Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. The Cleanse
    You might wish that the ending, and the story overall, had packed a bit more dramatic oomph, but Miller’s decision to keep the emphasis entirely on character and theme shows impressive confidence. He gives the movie all the juice it needs.
  2. Cargo
    Radiating not only paternal devotion but also a blunt matter-of-factness that amplifies as his situation becomes more dire, Freeman’s empathetic turn makes Andy an endearing center of attention, and the film — even for those who’ve seen its source material — a heartfelt entry in the overstuffed genre.
  3. Mrs. Fang
    This is a merciless film, and whether the process of teasing its meaning out for yourself feels like a punishment or a reward will depend entirely on your patience and your point of view.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
    Frears levitates the film’s harsh realism with a fantastical counterpoint in touches like the ghost of a tortured labor leader who haunts Rafi from the outset, and a band of gypsy buskers who serenade the ongoing anarchy.
  5. Greyhound
    When the mortars aren’t firing, the movie ebbs, flows, occasionally sags, and sometimes rivets.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kill Me Again
    The tale of a down-and-out detective and a seamy femme fatale is a thoroughly professional little entertainment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The China Syndrome
    A moderately compelling thriller about the potential perils of nuclear energy, whose major fault is an overweening sense of its own self-importance.
  8. Journeyman
    If Considine doesn’t seem to know his characters as intimately as he did in his debut, however, he still knows acting inside out. It’s his unguarded conviction in the lead — and that of a superb Jodie Whittaker as his devoted but devastated wife — that finally lands Journeyman a victory on points, if not quite a knockout blow.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Streets of Fire
    A pulsing, throbbing orchestration careening around the rescue of a kidnapped young singer. The decor is urban squalor.
  10. Star Maps
    Stays consistently interesting through some risky tonal shifts.
  11. The Wife
    The Wife is Close’s film from start to finish, and several of the supporting performances fail to rise to her level, with Pryce and Slater the only ones who manage to impress in her orbit.
  12. Terminator: Dark Fate
    "Dark Fate” is a lean, tough, and absorbing sequel that taps back into the enthralling surface of the “Terminator” series’ comic-book kinetics as well as the sinister sweet spot of its grandiose pulp mythology.
  13. This Is Home: A Refugee Story
    This Is Home gestures toward a more detailed, heterogeneous understanding of these war victims as human beings, characterizing its four chosen families in detailed, individual terms, and listening attentively to their varied expressions of ambition and concern for their new future.
  14. Little Pink House
    If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.
  15. The Escape
    Savage’s film thoughtfully and credibly outlines the conflict between a superficially abundant lifestyle and overwhelming internal lack. It’s on less sure footing with the morally fraught wish-fulfilment of its second half, though Arterton’s quiet, consistent emotional conviction pulls matters through.
  16. Clouds of May
    Though it moves more slowly than the tortoise prominently featured in one sequence, Clouds of May is the kind of film that creeps up on the patient viewer.
  17. Barking Dogs Never Bite
    While the slender idea feels stretched at feature length and fails to brings its themes of societal chaos together in a fully cohesive way, the film is fresh and lively enough to score further festival bookings, particularly at events devoted to new talent.
  18. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    Gorgeously shot for the big screen by multihyphenate Gilles de Maistre, it thoughtfully explores what makes the globe-trotting chef-businessman tick.
  19. Ghostbox Cowboy
    This original if sometimes befuddling vision blurs the line between fiction and documentary elements, conventional storytelling and improvisational collage, all to oft-bracing effect.
  20. In a Relationship
    The movie is much funnier than the vast majority of indie comedies, serving as a great audition piece for a career of sitcom directing.
  21. Jonathan
    Taken on its own confidently crafted terms, Jonathan is an intelligent, absorbing tale that provides an impressive showcase for “Baby Driver” star Ansel Elgort.
  22. Love, Gilda
    Love, Gilda is plain but beautifully crafted. It draws you close to Radner, presenting her rise through the world of ’70s comedy as a journey of discovery.
  23. State Like Sleep
    Aided by Christopher Blauvelt’s sumptuous cinematography, this consistently surprising film slinks along with melancholic dreaminess, matching the fugue state that plagues its grief-stricken protagonist.
  24. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
    Miyazaki’s first hit fascinates as a glimpse into the master’s then-developing style, even when the final-act storytelling gets woozy.
  25. Goran
    Goran may in the end be simply a clever, sick joke, but it’s one that’s very astutely played.
  26. Crane World
    The pic is made up of small events and incidents, well observed and naturalistically performed.
  27. 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yellow Submarine
    This is a full length animated cartoon in which the prime factor is the appearance of the Beatles in caricature form. Here are all the ingredients of a novel entertainment.
  29. Mr. Fish: Cartooning from the Deep End
    Brisk and ingratiating, with some brief animated sequences adding color, this is an easy watch despite the frequently incendiary nature of its subject’s barbed images.
  30. The Rescue List
    Focusing on a rescue-and-rehabilitation organization and several youths it plucks from servitude, this is an involving indictment with enough individual human-interest elements to avoid being too much of a grim screed.
  31. Good Manners
    Class, desire, motherhood, responsibility to society — all these themes are worked in, to varying degrees. Yet balancing the film’s two halves is less successful, and certain shifts between humor and dead-seriousness don’t quite work.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mean Streets
    Scorsese is exceptionally good at guiding his largely unknown cast to near-flawless recreations of types. Outstanding in this regard is De Niro.
    • 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.
  34. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    You may enter a film like this one believing you had some grasp of how gravity works, or the human threshold for pain, or what constitutes a good movie, but the experience is so exhilaratingly mind-altering, so radically untethered from terra firma, you basically have to readjust your basic understanding of everything you know to be true and just go with the flow.
  35. Get the Gringo
    Gibson knows how to play to the camera, and Grunberg is savvy enough to maximize what the star gives, spinning a slick package around the crazy scenario.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Real Genius
    What lifts the production above the run-of-the-mill is swift direction by Martha Coolidge, who has a firm grasp over the manic material.
  37. Set It Up
    It’s the stars who have to work hardest to sell this kind of egg-white confection, and so they do. Having both charmed individually in previous vehicles, Deutch and Powell combine to winkingly wholesome effect, bringing just enough human self-awareness to their tidy back-and-forth banter to make it palatable.
  38. At War
    The chief value of the impassioned but slightly flavorless At War is that it gives Lindon another opportunity to wear the undersung virtue of ordinary, rough-hewn decency the way a superhero might wear a cape.
  39. Leto
    If not as overtly political as “The Student,” Leto nonetheless represents about as flamboyant a statement of free artistic expression as Serebrennikov could make at this moment: There’s certainly nothing contained or inhibited about its celebration of artists who themselves were given little support or leeway by the Soviet government.
  40. Rafiki
    Even when Rafiki irons out its emotions a little too neatly, however, Mugatsia and Munyiva’s relaxed, sparking chemistry quickens its heartbeat.
  41. The World Is Yours
    These criminals may be out of their league, but Gavras orchestrates it all with a surfeit of style and an irreverent sense of humor that spares no one, no matter their background.
  42. Yomeddine
    Anchored by lead Rady Gamal’s warm-hearted charisma, the film is a sweet, solid first feature marbled with genuinely touching moments that make up for times when the siren call of sentimentality becomes a little too loud.
  43. Border
    An exciting, intelligent mix of romance, Nordic noir, social realism, and supernatural horror that defies and subverts genre conventions.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hardcore
    The easily shocked may want an expose, or more a condemnation. The more sophisticated may grow tired of Scott’s morality. But shocked, cynical or dissatisfied, nobody’s going to be bored.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Getaway
    The Getaway has several things going for it: Sam Peckinpah's hard-action direction, this time largely channeled into material destruction, although fast-cut human bloodlettings occur frequently enough, and Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw as stars.
  46. Knife + Heart
    Gonzalez has mastered the art of creating atmosphere and tone, but not tension, and the movie feels meandering and slow at times, since audiences are not invested in anyone’s survival.
  47. 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.
  48. Breath
    Though not without its flaws, the movie has authenticity and resonance; there have been plenty of good surfing documentaries, but very few good dramas about the sport — a short list on which Breath instantly earns a prominent spot.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Soylent Green
    The somewhat plausible and proximate horrors in the story of Soylent Green carry the production over its awkward spots to the status of a good futuristic exploitation film.
  50. The Workers Cup
    What emerges is a nuanced, if somewhat undernourished, portrait of the poorest inhabitants of the richest country in the world.
  51. Like a Boss
    Its economic message might be fuzzy. Its feminism, too. But best-friend comedy Like a Boss rides Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrnes’s frisky and believable chemistry to laughs — some worn, some crude, but more than a few delivered deftly and consistently enough to keep audiences smiling if not doubled over.
  52. Doctor Sleep
    This sequel to “The Shining” may register, in the end, as a long footnote, but it makes you glad that you got to play in that sinister funhouse again.
  53. Pin Cushion
    Cinematically, Pin Cushion goes all in on a heightened, macramé-and-macaroons aesthetic that occasionally smothers the rawer nerves of its storytelling.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
    Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is an overlong, sometimes hilariously vulgar comedy-drama, about the restaging of a difficult safecracking heist. Debuting director Michael Cimino obtains superior performances from Clint Eastwood, George Kennedy, Geoffrey Lewis and especially Jeff Bridges.
  55. Coneheads
    A sweet, funny anarchic pastiche that should find broad based popularity. Its sly combination of the outrageous and the mundane is a surprisingly appealing screen entertainment that transcends the one-joke territory it inhabited on television.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Perfect World
    Star Kevin Costner and director Clint Eastwood deliver lean, finely chiseled work in A Perfect World, a somber, subtly nuanced study of an escaped con’s complex relationship with an abducted boy that carries a bit too much narrative flab for its own good.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. Zoo
    Writer-director Colin McIvor adapts the true-ish story of how a handful of citizens came to the rescue of a baby elephant into an unlikely family film, one that will delight the kids (who see themselves portrayed as heroes) while leaving parents with a lot of explaining to do.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Into the West
    Byrne gives a credible, if low-key, rendering of the weak, illiterate father. Barkin downplays her looks and carries off an Irish accent with aplomb. The real stars are the two kids, notably Fitzgerald as the younger bro.
    • Variety
  61. Guilty Men
    Ensuring that most characters are neither all-good nor all-bad means “Guilty Men” is a much more human film than other dramas basing themselves on often clear-cut Westerns.
  62. Never Steady, Never Still
    Hepburn’s film eschews the expected emotional progression of a grief drama by focusing as much on continuing pain as sudden mourning.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Omega Man
    The Omega Man is an extremely literate science-fiction drama starring Charlton Heston as the only survivor of a worldwide bacteriological war, circa 1975. Thrust of the well-written story [adapted from Richard Matheson's novel] is Heston's running battle with deranged survivors headed by Anthony Zerbe.
  64. 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.
  65. Path of Blood
    In Path of Blood, the masks come off, and we literally see the faces of Al Qaeda in action, with the propaganda machine turned off. What’s shocking is how ordinary and high-spirited they appear.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Magnum Force
    The story contains the usual surfeit of human massacre for the yahoo trade, as well as a few actual thoughts.
  67. The Captain
    Few and far between are the movies...that actually implicate modern viewers in the evil, which is precisely what makes The Captain such a remarkable film. Not a great one, mind you — the movie starts out with a bang but swiftly falls into a kind of prolonged and distressingly outlandish tedium, and lodges there for the better part of its rather taxing running time — but a brave and uncompromising indictment of human nature, Teutonic or otherwise.
  68. Elizabeth Harvest
    The disorienting impact of this early shock, coupled with the zig-zaggy progression of the time-tripping narrative, goes a long way toward distracting from a fairly conventional premise that ultimately asserts itself above all the flash and filigree. Indeed, you could describe the entire movie as an elaborate con job — and intend that appraisal as a compliment.
  69. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    It’s a handsomely crafted portrait overall, yet one whose middleweight content flatters the subject without ultimately quite doing him justice.
  70. On the Basis of Sex
    An RBG biopic shouldn’t be about sizzle and showpersonship, but hard work and determination in the face of rampant, seemingly unremitting sexism, and in that respect, Leder’s film gets its priorities right.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Angel Heart
    Even if it may be a specious work at its core, Angel Heart still proves a mightily absorbing mystery, a highly exotic telling of a small-time detective's descent into hell, with Faustian theme, heavy bloodletting and pervasive grimness.
  72. 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.
  73. 3 Ninjas Kick Back
    3 Ninjas Kick Back clearly was made with an eye on the international movie market. Set mostly in Japan and adding a female ninja to the three boys, this high-spirited adventure succeeds in conveying the positive and fun elements of both Japanese and American cultures.
  74. After Everything
    Its refractory tone, both deadpan and swoony, announces that the first-time feature directors have a phenomenal eye for character (which is something those who’ve been watching Marks’ work as an actress may already have realized).
  75. Hal
    Hal has a once-over-lightly quality, but at times it offers a telling window into how the New Hollywood worked.
  76. My Father the Hero
    Offers some of the same breezy charm as its environs.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    The mad scientist/corporate heavy comedy is an odd combination of belly laughs and cerebral humor that will delight those familiar with the sketchcom troupe's antics.
  78. Good Burger
    A ruthlessly clever yarn about small fries vs. big biz, this winning comedy serves up a hearty helping of fun and wholesome values that will ring up appetizing sales at the box office.
  79. Memoir of War
    Large as its historical canvas is, the film is most artful as an interior evocation of a preemptively grieving state of mind.
  80. Ben Is Back
    The entire film is that rarest of gifts for its cast, providing virtually every character with a chance to play not only the present moment, but the complicated history they’ve established with Ben in the past, as well as whatever chance they see in the troubled young man’s future.
  81. The Getaway
    The Getaway is a pretty good remake of a pretty good action thriller.
  82. Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings
    On the level of pure popcorn entertainment, there’s not a thing one can fault the 3D megabuster for.
  83. 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.
  84. La Familia
    An honest, urgent two-hander, tracking a struggling single father and his wayward son on the run from more than one undefined enemy, Córdova’s film brings little that’s new to its stylistic school of observational realism — but hits the Caracas sidewalks hard and purposefully enough to compensate.
  85. 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.
  86. No Date, No Signature
    All four main actors are in top form, but it’s Mohammadzadeh who steals the show in his scene at the poultry plant, when his desperate monologue takes on an epic, Shakespearean quality as he throws all his physical force into a verbal storm of pained outrage.
  87. 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fourth War
    Tightly directed by Frankenheimer with an eye for comic relief as well as tension maintenance, The Fourth War holds the fascination of eyeball-to-eyeball conflict.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Verdict
    There are many fine performances and sensitive moral issues contained in The Verdict but somehow that isn't enough to make it the compelling film it should be. David Mamet's script [from a novel by Barry Reed] offers little out of the ordinary.
  90. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
    A collection of five femme-oriented vignettes that are not intricately linked dramatically but overlap characters, this observant, emotionally acute drama is distinguished by a pronounced poetic sensibility.
  91. The Spy Gone North
    This well-crafted work deserves to be seen for its thorough account of intricate workings of secret service and political skullduggery.
  92. Sharkwater Extinction
    A testament to its maker’s staunch belief in the cause of shark preservation, it’s a plea for transparency and conservation whose gorgeous 4K cinematography should make it an enticing proposition for nonfiction cinephiles and activists alike.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paper Moon
    Ryan O'Neal stars as a likeable con artist in the Depression midwest, and his real-life daughter, Tatum O'Neal, is outstanding as his nine-year-old partner in flim-flam.
  94. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Brood
    A horror entry which casts children in the role of malevolent little monsters, The Brood is an extremely well made, if essentially unpleasant, shocker.
  96. The Aeronauts
    The duo [of Redmayne and Jones] hand-in-hand elevates [The Aeronauts] ... from a flimsy action-adventure to something worth watching on the biggest possible screen, even if it operates on a handful of clichés with little character-based substance to speak of.
  97. Monrovia, Indiana
    Its methodical gathering of material never quite brings us to a more stirring understanding of the lives under its lens.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lone Wolf McQuade
    Fans of Soldier of Fortune magazine will think they've been ambushed and blown away to heaven by Lone Wolf McQuade. Every conceivable type of portable weapon on the world market is tried out by the macho warriors on both sides of the law in this modern western.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Southern Comfort
    Pic is most exciting as a visual experience, as Walter Hill once again proves himself a consummate filmmaker with a great talent for mood, composition and action choreography.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    Beau Bridges heads the uniformly excellent cast as a bored rich youth who buys a black ghetto apartment building and learns something about life.
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