Variety's Scores

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For 17,758 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 17758
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17758
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17758
17758 movie reviews
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  1. Heimat is a Space in Time
    The overall effect of Heise’s work is mesmeric, persuasive and cumulatively powerful, as each piece of the puzzle falls into place and he lands on overarching insights into a German century and what it portends for the future.
  2. I Still Believe
    Thanks to the immensely appealing performances by Apa and Robertson, it’s easy for the audience to take a rooting interest in the sometimes awkward, sometimes amusing development of the budding romance between Jeremy and Melissa.
  3. The Hunt
    The Hunt turns out to be a good deal smarter — and no more extreme — than most studio horror films, while its political angle at least encourages debate, suggesting that there’s more to this hot potato than mere provocation.
  4. Bloodshot
    Bloodshot is a trash compactor of a comic-book film, but it’s smart trash, an action matrix that’s fun to plug into.
  5. Kill It and Leave This Town
    An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s abrasive animation Kill It and Leave This Town exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be.
  6. Resistance
    Resistance tells a story that’s plenty strong on its own terms, and if anything, it’s a bonus that one of the key participants should survive to become famous. Afforded depth and gravitas by Angelo Milli’s string score, the film hardly needs the framing device in which Ed Harris appears as Gen. George S. Patton, regaling his troops with Marceau’s story before inviting him onstage for his first public show.
  7. Last and First Men
    A ravishing 70-minute audiovisual essay on human mortality, extinction and legacy — all the more poignant for being its maker’s final creative statement.
  8. Spenser Confidential
    The film even pokes fun at itself in the process, fully aware that Spenser Confidential isn’t meant to be taken as seriously as Wahlberg’s last few movies — and just as well, since irreverence plays well on Netflix.
  9. Escape from Pretoria
    Francis Annan’s film works effectively as a straight-up jailbreak thriller, well-oiled in greasy B-movie tradition. It’s when it shoots for more historical import that it falls somewhat short.
  10. The Dark Red
    An overcomplicated stew of apparent madness, conspiracy, supernatural powers and revenge whose narrative elements never quite mesh or even come to full fruition individually. Nonetheless, this quasi-horror mixed bag will hold viewers’ attention for its originality even as it flags in both credibility and suspense.
  11. Only
    An absorbing post-catastrophe drama.
  12. Run This Town
    Run This Town offers some sharp observations about the struggle to provide anything like watchdog journalism in an age of diminished budgets and readership.
  13. The Booksellers
    The Booksellers is a documentary for anyone who can still look at a book and see a dream, a magic teleportation device, an object that contains the world.
  14. Go Back to China
    The capable cast and brisk pacing keep attention held toward a happy ending that pleases even if it is a bit pat, not to mention inevitable.
  15. The Banker
    You may wish that you were reading about these events in The New Yorker, because the movie is so choked with neutral detail that it’s a little bloodless. It lacks fire.
  16. The Way Back
    I’d love to see Affleck star in a film about an addict with nothing to explain his addiction but his own flawed, desperate, hungry soul. That’s a movie that could speak to us — the way that Ben Affleck’s real story already does — far more than this modestly well-made Sunday-school lesson.
  17. The Trouble with Being Born
    Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble With Being Born inspires nothing but strange feelings, from unnerving horror to shocked admiration to visceral disgust to that specific type of disorienting nausea that comes from the fractional delay between your eye processing a well-composed image, and your brain comprehending the implications of the actions so coolly depicted.
  18. Saint Frances
    Turns out there are a lot of things that have gone unsaid in movies until now, and Saint Frances goes there in a way that’s not only enlightening, but entertaining as well. This exceptionally frank, refreshingly nonjudgmental indie was written by and stars Kelly O’Sullivan, a “girl next door” type whose no-nonsense approach to issues facing both her gender and her generation leaves ample room for laughter — à la Amy Schumer’s “Trainwreck.”
  19. There Is No Evil
    There Is No Evil comes across as four films for the price of one, none of its segments anemic, and each contributing fresh insights to the paradoxes of capital punishment in Iran.
  20. Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street
    All this certainly constitutes an intriguing footnote to horror cinema history. But Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen’s film could’ve used more distance from its principal interviewee, a producer here.
  21. Lost in America
    While listening to the kids, Rainwater makes sure we see the humanity and future potential in each and every one, treating his subjects with the respect they deserve.
  22. The Salt of Tears
    It’s an exercise only for the most forgiving of Garrel acolytes — who should revel in its warm, tactile black-and-white lensing and throwback air of mournful romanticism, but would still be hard pressed to describe the whole as essential.
  23. Siberia
    As a study of a rugged individualist looking back on long-withered connections — to others, to the mainstream world, and indeed to himself — it feels personally invested both as a star vehicle and an auteur piece. If it isn’t, the joke’s on us, and still pretty funny.
  24. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    The result, though intermittently stirring and often luminously shot, represents something of a chore for all but the most ardent Jia completists — and even some of them may be left adrift by the literary scope of a film that does surprisingly little to contextualize its subjects for viewers unfamiliar with their work.
  25. Undine
    There’s a stylistic and narrative elegance to Petzold’s approach, with its clean lensing and repeated use of a single piece of music (the rolling piano Adagio from Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974), that suggests restraint, where a queer filmmaker might have propelled things into camp territory. In a way, it’s a shame that Undine stops short, since the material feels thin, and the statement as murky as the lake to which the camera ultimately returns.
  26. The Woman Who Ran
    This deceptively offhand vibe requires the actresses to project effortless naturalism, and they all deliver.
  27. Charlatan
    Caught between a respectful tribute to Mikolášek’s medical achievements and a more salacious examination of his moral transgressions — with a tender if speculative gay romance propped somewhere in between — it’s an ambitious portrait of human imperfection that doesn’t strain to arouse much affection for its subject in the audience.
  28. My Little Sister
    A modestly scaled, intimately observed domestic drama that doesn’t reinvent any wheels in its portrayal of family frictions, midlife ennui and the anguish of terminal illness, but handles all this potentially sticky material with clear-eyed (and finally, when required, somewhat moist-eyed) grace.
  29. Mogul Mowgli
    Outside of Ahmed’s seething, spitting, can’t-look-away performance, Mogul Mowgli is a sparsely scripted but scratchily atmospheric culture-clash drama that runs on some quite traditional father-son melodramatics. But considering the film outside the performance would be a mistake.
  30. Minamata
    Depp plays it surly throughout, dominating those around him, but Minami has a strong screen presence as well (despite struggling somewhat with the dialogue in her first English-language role). As Aileen, she needs only to look at Gene, and he will yield to her demands. The two characters read as equals here, despite their polar-opposite personalities, and that unusual chemistry fuels the dangerous reporting ahead of them.
  31. All the Bright Places
    All The Bright Places would be nowhere without Haley’s vision and deft ability to deliver all of the feels. He finds places to let his bright intellect shine, perfectly crafting heartrending melodrama through tonal pacing that’s never cloying nor disgustingly saccharine.
  32. Blood on Her Name
    A film that remains relentlessly absorbing for all of its compact 83-minute length largely because it places its audience in the position of helpless witnesses to a slow-motion trainwreck.
  33. Malmkrog
    Even people reasonably familiar with Gnosticism, Manichaeism and its offshoots, early 20th century history and the works of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose writings Puiu adapted, will find this punishing film, with its theatrical construct and off-putting running time, a challenge with few lasting rewards.
  34. The Intruder
    Perhaps the key issue, aside from the inherent silliness of the unsubstantiated mystical psychobabble that is fielded as an explanation for Inés’ “condition” is that Inés herself is not a particularly well-developed character.
  35. Straight Up
    A little of this can go a long way (the film is sometimes a bit airless), but James Sweeney is a filmmaker with the rare ability to toss antically inspired dialogue right off the edge of his brain. Straight Up is the work of a startling talent.
  36. All the Dead Ones
    Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, collaborating as directors for the first time, channel the artificiality of late Manoel de Oliveira but without the enticing mystery, hampered by an understandable earnestness that yearns for a more subtle approach.
  37. Funny Face
    Oddly, Funny Face feels more like a promising but overreaching debut than any of his earlier films, particularly at the level of its slender script, heavy as it is on banal, minimalist dialogue that doesn’t fuel the flickering chemistry between leads Cosmo Jarvis (“Lady Macbeth”) and appealing newcomer Dela Meskienyar as best it could.
  38. My Salinger Year
    The movie doesn’t show a complex enough representation of either adult life or the New York literary world to offer much depth to grownups (it’s far more engaged with Joanna’s romantic life and dream sequences set at the Waldorf Astoria), which means that My Salinger Year must have been intended to inspire young women for whom 1995 seems like the ancient past.
  39. Greed
    The emperor is naked, Greed wants us to realize, but unless we agree to radically rethink our own wardrobes, does it make any difference?
  40. Goldie
    With vibrantly expressive aesthetics that match the energy of its defiant and distressed heroine, this impressive coming-of-age indie . . . heralds the arrival of both a distinctive new filmmaking voice and a leading lady with charisma to burn.
  41. Balloon
    Balloon is decent entertainment to a degree, and that is mostly thanks to its handsome production values.
  42. Emerald Run
    Emerald Run is one of the weirdest hodgepodges to make its way to theater screens and digital platforms in quite some time.
  43. Impractical Jokers: The Movie
    Impractical Jokers: The Movie is an undistinguished and unnecessary extension of a brand whose primary attributes are likability, authenticity and relative modesty (given the worst impulses of the genre).
  44. Jinpa
    The movie is a dreamily austere shaggy-dog story that recalls the matter-of-fact absurdism of early Jim Jarmusch, yet at the same time generates a fair amount of suspense by repeatedly hinting at a potential for melodramatic upheaval. Ultimately, however, Tseden finds an audaciously different way to pull the rug out from under us.
  45. The Invisible Man
    This gratifyingly clever and, at times, powerfully staged thriller is too rooted in our era to be called old-fashioned — its release, in fact, feels almost karmically synched to the week of the Harvey Weinstein verdict. Yet there’s one way that the movie is old-fashioned: It does an admirable job of taking us back to a time when a horror film could actually mean something.
  46. Onward
    By the end of Onward, you’ll have chuckled and maybe choked up, and enjoyed a conventional ride.
  47. Standing Up, Falling Down
    Thanks largely to the performers (and Crystal in particular), the end result is diverting enough if unmemorable.
  48. Premature
    While Premature may seem less professional than your average Sundance movie (much less entry-level studio fare), that doesn’t diminish what’s fresh, vulnerable and true about the film.
  49. The Night Clerk
    Sheridan and de Armas’s scenes together leave an impression long after the rest of the movie evaporates.
  50. The State Against Mandela and the Others
    The State Against Mandela and the Others outlines a complex network of motives and tensions underpinning this single sensational trial: Nothing here is exactly revelatory to those with a working knowledge of apartheid history, but few documentaries have gathered the stakes involved in the trial quite so deftly.
  51. Changing the Game
    Unadventurous in its design — Barnett goes for a conventional mélange of clips and talking heads to structure the story — Changing the Game admittedly benefits from a traditional approach that slowly familiarizes the audience both with the subjects and the layers of an ongoing discriminatory debate around fairness.
  52. José
    Cheng delivers a mood that is unquestionably human and, at times, unexpectedly hallowed (as when Jose stares down the worn face in a Mayan ruin). José brings to light the promise of a director as compassionate as he is observant.
  53. The Call of the Wild
    For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.
  54. After Midnight
    It’s not enough just to be offbeat. Defy whatever rules it might, a movie has to find its own beat, and After Midnight still seems to be weighing its options when the final credits roll.
  55. Blumhouse's Fantasy Island
    The finished film plays at times like an out-of-control pitch meeting, lurching from one ostensibly clever idea to the next without having taken the trouble to connect the dots, or even to remain consistent with the two simple rules it sets out for itself.
  56. You Go to My Head
    If you can surrender yourself to the measured rhythms of the film and accept its mix of feeling and artifice, you may find much to admire here.
  57. Come As You Are
    There’s a relaxed yet energetic comic rapport between players that suggests a good time was had by all.
  58. The Photograph
    It’s a looser, warmer, and more meditative romance, one that takes its time by giving its actors room to breathe.
  59. Sonic the Hedgehog
    We all know that your average Hollywood comedy tends to include some on-set improvisation, but in this case the contrast between the leaden pseudo-brashness of the rest of the movie and the ping! of Carrey’s dialogue is so marked that it almost feels like he made up his entire character on the spot. (I’m not declaring that he actually did. I’m just sayin’.)
  60. Untouchable
    With Weinstein on the ropes, Macfarlane pulls no punches, doing a fair but unflinching job of letting those he once dominated share their narrative. That they do so on camera makes what they have to say that much more impactful, and Macfarlane does their testimony justice, delivering a hard-hitting documentary that speaks truth to power.
  61. Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia
    It’s an inspired goof — for a while, before it turns into waaaaaay too much of a good thing.
  62. Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words
    Created Equal is structured as a monologue of self-justification, a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas.
  63. To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You
    The trouble with “P.S. I Still Love You” is that nearly all the reasons that Lara Jean makes such a refreshingly different romantic lead are contained in the earlier film, and here, she’s reduced to a version of the passive Disney princess, trying to decide between two dudes who both think she’s swell.
  64. Relic
    Not everyone will appreciate the ambiguity of a climax that can be read as either an uplifting act of pure and selfless love or a depressing capitulation to the malign forces of inevitable decline, but either way, “art-house horror” has its 2020 tidemark set high.
  65. And Then We Danced
    Gifted as both a thrilling dancer and a nuanced actor, Gelbakhiani’s magnetic presence goes a long way toward papering over some of the more timeworn plot elements . . . and the film should make audiences clamor for more vehicles that feature his seemingly effortless ability to radiate joy.
  66. Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made
    The quiet humanity of McCarthy’s filmmaking meshes oddly with the material’s zanier demands, finally reaching an anodyne middle ground.
  67. Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
    A very entertaining recap that grows more disturbing as it wades into the dysfunctional behavior that doomed the show.
  68. His House
    A potent if unbalanced mashup of social-issues polemic and haunted-house horror.
  69. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Directing her first studio feature, Cathy Yan keeps it all hurtling along with impeccable ferocity. Her action scenes have a deftly detonating visual spaciousness, capped by crowd-pleasing moments.
  70. Boys State
    Ultimately, Boys State works because the “characters” are so compelling.
  71. Scare Me
    Scare Me would work even better onstage. On screen, it feels like an experiment in minimalism. The film is heavy-handed only in Fred’s fear of emasculation and Fanny’s digs at “desperate white dudes,” troweled on for socially relevant heft.
  72. Emma.
    There’s something quite comforting in seeing her (Austen) work returned to a more natural habitat: adapted into handsome, clever, faithfully unambitious films like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma.
  73. Welcome to Chechnya
    The ironically inviting title only hints at part of the story in this wholly devastating documentary: The crisis, it turns out, is all around us.
  74. Tesla
    Almereyda lays tracks to take Tesla in a dozen wild directions. . . . Yet, having ordered the audience onboard, Almereyda doesn’t go anywhere with the gambit.
  75. The Glorias
    The film is acted with great flair and emotional precision, and it’s been staged by Taymor with vividly detailed historical flavor, yet it tells Steinem’s story in a way that’s more wide than deep.
  76. Nine Days
    Nine Days is that rare work of art that invites you to re-consider your entire worldview.
  77. The Nowhere Inn
    As a ballad about a rock star’s soul, The Nowhere Inn is a fun riff performed on flimsy strings.
  78. Horse Girl
    The transgressiveness of Baena and Brie’s strange and sorrowful Horse Girl, is in how it turns the simplistic, inauthentic tweeness of the generic, quirky indie comedy in on itself to produce a rare and piercingly compassionate exploration of the sorts of madness that come from intense loneliness, and the intense loneliness that comes from being regarded as mad.
  79. The Father
    The Father is a chamber piece, but it has the artistic verve to keep twisting the reality it shows us without becoming a stunt.
  80. Falling
    Falling is unpretentious and perfectly accessible to mainstream audiences. Mortensen’s patience, his way with actors and his trust in our intelligence are not unlike late-career Eastwood, which isn’t a bad place to be so early in one’s directing career.
  81. Dream Horse
    This is a well-cast, artfully handled effort that exercises sufficient restraint to really earn its requisite laughter and tears.
  82. Assassins
    Assassins is a terrific true-crime story, but it’s also a documentary thriller about the new world disorder.
  83. The Social Dilemma
    Densely packed yet lively and entertaining documentary, whose accessibility is heightened by some narrative play-acting.
  84. Sylvie's Love
    More even than Declan Quinn’s sumptuously old-school cinematography and the throwback styling and stock footage exteriors that deliberately mimic the Technicolor romances of old, it’s the fresh-faced naiveté of the storytelling that feels so anachronistic.
  85. Lost Girls
    In Lost Girls, Liz Garbus takes the serial-killer thriller and turns it on its head, insisting that we see the victims as larger than the crimes that destroyed them.
  86. Charm City Kings
    The film’s truly ridiculous plot choices — the phony twists that make you leave the theater feeling like you’ve inhaled a tank of carbon monoxide — are its own invention, bolted onto a likable, if formulaic, charmer.
  87. Coda
    A deliberately paced and stealthily involving saunter through familiar territory.
  88. 37 Seconds
    Deceptively delicate and quietly tough.
  89. Gretel & Hansel
    The problem is that so many of its virtues feel compromised.
  90. Incitement
    While Incitement is a compelling watch, with archival footage neatly woven in, and offers a salutary warning about how easily democracies are endangered, this psychological profile of a political assassin nevertheless falls into a kind of moral trap.
  91. Minari
    Chung transforms the specificity of his upbringing into something warm, tender and universal.
  92. The Rhythm Section
    This isn’t an easy role, but Lively aces it.
  93. Palm Springs
    It’s an irreverent take on a form where earlier iterations were obliged to take themselves seriously. And somehow that liberates what felt like a slick but ironic riff on a tired genre to do something sincere.
  94. Summertime
    This fleet-footed, kaleidoscopic showcase is all about finding your voice so that the world can start to appreciate what it doesn’t know about those it hears from far too seldom.
  95. The Last Thing He Wanted
    The human dimension that gives the film brief jolts of energy never takes root. Instead, audiences are left grappling with a stuffy maze, albeit one presented with handsome production values and a filmmaker’s striking visual touch.
  96. The Nest
    Movies almost never deal with the intricacies of marriage: finances, schooling, finding the right work-life balance. By contrast, The Nest burrows into the minutiae, and the rewards of going along with the O’Haras are worth it, at least for those willing to risk the frustration of a movie that plays by its own rules and doesn’t necessarily believe in happy endings.
  97. Blast Beat
    Blast Beat cares far more about testing the limits of the family’s togetherness, and while the resolution doesn’t have the sweetness of a pop song, Arango is happy to settle for heavy metal discordance.
  98. Black Bear
    This adventurous seriocomedy has enough surprising elements and off-kilter humor to keep one intrigued, even if the payoff is debatable.
  99. Beast Beast
    Beast Beast’s plot twist is a swing at gravitas that disrupts the balance of Madden’s naturalistic character study. This is the way teen life is, Madden says, until suddenly the film accelerates from reality to sensationalism, and trades humanity for pulp.
  100. Worth
    Though Feinberg is a singular figure in modern American history (few else could, or would, do his job), Worth hammers his story into a standard biopic template — Grinch Finds Heart — as though one man discovering empathy is truly priceless.
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