Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Where Hands Touch
    Amandla Stenberg carries the magnetism she brought to her breakthrough role in the YA romance “Everything, Everything,” but she’s betrayed by a stilted rendering of a rarely illuminated piece of history.
  2. In Fabric
    There’s no reason a movie about a devil dress should work, and yet Strickland strikes the right tone, inviting laughter by taking it all so seriously.
  3. The Hate U Give
    Without compromising the complexity of the issues raised, or condescending to the youth of its protagonists, The Hate U Give strides with absorbing, intelligent certainty through the desperately dangerous, uneven terrain of racially divided America.
  4. Final Score
    Park your brain cells in the lobby, and this U.K. production about a terrorist attack on a London soccer stadium — with Dave Bautista as Bruce Willis plus 100 or so extra pounds of muscle — is an entertainingly over-the-top ride that doesn’t even try to be “credible.” It’s not quite daft or otherwise distinctive enough to be memorable.
  5. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    Structured as a straightforward life story followed by an extended coda looking in detail at the features Cohen is restoring, The Great Buster can’t hold a candle to the 1987 three-part series “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow” but will make do as a decent DVD extra.
  6. High Life
    This kinky, often grotesque melding of genre science-fiction with all-out body horror is an audacious project, but the scope of its ambition is cleverly reined in by the low-key presentation, its more salacious potential muted down to an insistent threatening hum, like the background radiation of Stuart Staples’ score.
  7. Gloria Bell
    Although García and Moore were born in the same year (under the same sign!), Lelio is more mature now than he was when he made the original film, and he brings that experience to the project in small but crucial ways.
  8. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The movie quotes Baldwin as saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street,” but this one may as well be located inside a snow globe. In deciding how to translate Baldwin’s prose to the screen, Jenkins may as well have made Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a Douglas Sirk movie (or put Alice Waters’ “The Color Purple” through the Steven Spielberg filter).
  9. Fistful of Dirt
    A dark Brothers Grimm-like fairy tale anchored by a terrific child-actor performance.
  10. The Fall of the American Empire
    Arcand tries a little too hard at the very end to demonstrate his deep-down earnestness. But never mind: The performances across the board are everything they need to be, and the satirical thrusts are well aimed at the right targets.
  11. A Simple Favor
    The film feels a lot like the Serge Gainsbourg number that Stephanie dances to in the kitchen: jazzy, a little sleazy, and worth a cult following.
  12. Widows
    Widows, while a highly original and entertaining variation on the heist film, isn’t a home run.
  13. Halloween
    By contemporary horror standards, the original “Halloween” was actually quite tame, featuring just five (human) deaths, whereas this one more than triples the body count — and it does so with style, borrowing several of Carpenter’s classic devices...before getting into the more prosthetic-heavy mayhem that follows.
  14. Fahrenheit 11/9
    The movie, in its way, summons something ominous and powerful. It’s not a screed — it’s a warning. It says, quite wisely: Take action now, or you may no longer have the opportunity to do so.
  15. Charlie Says
    The film Harron delivers is so ambivalent as to be frustratingly gun-shy about truly asserting a point of view, or adding anything meaningful to the already thriving cottage industry of Manson-adjacent storytelling.
  16. Beautiful Boy
    Beautiful Boy, made by the Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), from a script by Luke Davies, is scrupulous and tenderly wounding — a drama that seizes and holds you.
  17. American Dharma
    What you see in American Dharma isn’t investigative filmmaking — it’s a toothless bromance.
  18. White Boy Rick
    Although Demange directs the heck out of it, White Boy Rick ultimately feels like a glorified TV movie, albeit with a better cast and a much hipper score.
  19. Mara
    A generically conceived horror thriller distinguished only by its belief that more hysteria equals a more frightening movie.
  20. Walking on Water
    The artist’s forceful character does battle with technology, bureaucracy, corruption and the elements, resulting in an installation of stunning beauty and a documentary that delights in capturing the act of creation.
  21. Dead Souls
    Wang Bing’s Dead Souls is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.
  22. Outlaw King
    Whatever its value as rabble-rousing historical reenactment, Outlaw King never quite compares to the many films it’s so keen to imitate, and in some cases outright quote.
  23. The Predator
    All of this is silly, borderline senseless, lively, and without any real rooting value at all. The supposedly lovable misfits here aren’t, no matter how the cast members feign hilarity at their potty-mouthing. Not that it matters — because nothing does in this expensive toy of a film, which ultimately works on the level of a disco ball. It’s shiny, it moves, and is accompanied by much noise.
  24. Hal
    Hal has a once-over-lightly quality, but at times it offers a telling window into how the New Hollywood worked.
  25. Five Fingers For Marseilles
    Five Fingers for Marseilles turns out to be an impressively effective and engrossing cross-cultural hybrid that has a great deal more than novelty value going for it.
  26. Cold Skin
    A good-looking and well-crafted if familiar chunk of creature-siege horror.
  27. Hotel by the River
    As a forlorn kind of hangout movie, then, Hotel by the Sea proceeds at a pleasing shuffle, spiked with bittersweet humor and even a gentle, surprising hint of sentimentality.
  28. Sibel
    Weaving together folklore, gender roles and a fitful kind of emancipation in the story of a mute young woman desperate to counter the ostracism of her fellow villagers, the writer-director couple have created an attractive package that doesn’t hold up to close inspection.
  29. Beautifully Broken
    Beautifully Broken enthusiastically and unabashedly celebrates the power of faith and forgiveness, and the potential for reconciliation and redemption. But it never comes across as simplistic (or simple-minded) in its boundless optimism. Rather, the movie is dramatically and emotionally satisfying.
  30. Running for Grace
    Imagine a Troy Donahue-Sandra Dee teen romance of the early ‘60s with an inoffensive undercurrent of social consciousness, and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect from director David L. Cunningham’s thoroughly predictable but lightly enjoyable tale of love and prejudice in 1920s Hawaii.
  31. Down a Dark Hall
    This is a decent modern Gothic thriller handled with sufficient style and a straight face by genre ace Cortés. His efforts, and strong performances by the young female leads, make for a movie that’s fairly strong meat by juvenile fantasy standards, if probably a tad wimpy for horror-fan tastes.
  32. Breaking & Exiting
    Despite surface polish, this indie feels like a classroom exercise that checks off the basic technical and narrative-beat boxes needed to get a passing grade, yet never develops any real personality of its own or raison d’etre.
  33. The Little Mermaid
    Creaky visual effects, slapdash plotting and a script drunk on cliché: There’s pretty much nothing but cheap parlor trickery here.
  34. To All the Boys I've Loved Before
    So much of the movie’s charm owes to Condor’s lead performance, which balances the character’s timidity with her lovability. Any guy would be lucky to date her, but the choice is ultimately hers.
  35. The Island
    This mix of broad humor, survivalist drama and romance opens brightly and ends with a bang but stutters a little in the middle.
  36. Along Came the Devil
    The budget may be low, but the level of scares and imagination are lower still in Along Came the Devil, a feeble indie horror film that sometimes seems like a straight retread and other times feels like a movie aimed specifically at Christian audiences.
  37. Nelly
    Émond obviously has deep feeling for Arcan, and “Nelly” is a sincere and respectful attempt to do at least partial, fragmentary justice to a troubled woman able to self-create any persona except a happy one, but it can’t put her back together again.
  38. Peppermint
    As a onetime Girl Scout den mother turned brass-knuckled avenging angel, Garner gives everything that is asked of her, from brute physicality to dewy-eyed tenderness, but this half-witted calamity botches just about everything else. Drably by-the-numbers except for the moments where it goes gobsmackingly off-the-rails, Peppermint misfires from start to finish.
  39. Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
    Sierra Burgess is a Loser is a slumber-party charmer that wants to satisfy every craving, even when what audiences are hungry for clashes, like pouring a chocolate milkshake over a pepperoni pizza.
  40. Too Late to Die Young
    While the film is perhaps longer than necessary, and the adult characters could use some fleshing out, this is a satisfying sensorial work.
  41. A Land Imagined
    "Land” will feel overly familiar to those looking for more than well-intentioned musings on the horrendous treatment of guest workers.
  42. The Nun
    Employing just about every trick from the Hammer Horror playbook without wasting time trying to make any sense, it provides a serviceable 96 minutes of standard-issue jump scares and supernatural hokum.
  43. 22 July
    It’s intelligently stern, storm-gray filmmaking, as we’ve come to expect from Greengrass; if it feels a bit mechanical as well, perhaps this is a near-impossible story to film with both tact and soul.
  44. Boarding School
    Boarding School includes an odd mix of narrative elements within a classically Grimm child-endangerment scenario that would work best played as a modern fairy tale. Yet Yakin chooses to pace the film more slowly as a serious drama, which keeps the suspense from building real momentum and exacerbates the script’s implausibilities.
  45. Vox Lux
    Powered in its second half by a riveting performance of fiercely mannered bravado by Natalie Portman, as a kamikaze electropop diva running her Faustian fame off and under the rails, Vox Lux paints a sharp, shellacked portrait of a ghost in the celebrity machine.
  46. Sunset
    The chaos is there but without the coherence necessary to balance sensorial turmoil with genuine meaning.
  47. Free Solo
    For those who love the thrill of high-adrenaline adventure docs, National Geographic’s Free Solo will be a hard experience to top.
  48. What Keeps You Alive
    This thriller about a lesbian couple whose weekend takes a drastic turn is less one-note as a narrative conceit than “It Stains the Sand Red,” though it too ultimately stretches inspiration a tad thin. Nonetheless, it’s an entertaining and well-crafted effort.
  49. Dragged Across Concrete
    At a whopping 158 minutes, “Concrete’s” sleek, languorous anatomy of a heist represents the filmmaker’s most extreme exercise yet in painstaking genre deceleration, sparked as ever by the tangy movie-movie vernacular of his writing, the crunchy metal-on-asphalt dynamism of his craftsmanship, and the back-from-the-brink reanimation of his stars.
  50. At Eternity's Gate
    Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy.
  51. The Front Runner
    Hugh Jackman proves an inspired candidate to embody Hart, downplaying his brawny movie-star persona, while still conveying the twinkle-eyed sex appeal that was not only Hart’s undoing, but one of the qualities that would have made the photogenic and well-spoken senator from Colorado a logical choice to follow the country’s first movie-star president.
  52. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    It’s the human side of the character that makes this McCarthy’s best performance to date, revealing haunting insights into friendship, loneliness, and creative insecurity.
  53. Boy Erased
    Edgerton shows an admirable sense of restraint, even when hitting all the usual beats. He includes moments of quiet introspection for the characters and the audience alike.
  54. Destroyer
    Kidman has always been a chameleon, but in this case, she doesn’t merely change her color (or don a fake nose, à la “The Hours”); she disappears into an entirely new skin, rearranging her insides to fit the character’s tough hide.
  55. Ray & Liz
    Ray & Liz is formally arresting and rigorous, though not at the expense of its direct emotional force.
  56. MDMA
    None of the sizzle is as compelling as this character study of a young woman who confesses that her only childhood companion was the TV.
  57. The Sisters Brothers
    I enjoyed the film as far is it goes, especially John C. Reilly’s straight-shooter performance, yet I also found myself, at certain points, growing impatient with it.
  58. Suspiria
    Suspiria has been made with enough skill to get inside your head, but enough ominous pretension to leave you scratching it.
  59. Peterloo
    When Peterloo’s unaligned fingers form a fist, for a punching, unyielding, robustly choreographed finale of rage against the right-wing machine, the film makes good on its most taxing demands.
  60. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    It says more about the man behind it than any documentary to date, cut together with such a supreme understanding and care for its subject that director Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) seems half-justified in suggesting that his project may as well be the missing film.
  61. The Old Man & the Gun
    People don’t forget a performer like Redford, whose movie-star charisma idles low and sexy like a Harley Davidson motor even when he’s not doing anything, and that means a movie like David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun — a dapper, low-key riff on the bank-robber genre — can play things soft, counting on Redford’s charm to fuel the show.
  62. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    Since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing. Yet The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie.
  63. A Star Is Born
    Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet.
  64. Non-Fiction
    This story of two couples dealing with change in their personal and professional lives, so packed with intellectual sparring, gets progressively lighter as it moves along, acknowledging the primacy of human interaction (foibles and all) over doctrine.
  65. Reprisal
    Reprisal is not a very good movie, but it leaves you with tantalizing hints that some people involved with it are capable of doing something much better.
  66. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.
  67. Let the Corpses Tan
    Even if the rewards are limited, the technique is impeccable.
  68. Inventing Tomorrow
    Inventing Tomorrow won’t win points for originality, but this snapshot of adolescent ingenuity and innovation, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, nonetheless proves equally entertaining and inspiring.
  69. Destination Wedding
    Destination Wedding barely holds together as a coherent film. It’s too callous for coos, too chipper to examine the dark corners of the soul. Yet it works as a valentine to old-fashioned star power — two modern legends, older if no wiser, daring the audience to somehow love them for all their faults, and on that level, somehow succeeding.
  70. The Laws of Thermodynamics
    The final result is a curiosity, sure, but a cute, quick-witted one, with much (maybe too much) on its mind.
  71. The Favourite
    It’s a perfectly cut diamond of a movie — a finely executed, coldly entertaining entry in the genre of savage misanthropic baroque costume drama.
  72. Kin
    The results are, in artistic terms, a modest success. In commercial terms, it’s a dicier prospect — viewers expecting the kind of bigger-budget spectacle that typically ensues when a screen teenager stumbles into sci-fi situations may be befuddled by what’s primarily a medium-scaled road trip drama with thriller elements … and a very special ray gun.
  73. Roma
    Roma is no mere movie — it’s a vision, a memory play that unfolds with a gritty and virtuosic time-machine austerity. It’s a Proustian reverie, dreamed and designed down to the last street corner and scuffed piece of furniture. Yet I actually think it’s far from a masterpiece, because as a viewing experience it has a slightly hermetic coffee-table-book purity. Every moment comes at you in the same methodically objective and caressing Zen way.
  74. The Man from Mo'Wax
    Weaving together a dizzying array of archival material and previously unseen personal home movies, director Matthew Jones never quite cracks the man behind the music, but he nonetheless offers an appropriately hyperactive snapshot of a colorful era.
  75. The Little Stranger
    Wilson’s extraordinary performance rules the film, weaving a lifetime of accumulating disappointment into a single arched eyebrow.
  76. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    It’s a film as compellingly all over the shop as its subject, even if it doesn’t quite have her beat on stylistic verve and risk.
  77. First Man
    After seeing First Man, it’s doubtful you’ll think about space flight, or Armstrong’s historic walk, in quite the same way. You’ll know more deeply how it happened, what it meant and what it was, and why its mystery — more than ever — still lingers.
  78. Bisbee '17
    It’s an investigation into memory, intolerance, corporate-labor conflicts and race relations that’s as audacious as it is timely — and further confirms that director Robert Greene is one of America’s finest new voices in nonfiction.
  79. I Am Not a Witch
    Singular as that story might be, what makes I Am Not a Witch unique, however, is Nyoni’s abundant, maybe even overabundant directorial confidence. It’s rare and exhilarating that a new filmmaker arrives on the scene so sure of herself and so willing to take bold, counter-intuitive chances.
  80. The Elephant and the Butterfly
    The Elephant and the Butterfly is a movie too cool-headed and present tense for backstory.
  81. Four Hands
    While the supernaturally-tinged plot may be outlandish, the commitment and confidence of the actors, and of Kienle in delivering what could be shallow twists with a surprising amount of emotional effect and psychological insight, give the film its melancholic, meditative texture.
  82. Active Measures
    While it’s not as if the film comes up with some smoking gun that Robert Mueller hasn’t yet, it fills in the Trump-Russia connection in a dogged, rigorously reported, eyebrow-raising way.
  83. Blue Iguana
    Blue Iguana strains to be antic in every joint, from gimmicky editorial and camera choices to a soundtrack cluttered with early ’80s New Wave tracks by the B-52’s, Violent Femmes, Only Ones — great stuff, but they can’t get a party started that’s already flatlined.
  84. Jane Fonda in Five Acts
    Lively, confessional, and entertaining.
  85. Makala
    French helmer-lenser Emmanuel Gras’ camera embraces the subject’s every move with such rapt intimacy and cinematic poetry it’s easy to forget this is not a fictional drama.
  86. Arizona
    As a debut film, Arizona shows that Watson could become a director with interesting ideas, but this housing crisis horror comedy is definitely just a rental.
  87. The Happytime Murders
    It should come as no surprise that “Happytime” comes up farcically short as a metaphor for racism. But its most fatal miscalculation is the decision to frontload so many of its crassest setpieces into the first 15 or 20 minutes, depriving the rest of the film of the shock value that is its entire raison d’etre.
  88. Operation Finale
    The last thing you want a movie like this one to feel like is a slick Hollywood suspense drama with famous historical names plugged in. Operation Finale doesn’t feel like that, yet taken on its own here’s how it really happened terms, the movie is at once plausible and sketchy, intriguing and not fully satisfying.
  89. Minding the Gap
    It exists because it’s the movie Liu was born to make, the one he had to get off his chest before he could move on in his filmmaking career.
  90. The Bookshop
    This is a frustratingly patchy adaptation, in which some of Fitzgerald’s shrewdest observations on the savage politics and politesse of supposedly tranquil English village life get a little bit lost in the Europudding. A fine, sensitive leading turn from Emily Mortimer helps shore up these quiet, lightly dust-covered proceedings, but can’t quite put The Bookshop in the black.
  91. Billionaire Boys Club
    There are no billionaires here, just a lot of testosterone where the movie’s brains ought to be.
  92. The Motive
    Whatever attracted Cuenca (“Cannibal”) to this material is seldom evident in his handling of it. Yet the material itself still lends the film its genuine if all-too-modest pleasures.
  93. We the Animals
    As if by magic, Zagar has managed to foster a sense of familiarity among the boys that sells the illusion that they’re related, further reinforced by the editors’ trick of including moments of spontaneous, unscripted tomfoolery between the young actors.
  94. Madeline's Madeline
    Madeline’s Madeline mistakes intimacy for honesty, and it mis-assumes that audiences care nearly as much about the creative process as actors and directors do.
  95. Mile 22
    Berg, when he wants to be, is a surgical craftsman of chaos. Yet Mile 22 has little weight or resonance.
  96. Songwriter
    Murray Cummings’ film is a cautiously peppy, unrevealing affair, showing little of the trial and tension that goes into artistic creation — just the finger-snapping moments when it all comes together.
  97. The Ranger
    Diehard gorehounds may be disappointed by its relatively infrequent reliance on graphic and grisly mayhem (relative to this particular subgenre’s standards, that is), but Wexler’s discretion in this area turns out to be one of her film’s few distinguishing characteristics.
  98. Cielo
    Affording viewers a trip to the Chilean desert to gaze up at the crystal-clear sky, Cielo is a rapturous act of cinematic contemplation.
  99. Alpha
    Alpha, a spectacular prehistoric eye-candy survival yarn, is enthralling in a square and slightly stolid way.
  100. Slender Man
    Slender Man is the kind of movie in which images come before logic, because there really isn’t much logic. There’s just a movie out to goose you.
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