Variety's Scores

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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
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    House of Usher
    In patronizingly romanticizing Poe's venerable prose, scenarist Richard Matheson has managed to preserve enough of the original's haunting flavor and spirit. The elaborations change the personalities of the three central characters, but not recklessly so.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bloody Mama
    The best performance in the film, and one of the most outstanding screen portrayals in many moons, is that of Pat Hingle, playing a wealthy businessman kidnapped for high ransom.
  3. Celebration
    Celebration doesn’t feel entirely fair, but it’s a priceless addition to our understanding of how Yves Saint Laurent — the man, the myth, la marque — operated: a flawed film whose mere existence makes it essential viewing.
  4. Richard Jewell
    A good story is a good story, and Eastwood knows how to tell a good story.
  5. Good Girls Get High
    With heartening, encouraging messages that speak to the target audience and beyond, Good Girls Get High doesn’t stray too far from the formula, but manipulates it in such a way that feels fresh.
  6. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    Bully. Coward. Victim. isn’t as authoritative a chronicle as “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” but in its loosely anecdotal way it may bring us a notch or two closer to who Roy Cohn was.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pit and the Pendulum
    A physically stylish, imaginatively photographed horror film which, though needlessly corny in many spots, adds up to good exploitation.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One, Two, Three
    Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three is a fast-paced, high-pitched, hard-hitting, lighthearted farce crammed with topical gags and spiced with satirical overtones. Story is so furiously quick-witted that some of its wit gets snarled and smothered in overlap. But total experience packs a considerable wallop.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How the West Was Won
    It's a story [suggested by the series How the West Was Won in Life magazine] which naturally puts the spotlight on action and adventure, and the three directors between them have turned in some memorable sequences.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Shaggy D.A.
    Jones is a pleasant light comedian whose style is perfectly suited to the WASPish world of Disney. As his wife, Suzanne Pleshette has her first film role in five years, and her beauty and intelligence livens a part that might have been dull without her.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cat from Outer Space
    The fun, as usual with Disney pix, comes in the believable sight gags provided along the way. Also as usual, it’s a good cast of veterans and nothing to tax them beyond their abilities, all ably kept in pace by director Norman Tokar.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    There are a good many laughs on this simple premise and the script’s exploitation of them. The only time the film falters badly is in its choice of a gimmick to get the boy-who-turns-into-a-dog turned back, for good and all, into a boy.
  13. Serendipity
    Nourry isn’t the most self-effacing of artists, and Serendipity could stand to reveal more of her artistic process, rather than gazing upon the often formidable finished product. Still, on the occasions it stops self-curating and gives us a glimpse into Nourry’s frightened, still-restless soul, this is a stirring, imposing self-portrait.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackbeard's Ghost
    Blackbeard's Ghost, a lively and entertaining Walt Disney production, features Peter Ustinov in a tour de farce title role as the restless spirit of the famed pirate. Dean Jones and Suzanne Pleshette share top billing. Robert Stevenson's direction is highlighted by several very amusing chase and special effects sequences.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Escape to Witch Mountain
    Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann are happy choices as the orphans.
  16. No Safe Spaces
    No Safe Spaces is a smart, vital, urgent, and provocative exploration of that question.
  17. Mountaintop
    I’d say that Mountaintop provides a valuable service in capturing what it’s like to be in a recording studio at length, with all the bickering and tiny experiments and small eureka moments that entails, better than any other music doc ever has.
  18. 63 Up
    If this is the final chapter, as Apted suggests it could be, it’s a worthy cap to one of the boldest experiments in world cinema.
  19. First Kid
    The real strength of the Tim Kelleher script is its understanding that despite the two main characters’ considerable positive traits, they are misfits. Each appreciates the other for his qualities, not his station. The writer has effectively created an appealing fantasy and given it human dimension.
  20. Queen of Hearts
    In a conversation piece pitched halfway between the delicate Sirkian tragedy and Adrian Lyne at his most sensational, it’s the overridingly controlled nature of proceedings — from performance to production design — that keeps “Queen of Hearts” from sliding into the hysterical silliness that its provocations invite.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Honey, I Blew Up the Kid
    This lighthearted summer entertainment will give kids a vicarious kick while the elaborate visual effects help keep parents intrigued.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mystify: Michael Hutchence
    While Mystify in many ways amplifies the tragedy of Hutchence’s death, it also goes a long way toward explaining and humanizing it.
  23. Operation Dumbo Drop
    A well-crafted and entertaining pic with broad, cross-generational appeal.
  24. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    Flat-footed storytelling meets fleet-footed choreography and sumptuous production values in the untaxingly fun Ip Man 4: The Finale.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Betty Blue
    Director Jean-Jacques Beineix has adapted a novel by Philippe Djian, considered an enfant terrible of the new literary generation. It's another feverish tale of amour fou.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dracula
    Director John Badham and Frank Langella pull off a handsome, moody rendition, more romantic than menacing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pacific Heights
    The specter of a menace who invades one's home turf and can't be ousted is universally disturbing, and director John Schlesinger goes all out to make this creepy thriller-chiller as unsettling as it needs to be.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fright Night
    Director Tom Holland keeps the picture wonderfully simple and entirely believable (once the existence of vampires is accepted, of course).
  29. Judy & Punch
    The core narrative is rather simple, and the political metaphor not especially subtle. But the overall concept, from Foulkes and her trio of story collaborators, has a bracingly original air, from the film’s period anachronisms to its impressive design elements.
  30. I See You
    An eerie suspense exercise that starts out looking like a supernatural tale — one of several viewer presumptions this cleverly engineered narrative eventually pulls the rug out from under.
  31. Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator
    Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator is more than an indictment of a man. Orner cross-examines the community that protected a bully for four decades, ever since Bikram pranced before TV cameras flexing his pecs for a cheering audience.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Defending Your Life
    Defending Your Life is an inventive and mild bit of whimsy from Albert Brooks.
  33. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
    The great pleasure of these films’ bright, largely wordless slapstick is that it plays universally whilst accommodating all manner of obsessive, idiosyncratic detailing at the edges.
  34. After Parkland
    After Parkland has its gun politics, and its aching heart, in the right place, but we need more from a movie about this subject. We need to ask how where the contemporary American heart of darkness is coming from.
  35. My Friend the Polish Girl
    The film grabs at so many thematic strands — further including toxic female friendship, urban alienation and abusive sexual manipulation — that it can’t substantially sort through them all. Still, the attempt is audacious and stimulating.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deadly Friend
    Pic has enough gore, suspense and requisite number of shocks to keep most hearts pounding through to the closing credits.
  37. Incitement
    While Incitement is a compelling watch, with archival footage neatly woven in, and offers a salutary warning about how easily democracies are endangered, this psychological profile of a political assassin nevertheless falls into a kind of moral trap.
  38. Promising Young Woman
    Haphazard as “Woman” can seem, it all somehow pulls together at last with a satisfying smack.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The tender story, with its frank and unashamed assault on the emotions, still has its effective moments at times when the sentiment doesn’t grow a little too thick.
  40. Colewell
    The film’s finely crafted serenity is in keeping with its main character’s secluded state of affairs, and mind.
  41. Free Guy
    Free Guy is a lot of fun, despite the fact that Levy and the screenwriters seem to be changing the rules as they go.
  42. Downhill
    The story worked brilliantly before. In Downhill, it works…well enough. The new movie is a teasing trifle with something real on its mind.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Silent Partner
    The Silent Partner is one of the films that run the gamut from intrigue to violence.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Malice
    The immaculately crafted Malice is a virtual scrapbook of elements borrowed from other suspense pix, but no less enjoyable for being so familiar.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Kentucky Fried Movie
    The Kentucky Fried Movie boasts excellent production values and some genuine wit, though a few of the sketches are tasteless.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wiz
    Director Sidney Lumet has created what amounts to a love letter to the city of New York, which he equates with Oz.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Futureworld
    Futureworld is a strong sequel to Westworld in which the rebuilt pleasure dome aims at world conquest by extending the robot technology to duplicating business and political figures.
  48. Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
    A very entertaining recap that grows more disturbing as it wades into the dysfunctional behavior that doomed the show.
  49. The Social Dilemma
    Densely packed yet lively and entertaining documentary, whose accessibility is heightened by some narrative play-acting.
  50. Acasă, My Home
    Balance and objectivity are laudable instincts, but they can put the film at a slightly frustrating remove.
  51. Corpus Christi
    All of this makes for compelling dramatic conflict, and it’s satisfying to watch an impostor shake up the status quo. But there’s also a soap opera-like dimension to Corpus Christi that threatens the more thoughtful aspects of the script.
  52. Respect
    Though Respect can feel a little soft in the drama department, it delivers the added pleasure of hearing Hudson re-create Franklin’s key songs, from the early jazz standards she covered for Columbia to her reinvention of the Otis Redding single that lends the film its name.
  53. The Wave
    This fever dream feels more derivative than distinctive, entertaining and eventful as it is. Still, it’s a well-cast, well-crafted stab at something offbeat.
  54. Stargirl
    While it suffers from a rocky beginning with burdensome amounts of kook and quirk, the unfolding spell it subtly casts holds profundity and wisdom.
  55. Bloodshot
    Bloodshot is a trash compactor of a comic-book film, but it’s smart trash, an action matrix that’s fun to plug into.
  56. Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway
    This superior sequel serves as both a meta-commentary on his humbling past antics and a pivotal point for the eponymous protagonist. It’s an astute, entertaining, light-hearted mix of slapstick and self-reflexive humor commingling with enlightened, sharp sentiments about individualism and commercialism (the latter of which Potter herself wrestled with, and eventually pioneered).
  57. The Photograph
    It’s a looser, warmer, and more meditative romance, one that takes its time by giving its actors room to breathe.
  58. Miss Americana
    Watching the movie, you know you’re getting a controlled and sanded-off confection of pop-diva image management, one that’s going to leave anything too dark or messy or random on the cutting-room floor. Yet what matters is that the things we do see ring true. In “Miss Americana,” the vision Taylor Swift presents of herself is just chancy and sincere enough to draw us in.
  59. José
    Cheng delivers a mood that is unquestionably human and, at times, unexpectedly hallowed (as when Jose stares down the worn face in a Mayan ruin). José brings to light the promise of a director as compassionate as he is observant.
  60. The Booksellers
    The Booksellers is a documentary for anyone who can still look at a book and see a dream, a magic teleportation device, an object that contains the world.
  61. Candyman
    The new Candyman references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.
  62. The Forever Purge
    As a satirical demagogic action movie, The Forever Purge is blatant, bare-bones, and entertainingly brutal.
  63. Black Bear
    This adventurous seriocomedy has enough surprising elements and off-kilter humor to keep one intrigued, even if the payoff is debatable.
  64. Premature
    While Premature may seem less professional than your average Sundance movie (much less entry-level studio fare), that doesn’t diminish what’s fresh, vulnerable and true about the film.
  65. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    Better late than never, this film is Blank’s shot, and by staying so true to her voice, her aim hits home.
  66. Boys State
    Ultimately, Boys State works because the “characters” are so compelling.
  67. Us Kids
    If it seems more of a flashback than a flashpoint — particularly as impeachment proceedings seem to crowd out discussion of anything else — Us Kids nonetheless reminds that this issue too often comes down to children, and whether our society places enough value on that supposedly most-precious-resource to meaningfully protect them.
  68. The Australian Dream
    Gordon uses blockbuster tools — pairing bold visuals with the kind of thundering sound design that makes your joints rattle — to turn his well-organized sociology lesson into a more visceral cinematic experience. More than just a compelling TED Talk, it’s an urgent and engaging call to action.
  69. Relic
    Not everyone will appreciate the ambiguity of a climax that can be read as either an uplifting act of pure and selfless love or a depressing capitulation to the malign forces of inevitable decline, but either way, “art-house horror” has its 2020 tidemark set high.
  70. The Fight
    America is so punch-drunk that The Fight often feels like it’s whacking old bruises. But that is the national psyche’s problem more than the filmmakers’. For their part, they have made a worthwhile record of the civil rights advocates combating the country’s backslide into stripping away rights for voters, immigrants, pregnant women and the LGBTQ community.
  71. Mucho Mucho Amor
    The doc gives Mercado’s story back to Mercado. Better, it shows that Mercado is still the same spiritualistic, highfalutin’ fashion-plate as a retiree eating breakfast at home as he was on TV. The film’s biggest revelation is that Mercado’s mystical, magnificent, big-hearted shtick was no fraud — he was always the real deal.
  72. Coda
    A deliberately paced and stealthily involving saunter through familiar territory.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    Film is most engaging in its romantic sparring between Martin and his gorgeous client, Ward.
  74. Uncle Frank
    Uncle Frank recalls plenty of prior coming-out (and coming-of-age) sagas, but revisits their familiar terrain with a confident and skilled mix of humor and character-dynamic shorthand.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    An Eye for an Eye
    An Eye for an Eye is an effective martial arts actioner vehicle for Chuck Norris.
  76. 37 Seconds
    Deceptively delicate and quietly tough.
  77. The Glorias
    The film is acted with great flair and emotional precision, and it’s been staged by Taymor with vividly detailed historical flavor, yet it tells Steinem’s story in a way that’s more wide than deep.
  78. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    Six months into 2022, it’s the funniest film Hollywood has produced thus far. Audiences know what to expect, and Illumination delivers, offering another feel-good dose of bad behavior.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Stepfather
    The Stepfather is an engrossing suspense thriller that refreshingly doesn't cheat the audience in terms of valid clues and plot twists.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Target
    Target is a spy thriller that's not only completely understandable and involving throughout, but also continually surprising along the way. It also strangely contains a few scenes of dreadful writing, acting and direction.
  81. Resistance
    Resistance tells a story that’s plenty strong on its own terms, and if anything, it’s a bonus that one of the key participants should survive to become famous. Afforded depth and gravitas by Angelo Milli’s string score, the film hardly needs the framing device in which Ed Harris appears as Gen. George S. Patton, regaling his troops with Marceau’s story before inviting him onstage for his first public show.
  82. The Wretched
    The film successfully mixes together a lot of things, from the waterfront tourist-town setting of “Jaws” to a general teen fantasy-adventure feel that tempers (without weakening) horror content variably redolent of “It,” “Fright Night” and myriad other predecessors. If originality isn’t a strong suit here, the film’s conviction and polish make that a minor sin.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Flamingo Kid
    Dillon does a good job in his fullest, least narcissistic characterization to date.
  84. Happiest Season
    The film is cheeky and blithe and situational, suffused with enough upscale Christmas froth to get the audience high on spiced-cocktail fumes. In a key scene near the end, it’s more than willing to go over-the-top. Yet Happiest Season is also a deft and humane dramedy of manners that’s really about something.
  85. Da 5 Bloods
    The result is overlong and erratic, but also frequently surprising for a contemporary riff on the classic greed-doesn’t-pay parable “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
  86. The Old Guard
    It’s like an immortal-mercenary hangout movie. Chunks of the picture are logy and formulaic (it dawdles on for two hours), but the director, Gina Prince-Bythewood (making a major lane change after “Love & Basketball” and “The Secret Life of Bees”), stages the fight scenes with ripe executionary finesse, and she teases out a certain soulful quality in her cast.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
    On a production level, film is a marvel, as fabulous Cameroon locations have been seamlessly blended with studio recreations of jungle settings.
  88. Changing the Game
    Unadventurous in its design — Barnett goes for a conventional mélange of clips and talking heads to structure the story — Changing the Game admittedly benefits from a traditional approach that slowly familiarizes the audience both with the subjects and the layers of an ongoing discriminatory debate around fairness.
  89. Uncorked
    An earnest, scrappy, and finally touching drama about a young man from Memphis who’s got a dream — he’s a wine buff who wants to become a sommelier — but if he follows it, it will tear him away from everything his father yearned for him to be. That, of course, is part of why it’s a tasty dream.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Twice in a Lifetime
    The pic is loaded with jock humor and incidental comments that allow the characters’ frustrations to seep out. Audiences will love Burstyn’s warm wrinkles and visit with her daughters to a male strip joint, as well as Hackman’s workmanlike heroism.
  91. The Grizzlies
    Like any good, inspirational athletic adventure, the film forges a strong connection with the human side of the story.
  92. No Small Matter
    While it falls short of its promised earth-shattering, mind-altering revelations, it does cast an interesting hook from a creative perspective, thoughtfully packaging its message in visually coherent, engaging ways.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    All of Me
    For all its clowning, All of Me makes some good points about taking chances and doing what you want in life. Tomlin undergoes a transformation from a crabby sheltered poor little rich girl to a compassionate woman. It’s a measure of her performance that even as a sourpuss she’s irressistible.
  94. Why Don't You Just Die!
    Set almost entirely in a corrupt cop’s Moscow apartment, Why Don’t You Just Die! is a neatly conceived dark-comedy chamber piece — à la the Wachowski siblings’ clockwork-perfect queer-noir “Bound” or Sidney Lumet’s airtight but otherwise diabolical “Deathtrap” — in which a simple setup spirals into unimaginably twisted mayhem.
  95. Arkansas
    Not everything here works, including some lead casting. But this daylight noir should please viewers willing to roll along with a crime meller more interested in character quirks than action thrills.
  96. The Last Vermeer
    This isn’t the kind of storytelling that flatters the audience’s intelligence, and yet, spelling things out ensures that viewers who don’t like to work too hard can follow along easily and focus on the film’s other pleasures — namely, Pearce’s performance and the twisty case of the missing “Vermeer.”
  97. Kill It and Leave This Town
    An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s abrasive animation Kill It and Leave This Town exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be.
  98. Minamata
    Depp plays it surly throughout, dominating those around him, but Minami has a strong screen presence as well (despite struggling somewhat with the dialogue in her first English-language role). As Aileen, she needs only to look at Gene, and he will yield to her demands. The two characters read as equals here, despite their polar-opposite personalities, and that unusual chemistry fuels the dangerous reporting ahead of them.
  99. Mogul Mowgli
    Outside of Ahmed’s seething, spitting, can’t-look-away performance, Mogul Mowgli is a sparsely scripted but scratchily atmospheric culture-clash drama that runs on some quite traditional father-son melodramatics. But considering the film outside the performance would be a mistake.
  100. Siberia
    As a study of a rugged individualist looking back on long-withered connections — to others, to the mainstream world, and indeed to himself — it feels personally invested both as a star vehicle and an auteur piece. If it isn’t, the joke’s on us, and still pretty funny.
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