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. No Safe Spaces
    No Safe Spaces is a smart, vital, urgent, and provocative exploration of that question.
  2. Richard Jewell
    A good story is a good story, and Eastwood knows how to tell a good story.
  3. Shooting the Mafia
    Not quite a fleshed-out personal study, nor fully a meditation on what Battaglia’s camera sees, this intriguing but frustrating film finally makes the case for letting the photographer’s pictures tell their story.
  4. 21 Bridges
    Boseman’s role doesn’t offer nearly as much complexity as the screenwriters seem to think — which is why the movie needs an actor like him to distract us from its many plot holes and paradoxes.
  5. The Warrior Queen of Jhansi
    Too tepidly sincere to consistently excite or amuse. What keeps it at least moderately interesting on a scene-to-scene basis is the novelty value of seeing a strong and self-confident woman, credibly portrayed by Devika Bhise.
  6. Crown Vic
    A respectable if non-revelatory cruise through a familiar terrain of mean streets and men in blue.
  7. Line of Duty
    High on energy if low on credibility.
  8. Noelle
    What you see a movie like Noelle, what the experience comes down to is: It’s something you’re not watching in a theater because most of us wouldn’t watch it in a theater. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. Whatever your idea of a sentimental connect-the-dots Christmas comedy is, this is sub that.
  9. Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer
    If anyone out there thinks the National Enquirer is merely harmless entertainment, “Scandalous” give them no shortage of alarming reasons to reconsider.
  10. Feast of the Seven Fishes
    This easily digestible “Feast” is unlikely to join the holiday viewing canon, but the particularity of its focus on the eponymous, American-fried immigrant tradition is welcome: Any Christmas film that teaches us how to correctly soak baccala is more useful than most.
  11. Angelfish
    This easy-to-take film’s pleasures, then, lie chiefly in its relaxed evocation of place and time. Set in 1993, though it could just as easily work in a contemporary setting, Angelfish wisely doesn’t go all in on period kitsch, though music and costuming are both deployed to evoke a pre-internet, arguably gentler era of youth.
  12. Queen & Slim
    When a movie taps a nerve with the public, it doesn’t need to be a masterpiece to become a phenomenon, which might explain why Matsoukas puts greater attention on the look, feel and musical signature of the project than she does the plot, which feels thin and familiar.
  13. Radioflash
    Ultimately it seems a message movie not quite willing to deliver any clear message, as well as a genre film shy about admitting as much. It’s too melodramatic to be taken as gritty realism, yet not suspenseful enough to work as a straight thriller.
  14. Frozen II
    In a world where old-timers accuse the youth of being oversensitive snowflakes, Frozen II shows what it means to have one’s heart in the right place.
  15. Dark Waters
    What gives Dark Waters its singular texture is that Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”), who has never made a drama remotely like this, colors in the scenario with an underlying dimension of personalized obsession.
  16. Cold Brook
    There’s no complexity to anyone or anything here. Even the hint of family conflict in the portrayal of our heroes’ children as bratty teens goes nowhere in the director and Cain DeVore’s screenplay, which at times teeters on the edge between simple and simple-minded.
  17. Bloody Marie
    Given their evident talent for packaging (as opposed to content), Hillege and van Driel might next consider doing something of a more purely genre-based nature, where depth or its lack thereof won’t matter much.
  18. Charlie's Angels
    The movie is relentless, it’s pulpy and exciting, it’s unabashedly derivative, and at an hour and 58 minutes it’s a little too much of a rousingly of-the-moment feministic but still rather standard-issue thing.
  19. Love Is Blind
    Perhaps the biggest problem with this story is that the filmmakers work from the assumption that the audience instantly cares about these characters. We don’t, especially when we’ve been given no good reason to. As the film’s tagline prophetically declares, “We all have blind spots.” It’s okay to keep this one in yours.
  20. Danger Close
    By turns viscerally exciting and predictably formulaic — and, quite often, both at once — Danger Close is an efficiently crafted and consistently involving old-school war movie propelled by matter-of-fact professionalism on both sides of the cameras.
  21. Lady and the Tramp
    It’s as creatively anemic and blandly calculated as, say, this summer’s billion-grossing “The Lion King.”
  22. Good Girls Get High
    With heartening, encouraging messages that speak to the target audience and beyond, Good Girls Get High doesn’t stray too far from the formula, but manipulates it in such a way that feels fresh.
  23. Playing with Fire
    Playing with Fire . . . is a barely glorified sitcom made in the overlit and benignly smart-mouth Nickelodeon house style.
  24. The Good Liar
    The pleasure of The Good Liar, and it’s a major one, is the chance to watch Mirren and McKellen act together in a cat-and-mouse duet that turns into an elegant waltz of affection and deception.
  25. Last Christmas
    As much as we go into Last Christmas eager to see a nicely wrapped package of acerbic fun, the film falls short of that. It’s not so much clever, toasty, and affectionate as it is the faux version of those things. It’s twee, it’s precious, it’s forced. And it’s light on true romance, maybe because the movie itself is a little too in love with itself.
  26. Midway
    The film’s drama is B-movie basic. But the destructive colliding metal-on-metal inferno of what war is makes Midway a picture worth seeing.
  27. Primal
    That this mashup of too many familiar action-thriller elements doesn’t emerge a generic mess is a credit to all involved. That it’s passably entertaining but also instantly forgettable comes as less of a surprise.
  28. Ride Your Wave
    Sooner or later, Hinako is going to have to learn to face the world on her own, which is where the tension finally arises before this dopey film reaches its sappy conclusion — by showing its heroine, so effortless on water, “learning to ride life’s waves, too.”
  29. Klaus
    What goodwill the movie does inspire owes more to the splendid visual world than to anything the story supplies.
  30. The Current War
    It benefits from a smart, snappy script and a well-rounded cast, and gives its director the chance to employ virtually every camera trick known to man. What it can’t do, however, is generate even the slightest bit of interest in what happens to any of its characters.
  31. The Apollo
    You should never take for granted a documentary that fills in the basics with flair and feeling. Especially when the basics consist of great big gobs of some of the most revolutionary and exhilarating popular art ever created in this country.
  32. Badland
    A solidly crafted piece of work that, despite its leisurely pacing, manages to infuse a respectable amount of fresh vigor into clichés and conventions common to shoot-’em-ups set during the post-Civil War era.
  33. Mrs. Lowry & Son
    The disappointment of Mrs. Lowry & Son is that it finds neither of its star attractions at the peak of their powers: Both Spall and Redgrave feel stifled and stiff-jointed, hemmed in by a thin, shallow-focus script that betrays its origins as a radio play all too easily.
  34. Redoubt
    If it all made sense, would it still be art? Ironically, the trouble with Redoubt is that it’s not obtuse enough. It’s the first Barney film audiences won’t have trouble sleeping after — or through.
  35. Earthquake Bird
    Westmoreland approaches the project every bit as respectful toward Japanese customs as Jones was, although only a percentage of her insights carry over to the film. They’re still there, mind you, but more difficult to detect.
  36. Queen of Hearts
    In a conversation piece pitched halfway between the delicate Sirkian tragedy and Adrian Lyne at his most sensational, it’s the overridingly controlled nature of proceedings — from performance to production design — that keeps “Queen of Hearts” from sliding into the hysterical silliness that its provocations invite.
  37. Doctor Sleep
    This sequel to “The Shining” may register, in the end, as a long footnote, but it makes you glad that you got to play in that sinister funhouse again.
  38. Ne Zha
    Ne Zha has something vital to teach the American animation industry — about the glories of letting the dark side rip — but it’s also clear that Chinese animators, working under more restrictions than we have, have absorbed a great many of the breakneck freedoms of American pop culture. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful symbiosis.
  39. Children of the Sea
    This wide-eyed loner may be “just” an anime character, but she’s as relatable as any live-action teenager you might meet on screen this year, thanks to the splendid attention to detail and seemingly boundless imagination that characterizes Children of the Sea, director Ayumu Watanabe’s stunning adaptation of the prize-winning manga by Daisuke Igarashi.
  40. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
    Making Waves is a brisk 94 minutes, the last half hour of which is a quick-study primer on the categories of movie sound. The film is quite educational.
  41. I Lost My Body
    I’d hazard to say it’s one of the most original and creative animated features I’ve ever seen: macabre, of course — how could it be otherwise, given the premise? — but remarkably captivating and unexpectedly poetic in the process.
  42. Citizen K
    Authoritative and dense — though never dull — at over two hours, Citizen K is the prolific docmaker’s most rewarding feature in several years, attaching his typically methodical research to a cheerfully slippery, charismatic human subject who, even on the side of right, is cagey in the face of investigation.
  43. 63 Up
    If this is the final chapter, as Apted suggests it could be, it’s a worthy cap to one of the boldest experiments in world cinema.
  44. Girl on the Third Floor
    What’s ultimately less impressive is Stevens’ script, which to varying degrees draws on the templates of “The Amityville Horror,” “The Shining,” “Eyes Wide Shut” and other conspicuous predecessors, but lacks the original fillip or three that might have turned an enjoyable exercise into something really first rate.
  45. Farming
    Unremittingly, bludgeoningly bleak in its portrayal of his own degradation and humiliation, and displaying only a passing interest in his eventual rehabilitation, the film is remarkable for its lack of self-pity, but it makes the experience of “Farming” a merciless one for the audience too.
  46. Fiddlin'
    Even filmgoers with little taste for these arcane sounds may enjoy the doc, if only for the chance to spend an hour and a half in the company of so many prodigies who’ve put down their phones in the service of taking up catgut.
  47. The Great Alaskan Race
    With its general tone of inspirational uplift that’s too often spelled out in dialogue rather than felt, The Great Alaskan Race bears the same relation to “faith-based entertainment” that it does to action-adventure cinema: It gestures in that direction, yet doesn’t actually make the commitment.
  48. Mountaintop
    I’d say that Mountaintop provides a valuable service in capturing what it’s like to be in a recording studio at length, with all the bickering and tiny experiments and small eureka moments that entails, better than any other music doc ever has.
  49. The Cat and the Moon
    Wolff has made a debut feature as impressive in its deliberate modesty and unpretentiousness as it is in matters of psychological nuance and technical skill.
  50. Chicuarotes
    As a film, Chicuarotes is intermittently impressive and as a director, García Bernal clearly has real heart — it’s just that here, he puts it in the wrong place.
  51. Paradise Hills
    If you’ve ever wanted a mashup of Disney princess movies and “The Stepford Wives” or imagined “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a swoony YA fantasy, Paradise Hills is absolutely the movie for you.
  52. Countdown
    Bombastically dumb new chiller that probably would have been called "Killer App" if that title hadn't already been used several times.
  53. Marona's Fantastic Tale
    Provides pleasures for all ages, but especially for dog lovers.
  54. Terminator: Dark Fate
    "Dark Fate” is a lean, tough, and absorbing sequel that taps back into the enthralling surface of the “Terminator” series’ comic-book kinetics as well as the sinister sweet spot of its grandiose pulp mythology.
  55. Serendipity
    Nourry isn’t the most self-effacing of artists, and Serendipity could stand to reveal more of her artistic process, rather than gazing upon the often formidable finished product. Still, on the occasions it stops self-curating and gives us a glimpse into Nourry’s frightened, still-restless soul, this is a stirring, imposing self-portrait.
  56. Cyrano, My Love
    As fizzy as a freshly poured glass of Perrier-Jouët, though considerably less complex, writer-director Alexis Michalik’s Cyrano, My Love attempts to give the “Shakespeare in Love” treatment to the timeless French play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” with shamelessly derivative yet undeniably entertaining results.
  57. Tell Me Who I Am
    In the documentary, the director appears to be interviewing the twins separately, but he’s really just filming them as they recite their own story. They’ve chosen their words carefully; they cry on cue; and they share just enough, while holding back an enormous amount of information.
  58. Kinetta
    Lanthimos’ point seems to be that everyone has their own private weaknesses, but after a Lynchian first act in this strange world, he avoids any mainstream dramatic or satiric elements.
  59. On the President's Orders
    Populist politics can turn all too easily to popcorn ones; On the President’s Orders vividly captures the tipping point.
  60. The Jesus Rolls
    In the end, the project doesn’t really work. The Coen brothers have a touch for the absurd, and a gift for dialogue, that’s lacking here, and without those two qualities, Jesus wears out his welcome relatively early in the journey.
  61. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
    Smith has every right to be older and wiser here, and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, with its gentle anarchy and not-quite-mock nostalgia, is a time-machine sequel that passes the time amiably enough. But if Jay and Silent Bob get any older or wiser than this, they’re going to stop being who they are.
  62. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Humor turns every kill into a sick punchline, and while the writers do a fine job of making them funny, like macabre cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote can rebound from unthinkable injuries, the movie’s tone negates a fundamental respect for human life.
  63. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    If America goes to war sometime in the next year, pundits will have a field day with this movie. But barring that, it’s just another ugly, unpleasant slog through a disposable fantasy universe. The true Disney villains in this case are off screen, sabotaging the studio’s canon from within.
  64. Lucky Day
    The trouble is, apart from Glover’s unforgettably weird contribution, Lucky Day isn’t a particularly memorable offering. It’s enough to get Avary back in the game, one hopes, but considering his talent, this is hardly the film his fans have been waiting for.
  65. Jexi
    Lucas and Moore write some whiplash funny lines, and since the film is just a throwaway, you can enjoy it on a trivial synthetic revenge-of-the-nerd level.
  66. The Dead Center
    There’s a lot of excellent atmospherics here that are more unsettling than the actual violence, which in turn is all the more effective for largely being kept just off-screen.
  67. A German Youth
    Utilizing news footage, TV programs, crude activist films and the like, Périot (always his own editor) builds his arguments almost invisibly, guiding the viewer while trusting his audience to use their heads. How refreshing to have a director refuse black-and-white conclusions, knowing that formulating questions is the best way to probe the past and its ramifications.
  68. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    There’s a momentum to his story — it has a heist-movie-style checklist, carried out by a team composed of only one — that has its own satisfactions, and set-pieces with real tension, even if they lead to a less-than-novel place.
  69. The Addams Family
    The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.
  70. Sink or Swim
    The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting.
  71. The Sky Is Pink
    The emotions we witness and feel should have more force given the obviously stressful circumstances depicted. But they feel like all the edges have been sawed off to flatter both the subjects and principal actors.
  72. Mary
    Beyond de rigueur jump scares, Mary has little real atmosphere or suspense, and that is at least partly due to the fact that its supernatural force is so generically ill-defined.
  73. Roger Waters: Us + Them
    A sonically superior if sometimes draggy affair that earns its stripes by affirming the timelessness of Waters’ thematic concerns and proving that fresh material doesn’t have to be the medicine we’re forced to swallow to hear the classics.
  74. Consequences
    Ultimately, Stante’s raw energy and sure hand with actors are more encouraging than the screenplay’s lack of depth is bothersome.
  75. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    Bully. Coward. Victim. isn’t as authoritative a chronicle as “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” but in its loosely anecdotal way it may bring us a notch or two closer to who Roy Cohn was.
  76. Celebration
    Celebration doesn’t feel entirely fair, but it’s a priceless addition to our understanding of how Yves Saint Laurent — the man, the myth, la marque — operated: a flawed film whose mere existence makes it essential viewing.
  77. Jallikattu
    A fever-pitch, adrenaline-soaked vortex of social issues drama, deconstruction of the male id, and hokey, hubristic descent into hell, this crazed howl of human brutality morphing inexorably into bestial savagery deserves, and feels destined to find, a willingly cultish following on the festival circuit.
  78. Mister America
    The movie amounts to a few weak gags stretched out to feature length.
  79. Low Tide
    In addition to establishing a tangible sense of place, McMullin impresses by putting together such a strong ensemble and eliciting from them the performances he does. He’s a very visual director, jump-starting scenes with an unexpected extreme-closeup of some kind before allowing audiences to get their bearings — a strategy that subconsciously reinforces the notion that we can never get too comfortable in this otherwise familiar genre.
  80. Semper Fi
    Though professionally smooth in execution, Semper Fi has the frustrating sum impact of a movie at fundamental conflict with itself.
  81. Dilili in Paris
    In its native France, “Dilili” was released in stereoscopic 3D, which may have helped things look less wooden, but it feels as if the director stuck to a style that works well in silhouette — where characters typically appeal in profile, and bend only at elbow, knee and waist. In any case, it hurts the brain, which is clearly the opposite of what Ocelot intended.
  82. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    “Memory” captures the hypnotic layers of history and meaning that were folded into the shock value of “Alien.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    Perry Henzell emerges a director with a solid visual flair who can mix action and inchoate rage sans excess to give the film a taut pacing and use the local color and a basically predictable tale with a few new twists.
  84. The Pretenders
    While the film’s sense of experimentation carries a fair amount of intrigue, it traps its central threesome in an Easter egg-filled intellectual exercise punctuated by melodramatic strokes. It’s skillful enough to tickle the mind and the emotions but not effective enough to fully engage them.
  85. Cuck
    Cuck is powerful so long as we’re simply trapped observing Ronnie’s all-too-palpable incomprehension and childlike tantrums over his dead-end circumstances. But when those circumstances start to feel rigged, the film’s value as analysis of a hot-button social phenomenon begins to cool.
  86. Monos
    A sublimely crafted saga about child soldiers discovering their own hearts of darkness in an unnamed, untamed Latin American wilderness, Monos presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.
  87. The Day Shall Come
    The title suggests that the revolution Moses is praying for will someday arrive, but that shouldn’t be nearly as scary to Americans as the fact that his own government is trying to push people like him over the edge. That day is already here.
  88. The Irishman
    Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.
  89. Sister Aimee
    Unfortunately, the invention on display is of a helter-skelter variety, as Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann’s film so madly lurches about in search of a tone that it feels like the first draft of a gonzo faux-biopic.
  90. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
    Prosaically straightforward but consistently interesting portrait of the maverick research scientist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine.
  91. Bliss
    Whether classified as straight-up genre piece or substance-abuse drama in disguise, this is a dive into psychedelic hedonism that succeeds in constantly topping itself, rather than succumbing to shock-value fatigue like the aforementioned Noé joints.
  92. The Death of Dick Long
    The distinguishing quality of its jokey, can-you-believe-this? tone is that the two millennial hayseeds at its center are so richly incompetent that they seem to be inventing a new low place on the totem pole of backwoods idiocy.
  93. Gemini Man
    Gemini Man is a case in which an awful lot of effort has gone into making an awfully lazy action movie.
  94. Black and Blue
    Black and Blue feels imbalanced and overlong, favoring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.
  95. The Disappearance of My Mother
    The Disappearance of My Mother is a successful piece of documentary filmmaking inasmuch as it’s entertaining and dextrously crafted. But its precise intent is unclear.
  96. The Times of Bill Cunningham
    The Times of Bill Cunningham is only 74 minutes long, yet it’s a snapshot of a life that leaves you grateful for having encountered it.
  97. In My Room
    In My Room presents and accepts its partial apocalypse with unquestioning calm — an extreme contrivance that merely enables an elegant, exacting character study.
  98. In the Shadow of the Moon
    The dedicated entertainment junkie now has more options than ever before. So if you’re wondering which logy, derivative, visually pedestrian piece of made-for-Netflix pulp you should avoid at all costs this week, it would be hard to top In the Shadow of the Moon.
  99. Promare
    Every bit as loud and ambitious as one might expect from a visual artist with such a hyperactive imagination, sci-fi action-adventure Promare checks all the conventional anime boxes — post-apocalyptic setting, mecha suits and plenty of fan service — but it’s still an exciting watch.
  100. Bloodline
    Well acted (though Garriga doesn’t quite make a coherent character out of Lauren, or create believable marital chemistry with Scott), this is a smooth movie that maybe should have been a little less tidy for maximum impact.
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