Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. The Other Side of Hope
    As long as Kaurismäki presents this tidy a vision (aesthetically and morally), he’ll continue to be an engagingly hermetic art-house curio impersonating an artist.
  2. A Fantastic Woman
    Vega’s tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It’s a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina’s condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn’t herself go.
  3. As You Are
    A promising and impressively self-assured debut for 23-year-old filmmaker Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, As You Are is crafted with the confidence and skill of a veteran, but also the youthful eye of someone not far removed from his protagonists.
  4. The Great & The Small
    Bias provides an emotionally and dramatically satisfying conclusion for his dramedy — which takes its title from a children’s book read aloud twice, each time with starkly different impact — by making sure that everyone gets what’s coming to them before the final credits roll.
  5. On Body and Soul
    It’s to the credit of Borbély’s intelligent, melancholically understated performance that Maria remains sympathetic even as she becomes more of a condition than a character — and to the richness of the writer-director’s ideas that they move and intrigue even when they’re most artificially expounded.
  6. Wonder Wheel
    It’s got movement and flow, it’s got a vibrant sunset look of honky-tonk nostalgia, and it’s got a bittersweet mood of lyrical despair that the film stays true to right up until the final note. It’s also strikingly acted.
  7. Aroused by Gymnopedies
    "Gymnopedies” is an engaging and ultimately touching portrait of love, loneliness and loss of youth.
  8. Okja
    Downright charming at times and irrepressibly gonzo at others, Okja hews to an all-too-familiar trajectory.
  9. The Women's Balcony
    Offering solid, middle-brow entertainment that borrows from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” the film shows the relationships and tensions between different groups within Orthodox Judaism in Jerusalem, and provides a cautionary (and universally understandable) tale about religious fundamentalism.
  10. Love & Taxes
    The movie takes Kornbluth’s stage show, recorded live, and intersperses it with dramatized scenes that are just deft and amusing enough to make you wish they were part of a larger indie production. Yet it all works together, as if Kornbluth was narrating and acting out the graphic novel of his life.
  11. The Settlers
    The real achievement here is in going beyond the buzzwords of newscasts and talking points to convey a sense of what’s happening on the ground — and to give it a sense of urgency.
  12. Ben-Gurion, Epilogue
    The new documentary Ben-Gurion, Epilogue offers a rare intimate look at what went on inside Ben-Gurion’s heart and mind.
  13. Radio Dreams
    Radio Dreams is a witty, low-key exercise in deferred gratification.
  14. 47 Meters Down
    Director Johannes Roberts’ mostly underwater thriller is a compact and sturdily crafted B-movie that generates enough scares and suspense to qualify as — well, maybe not a pleasant surprise, but a reasonably entertaining one.
  15. School Life
    There’s considerable poignancy in the contrast between this eccentric pair’s mutual sense that their lives are winding down and the vast, still-unshaped futures of their young charges, but Ní Chianáin’s film largely resists sentimentality of the “Greatest Love of All” variety.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mighty Joe Young
    Mighty Joe Young is wholesome, well-crafted family fare like Hollywood used to make.
  17. 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.
  18. The Death of Louis XIV
    The vividness of the realization — with a sound design that emphasizes every chew and tick of the clock — makes the movie continually engrossing.
  19. The Disaster Artist
    Somehow, in accentuating Wiseau’s weirdness, Franco overlooks his soul.
  20. Porto
    This narratively slender item is unapologetically a mood piece: a film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.
  21. Private Life
    It’s witty and moving but a touch repetitive, and it goes on for too long. That said, Jenkins has made the most intimate comedy imaginable about the fertility blues. Private Life hits some delicate nerves, and heals a few of them too.
  22. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    Writer-director Jared Moshé’s solidly entertaining period drama...can be enjoyed as both a straight-shooting homage to crotchety sidekicks and shoot-’em-up conventions, and a well-crafted movie about loyalty, betrayal, and redemption.
  23. California Dreams
    As is Ott’s wont, California Dreams blurs the line between simulated vérité and authentic observation, making it often impossible to tell whether those on camera are playing themselves, simply being themselves or a combination of the two.
  24. Skyscraper
    On the scale that ranges from implausibly entertaining to entertainingly implausible, Skyscraper comfortably falls toward the compulsively over-the-top end, generating thrills by straining credibility at every turn, relying on Johnson’s invaluable ability to engage the audience while defying physics, common sense, and the sheer limits of human stamina.
  25. Karl Marx City
    Epperlein offers Karl Marx City as her own act of painful transparency, an essential warning about what happens to societies when ordinary citizens are being watched.
  26. Band Aid
    Band Aid has wit and nasty charm to burn in the earlygoing, generating enough goodwill to power it through an uneven final act.
  27. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    It’s mostly interested in the off-kilter but natural chemistry of its leads, who despite their differences come across as comrades who genuinely care about each other, and whose bond is solidified by their shared hangups.
  28. California Typewriter
    A lively and appealing analog-nostalgia documentary.
  29. UglyDolls
    UglyDolls is “Trolls Lite,” and the way things work I have no doubt we’ll be seeing a movie in the next few years that’s “UglyDolls Lite.” Yet this is still a winsomely appealing and joke-happy bauble for kiddies.
  30. One Week and a Day
    This sentimental film takes things one step at a time.
  31. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    Although its reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, Catherine Bainbridge’s Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World earns respect as much for its achievement as its ambition.
  32. The Cage Fighter
    An engaging and sympathetic documentary.
  33. Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
    Axelrod plays along with her eccentric subject’s insouciant attitude vis à vis his own identity to mostly delightful effect.
  34. Alex Strangelove
    It’s hard to dislike Alex Strangelove; one just wishes the film didn’t lean in quite so insistently to be petted.
  35. Animal Crackers
    Though inevitably derivative in some ways (it won’t be hard to spot the influence of “Shrek” and various Disney classics), Animal Crackers asserts its own identity, combining some of the most distinctive voices with an ensemble of personality-rich, sequel-ready characters.
  36. Tomorrow
    When Tomorrow starts to make intellectual as well as geographical leaps and to draw macroeconomic, political, and social factors into its bright-eyed, approachable orbit, that’s when cynicism gives way to admiration, and admiration can flare into inspiration.
  37. Deadpool 2
    In almost every respect, this sequel is an improvement on its 2016 predecessor: Sharper, grosser, more narratively coherent and funnier overall, with a few welcome new additions. It’s a film willing to throw everything — jokes, references, heads, blood, guts and even a little bit of vomit — against the wall, rarely concerned about how much of it sticks.
  38. Widows
    Widows, while a highly original and entertaining variation on the heist film, isn’t a home run.
  39. Everything Else (Todo Lo Demás)
    Though the concept of the gendered gaze can be over-pushed in film theory circles, in this case there’s no mistaking Almada’s privileging of a woman’s perspective, with its sympathetic non-judgmental stance and sense of female solidarity.
  40. Leaning Into the Wind
    Riedelsheimer is well-matched to Goldsworthy’s methods and interests.
  41. Abundant Acreage Available
    It’s a pleasure to see such a fine actress navigate the nuances of her role.
  42. House of Z
    House of Z captures the way in which direct hands-on engagement is vital to an artist’s continued relevance, and vitality.
  43. Ice Mother
    For the first time, older characters are at the heart of a Sláma film, and Kronerová and Nový repay the helmer-writer with warm, dignified turns that require both soul- and flesh-baring.
  44. The Trip to Spain
    That The Trip to Spain is unabashedly more of the same is good news…but not entirely good news.
  45. Gook
    Chon’s sophomore feature wavers uncertainly in tone, getting a little too cute for comfort in spots, but is otherwise a lively, auspicious breakthrough.
  46. 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.
  47. Spettacolo
    Though at its core the film is about a dying way of life, the location and photography here are so beguiling that they semi-perversely encourage just the kind of foreign tourism that factors into that slow death.
  48. The Day After
    Even lesser Hong has its lackadaisical pleasures, and The Day After has its share of wry musings and twitchy banter between characters to counter its visual stasis and lulling storytelling.
  49. 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.
  50. In the Fade
    Diane Kruger’s powerhouse performance in her first German-language production goes a long way toward compensating for the narrative’s dip into overly crystalline waters.
  51. A River Below
    In the stories of both men, Grieco’s film highlights the double-edged nature of eye-opening visuals, which are just as apt to enrage others and endanger the messenger as they are to achieve noble ends.
  52. The Divine Order
    Though the film’s feel-good construction undercuts its ability to surprise, Petra Volpe’s cine-history lesson remains a mainstream crowd-pleaser adept at inspiring and amusing in equal measure.
  53. Godard Mon Amour
    A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).
  54. Hickok
    Less censorious aficionados likely will be willing to look past the rough edges and enjoy the simple pleasures provided by a respectfully sincere retelling of a familiar legend.
  55. Tully
    Tully has its heart (and many other things) in the right place, but by the end you wish it had an imagination finely executed enough to match its empathy.
  56. Brimstone & Glory
    Mixing sheer spectacle with modest but pleasing human-interest threads, Viktor Jakovleski’s first directorial feature is a poetical, entrancing documentary.
  57. 32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide
    Gripping and discomfiting, this first directorial feature by the veteran editor is the kind of diaristic inquiry that can seem self-indulgent but here sports a fearlessness that transcends vanity — at times it’s downright unflattering.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gaslight
    Patrick Hamilton's London stage melodrama, is given an exciting screen treatment by Arthur Hornblow Jr's excellent production starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sword in the Stone
    It emerges as a tasty confection.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Midnight Cowboy
    The sometimes amusing but essentially sordid saga of a male prostitute in Manhattan,...Midnight Cowboy is of the modern moment moderne. It has a hot topical theme; a popular actor from last year’s greatest film comedy; a miscellany of competent bit players, a good deal of both sly and broad humor. If the women object, and some will, that it accords their sex scant courtesy, the story hardly presents males as admirable. Indeed in this film the scenery is lovely and only the human race is vile.
  61. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    The movie is diligent and, to a degree, absorbing — a legal/business saga that’s also the story of a family in crisis.
  62. Soul on a String
    Chinese director Zhang Yang (“Shower,” “Sunflower”) eschews the thrill of propulsive duels for a discursive allegorical approach, serving up picturesque visuals, highland-dry humor, and karmic plot twists.
  63. The King
    Promised Land is a searching, flawed, let’s-try-this-on-and-see-how-it-looks movie. At times, it veers too close to being a standard Elvis chronicle, and at others its insight into our national neurosis may strike you as a tad ethereal. It’s an essay in the form of an investigation. Yet it’s the definition of tasty food for thought.
  64. Blade of the Immortal
    The story’s supernatural elements enable Miike to take huge liberties with chanbara, the oldest genre in Japanese cinema, and break free from rigid traditions of choreographing swordplay sequences.
  65. Before We Vanish
    Playing frequently like an absurdist political satire with only flashes of violence, this low-tension, drawn-out work won’t gratify the chills or adrenaline rushes fanboys crave, but the ending strikes a romantic chord so pure that all but the most jaded cynics will be moved.
  66. April's Daughter
    Frankly, it’s anybody guess why characters do what they do in April’s Daughter, which may be both realistic and admirably nonjudgmental on Franco’s part, but it makes for a confusing and at times clinical moviegoing experience, as the director applies his detached Michael Haneke-like style to material that begs a certain amount of clarification.
  67. Platoon
    There is plenty of good work to be found here, and pic certainly grabs the viewer by the collar in a way not found everyday in contemporary films.
  68. Shot Caller
    It’s a genre movie, to be sure, but there’s an impressive sense of authenticity — in the language, the locations and the overall texture —that goes a long way to sell the scenario.
  69. Better Watch Out
    What starts out looking like a prank run amuck gradually grows more sinister, with director Chris Peckover (“Undocumented”) nicely handling the swerves toward dramatic peril and fatal consequences while still maintaining a confectionary “family entertainment” veneer of antic doings in a glossy suburban setting.
  70. The Boy Downstairs
    Mamet has a quick, spry reaction time and a gently forlorn focus that holds the screen, and she holds this movie together.
  71. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    “Here We Go Again” is another kitsch patchwork; it’s as if you were watching the CliffsNotes to an old studio weeper that happened to be carried along by some of the most luscious pop songs ever recorded. Yet the feeling comes through, especially at the end — a love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters.
  72. The Angry Birds Movie 2
    Van Orman, Emmy-nominated creator of the quirky, cult-inspiring kids’ cartoon series “The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack,” brings just the right level of dippy zeal to the project, committing to extended, farcical routines that, at their most immaculately choreographed and paced, channel the pure, physical hilarity of vintage Chaplin or Sellers.
  73. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    The remarkable thing is that the movie acquires the quality of a time machine. You don’t just watch “Dawson City.” You step into it to and draw back a magical curtain on the past, entering a world of buried memory that’s the precursor to our own.
  74. Charlie's Angels
    The movie is relentless, it’s pulpy and exciting, it’s unabashedly derivative, and at an hour and 58 minutes it’s a little too much of a rousingly of-the-moment feministic but still rather standard-issue thing.
  75. The Rider
    Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.
  76. Barbara
    The movie lightly plumbs that dangerously unsettled space between performing and literally being the protagonist in a biopic.
  77. Gabriel and the Mountain
    On one level, the film can be classified as a journey of discovery, but what deepens interest is the way Barbosa constantly asks the viewer to question what it means to travel.
  78. Song of Granite
    Pat Collins’ echoing, elegiac evocation of the spirit of Irish sean nós singer Joe Heaney is most interested in his haunted vocal gift, letting the troubled life that weathered it show through only in glimmers between the gorgeous songs.
  79. Us
    Terrifying...The less you know going in — and the less energy you spend thinking about it after the fact — the better the movie works, trading on some uncanny combination of Peele’s imagination and our own to suggest a horror infinitely larger and more insidious than the film is capable of representing.
  80. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    In addition to being a rather fine addition to the Christmas-movie canon, the film marks a useful teaching tool — a better option for classroom screenings than any of the previous “Carol” adaptations, once students have finished reading the novella.
  81. Letters from Baghdad
    The bottom line is that Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have fleshed out a complex, fascinating figure.
  82. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
    An offbeat, middleweight charmer that is lent a measure of substance by its astute performances and observational insight.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Escape from New York
    Although execution doesn’t quite live up to the fabulous premise, Escape from New York is a solidly satisfying actioner.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Mom
    Garr, as always, is a delight to watch though it would be nice to see her in a role where she wasn't someone's wife or mother. Still, her inspired double takes continue to say more than pages of dialogue while her keen timing helps somewhat in the more beleaguered scenes.
    • Variety
  85. Muppet Treasure Island
    While the picture is often pure delight, and constantly inventive and engaging, ultimately it is not up to the highest standards of the troupe. [25 Feb 1996, p.47]
    • Variety
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fog
    John Carpenter is anything but subtle in his approach to shocker material. Story exposition and setting are well-established before the opening titles are over, and The Fog proceeds to layer one fright atop another.
  87. Killing Ground
    Tasmania-born Damien Power’s impressive first feature, Killing Ground, transcends the cliches even as the film uses plenty of familiar tropes, laying down a solid hour of effective buildup to a duly hair-raising, prolonged climax.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lawnmower Man
    The stunning visuals for the ‘virtual reality’ sequences really put The Lawnmower Man over. The computer animation doesn’t necessarily break new ground, but it marks the first time it has been so well integrated into a live-action story.
  89. Moka
    Watching these two fine actresses circle each other in a kind of watchful alligator’s tango, each waiting for the other to blink first, is the chief pleasure on offer in Moka.
  90. Escapes
    A unique, breezy pastiche that’s as nostalgic as a TV Land binge-watch, and as intimate as having one’s ear pleasurably bent by a garrulous “man of the world” at a dinner party.
  91. Happy Death Day
    Happy Death Day is “Groundhog Day” dipped in blood, and if the movie isn’t all that clever, it’s just clever enough to get by.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Tales from the Darkside is significantly gorier than its namesake TV series, and has better production values.
    • Variety
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dark Half
    The writer's desk intriguingly becomes a gladitorial arena for warring manifestations of the same personality in The Dark Half, George A. Romero's adaptation of Stephen King's 1989 bestseller, a classic Jekyll-and-Hyde story.
    • Variety
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story
    “Can’t Stop” is essentially a post-reality-TV documentary: It’s got quick-cut pacing, dozens of talking heads, flashbacks in the form of vintage footage and visits to old neighborhoods, and most of all, the snowballing drama inherent in working toward a looming, difficult goal.
  95. The Only Living Boy in New York
    If it’s less punchy and original than “(500) Days of Summer,” it’s still a wry tale that deserves to be seen. Gerald keeps telling Thomas that life should be a mess, but in The Only Living Boy in New York it’s a pleasingly witty and well-observed one.
  96. Brave New Jersey
    [An] uneven but ultimately winning comedy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wolfen
    Wolfen is consistently more interesting than it is thrilling. Wadleigh creates a surreal point-of-view for the killers that works effectively, accented by handy digital sound.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Mighty Ducks
    Helmer Stephen Herek endows a familiar story with a crisp look and swift tempo, seldom allowing sanctimonious tale to linger too long or gags to get too tiresome.
    • Variety
    • 25 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cobra
    Cobra is a sleek, extremely violent and exciting police thriller.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Innerspace
    Quaid is engagingly reckless and gung-ho as the pioneer into a new dimension, although he is physically constrained in his little capsule for most of the running time. Short has infinitely more possibilities and makes the most of them, coming into his own as a screen personality as a mild-mannered little guy who rises to an extraordinary situation.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »