Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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 2.4 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. Shut Up and Play the Hits
    Much like the band's self-conscious synth-pop itself, "Shut Up" is initially satiric but ultimately disarming in its emotional resonance.
  2. The Wedding Plan
    The film nicely plays with the standards of romantic comedy.
  3. Best Summer Ever
    Overall, however, Best Summer Ever is too earnest and charming to ever feel smart-alecky or unduly spoofy, and the winning performances by DeVido and Wilson go a long way toward encouraging a serious emotional investment in the relationship between Sage and Tony.
  4. Love, Simon
    Love, Simon proves groundbreaking on so many levels, not least of which is just how otherwise familiar it all seems, from laugh-out-loud conversations in the school hallways to co-ed house parties where no one drives drunk, and no one gets past first base.
  5. Diplomacy
    To be sure, we are in that authorial fantasy by which historical figures become shrewder, sharper and wittier than they surely were in life — the domain of Peter Morgan and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” But when the actors and the dialogue are this good, one scarcely objects.
  6. Crime After Crime
    Although helmer Yoav Potash's approach is low-key and only vaguely cinematic, each instance of judicial malfeasance -- and there are many -- is allowed to toll loudly in its own moral echo chamber.
  7. Dogtooth
    The Greek helmer's sophomore picture does exude a strange fascination throughout.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prick Up Your Ears
    The script is witty, the direction fluid, with one of the homosexual orgy scenes in a public toilet almost balletic, and the depiction of the lovers’ life in their flat suitably claustrophobic. Gary Oldman is excellent as Orton, right down to remarkable resemblance, while Alfred Molina creates both an amusing and tormented Halliwell. Vanessa Redgrave takes top honors, though, as a compassionate and benign agent.
  9. Journeyman
    If Considine doesn’t seem to know his characters as intimately as he did in his debut, however, he still knows acting inside out. It’s his unguarded conviction in the lead — and that of a superb Jodie Whittaker as his devoted but devastated wife — that finally lands Journeyman a victory on points, if not quite a knockout blow.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The King and I
    All the ingredients that made Rodgers & Hammerstein's [1951] The King and I a memorable stage experience have been faithfully transferred to the screen. The result is a pictorially exquisite, musically exciting, and dramatically satisfying motion picture.
  11. I'm No Longer Here
    Frías isn’t trying to change policy so much as perceptions.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sons of Katie Elder
    Wayne delivers one of his customary rugged portrayals, a little old, perhaps, to have such a young brother as Anderson but not so old that he lacks the attributes of a gunman. Martin, who plays his part with a little more humor than the others, is equally effective in a hardboiled characterization.
  13. In the House
    More inspired by than adapted from Juan Mayorga’s play “The Boy in the Last Row,” this low-key thriller feels like a return to form for Ozon, whose pictures lost their psychosexual edge after the helmer stopped collaborating with Emmanuele Bernheim (“Swimming Pool”).
  14. Hal
    Hal has a once-over-lightly quality, but at times it offers a telling window into how the New Hollywood worked.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Face in the Crowd
    Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg, who teamed to bring forth On the Waterfront, have another provocative and hardhitting entry, based on Schulberg's short story The Arkansas Traveler. It's a devastating commentary on hero-worship and success cults in America.
  16. Exotica
    There's demonstrable growth in his visual and narrative skills here but the writer/director isn't likely to expand his audience with the sometimes oblique, unnerving saga of interwoven lives whose paths cross with alternately comic and tragic results.
  17. The Thomas Crown Affair
    The characters in The Thomas Crown Affair are cool -- too cool, in fact, for the film to develop much of a pulse.
  18. City of Gold
    At a moment when public discourse seems so often focused on exacerbating hostile divisions, this docu’s joyful embrace of human (as well as edible) variety as “the spice of life” seems particularly, well, filling.
  19. Rejoice and Shout
    An overview of African-American gospel sounds whose dazzling talent-display should exhilarate viewers regardless of religious leanings.
  20. A Man for All Seasons
    Producer-director Fred Zinnemann has blended all filmmaking elements into an excellent, handsome and stirring film version of A Man For All Seasons.
  21. Berlin
    Less groundbreaking video experimentation than extraordinary concert experience, Lou Reed's Berlin expertly fulfills its function.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    All That Jazz
    All That Jazz is a self-important, egomaniacal, wonderfully choreographed, often compelling film which portrays the energetic life, and preoccupation with death, of a director-choreographer who ultimately suffers a heart attack.
  23. M3GAN
    M3GAN, as you may have gathered, is overly steeped in pop-culture role models, but in its trivial way it’s a diverting genre film, one that possesses a healthy sense of its own absurdity.
  24. Belushi
    In the film, Belushi’s own letters betray his fear that he had reached the point of no return. Yet there can be a shadow hint of intentionality to all that. Belushi was a bighearted person who craved no limits. In some terrible way, he went out like the rock star he was.
  25. God Grew Tired of Us
    Although shot over a longer period of time than "Lost Boys," God Grew Tired is a softer, less complex version of essentially the same story, far less troubling in its explorations and implications than "The Lost Boys," but with far greater commercial potential.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Big Carnival
    Billy Wilder's direction captures the feel of morbid expectancy that always comes out in the curious that flock to scenes of tragedy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kissing Jessica Stein
    Pure pleasure. A fresh take on sex and the single girl, this buoyant, well-crafted romantic comedy blends pitch-perfect performances with deliciously smart writing.
  28. Seabiscuit
    Respectable when it should be thrilling, honorable when it should be rough and ready.
  29. Always Shine
    With her confident second feature, director Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs itself nearly to death.
  30. Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle
    Salmerón’s film, crammed as full of tchotchkes and knick-knacks and bibelots as one of his mother’s closets, refutes that, presenting an endearingly haphazard portrait of an extraordinary woman and the family she made — one that has discovered its own, completely unique way to be happy.
  31. 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.
  32. A Secret
    A fine drama that stands as Gallic vet Claude Miller's best in at least a decade.
  33. King Jack
    Thompson and his appealing young cast enliven the material with authentic, ingenuous feeling; there’s a palpable understanding here of the substantial difficulties involved in growing up under any circumstances, and Thompson’s script never condescends to its teen subjects with dewy-eyed nostalgia for youth.
  34. Mickey 17
    Though it earns points for sheer oddity (and the nearly monochromatic, future-noir look established by DP Darius Khondji and production designer Fiona Crombie), too much of “Mickey 17” turns out to be sloppy, shrill and preachy — ironically, the same things that make Mark Ruffalo’s deliberately Trump-styled villain so grating in this movie.
  35. 3-Iron
    A rarefied love story, conducted with no dialogue between the principals.
  36. Blow the Man Down
    “Blow the Man Down” has a few contrivances ... Yet Morgan Saylor and Sophie Lowe invest the embattled but loyal Connolly sisters with a desperate resonance, and the movie is clever enough to hold you, even when you wish it had taken the extra step and gone full Patricia Highsmith.
  37. Happy End
    It’s as if the director has tied up loose ends from his earlier films, while forcing us to re-examine issues that have only grown more dire since he first brought them to our attention.
  38. His House
    A potent if unbalanced mashup of social-issues polemic and haunted-house horror.
  39. Earth
    A ravishing distillation of the BBC/Discovery series "Planet Earth," docu brings to the large screen memorable images that cried out on TV for the full movie-going experience.
  40. Burden
    A portrait of the artist emerges that’s complex, somewhat mysterious, but ultimately quite winning.
  41. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    A coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur that expands, not altogether convincingly, into a meditation on our collective over-reliance on our favorite handheld gadgets.
  42. Strike
    Continuing the late-career renaissance of historically urgent, politically engaged fiction filmmaking that began with 1999's "The Legend of Rita" and 2004's "The Ninth Day" German vet Volker Schloendorff stumbles slightly, but doesn't fall, with Poland-set Solidarity saga Strike.
  43. Aliyah
    [An] intimate and dexterous debut feature.
  44. The Prayer
    Agnostically observant in its approach to spiritual matters, but more devout in its quiet celebration of human compassion, this film’s most complicated lines of inquiry largely play out on the young, unformed face of its protagonist Thomas — impressively played by breakthrough star Anthony Bajon.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hospital
    The heavily sprayed-on sociological angle is that hospitals today treat patients like baggage.
  46. Sophie Jones
    The cinematic catharsis the Barrs and company have carefully crafted stands as a fully realized portrait of grief that’s universal in its texture. By focusing on living with the specter of grief and the discovery of its blessings, the filmmakers highlight the human struggle, breaking through to the gutting truth of the matter.
  47. Princess Cyd
    Caring more about what its characters represent — and its empathetic representation of them — than about crafting a fully formed drama concerning flesh-and-blood people, Cone’s film has little more than its heart in the right place.
  48. Big Fish & Begonia
    Big Fish & Begonia commands awe on the strength of its imagery alone...while weaving an epic tale that’s uniquely informed by local myths and motifs. If only it made the slightest bit of sense.
  49. Bone Tomahawk
    Bone Tomahawk may seem over-indulgent at 132 minutes, yet it’s the wayward digressions of Zahler’s script — navigated with palpable enjoyment by an expert, Kurt Russell-led ensemble — that are most treasurable in a film that commits wholeheartedly to its own curiosity value.
  50. Cairo Conspiracy
    What we’re dealing with here is a fairly conventional political thriller — think “House of Cards,” minus the sleek David Fincher aesthetic or much in the way of suspense — set in a world no one has dared to explore on screen before now.
  51. Our Hero, Balthazar
    It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.
  52. Risk
    Running a short 84 minutes, Risk offers considerable insights into Assange, but seems to omit as much as it reveals.
  53. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    In Reuveny’s subtle hands, any uplift to emerge from this extraordinary tale is earned, not gratuitously extracted.
  54. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Mugen Train
    Rest assured that there’s a wacky enjoyment to be had even when things don’t make sense.
  55. Let Them All Talk
    It’s probably best to think of this as either an experiment or an exercise, Soderbergh’s way of challenging himself yet again. What results may not be literature exactly, but it broadens other creators’ of idea of what the medium can do.
  56. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    The director’s double vision establishes a level of equality on film that in some ways defies the disparity in power between the two opposing forces.
  57. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Piscatella and editor Matthew Sultan have shaped the kind of exciting you-are-there narrative that captures the feeling of underdog “naive” idealism transforming into a game-changing popular movement.
  58. Invisible Beauty
    Invisible Beauty will likely make you hungry for Hardison’s book. But in a twist, one might wonder, can it be as good as the movie?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Phantasm
    Strong point of the feature is that it’s played for both horror and laughs.
  60. Widow of Silence
    Widow of Silence is a classic example of festival filler, the sort of issue-driven art-house film that masks a plodding obviousness of intent beneath a thick varnish of righteousness and attractive visuals.
  61. Gaucho Gaucho
    Some of these vignettes are more arresting than others; all are pleasurable in the patchwork impression they form of a lively and eccentric way of life. Anthropological excavation isn’t the objective here; Dweck and Kershaw are more than happy to buy into the community’s self-mythologizing, to absorb the hand-me-down stories and macho iconography that keep the romance of the gaucho alive.
  62. 7 Days
    In the future, audiences may tire of movies about COVID-19. For the moment, however, 7 Days arrives as a funny, modest charmer.
  63. Meeting Gorbachev
    We might have hoped for a more sparky encounter, but Meeting Gorbachev, though consistently engaging, is less a fireworks display than a fireside chat, and so feels curiously like an opportunity missed.
  64. Nine Days
    Nine Days is that rare work of art that invites you to re-consider your entire worldview.
  65. Exhibition
    With acute sensitivity, Brit writer-helmer Joanna Hogg’s third feature, Exhibition, explores the difficulty of telling inside from outside, intimacy from estrangement, and revelation from concealment.
  66. Mike Wallace Is Here
    He left behind enough tape from both ends of the microphone that Belkin is able to create his entire documentary with old footage, juiced by retro imagery of broadcast air waves and vintage dials and knobs.
  67. Superman Returns
    Grandly conceived and sensitively drawn.
  68. Weathering with You
    Shinkai hasn’t gone far enough into fantasy to excuse the enormous holes in his script, though he does a nice job of distracting us with detail.
  69. Men in Black
    A witty and sometimes surreal sci-fi comedy, Men in Black is a wild knuckleball of a movie that keeps dancing in and out of the strike zone.
  70. Infinity Pool
    The Canadian helmer has created the cinematic equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing, which bends and breaks and folds back on itself in impossible ways. Brain-shattering as it all is, we can hardly tear our eyes away.
  71. Blindsight
    The deceptively complex picture gradually grows sharp edges and snowballs into a compelling study in culture clash, with spectacular scenery to boot.
  72. Good Hair
    A raucous and rigorous inquiry into the subject of African-American hair -- the stigmas, the secrets, the shocking price of maintenance -- that gets at universal but rarely discussed truths about black femininity.
  73. Pi
    The film's imaginative, diverse images create a mind's-eye urban claustrophobia; such intensity may exhaust over 85 minutes' course, but it's never less than impressive.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dances with Wolves
    Costner's directing style is fresh and assured. A sense of surprise and humor accompany Dunbar's adventures at every turn, twisting the narrative gently this way and that and making the journey a real pleasure.
  75. Tony Manero
    Balancing black humor against allegorical indictment of the Pinochet regime's oppression on narrow stack heels, striking, very offbeat period pic Tony Manero follows a psychotic petty criminal into the depths of his crazed obsession with John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Presumed Innocent
    Honed to a riveting intensity by director Alan Pakula and featuring the tightest script imaginable, Presumed Innocent is a demanding, disturbing javelin of a courtroom murder mystery.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These Are the Damned
    Although the cast is excellent, no one character dominates the action or overshadows the others. Joseph Losey's hand is so apparent that the film's considerable effectiveness must be accredited to him as must its few faults and the fearsome message it conveys.
  78. The Outrun
    On its own unvarnished, metaphoric, diary-of-destruction-and-renewal terms, The Outrun is competent and even stylishly made, yet I have to confess: I found the movie overwhelmingly drab.
  79. Wreck-It Ralph
    With plenty to appeal to boys and girls, old and young, Walt Disney Animation Studios has a high-scoring hit on its hands in this brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed toon, earning bonus points for backing nostalgia with genuine emotion.
  80. First They Killed My Father
    The film is so understated with regard to Loung’s basic predicament that we don’t recognize her driving desire...until the movie is over.
  81. Power
    Anyone watching the film is likely to learn something, though whether its lessons will stick, or claw their way beneath one’s skin, is less likely.
  82. ParaNorman
    Few movies so taken with death have felt so rudely alive as ParaNorman, the latest handcrafted marvel from the stop-motion artists at Laika ("Coraline").
  83. Let It Rain
    Despite an initial forecast of smart laughs and witty tete-a-tetes, the French dramedy Let It Rain winds up being a partly cloudy affair that lacks the cohesiveness of Agnes Jaoui’s two previous features, "The Taste of Others" and "Look at Me."
  84. Screwball
    It works surprisingly and consistently well as a storytelling flourish for a documentary that does not traffic in subtleties or moral indignation while repeatedly and boisterously posing the question: “Can you believe these people actually did this?”
  85. Luce
    The film is sleek and shadowy, benefiting from the fact Onah chose to shoot on celluloid and driven by stellar performances across the board.
  86. The Rocket
    Mordaunt previously directed a docu in Laos that featured kids who sold unexploded bombs for scrap metal, and that earlier experience invests this feature’s characters and milieu with an absolute integrity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sign 'o' the Times
    Posing, pouting and pirouetting with androgynous abandon, pushing his guitar into ethereal, upper-register soundstorms and giving supple voice to songs of sensual and emotional free-fall in an anomic contemporary world, Prince provides music video addicts with a pure fix of visual and aural synchronicity.
  88. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    Tyler Taormina‘s delightful stocking-stuffer Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is as alive to the domesticated magic of the season as a classic carol.
  89. A People Uncounted
    This globe-trotting debut effort by helmer Aaron Yeger and his producing team offers a vivid mix of visual evidence, historical commentary and survivor testimonies. It’s less successful trying to integrate the struggles of today’s Roma, which merits a docu of its own.
  90. Welcome to Sarajevo
    The film's persistent skimming from one vantage point to another, with no dominant dramatic line until midway through, will unsettle audiences expecting a more regular construction and something on which to hook their emotions over the long term.
  91. Being Evel
    An exercise in hero worship that doesn’t shy away from its subject’s least admirable traits, “Being Evel” attempts to deliver a complex portrait of a man who preferred to be seen as a self-styled myth
  92. Paul Williams Still Alive
    An engrossing and satisfying picture, one that can be enjoyed even by people who have never before heard of its subject.
  93. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    The Internet’s Own Boy is a beautifully crafted film that opens a window on a world not everyone has entered yet, and exposes ways in which both the legal system and the U.S. government is lagging hopelessly behind technology.
  94. Extra Ordinary
    Extra Ordinary is a kind of tea-cosy “Ghostbusters” that’s consistently funny in a pleasingly off-kilter way.
  95. Only the Brave
    It’s a gripping and powerfully emotional portrait of yee-haw heroism, pitting a squad of cocky, calendar-purty white dudes against an adversary with no creed or color, just an unquenchable appetite for destruction.
  96. The Tunnel
    A cracking slice of old-fashioned, widescreen entertainment.
  97. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    The grounding material here is with the elderly Vidal himself... Unfailingly witty and devastatingly insightful, he personifies that near-extinct species — the public intellectual.
  98. The Search for General Tso
    Eventually, the quixotic “search” of the movie’s title seems secondary to that more arduous quest of so many Chinese-Americans to find their place in a country that did not always welcome them with open arms, and how food forged the path of least resistance.
  99. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    “Fireball” is a documentary about meteorites, but what makes it a Herzog film is that it’s in love with meteorites.
  100. Breaking a Monster
    What makes Luke Meyer’s documentary interesting isn’t so much the music or even the incipient stardom, but rather the push-pull between high-stakes biz pressure and subjects who — being 13 years old or so — hardly have the attention spans for the drudgery and minutiae a “career” requires.
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