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. Terrestrial Verses
    This is punchy first-person filmmaking, from the point of view of the last person you want to be.
  2. The Scent of Green Papaya
    Precision lensing by Benoit Delhomme, and charming, contained playing by the amateur cast, add up to a tasty package.
  3. Concerned Citizen
    With its piercing, probing final moments, which turn self-flagellating into thorny cathartic territory, Haguel has crafted an intimate portrait of privilege that’s as damning as it is discomfiting.
  4. Against All Enemies
    A grim diagnosis of a fast-spreading cancer, Against All Enemies may provide much less reassurance than cause for alarm, but its wakeup call is certainly worth heeding.
  5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    Practically all that’s missing is an appearance by Anderson himself, the way Alfred Hitchcock used to present episodes of his television series. Then again, one could say he’s present in every frame.
  6. Klondike
    Without undue contrivance or melodrama, Er Gorbach overlaps escalating marital tension with the larger war closing in on the couple to claustrophobic life-or-death effect, building to a finale of staggering savagery.
  7. The League
    If one measure of a documentary’s quality is whether it inspires you to learn more about its subject after the credits roll, The League is an unqualified success.
  8. Surrounded
    An exceptionally well-crafted Western that spins a gripping, racially charged tale of suspicion, deception and survival in post-Civil War New Mexico.
  9. American Pain
    It’s hard to think of a prior chronicle quite so luridly indicting as American Pain.
  10. Dumb Money
    [A] smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Public Enemy
    There's no lace on this picture. It's raw and brutal. It's low-brow material given such workmanship as to make it high-brow.
  12. The Eternal Memory
    This insistent parallel between individual and national consciousness never culminates in quite the rhetorical kicker Alberdi seems to be seeking, but there’s power in it just the same: a reminder of how our best efforts to keep and curate memories — for ourselves and others — can be thwarted by time.
  13. Red Rooms
    In contrast to most movies about serial killers, this one offers nary a glimpse of violence, let alone any wallowing in sadism. Yet somehow that makes it all the more icky — at times the squirm factor is such that you may think no shower could wash a viewer’s taint-by-association away.
  14. Restore Point
    Marrying glossy mainstream genre aesthetics to probing, elaborately conceived speculative storytelling, this is a notably ambitious and auspiciously well-realized first feature for Hloz: the kind that appears to be flaunting his capabilities for even bigger international and Hollywood assignments.
  15. Mars Express
    A gripping, heady and refreshing 2D animated take on the perils of man and machine coexisting, Périn’s first feature as a director inserts the necessary exposition in a mostly natural manner so we incrementally become aware of how this reality functions.
  16. Fremont
    In its final moments, the potency of Fremont sneaks up on you. You go in reluctant and even skeptical, and come out wondering how and why you’re moved to tears.
  17. Mutt
    While Feña’s journey may contain some contrivances, the way this young man adapts to each predicament feels authentic and emotionally potent. That’s a testament to Lungulov-Klot, who succeeds in placing vivid characters in slightly heighted situations — amplifying our connection in the process — without sacrificing the sense of realism that makes “Mutt” so relatable.
  18. Return to Dust
    A later-life love story of the gentlest kind, Li Ruijun’s Return to Dust is an absorbing, beautifully framed drama that makes a virtue — possibly too much a virtue — of simplicity.
  19. American Fiction
    The helmer trusts his audience to bring themselves to the material. Ultimately, that’s what makes reading “American Fiction” so rewarding.
  20. The Iron Claw
    A perfect movie for this moment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Plot Against Harry
    The Plot against Harry is hilarious and often poignant.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They Died with Their Boots On
    The liberties which the screen writers have taken with well established and authenticated facts are likely to be a bit trying in spots. But the test of the yarn is not its accuracy, but its speed and excitement. Of these it has plenty.
  23. Coup de Chance
    It’s not a comedy, but as you watch it you can almost see Woody Allen standing off to the side, chuckling at the human folly he’s showing you.
  24. Rustin
    Directed by George C. Wolfe with the same passion and conviction that defined its subject, Rustin reminds that the pursuit for equality has never been and should never be satisfied with the advancement of a single group.
  25. 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?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marty
    It’s a warm, human, sometimes sentimental and an enjoyable experience.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Heat
    The tight-lipped scowl, the hunched shoulders that rear themselves for the kill, the gargoyle speech, the belching gunfire of a trigger-happy paranoiac - one with a mother complex, no less - these are the standard and still-popular ingredients that constitute the James Cagney of White Heat.
  28. El Conde
    As a magnificently unlovable art-house object, El Conde is perhaps best approached as a challenge: Run the gauntlet if you dare, and if, at the other end, you emerge dazed and disturbed rather than straightforwardly entertained, perhaps those are just the splinters you get when you try to stake a vampire.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grand Hotel
    The drama unfolds with a speed that never loses its grip, even for the extreme length of nearly two hours, and there is a captivating pattern of unexpected comedy that runs through it all, always fresh and always pat.
  30. Evil Does Not Exist
    It may not be wholly successful, but it certainly is bleakly fascinating to witness a master filmmaker paint so subtle and soothing a portrait of humanity, only to finally, bitterly remind us that there is no soothing nature – human or otherwise – when there’s a bullet in its belly.
  31. Fingernails
    A love story hinging on human chemistry as a disruptive force would fall to pieces if its stars didn’t have that very unquantifiable quiver of static between them. But Buckley and Ahmed play off each other exquisitely, gradually reflecting each other in motion and mien, each looking at the other with the kind of facially centered full-body want that no amount of dialogue can convey on its own.
  32. Nyad
    Audiences want to see Diana Nyad succeed, but the pleasure of the experience comes from watching actors become these characters. No matter how tricky such feats must have been to re-create, you get the impression that everyone involved was having a blast.
  33. Mami Wata
    Even if narratively Mami Wata never fully reaches a satisfactory apex, its images remain utterly enthralling.
  34. All of Us Strangers
    The entire journey is not based in logic so much as a kind of emotional intuition, and as such, no two viewers will experience it the same way. What strikes some as manipulative will crack open others, as the film offers a kind of connection that’s all too rare, and maybe even impossible.
  35. Sly
    Throughout the film, he’s so calmly but blazingly articulate, so candid about the processes of moviemaking and his strengths (and weaknesses) as an actor, so wise about the meaning of his own stardom, that I realized, with a touch of embarrassment, a prejudice I’ve been carrying around for 47 years. Deep in my reptile brain, I still think Sylvester Stallone is Rocky.
  36. Janet Planet
    It’s striking proof of an original sensibility.
  37. The Universal Theory
    An overlong but enjoyable metaphysical thriller that delivers pastiche so meticulous it becomes its own source of supremely cinematic pleasure.
  38. Io Capitano
    Me Captain is surprisingly classical in construction and style, wisely guiding our attention away from its sure directorial touch and toward the story at hand — pieced together by a small army of screenwriters and collaborating contributors from first-hand migrant accounts.
  39. The Critic
    The film is a heady brew of period thriller, compelling melodrama and jet-black comedy, and the second most remarkable thing about it is how seamlessly these diverse elements gel.
  40. They Shot the Piano Player
    Jazz and animation make for strong bedfellows in They Shot the Piano Player, a film from Spanish directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal that represents an intriguing hybrid in all sorts of ways.
  41. Society of the Snow
    It’s up to the individual whether to see this story as a miracle or a tragedy, Numa says in voiceover; Bayona’s film, for all its forceful feeling, doesn’t decide for us.
  42. Hesitation Wound
    In images tinged with the blue of sadness, the green of decay and the bilious yellow of institutional hallways, Nacar makes remarkably suspenseful drama out of one hyper-committed woman’s refusal to curry sympathy, as she crosses Rubicon after ethical Rubicon in one 24-hour period.
  43. The Featherweight
    The film is convincingly fashioned as a candid all-access documentary, a promotional puff piece curdling before our eyes into an unintended study of mental breakdown.
  44. Shoshana
    In addition to sterling work by the three young principals, Ian Hart gives a standout performance as the British High Commissioner’s ubiquitous righthand man, offering a supercilious, world-weary gravitas that seemingly epitomizes the official British attitude to the Mandate.
  45. My Love Affair with Marriage
    With My Love Affair with Marriage, animator Signe Baumane creates another dense personal narrative that expresses complicated concepts and ideas in images.
  46. Another Body
    A groundbreaking, creepy, fascinating, and important documentary.
  47. Daddio
    Every aspect of Daddio is designed to spark conversation. But it’s sweeter and more satisfying than you might expect, especially as Hall pays off ideas introduced early in her script.
  48. American Symphony
    For this warm and lovely film’s most natural audience, which will most likely be families struggling with illness, the documentary’s final inconclusiveness may feel like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony.
  49. Inshallah a Boy
    Inshallah a Boy moves like a sleek thriller, but is full of the unsolved mysteries and dangling question marks of real life.
  50. Dancing in the Dust
    Dispensing with heavyhanded symbolism, Farhadi tells the tale engrossingly and with a lot of physicality through the two main actors.
  51. The Successor
    Taken literally, The Successor is a chilling thing to watch. Step back and imagine what it’s saying on a metaphorical level, and it’s clear that writer-director Xavier Legrand has crafted one of the most damning depictions of patriarchal power imaginable.
  52. A Silence
    The film’s first half-hour keeps our emotional investment at bay as we work out the precise geometry of the characters and their unhappy histories. But there is a gasping power to its staggered reveals, and a searching sadness to the emerging family portrait that outweighs the film’s shock factor.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Holiday Inn
    Loaded with a wealth of songs, it's meaty, not too kaleidoscopic and yet closely knit for a compact 100 minutes of tiptop filmusical entertainment. The idea is a natural, and Irving Berlin has fashioned some peach songs to fit the highlight holidays.
  54. We Grown Now
    Even in its quietest moments, “We Grown Now” feels alive through the kids’ joint triumphant spirit and Baig’s discernible love and care for them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    It’s satisfying without being indulgent, but most of all, it’s a monument to Beyoncé’s status as one of pop’s most enduring figures, and everything it takes to get there.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Letter
    Never has [the W. Somerset Maugham play] been done with greater production values, a better all-around cast or finer direction. Its defect is its grimness. Director William Wyler, however, sets himself a tempo which is in rhythm with the Malay locale.
  57. Strange Darling
    Writer-director JT Mollner flips the script on this tired genre, crafting the cleverest thriller of its kind in a while with a mighty assist from a pair of killer performances by co-leads Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner. Best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, Strange Darling demands a bit of patience, but it also rewards it.
  58. Concrete Utopia
    It’s a fractious, blood-soaked drama about the will to survive that feels like “Earthquake” crossed with “Lord of the Flies.” What’s gripping is that you watch it and think, “If I were in this movie, what would I do?”
  59. Plan C
    Urgent and unvarnished, Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary Plan C is an early entry in what might be considered post-Roe cinema, focusing less on pro-choice ideology than on the practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea.
  60. Daaaaaalí!
    Dupieux injects his own particular brand of daffy humor too, writing, directing, shooting and editing his movie, cutting it along a bias that is familiar to those of us who’ve been paying attention to his recent run of form.
  61. Starve Acre
    Daniel Kokotajlo‘s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement.
  62. The Fall Guy
    The Fall Guy is funny, it’s sexy, and it features the boy toy version of “Barbie” MVP Ryan Gosling — which is to say, this time around, he embodies the ultimate action figure.
  63. A Normal Family
    The whole matter seems so morally ambiguous that it makes for an unpredictable ride, right up to the film’s abrupt but darkly poetic smash ending.
  64. The Tuba Thieves
    Without the rigidness of a concrete story, O’Daniel is able to command the medium in an invigorating manner. Though it requires that audiences surrender to its unconventional tactics, the reward is the opportunity to rediscover the familiar with a fresh set of eyes and ears.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gambit
    Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine star in a firstrate suspense comedy, cleverly scripted, expertly directed and handsomely mounted.
  66. Bad Press
    Following events over the course of several years, this cautionary tale has an impact not unlike watching the rise of similar anti-transparency policies and politicians elsewhere of late: dismaying, yet with all the lurid appeal and colorful personalities of any juicy public scandal.
  67. Good Grief
    Levy’s funny-sad contemporary drama acknowledges the supportive dynamic that Marc plays in Thomas and Sophie’s lives, even as it centers the gay best friend for a change — not so different from the one he played in “Happiest Season.” All three characters feel well rounded and real, especially in their imperfections.
  68. Civil War
    A literal shock to the system, Civil War is designed to be divisive.
  69. Apolonia, Apolonia
    Gazing upon great art often clears our minds, sharpens our thinking and invites new ideas in; in Apolonia, Apolonia, tracing the long-term push-pull of someone else’s artistic process appears to do the same for the woman behind the camera.
  70. Love Lies Bleeding
    Love Lies Bleeding turns consciously wild and garish, and you may think that the film is losing control, yet Rose Glass is fiercely in control of what she’s doing. She’s made a midnight noir that shoots over the top of our expectations but lands where it should, at a place where even valorous people have to go to extremes.
  71. Kinds of Kindness
    Lanthimos trades in discomfort, trusting his audience enough to take his brand of provocation as they please.
  72. The Brutalist
    It’s clear that Corbet made this movie because he wants it to mean something big. Whether it does may be in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, The Brutalist lets you feel that you’re seeing a man’s life pass before your eyes. That may be meaning enough.
  73. A Different Man
    With A Different Man, Schimberg attempts — and mostly succeeds, with deliciously awkward results — to cram a lifetime of thoughts about beauty and ugliness, attraction and disgust, identity and performance into a postmodern meta-film mold that few (apart from Charlie Kaufman, perhaps) have managed to make tolerable.
  74. The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside gives us that catharsis; it’s a real rouser. Yet the film is rooted in a sobering grasp of the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph. The arc of the drama is built around an enormous curveball it throws at the audience. And that’s when the movie really gets good.
  75. Oh, Canada
    Oh, Canada presents a dying artist’s final testimony as a multifaceted film-within-a-film, honoring Banks while also revealing so many of Schrader’s own thoughts on mortality.
  76. Queer
    The last third of “Queer” may prove to be a challenge for audiences — much more so than the film’s explicit eroticism. Yet Luca Guadagino is telling a version of the same compelling story that he told in “Call Me by Your Name”: that of a queer love that, instead of delivering the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world.
  77. The Substance
    The Substance is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us.
  78. Sasquatch Sunset
    Sasquatches may not exist, but miraculously enough, this movie does, and like the creatures it depicts, it must be seen to be believed.
  79. In the Shadow of Beirut
    Despite so much cause for grief, what’s striking about the protagonists is their cordiality and resilient hopefulness.
  80. Upgraded
    Director Carlson Young and screenwriters Christine Lenig, Justin Matthews and Luke Spencer Roberts ground sharp, soaring sentiments in a reachable reality, innovatively remixing the genre’s familiar formulas to create their own meaningful and rather endearing movie.
  81. Frida
    Even those already familiar with the trajectory of Kahlo’s existence may find the delivery here raw, vulnerable, and refreshing.
  82. Girls State
    The film’s seven protagonists are the result of McBaine and Moss’s broad and deep interview process. Demographically diverse, the women are immensely watchable and touchingly articulate.
  83. Luther: Never Too Much
    "Never Too Much” shows just how hard Luther Vandross worked to make his natural and irresistible talent seem effortless. That it took longer than he’d wanted to achieve certain results, not because of his shortcomings but the prevailing cultural forces of the time, is just one of many takeaways.
  84. Stress Positions
    In real life, anyone would hate to spend even a few minutes in their company. Yet in Hammel’s hands, they become easy to enjoy and laugh at while completely understanding their full awful personalities.
  85. Good One
    Collias impresses in a role that doesn’t grant her any great extremes of expression. Sam’s temperate demeanor may simply be her nature, but Collias’s tautly wired performance shows how it’s also a defense.
  86. Brief History of a Family
    No doubt comparisons to “Saltburn,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley” will abound, but what Lin conceived is far more subcutaneous, with a sobering tone and disinterested in building up to a grand plot twist — though the resolution is unexpected.
  87. Devo
    "Devo,” in its way, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too serious about any of this. Instead, the film traces the rocky road on which this unlikeliest of hit bands became a success.
  88. Will & Harper
    It can sound like a cliché to say that any given movie is what the world needs now, but “Will & Harper” earns that distinction.
  89. Never Look Away
    Never Look Away gives us as complete a portrait as seems humanly possible, for which Lawless merits abundant credit.
  90. Road House
    The action in Road House is beyond brutal; at moments, it’s vicious. Yet if the movie is far more violent than your average action film, in its slightly crackpot bare-knuckle way it’s also more humane.
  91. Tuesday
    There’s something undeniably exciting about Pusić’s vision, which confronts serious subjects with disarming irreverence. But her creative choices are peculiar, to say the least.
  92. Shirley
    In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.
  93. The Room Next Door
    The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.
  94. Hundreds of Beavers
    On paper, it would hardly be expected to remain funny for eight minutes, let alone 108. But this ingeniously home-made lark never runs out of steam.
  95. Rez Ball
    An almost comically brisk but genuinely rousing underdog story.
  96. Scoop
    The frustration of Scoop is also its point: It vividly conjures the adrenaline and awe of one hour of dynamite television, but can bring us no closer to complete truth, or complete justice.
  97. The Six Triple Eight
    Impressive in both its subject and suggested scope, Perry’s sweeping film reflects how the achievement of these women directly impacted the troops’ morale, despite the adversity they faced from skeptical superior officers.
  98. That Christmas
    Every season brings dozens of new Christmas offerings, most of which prove instantly forgettable. This one’s a keeper.
  99. The Space Race
    In telling the specific moving stories of a few men, The Space Race manages to provide such a rich perspective into their experience that it transcends its goals of shining a light on worthy lives and untold history, to entertain and educate.
  100. Small Things Like These
    It’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives Small Things Like These its eventual, fist-in-the-gut power, even as the film evades melodramatic confrontation to the last, ending elegantly at a point where many other stories might choose to begin.
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