Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. Colours of Time
    Colours of Time doesn’t want to surprise so much as to please, and the multiple, largely antagonist-free storylines are just charming enough to keep the absence of real conflict from becoming a problem.
  2. Sunshine
    Like a collapsing star, Sunshine initially burns brightly but finally implodes into a dramatic black hole.
  3. Mean Dreams
    The join-the-bullet-holes nature of Mean Dreams' storytelling would be less of a problem if the characterization were a little more textured, but for all the picturesque anguish on display, the febrile messiness of actual human life is little in evidence.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    South Central
    As a cautionary tale about the nihilistic life of street gangs, South Central speaks eloquently to black kids desperately in need of straight talk. A profoundly moving story of a father's attempt to save his son from his own mistakes, Steve Anderson's film has performances by Glenn Plummer and young Christian Coleman that will touch any viewer.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Prince of Egypt
    At once rich in historic and character detail and full of eye-popping tableaux, this new spin on the Moses saga sometimes out-DeMilles DeMille's 1956 live-action epic, "The Ten Commandments."
  6. He Got Game
    Lacking the moral indignation, outrage and militant politics that marked Lee's earlier work, this vibrantly colorful film is a tad too soft at the center, and arguably the director's most mainstream movie.
  7. Runoff
    The universal theme of personal principle vs. human necessity gets a workout in languid but inexorably powerful morality play, Runoff.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Muppets Take Manhattan
    The Muppets Take Manhattan is a genuinely fun confection of old-fashioned entertainment.
  9. 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.
  10. Alien: Romulus
    This is closer to a grandly efficient greatest-hits thrill ride, packaged like a video game. Yet on that level it’s a confidently spooky, ingeniously shot, at times nerve-jangling piece of entertainment.
  11. 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.
  12. Enforcement
    A thriller that’s both a relentless adrenaline rush and a social-issue Rorschach test for all who watch it.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heaven Help Us
    Very funny in spots and wonderfully evocative of Brooklyn, circa 1965, pic suffers somewhat by dividing its attention between outrageous pranks and realistic sketches of the Catholic school experience.
  14. Frozen II
    In a world where old-timers accuse the youth of being oversensitive snowflakes, Frozen II shows what it means to have one’s heart in the right place.
  15. Attachment
    For horror fans that are as compelled by creative (and thought-through) ideas as by style or skillful execution, “Attachment” embraces what to many may be a new or different text, but it’s clearly knowledgeable about the traditions of the genre — and most of all, deeply faithful to its spirit.
  16. Mother and Child
    An insightfully observed and exceptionally acted ensemble piece precisely about what the title suggests.
  17. Examined Life
    Stimulating film, enlivened by creative location shooting.
  18. There Was Once...
    Hungarian schoolteacher Gyongi Mago's campaign to raise awareness of her hometown's once-vibrant, now conspicuously absent Jewish population is captured in the superior docu There Was Once ...
  19. Thelma the Unicorn
    Thelma the Unicorn avoids being rendered completely unoriginal by its overly familiar premise thanks to consistent splashes of acid humor and a plethora of wacky supporting characters.
  20. The Vanishing
    Falling between the stools of thriller and drama, this speculative tale grows steadily less satisfying, despite a handsome look and a strong cast.
  21. The Beautiful Country
    Standout performance is by Nolte who, in the final 20 minutes, draws on a deep reservoir of playing broken romantic heroes to portray Binh's father. The subtle, resonant scenes between the two men are worth the price of admission.
  22. Disconnect
    Well-meaning but dated and frequently risible issue-drama.
  23. Gretel & Hansel
    The problem is that so many of its virtues feel compromised.
  24. Goat
    To pretend that the pledges (who voluntarily submit to such harassment) are somehow the victims in an institution of exclusion, objectification and underage substance abuse goes far beyond disingenuous, and the resulting film falls far short of actually surprising those who already know a thing or two about fraternities.
  25. MaXXXine
    Ti West is a good filmmaker, but it may be time for him to stop reconfiguring trash. He needs to try embedding A ideas in an A-movie.
  26. Frailty
    A resoundingly old-fashioned and well crafted study of evil infecting an American family, Frailty moves from strength to strength on its deceptive narrative course.
  27. 8 Women
    For all its careful plotting, some viewers may find the exercise ultimately hollow and nasty, but thesps make the experience completely worthwhile.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Herod's Law
    Provocative, well-shot and vastly entertaining in its malice.
  29. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    Kang remains a superb technician, but somewhere the movie forgot to pack any genuine emotion along with its ordnance and K rations.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pennies from Heaven
    Almost as if he were directing Pinter, Herbert Ross has actors speak a line, then wait two beats before delivering the next phrase. Technique smothers such ordinarily lively performers as Martin, Peters and Harper.
  31. Sleeping with Other People
    Headland demonstrated little interest in playing it safe with her previous film... But here she reins in that impulse almost too much, and Sleeping With Other People winds up both looking (with its adequate but unremarkable tech package) and often feeling like a run-of-the-mill studio comedy.
  32. Cherry
    Confronting that larger crisis directly is not the goal here. Though “Cherry” dips a toe in those troubled topical waters, it does so only gingerly, preferring instead to spin an uncomplicated, timeless tale about a woman coming into her own.
  33. Wanted
    Like it or not, Wanted pretty much slams you to the back of your chair from the outset and scarcely lets up for the duration.
  34. Casablanca Beats
    It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.
  35. Wes Craven's New Nightmare
    An ingeniously conceived and devilishly clever opus.
  36. I Am Taraneh, I Am Fifteen Years Old
    An appealing film thanks to its irresistible teenage heroine, I, Taraneh, Am Fifteen delivers the message that there's a new generation of strong-minded femmes out there who aren't afraid of bucking social norms.
  37. Fighting for Life
    The only people who seem immune to the politics of the Iraq War are also at its epicenter: the doctors and nurses who mend and tend to the wounded, and who provide the heart and soul of Terry Sanders' Fighting for Life.
  38. Sacro GRA
    In keeping with Rosi’s style, there are no explanations and no interactions with the camera, and Sacro GRA suddenly ends without a sense of having come to any conclusions.
  39. The Goodbye Girl
    The Neil Simon script evolves a series of increasingly intimate and sensitive character encounters as the adults progress from mutual hostility to an enduring love. Performances by Dreyfuss, Mason and Cummings are all great, and the many supporting bits are filled admirably.
  40. Ride or Die
    Although the journey feels rather drawn out in the film’s 142-minute running time, and is strewn with one ear-splitting brawl too many, the mystery of each protagonist’s true intentions, and the unpredictability of their course of action, keep tensions on a continuous simmer.
  41. Adoration
    This ambitious think-piece ultimately smothers its good intentions in didactic revelations, earnest pleading and incessant violin music. Engrossing nonetheless, the story of a high schooler troubled by his parents' legacy reps one of the Canadian writer-director's most accessible efforts.
  42. Gaia
    Gaia’s resourceful visuals, however, aren’t matched by equivalent nimbleness in the writing; after a time, the storytelling feels more anemic than enigmatic.
  43. The King's Choice
    It has a few traumatic and bedazzling scenes of combat, but mostly it’s about the backroom bureaucratic gamesmanship of war.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thunderball
    Terence Young takes advantage of every situation in his direction to maintain action at fever-pitch.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    In Looking for Mr Goodbar, writer-director Richard Brooks manifests his ability to catch accurately both the tone and subtlety of characters in the most repellant environments - in this case the desperate search for personal identity in the dreary and self-defeating world of compulsive sex and dope. Diane Keaton's performance as the good/bad girl is excellent.
  46. Outbreak
    Whether scarily charting the spread of the virus or choreographing a cat-and-mouse chase of choppers above a winding riverbed, Petersen demonstrates a smooth stylistic savvy that keeps the film highly absorbing from beginning to end.
  47. Give Me Future
    Somewhere buried beneath Peters’ new-day-rising clichés and superficial celebration of electronica stars, there’s an intriguing documentary about Cuba’s transformation struggling to break free.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Road to Bali
    There’s no story to speak of in the script [from a story by Frank Butler and Harry Tugend] but the framework is there on which to hang a succession of amusing quips and physical comedy dealing with romantic rivalry and chuckle competition between the two male stars.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kid Galahad
    The treatment is sophisticated and production deluxe. Also more than the usual amount of romance for a slugfest
  50. The Listener
    Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, The Listener plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era.
  51. Sitting in Bars with Cake
    Where Jane feels thinly sketched in pastels, Corrine’s portrait has been detailed in bright permanent markers. A’zion roils with emotions and her character is funny, mercurial, reactive and real.
  52. JCVD
    A French-language meta-movie parody par excellence, constitutes the headiest stretch of the beefy star's career since, well, ever.
  53. Cop Land
    The increasingly broad strokes with which the story is painted serve to simplify rather than deepen it, and to make it seem more artificially constructed than need be.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Girls Town
    Lili Taylor...gives a superlative, gut-wrenching performance in "Girls Town," a powerfully raw, ultra-realistic drama about a trio of abused teenage girls and their struggle to survive in a rigidly defined, male-dominated society.
  55. Day of the Fight
    The light and shade here is all in Peter Simonite’s splendid, inky-shadowed monochrome lensing; Huston’s visual sense outweighs his screenwriting.
  56. Captain Marvel
    Boden and Fleck are low-key American neorealists, and in Captain Marvel they barely retain a vestige of their signature style. Yet they have brought off something exciting, embracing the Marvel house style and, within that, crafting a tale with enough tricks and moods and sleight-of-hand layers to keep us honestly absorbed.
  57. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    Rough as can be in both content and style, Ghosts will be welcome everywhere tough, provocative docus are shown.
  58. Dolphin Tale
    Though garnished with some heavy dollops of cheese, Dolphin Tale is a surprisingly solid, earnest family picture.
  59. A Better Life
    Director Chris Weitz's problematic new picture, which, despite Demian Bichir's affecting lead performance and a strong feel for Los Angeles' Mexican-American communities, emerges an earnest and overly programmatic heart-tugger.
  60. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    If the first mission made roughly $50 million domestically, the sky could be the limit for this much better sequel -- a clever spoof of "Rambo" and a dozen other movies that employs the usual scattershot "Airplane!" approach but boasts a higher shooting percentage than its forebear. Look out, comedy fans: Fox is coming to get you.
  61. How to Survive a Pandemic
    Smart, humane and gripping even as it rakes over events all too fresh in our memories, How to Survive a Pandemic ends with plenty yet to be discussed and explored: It provides a road map to survival, but doesn’t suggest we’ve all made it just yet.
  62. The Notorious Bettie Page
    A superficial look at the '50s sex icon, picture feels like it was researched via press clippings rather than attempting a fresh rethinking of its era and provocative subject.
  63. Rental Family
    A movie like Rental Family lives or dies by its tone, and the one Hikari strikes is reflected in the concerned creases of Fraser’s forehead: It’s maudlin and unconvincing, means well but isn’t above manipulating us for the desired emotional outcome.
  64. The Eight Hundred
    Guan’s direction may be less radical or propulsive than Nolan’s, but it too plunges audiences into both the intimacy and magnitude of brutal war spectacle while immersing them in a stunningly mounted period canvas.
  65. Unstoppable
    It has plenty of familiar tropes, but in its no-frills way it touches a nerve of authenticity. The true story it tells is nothing short of extraordinary, and that may be why the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to overhype it.
  66. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    A quiet work with Ozu-like structure and concerns, but remains more an intellectual exercise than one from the heart.
  67. undertone
    Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.
  68. Clockwatchers
    What starts as a bright look at the dim lives of temps in a large company slides into unfortunate digressions and drabness in Clockwatchers.
  69. Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
    True to its title, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist is chiefly out to gild a remarkable, independent legacy. As the film unrolls its rousing, “Bolero”-scored closing montage of the stunning catwalk visions Westwood has given the fashion world over four decades, you can hardly say it’s undeserved.
  70. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    So insubstantial that it practically evaporates on screen, Pooh's Heffalump Movie likely will play best with toddlers and pre-schoolers easily amused by bright colors, merry songs and lovable, huggable toon animals.
  71. The Innkeepers
    Slow-burning buildup, lack of explicit mayhem and overall low-tech approach may strike cineastes as amusingly quaint.
  72. That Man: Peter Berlin
    Pic offers standard mix of digitally shot interview material with the elusive main subject himself, with archive footage and talking heads to assess Berlin's impact on gay culture.
  73. Sister Helen
    Riveting portrait of a straight-talking, tough-loving Benedictine nun in charge of a South Bronx home for recovering substance abusers.
  74. Northfork
    Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar.
  75. One Hour Photo
    This immaculately made first feature from noted musicvid and commercials director Mark Romanek provides Robin Williams with one of his creepiest, atypical roles, and the comic star responds with an unusually restrained performance that is, in the end, quite moving.
  76. Father and Son
    Irritatingly devoid of irony, the film has an unintentional but unmistakable homoerotic subtext.
  77. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
    Has some genuinely amusing moments of dumb and dumber silliness.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blue Juice
    Absolutely charming, unabashedly offbeat Blue Juice is a quirky comedy billed as Britain's first surf pic.
  79. Catch Me Daddy
    Although the film is never less than gripping, the story beats of the chase rely on a number of coincidental encounters, while the abundance of main characters and their unpredictable natures can make them seem a bit light on psychological investigation.
  80. Confess, Fletch
    There’s more than one way to get a job done — whether it’s solving a murder, recovering priceless art or repainting an old van — and Fletch’s strategy is guaranteed to be more original than whatever the next guy would try.
  81. Suitable Flesh
    There’s no lack of effort here, but too often Suitable Flesh just feels effortful, rather than the outrageous good time aimed for.
  82. Adam
    Though too insider-hip (and sometimes sexually graphic) a movie for more conservative viewers, this ingratiating and nuanced tale has plenty to offer those accepting of but not particularly knowledgeable about trans culture.
  83. Prometheus
    Elaborately conceived from a visual standpoint, Ridley Scott's first sci-fier in the three decades since "Blade Runner" remains earthbound in narrative terms, forever hinting at the existence of a higher intelligence without evincing much of its own.
  84. Orgasm Inc.
    This must-see expose entertains as it horrifies.
  85. Northern Soul
    If “Soul’s” script errs on the side of simplicity, it does effectively downplay the cliches inherent in its unambitious story arc. And the foregrounded local culture is always engaging, with meticulous but unshowy attention to period detail on all levels.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New York, New York
    In a final burst from Old Hollywood, Minnelli tears into the title song and it’s a wowser.
  87. Paper Clips
    Patiently told and lovingly made.
  88. Bonjour Tristesse
    While promising, Chew-Bose’s attractive but ultimately hollow debut offers audiences a vicarious vacation to the south of France, in which vivid sense memories are accompanied by words far too eloquent to have sprung from a 19-year-old’s head.
  89. Fast Color
    Ultimately, Fast Color’s thesis is more inspirational than the film, which often seems like it, too, is struggling to swirl itself into something more solid. Instead, its magical sparks don’t quite congeal as the audience can’t help hoping a movie this empathetic and unusual reaches transcendence
  90. Goon
    The picture has a first-rate team of actors who visibly enjoy their roles and the sharp dialogue by Baruchel and Goldberg.
  91. Mimosas
    Those familiar with the ethnographic works of Ben Rivers (who gets a thanks in the closing credits) and the films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”) will find much to admire in the movie’s combination of spiritual musings and stunning landscapes.
  92. Slash
    An effortlessly engaging dramedy that somehow manages to sustain an air of buoyant sweetness even while repeatedly referencing erotic fantasies and sexual anxieties.
  93. Meet Me in the Bathroom
    If it’s sometimes a little rough around the edges and not always structurally coherent, well, the same was true of these bands.
  94. Princesas
    This loosely-structured pic feels authentic, its underdramatized script resolutely nonjudgmental.
  95. Always Be My Maybe
    Perhaps the best sequences are multi-purpose. They’re both funny and genuine, add a bubbly buoyancy through deft wit and charm, and tweak genre conventions.
  96. The Lost Bus
    The Lost Bus resembles several other Greengrass films in that it’s also slim on character (only one of the kids has a name and personality), but succeeds in plunging audiences into the action — which, in this case, means trying to steer an unwieldy vehicle through hell itself.
  97. The New Boy
    In Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable The New Boy, spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.
  98. The Queen of My Dreams
    It does little to separate itself, thematically or stylistically, from a now repetitive form of “third culture” storytelling.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The French Lieutenant's Woman
    The casting of Meryl Streep as Sarah/Anna could not have been better. Sarah comes complete with unbridled passions and Anna is the cool, detached professional. There is never a false note in the sharply contrasting characters.
  100. The Patience Stone
    Sensual and horrifying, The Patience Stone plays like a mesmerizing, modern take on the tales of Scheherazade and a parable on the suffering of Afghan women.
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