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. Lilo & Stitch
    Somehow, Lilo & Stitch has lost its unpredictable sense of anarchy in the retelling.
  2. Highest 2 Lowest
    In the end, Lee has taken “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed.
  3. Renoir
    None of this would work at all if it weren’t pinned to the unselfconscious gaze of Fuki (delightful newcomer Yui Suzuki), 11 years old and already an original.
  4. Miroirs No. 3
    This 86-minute puzzle piece isn’t one of the director’s major works, but is distinguished by his trademark pleasures of texture and tone — and pushes his ongoing collaboration with star Paula Beer into ever more enigmatic territory.
  5. Dossier 137
    Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, “Case 137” keeps its mind strictly on the job.
  6. Alpha
    It’s painful to watch such talents pour so much into roles that are fairly common, if not clichéd by American indie standards.
  7. Sirât
    This thrilling directorial confidence, given his film’s elegant opacities and ambiguities, is a quality to marvel at, even as it’s binding your hands and tying you to your seat and forcing you to watch, possibly against your will.
  8. Urchin
    The film makes no claims to represent an entire disenfranchised demographic, but there’s resonant human texture and political feeling in its close-up individual portrait.
  9. The Secret Agent
    Mendonça crams the film with vivid time-capsule details.
  10. Dangerous Animals
    The efficient and highly effective thriller scarcely allows a calm moment in which to question how deranged its premise truly is.
  11. The Phoenician Scheme
    The dense but undeniably enjoyable saga doubles as a moving father-daughter tale and ultimately seems far more interested in exploring the robber baron spirit of 20th-century capitalism than its consequences.
  12. Nouvelle Vague
    The film reminds you that the real salvation of cinema will always come from those who understand that making a movie should be a magic trick good enough to fool the magician himself into believing it.
  13. Die My Love
    By the time Die My Love reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie.
  14. Bono: Stories of Surrender
    While the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.
  15. Words of War
    It’s a polished, pedestrian biopic, with direction by British TV veteran James Strong that smooths over instead of elevating Eric Poppen’s cliche-riddled script. While the subject matter is compelling, one hopes Politkovskaya can someday get a punchier, less formulaic screen treatment.
  16. The Chronology of Water
    The Chronology of Water invites us to experience each moment as if it were happening, but the movie is really telling the story of a spirit — the one that tries to survive, and become whole, through each moment.
  17. Eddington
    [Aster] wants to show us the really big picture, and while “Eddington” isn’t a horror movie, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you’ll recognize with a tremor.
  18. Sound of Falling
    No finer point of craft, performance or poetic nuance has been rushed or neglected in a film that ultimately sounds a warning against the dimming or blunting or de-specification of memory — not just for oneself, but for communities or lineages with more shared stories than they might think, but an inclination to clam up and carry on.
  19. Bring Her Back
    The old-school classicist in me wishes that “Bring Her Back” were more tidy and logical, but the Philippous work in a mode that’s impressionistic in an accomplished enough way to justify itself. They don’t care about tying up every bloody loose end. They’re after a feeling, a lavish sensation of malevolent shock.
  20. Hurry Up Tomorrow
    Hurry Up Tomorrow bears all the signs of pop star hubris masquerading as artistic candor, despite game performances by Jenna Ortega and Barry Keogan to prop up the budding thespian.
  21. To Live and Die and Live
    For all its tastefully exasperating gaps in character and storytelling specifics, “To Live & Die and Live” still has a persuasive overall vision, one that holds out the possibility of salvation for its hero — and its city — albeit only if history and the toll it still exacts are faced head-on.
  22. Desert of Namibia
    Like Kana, it’s gloomy, purposeless and hard to love — but that only makes the film, and its lead, feel more pulsating alive.
  23. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    In The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world.
  24. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
    The film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship.
  25. Becoming Madonna
    Becoming Madonna, in other words, does not live up to the basic concept that it’s about Madonna becoming Madonna. Yet the strange thing about the movie is that it convinces itself it is about that by treating the glory days of her career as if she were still “becoming” who she was.
  26. Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Clever, unpredictable and fun, Final Destination Bloodlines offers the series a transfusion of creativity that virtually guarantees that it will live to kill again.
  27. Deaf President Now!
    The propulsive nonfiction story feels as inspirational as any scripted feature, reuniting the four Gallaudet grads who organized the movement to describe events in their own words — words of passion, dynamically signed on-screen and spoken aloud by unseen actors.
  28. Juliet & Romeo
    Improperly developed, poorly executed and containing no indelible music numbers for us to tap our toes to, this “La La Land”-wannabe take on the Bard’s story serves to frustrate and bore.
  29. Sharp Corner
    Led by an against-type performance from Ben Foster, writer-director Jason Buxton’s languidly paced psychological thriller about domesticity and masculinity may be handsomely mounted but ultimately strikes an all too hollow tone to land its kicker of a final shot.
  30. Marcella
    "Marcella” is most interesting, however, when it peels away the layers of achievement and adulation to show us the brisk, unpretentious woman who surprised nobody more than herself by becoming a culinary icon, and articulates something of the oddly intimate but entirely parasocial relationships we form with our most trusted cookery writers.
  31. Shadow Force
    It takes a certain esprit to pull off this kind of bombastic yet larky star vehicle. Joe Carnahan’s film provides passable diversion for a couple hours, but the fun to be had is limited by uninspired action staging, less-than-sparkling dialogue and a maudlin streak of the “It’s about family!!” type.
  32. Fight or Flight
    Ultimately, it’s extremely doubtful that any of this would work nearly as well as it does without Hartnett at the center of the storm, anchoring the bloody chaos and generating rooting interest with a performance defined by propulsive physicality, industrial-strength enthusiasm and an indefatigable willingness, even eagerness, to repeatedly make himself the butt of the joke.
  33. Nonnas
    Nonnas repeatedly drives home its point about the unifying force of a homecooked meal as an embodiment of community, and even as it overcrowds its narrative pot with too many unnecessary condiments that get lost in the mix, the result is ultimately palatable.
  34. Bullet Train Explosion
    Bullet Train Explosion feels like a blockbuster made for adults — or let’s say, not for a lowest-common-denominator audience — where the priority is throwing challenges and complications at smart characters instead of sparking conflict with cheap narrative shortcuts and bad, even dumb choices.
  35. Neighborhood Watch
    There’s no great effort at building tension, or orchestrating major setpieces. But the narrative moves along at an engaging clip, and there’s a pleasing emotional payoff to the way things ultimately come together in Farley’s screenplay.
  36. Until Dawn
    It’s monotonous and derivative and numbing. It’s a grab bag that traps you in a version of hell, though the problem isn’t that the movie is like a video game. It’s that it’s like a video game that’s got no game.
  37. Queens of Drama
    The only way to enjoy Queens of Drama is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers.
  38. Cheech and Chong's Last Movie
    I’d never spent a minute thinking about how these two put their act together, but the evolution of their career, which took shape with not much more calculation than the comedy bits they often improvised, turns out to be a story at once fascinating and enchanting.
  39. Salvable
    Franklin & Marchetta have made a respectable first feature that is well-realized in every aspect — save the earnest but mediocre basic material it ultimately fails to elevate.
  40. Henry Johnson
    Watching it, you feel the depth of Mamet’s talent. It’s never left him. But you also feel the contempt he now has for the verities of entertainment. He wants to take us out of our comfort zone. The trouble is that he’s created his own rarefied discomfort zone of self-indulgence posing as importance.
  41. The Death of Snow White
    It’s a sort of fan-film magnum opus, impressively ambitious on limited means (purportedly around 1/200th the estimated Disney budget) yet still not quite ready for prime time, feeling more like an especially elaborate amateur cosplay than a honed vision with its own distinctive style and ideas.
  42. Sketch
    With his stellar indie family adventure Sketch, commercials director Seth Worley has come up with a creative — and highly teachable — concept for his feature debut, using imaginative visual effects to impart a valuable lesson about dealing with grief and other strong feelings.
  43. A Desert
    A Desert aims for the enigmatic, supernaturally-tinged mystery of something like Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” but in the end lacks the tension and atmosphere to pull that tricky gambit off.
  44. Rust
    It’s a handsome and watchable indie art Western, set in 1882, that turns into a sentimental cross-generational buddy film. Yet I can’t say that the movie, in the end, is especially good. It’s got a bare-bones plot, it lopes along more than it takes wing, and for no good reason it’s two hours and 19 minutes long.
  45. Thunderbolts*
    As with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, what works here is the uneasy tension within a team that comes together out of necessity, rather than any natural sense of affinity.
  46. Drop Dead City
    Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.
  47. The Comeback Trail
    Some people just don’t have the patience for lead performances that are as broad as a “Yellowstone” barn, and as hammy as a butcher shop specialty. I laughed unashamedly throughout the entire film. But your mileage may vary.
  48. Havoc
    The cheesy screenplay, shallow characters and wince-worthy acting (from all but A-listers Hardy, Whitaker and Olyphant) suggest that Evans might be better suited to specializing in the second unit or action sequences on a major franchise, rather than writing and directing a quasi-dramatic feature.
  49. Blue Sun Palace
    More akin to European art films than to American indies, “Palace” prioritizes mood over plot. Tsang allows her experienced actors plenty of breathing space to convey the melancholy of their existence in situations where dreams are more likely to be deferred than to come true, but are necessary nevertheless.
  50. Friendship
    Robinson’s brand of middle-class psycho surrealism works perfectly in bite-size sketch-comedy doses. Stretched out to feature length, a character like Craig simply stops making sense.
  51. Dead Mail
    Set in the 1980s Midwest with a mix of the drab and the eccentric, Dead Mail is an effective, twisty thriller with a singular edge of off-kilter black comedy.
  52. Summer of 69
    It’s a big step backward from the likes of “Anora” in terms of respecting sex workers, but at least it scores as many laughs.
  53. Ghost Trail
    Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis.
  54. Sneaks
    Though the story wears down its tread, strong performances elevate the material. Mackie, Fishburne, Lawrence, Bailey and David all pour a ton of heart into their vocal dynamics, allowing nuanced vulnerability and a bubbly buoyancy to shine through, keeping us tethered to the emotional pull of the picture.
  55. Sacramento
    Angarano has the showpiece role, but it’s Cera who proves himself, more than ever, to be a major actor.
  56. The Teacher
    What the characters can or cannot do in response, and the catharsis they’re prevented from attaining, are both key parts of their story, and of life in the West Bank at large — a reality Nabulsi conveys in stark, realistic hues, despite her first-feature growing pains.
  57. Gunslingers
    Goosed by a couple gratuitous interludes of gory amateur surgery, the movie is eventful, with a high body count. But there’s never the baseline authenticity of atmosphere or character depth that might make so much action meaningful, or even particularly exciting.
  58. The King of Kings
    The King of Kings is a serviceable if uninspired take on a story told countless times in just as varied formats.
  59. Eric Larue
    A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.
  60. Sinners
    Sinners works more than it doesn’t, even if it doesn’t always gel, but it’s a commanding demonstration of how lavishly spirited and “serious” a popcorn movie can be.
  61. G20
    Action does not come naturally to the “Under the Same Moon” director, though the script poses an even bigger problem in G20, a movie whose short title manages to reflect both its high concept and shockingly low intelligence level.
  62. The Amateur
    It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in The Amateur seems…arbitrary.
  63. I Love You Forever
    In observing how Mackenzie absorbs feelings of shame for any time she’s disappointed him, they consider all those who hold onto romantic notions too long, finding a fresh take on a toxic relationship.
  64. Art for Everybody
    Much like Penny Lane’s endlessly amusing “Listening to Kenny G,” Yousef’s illuminating doc appeals to all sides, from Kinkade’s haters to his most ardent defenders, revealing dimensions altogether absent from his enormously popular oeuvre.
  65. Hell of a Summer
    The movie’s hella derivative, but still quite entertaining, with an appealing cast and memorable characters.
  66. A Minecraft Movie
    A Minecraft Movie never stops goofing on itself, and that’s appealing.
  67. The Falling Sky
    One of the most necessary and scorching pieces of nonfiction storytelling in recent memory, “The Falling Sky” offers no comfort and points fingers with a ferocious righteousness as we stare into the abyss of the inescapable environmental catastrophe so-called “developed nations” have wrought.
  68. Warfare
    It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.
  69. On Swift Horses
    There’s a current of tragedy running beneath all of the couples here, as the characters create obstacles to their own happiness. It can feel a bit diagrammatic, as if the novelist were setting up impossible loves and then watching them fail. But there’s hope too, and however contrived the last scene may feel, there’s poetry in watching someone betting their future on yet another horse.
  70. The Woman in the Yard
    The Woman in the Yard never musters the imagination to horrify or even jolt you. It’s a tale of one-note inner demons.
  71. A Working Man
    Jason Statham is good at his job, which explains why he keeps booking the same kinds of movies — well, that and the fact that people keep watching them.
  72. The Luckiest Man in America
    With such a wealth of talent at its disposal, The Luckiest Man in America is strangely never as satisfying as it should be.
  73. When Fall Is Coming
    Nobody is exactly who they appear to be in “When Fall is Coming,” but Ozon’s nimble, perceptive little film takes that as a given: When winter and mortality are beckoning, the past only counts for so much.
  74. Tyler Perry's Duplicity
    It’s a strange-looking, odd-feeling film that gestures toward mystery and larger conspiracy, but it seldom pulls on these threads. Instead, it ends up an anodyne political drama that says little of note.
  75. Locked
    Locked is not without limited charms, but it ultimately fails to bridge the gap between putting audiences in the car with Eddie, and actually wanting to make them go for the ride.
  76. Snow White
    As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature.
  77. The Alto Knights
    If there was any doubt as to De Niro’s greatness, it’s laid to rest in these face-to-face confrontations. No star could’ve held his own quite so effectively against De Niro.
  78. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is nothing if not an homage to the lasting impact that junk culture can have on impressionable minds.
  79. Ash
    The movie’s razor-sharp visuals leave scratch marks on the back of your eyeballs, liable to burst back into your consciousness in subsequent dreams.
  80. The Threesome
    The results are mixed in ways the filmmakers probably didn’t intend, but they’re at once genuinely intriguing and enormously charming given the talent involved.
  81. The Rivals of Amziah King
    The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.
  82. O'Dessa
    There’s too much passion and creativity on display to declare “O’Dessa” a complete catastrophe, but the committed performances and detailed production design and costumes all come across as the product of bibles’ worth of backstory that couldn’t possibly be carried over with the constraints of time.
  83. Hallow Road
    With its dramatic themes spread across two wildly different halves, it makes for a unique, propulsive thrill ride whose baffling existence is key to its enjoyment.
  84. Clown in a Cornfield
    You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be.
  85. The Age of Disclosure
    These people all look and sound so important that the message that blankets every moment of The Age of Disclosure is: They’re official. And what they have to say is official.
  86. Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna
    Mason, a close friend of Hutchins, constructs a propulsive and compelling narrative by skillfully interlacing interviews with people involved in the tragedy — including the OSHA investigator who uncovered a pattern of risky behavior on the “Rust” set — with news footage, police interrogations, and video recorded on cellphones and police minicams.
  87. Holland
    Holland blossoms in the space where all-American domestic fantasy ends and nightmares begin, but never quite delivers on its premise, if only because the resolution feels so familiar.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Actor
    The pat nature of its surprisingly sentimental conclusion only highlights the degree to which Johnson’s directorial interventions feel like attempts to gild the lily, registering as surface-level oddities deployed in a half-successful attempt to replace the psychological insight needed to truly explore identity in such an extreme scenario.
  89. Meanwhile on Earth
    This sophomore directorial effort proves Clapin’s adept hand for soulful, existentialist tales with an offbeat touch, regardless of the medium he’s creating in.
  90. Drop
    It’s a junk-food thriller fried to near-perfection, balancing the tensions of kidnapping, conspiracy and murder with those of a nerve-wracking first date. It’s crisp and delicious.
  91. Novocaine
    In Novocaine, it’s the romance that keeps us going, more than whatever sadistic delight the co-directors take in poking Nathan full of holes, treating him like some kind of Looney Tunes character.
  92. Queen of the Ring
    Queen of the Ring is more of a montage of the highlights of Burke’s illustrious life, rather than an entertaining film.
  93. The Accountant 2
    The Accountant 2 is an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time.
  94. Death of a Unicorn
    As first features go, Death of a Unicorn is considerably more ambitious and imaginative than so much of what studios greenlight these days, which goes a fair distance to excuse some of its flaws.
  95. Another Simple Favor
    The Simple Favor films fill a niche, one that they helped create: the knowing synthetic thriller rooted in the angst of contempo motherhood. But this one both diverts and drags on.
  96. CHAOS: The Manson Murders
    “CHAOS” ends up suggesting that the Manson murders were a grand plot, orchestrated from on high (by the CIA? the Deep State? Nixon?) to turn America against the counterculture. I don’t believe that theory for a second, but there’s one way I think it stays true to the spirit of Charles Manson: It’s pure madness.
  97. The Electric State
    The filmmakers have diluted the source material, showing a clear lack of interest in making their creation just as haunting, searing and satisfying as the original product.
  98. Picture This
    Sweet, silly and sincere, director Prarthana Mohan’s spin has a clear understanding of what makes its source material revelatory and resonant.
  99. Black Bag
    Black Bag is a reminder of just how enjoyable Soderbergh can be when he’s riffing on well-worn genre material.
  100. Being Maria
    Being Maria is a flawed but fascinating look at the turbulent life of actor Maria Schneider.
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