Sunday School lessons: a noir that wants to scrub away the darkness.
  8. Unpregnant
    It’s as comforting as a prescription drug commercial, which could send some parents into a conniption. But Unpregnant advocates loudest for allowing young women the space to make their own choices — and that they have friends, longtime or newfound, willing to help when they stumble.
  9. Buoyancy
    In doing justice to the stories of thousands, Rathjen has somewhat undersold the personal story of its single protagonist.
  10. Notturno
    It is problematic that many of the film’s most powerful segments are its most prurient, and even more, that they are juxtaposed with the poetic and the prosaic.
  11. The Babysitter: Killer Queen
    Fans of the original will no doubt tune expecting more high-grade guilty-pleasure fun, only to get way too much of a no-longer-very-good thing instead.
  12. Our Time Machine
    Sun and Chiang strike a tricky balance between a high-stakes making-of documentary and an intimate, observational family portrait, but Maleonn is such a thoughtful, sensitive, brilliant subject that the film is compelling no matter where on the creative spectrum they find him.
  13. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    There’s nothing ironic about the title of American Utopia. It’s David Byrne and Spike Lee reveling in the majesty, and hidden magic, of the here and now.
  14. The Truffle Hunters
    It’s a complex picture that Dweck and Kershaw navigate with respect, curiosity and a sense of awe, managing to excavate the essence of a tight-knit, lovably atypical commune out of it.
  15. I Am Woman
    The film doesn’t contextualize Reddy within the musical personalities of her era (beyond saying she sure wasn’t cock-rockers Deep Purple, another Wald client), so newbies may well come away with no idea why she had a unique niche in the ’70s entertainment landscape.
  16. 12 Hour Shift
    Grant’s screenplay builds a Rube Goldbergian narrative of escalating, piled-up crises, from which she also engineers a just-credible-enough exit strategy.
  17. All In: The Fight for Democracy
    A powerfully timely and absorbing documentary.
  18. The Eight Hundred
    Guan’s direction may be less radical or propulsive than Nolan’s, but it too plunges audiences into both the intimacy and magnitude of brutal war spectacle while immersing them in a stunningly mounted period canvas.
  19. Pieces of a Woman
    Mundruczó and Wéber gave her the pieces from which to assemble this character, but only Kirby could have taken that puzzle and turned it into such an astonishing portrait.
  20. Enola Holmes
    The movie has contemporary issues of gender equality on the mind — and an endearingly radical protagonist in Enola.
  21. The Broken Hearts Gallery
    The Broken Hearts Gallery pushes all the rom-com buttons but does it knowingly, with a spirit that embraces killer cynicism and then comes out the other side.
  22. The Argument
    The Argument is amusing for a while, and some of the ensemble — Maggie Q and Coleman in particular — manage to access something both human and humorous in what might have seemed harsh in another actor’s hands. But silly as the filmmakers intend for this to be, there’s something unpleasant about the whole ordeal.
  23. Love, Guaranteed
    If likability is a trait you value, Love, Guaranteed delivers the undemanding pleasure of watching two fundamentally decent people tumble into fondness and then love.
  24. Feels Good Man
    Feels Good Man offers an inside peek at the internet’s growing ability to affect and shape modern society, which often makes the film a nightmare about extremism and technology.
  25. Critical Thinking
    It’s still, in the end, a bit of a connect-the-inspirational-dots movie, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be inspired.
  26. Mulan
    Storyboarded to within an inch of its life, then translated to screen with stunning energy and attention to detail, the film represents Hollywood’s most enthusiastic embrace of blockbuster Asian cinema tropes since “The Matrix” trilogy.
  27. The Mole Agent
    Alberdi’s comic-caper approach soon fizzles. Like Sergio, the film is hunting for drama, something to merit the 007 guitar and upright bass riffs of Vincent van Warmerdam’s score.
  28. Robin's Wish
    A documentary that’s honest and scary, wrenching and moving.
  29. Antebellum
    While Antebellum is no zombie movie, it treats systemic racism as a kind of contagion that refuses to die, eating the brains of successive generations. There’s only one way to stop it, and that’s by blowing the minds of all those infected — which is precisely the impact Antebellum achieves.
  30. Alone
    Accomplished in all its tech and design departments, Alone is easily the best of several recent hunted-woman-in-the-wilderness films, including fellow indies “Ravage” and “Range Runners” as well as the flashier French “Revenge.” It doesn’t necessarily need the structural gimmickry of onscreen “chapter” titles (“The Road,” “The Rain,” etc.), but that’s a minor quibble.
  31. Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe
    Candace Against the Universe has been made for “Phineas and Ferb” believers, and like such hipster kiddie brand extensions as “Teen Titans Go! To the Movies,” it’s not necessarily more fun than three good episodes of the show stacked together. But that’s fun enough.
  32. The New Mutants
    Re-shot, re-cut and somehow rescued from total obscurity, Boone’s movie isn’t half bad. Alas, it’s not half good either. It’s basically just decent enough to motivate those sick of shutdown to risk getting sick for real.
  33. Ava
    There’s a stranger, spikier, more unnerving film to be pulled from the sleek genre carapace of Ava, a film less interested in what makes a contract killer tick than in the superhuman Swiss-watch regularity of her ticking in the first place.
  34. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    The film is weightless and super-goofy — a blissed-out air balloon of nostalgia. It zips right along, it makes you smile and chortle, it’s a surprisingly sweet-spirited love story.
  35. Fatima
    While not especially artful, Fatima honors those who stand by their convictions. That its role models are children makes the message all the more remarkable.
  36. i'm thinking of ending things
    It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie — it’s didactically morose.
  37. All Together Now
    All Together Now has enough of Haley’s signature humanism to elevate it above the average teen melodrama, but only just.
  38. The Binge
    If the premise sounds more fun than the execution, that’s because The Binge doesn’t seem to recognize how or why people indulge in such substances to begin with, treating intoxication as the punchline rather than the setup for what should have been a more subversive satire.
  39. You Cannot Kill David Arquette
    Is Arquette a has-been actor trumping up his biggest failure so that he can exploit it? Or is he a lionhearted wrestler who finds triumph by going the distance? The weird thing is that there’s no difference.
  40. Lingua Franca
    Lingua Franca is notable not just for the deftness of its overall assembly and performances, but for its approaching hot-button issues of the moment (the status/rights of both transpersons and undocumented workers) in ways that are insightful without being heavy-handed.
  41. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
    Even though Chatwin is only seen in a handful of snapshots and one brief video snippet, Herzog brings him to vivid life.
  42. Tenet
    Tenet is no holy grail, but for all its stern, solemn posing, it’s dizzy, expensive, bang-up entertainment of both the old and new school.
  43. Stage Mother
    There’s much about Stage Mother that’s slightly stale, but like yesterday’s donut, the icing on top makes it both look inviting and go down easily enough.
  44. The 24th
    Buoyed by a charismatic performance from star and co-screenwriter Trai Byers, The 24th can at times be cumbersomely didactic and formulaic, but it finds plenty of contemporary relevance in a story that should be far more widely known than it is.
  45. Chemical Hearts
    For all its serious-faced surface grit, Chemical Hearts never quite rings true.
  46. Words on Bathroom Walls
    There are pockets of truth, grace and pain in this portrait of troubled adolescence, and its talented young stars know where to find them; like many a nervous teen, however, the film itself is caught between standing out and fitting in.
  47. Epicentro
    It’s a fascinating moment for cultural stock-taking. Yet despite the filmmaker’s evident fondness for the people and nation, this impressionistic feature feels frustratingly obtuse, unfocused and unstructured.
  48. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies
    Nudity, as “Skin” captures in its lively and disarming way, is the great leveler: the thing that makes us all gawk, no matter what the context.
  49. The One and Only Ivan
    The story takes no outsize turns, no big surprise twists. Perhaps the only surprise is how touching it is: a tale that will caress you, and your children, in a way that speaks to something true. It reminds you of what it’s like to be moved by a kids’ film that’s driven by more than nonstop movement.
  50. Desert One
    You emerge from Desert One knowing certain aspects of the Iran-hostage crisis better than you did before. That makes it a worthy film, and an absorbing one.
  51. Emperor
    A striking discovery, Dayo Okeniyi will be unfamiliar to most in the lead role. He played a small part as District 11 tribute Thresh in “The Hunger Games,” and appears opposite Jennifer Lopez in “Shades of Blue,” but Emperor is effectively his breakout, which makes him feel as much a revelation to audiences as Green’s story will be.
  52. Random Acts of Violence
    The result is more flashy and shallow than ingenious, let alone terrifying. Yet it’s also a committed effort, one whose energy and style command some appreciation even when they overwhelm the shaky story gist.
  53. The Vigil
    Like many such movies, The Vigil leans heavily on jump scares, and is arguably more effective during its tense buildup than in the climactic events.
  54. Cut Throat City
    Cut Throat City has vivid moments, but RZA’s direction is better than P.G Cuschieri’s script. The film is a muddled social-protest thriller that tries to bridge the corrupt machinations upstairs with the desperation of the streets, and can’t find a way to connect them convincingly.
  55. Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
    The grandest irony to emerge is that despite its unquestionable sincerity, soft-spoken iconoclast Martin Margiela’s insistent non-image may yet turn out to be fashion’s canniest bit of image-making of all.
  56. An Easy Girl
    Ultimately, An Easy Girl challenges what society thinks of those who leverage their desirability as Sofia does, leaving intriguing questions about one’s values — and value — in her wake.
  57. Project Power
    Project Power has propulsion, little detonations of visual magic, the resonant setting of a still desperate New Orleans, and a better cast than a movie like this one tends to have. Yet watching it, you may find yourself aware of how patched together the whole thing is.
  58. Pearl
    A few abrupt narrative transitions indicate that some scenes, for whatever reason, must have been discarded during the editing process. But what remains on screen is enough to hold attention and generate rooting interest, especially if you’re amused by inside-baseball allusions to the film and TV industry.
  59. Endless
    Scott Speer’s direction and the script (by Andre Case and Oneil Sharma) assures there are no baddies here. Although it shamelessly nods to the popcorn classic “Ghost,” it doesn’t rely on a culturally vexing villain to score points. This is one of the movie’s charms — and truths.
  60. Sputnik
    Abramenko maintains the film’s finite appeal throughout, mostly thanks to a familiar aura and a charismatic lead performance by Oksana Akinshina, a fine surrogate for the tough-as-nails heroine Ellen Ripley.
  61. The Bay of Silence
    The film’s pained, ugly revelations finally carry more weight than any amateur detective work leading up to them: a #MeToo reckoning hidden within a glinting, noir-esque hall of mirrors.
  62. A Thousand Cuts
    Ressa’s seemingly boundless energy, good humor and intelligence make her basically a power plant for the manufacture of inspiration in embattled times.
  63. Giraffe
    It’s a film of big themes on an intimate scale that lovingly acknowledges the unimaginable wealth of stories inside everyone we encounter, while also looking at how we negotiate the place of memory in our lives.
  64. Get Duked!
    That kind of all-around ineptitude puts the Get Duked! ensemble in the company of such classic Zucker and Abrahams movies as “Airplane” and “The Naked Gun,” and should appeal to lovers of old-fashioned lowbrow farce, provided they’re willing to accept a few lame hip-hop references.
  65. Work It
    Few of the lessons and triumphs of Work It will surprise, and some of the missed opportunities disappoint.
  66. La Llorona
    Its tightening tension seeks to push frayed characters to eventually tell on themselves.
  67. Echo
    Once a sense of rhythm is grasped, things fall into place, and audiences will exit the cinema debating their favorite scenes, recalling a wealth of graceful, humane interactions.
  68. Black Water: Abyss
    Given its tight dark spaces, opaque water and lunging menace, this movie has plenty of natural nightmare material that it deftly turns toward more atmospheric than rote jump-scare uses.
  69. Spinster
    Andrea Dorfman’s thoughtful little film arrives at a compromise that feels honest and hard-won — helped along by the infectious, defiantly offbeat presence of erstwhile “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star Chelsea Peretti.
  70. Paydirt
    Paydirt is a crime drama with darkly comical touches that possibly will be enjoyed best while you’re periodically distracted by other things — microwaving leftovers, feeding pets, washing face masks — and are unable to constantly focus on arrant contrivances and gaping plot holes.
  71. I Used to Go Here
    Likable enough, but a little too tame to make much of an impact.
  72. Sunless Shadows
    It quietly but pointedly interrogates the notion of victimhood, while tacitly letting a damning essay on Iranian gender politics and hierarchies emerge through the words of his subjects.
  73. Made in Italy
    A cringingly syrupy tale of overdue bonding between an estranged father and his only offspring.
  74. Red Penguins
    Red Penguins tells its story of outrageous, larger-than-life players in brisk, humorous fashion. Its assembly is always lively, aimed at engaging viewers with or without any interest in hockey.
  75. Nadia, Butterfly
    It’s not Nadia’s fault — or Savard’s — that she’s a bore. That’s just the way this oddly incurious movie, which assumes too much of its audience, has made her out to be. In the water, Nadia may be a powerful butterfly, but on land, she’s more of a moth.
  76. The Secret Garden
    In its top-heavy image-driven way, The Secret Garden is trying for some of the atmospheric poetry that was missing from Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 version. Yet if anything, that just makes it fall further away from the novel’s essence. The garden isn’t a supernatural place, but it’s supposed to be a mystical place. In this movie, it comes closer to being a special effect.
  77. Howard
    At 94 minutes, Howard is not and does not try to be a plumbing search through the generation of talent lost to HIV and AIDS; what it is trying to do, appealingly narrowly, is illuminate one life and the work done therein.
  78. The Tax Collector
    Bloody, barely coherent and about as fun as having your face dragged across asphalt from a moving SUV.
  79. An American Pickle
    Of course, the essence of the fish-out-of-water comedy is that it’s never been a realistic genre — it’s pure Hollywood fantasy. Yet An American Pickle, in its ethnically satirical and scattered way, lacks the integrity of its own ridiculousness. It’s pungent but flavorless: an unkosher dill.
  80. Proxima
    An unostentatious but quietly dazzling meditation on womanhood in the largely patriarchal space race, Alice Winocour’s highly satisfying third feature outdoes many more lavish Hollywood efforts in evoking the otherworldly emotional disconnect that comes with space travel, all without leaving terra firma for the vast bulk of its running time.
  81. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Whereas most of the movie takes place in a grubby, blue-tinged murk — a blend of hokey day-for-night lensing and virtual set extensions that’s badly suited for home viewing, but might look frightening in darkened theaters — day breaks just in time for a big, Michael Bay-style climax. The film has clipped along at a reasonably brisk pace until this point, only to downshift into a laughably protracted slow-motion finale, full of gratuitous lens flares and overwrought strings.
  82. Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind
    Highly entertaining documentary about the folk-pop troubadour of Canada.
  83. Calm with Horses (The Shadow of Violence)
    If the overall narrative arc is less than inspired, however, the milieu and personalities depicted do have real character.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Is King
    Black Is King excels as a celebration of Blackness in its many forms: Black women, Black men, Black children, Black motherhood, Black fatherhood, Black pasts, Black presents, and Black futures.
  85. The Secret: Dare to Dream
    Littered with confounding clichés and hokey devices, director/co-writer Andy Tennant’s feature is the exact inverse of what a passionate romance should aspire to be, let alone one preaching the power of positivity.
  86. Shine Your Eyes
    If the setup intrigues slightly more than the payoff, this is still a work of original, crystalline beauty, bursting with restless, refracted ideas.
  87. Unhinged
    The carnage is the point here, not any of the reasoning behind it, and Borte and Crowe bring it to a suitably frothing, furious head: Some movies just want to watch the world burn, preferably on a very big screen.
  88. Rebuilding Paradise
    Rebuilding Paradise is a movie that shows us a great deal without necessarily exploring what it shows.
  89. The Cuban
    The real learning here ought to be that if you cast two such charismatic performers as Louis Gossett Jr. and Shohreh Aghdashloo in your movie, it would be better to clear all the Life Lesson clutter away and just let them get on with it.
  90. She Dies Tomorrow
    The film feels a bit too experimental at times, suffering from lags in tempo and purpose, but it never succumbs to the ordinary either. There is a rare, unrefined quality to Seimetz’s film — a personal work of art that feels deeply honest throughout.
  91. The Go-Go's
    In the fresh bopping beauty of their punk romantic sound, they kicked open a door of perception. They said to a generation: We got the beat, and you can too.
  92. Summerland
    Summerland is very pretty, and bursts with affection for its gently befuddled characters, but for all its eager charms, streaming like colored pennants from every turret, it’s a castle in the air.
  93. Retaliation
    Whether you’re skeptical of Bloom’s abilities or have long been a believer, you can’t help but respect what the actor does with Retaliation. And the same might be true whether you’re religious or not, seeing as how the film promises revenge, while leveraging cinema’s most powerful weapon: empathy.
  94. The Kissing Booth 2
    It delivers a few refreshing details by giving the heroine more agency in her quest to find happiness — yet not quite enough to justify its interminable run time.
  95. Days of the Whale
    For all the peril that darkens its fringes, there’s an indomitable youthful exuberance that thrums through Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s debut feature “Days of the Whale.”
  96. Spree
    If you are in need of more reminders of the most extreme of the potential evils of internet interaction than you get every time you fire up an app, by all means, smash the like button on “Spree.” For the rest of us, the best advice might be to mute, block, vote down, unfollow or simply log off and go look at a tree.
  97. Amulet
    She hasn’t just created a stylish potboiler, but a densely textured piece that makes for a truly arresting viewing experience to a point. A shame then that the film succumbs somewhat to the more pretentious and silly aspects of Garai’s initially cryptic puzzle of a script.
  98. Babysplitters
    The path to the inevitable but deeply moving conclusion is lively and thoroughly entertaining. Friedlander gets us there by throwing in unexpected yet true-to-life twists and turns that will likely be all too familiar to new parents, who typically don’t have the help of a second couple to share the responsibility.
  99. Most Wanted
    Along with Pilon’s striking performance, the film’s sturdy, subdued craftsmanship keeps it from movie-of-the-week territory, even as Roby’s script ticks overly familiar boxes.
  100. Desperados
    The “raunchy” set-pieces feel like road bumps en route to a too obvious and disappointingly tidy conclusion. Do yourself a favor and spend five minutes — and as many dollars — researching something else to watch instead.
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