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 Line
    As with nearly all great drama, The Line is about conflict, although this particular narrative feels downright radical in the way it rejects aggression as an acceptable means of resolving problems.
  2. The Passengers of the Night
    An airy, low-key drama that doesn’t suffer for its lack of narrative tension, The Passengers of the Night further proves the old adage about the journey mattering more the destination.
  3. All the Old Knives
    I’m glad to report that All the Old Knives is a minor but engrossing genre movie: tightly wound, more or less rooted in the real world, with taut dialogue and espionage gambits that fall just this side of contrived. It’s not John le Carré, but it’s not thinly patched together pulp either.
  4. Wonka
    “Wonka” makes you feel good, but it never makes you levitate.
  5. Not Okay
    Shephard jabs well-placed elbows at modern day media celebrity, where the public’s attention veers in an instant from tutting about death to applauding as Danni does goat yoga.
  6. Spin Me Round
    Is this supposed to be some kind of sitcom? A thriller? A provocative #MeToo statement on sexual dynamics in the workplace? Yes, all of the above, it turns out.
  7. It Is In Us All
    If as a thriller, the cryptic It Is in Us All, doesn’t thrill quite enough, as an examination of the kind of perverse death-obsession that unloved, unhappy, estranged boys can develop, it is a darkly provocative and promising debut mood-piece from Campbell-Hughes.
  8. Slash/Back
    Innuksuk approaches everything with such a generous, supportive spirit, it seems churlish to focus on shortcomings in a film with so much personality. ... "Slash/Back" seems bound to find a cult following, but it will mean the most to Inuit audiences, for whom standing up to invaders is more than just another genre-movie cliché.
  9. The Woman King
    It’s stirring but slightly stodgy, designed to stand the test of time.
  10. Spellbound
    In the end, Jenson’s most radical twist on fairy-tale tradition is the belief that a pat “happily ever after” isn’t nearly as helpful as providing an example of how to cope with unhappiness.
  11. She Said
    Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.
  12. Babi Yar. Context
    Babi Yar. Context has power but falls short of the director’s greatest works, largely because his span here is considerably longer, and in consequence the focus suffers.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bells Are Ringing
    Better Broadway musicals than Bells Are Ringing have come to Hollywood, but few have been translated to the screen so effectively.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big House
    As Butch, Morgan and Kent, Wallace Beery, Chester Morris and Robert Montgomery are a great trio in ‘the big house’, where each is serving a stretch for homicide, forgery and manslaughter, respectively. Prison life on the half-shell is plainly exposed.
  15. DIO: Dreamers Never Die
    Don Argott and Demian Fenton’s film belongs more to the realm of fan service than crossover pic, but it’ll attract curious souls from other corners of the rock world who don’t mind the devil being in two hours’ worth of details.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Asphalt Jungle
    Ironic realism is striven for and achieved in the writing, production and direction. An audience will quite easily pull for the crooks in their execution of the million-dollar jewelry theft around which the plot is built.
  17. Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain
    Estevan Oriol’s entertaining, energetic, better-than-it-had-to-be documentary Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain offers a more complete picture of this massively popular yet often underestimated grou
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mississippi Masala
    Washington is savvy and attractive as the enterprising carpet cleaner destined for a brighter future. Choudhury is a discovery as the Americanized Mina, who calls herself a kind of masala (mixed spices). Together, they carry the film smoothly and agreeably.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweet Bird of Youth
    Sweet Bird of Youth is a tamer and tidied but arresting version of Tennessee Williams' Broadway play. It's a glossy, engrossing hunk of motion picture entertainment, slickly produced by Berman.
  20. The Equalizer 3
    Beyond the righteous action and visceral violence, it’s Washington’s swagger and charisma that compels.
  21. Devotion
    Director JD Dillard dazzles with see-it-in-Imax airborne sequences, but the meat of the film focuses on the friendship between Brown (“Da 5 Bloods” star Jonathan Majors) and his white wingman, played by Glen Powell, the “Hidden Figures” actor who most recently appeared in “Top Gun: Maverick.”
  22. Marvelous and the Black Hole
    A set-your-watch-by-it riff on the unlikely-friendship-helps-two-lonely-people formula, this time involving a troubled schoolgirl and a stage magician, it is however so nicely performed and takes such honest pleasure in the flourishes of its little magic show, that only a hard heart would mention that the palmed coins and hidden cards of its construction were visible all along.
  23. A Perfect Pairing
    A Perfect Pairing may lack a unique complexity and leave some sediment behind, but its finish is pleasing nonetheless.
  24. Bad Roads
    Although the various episodes don’t quite add up to a strong narrative whole, they do gain extra resonance from current events in this troubled region.
  25. Brian and Charles
    A deceptively unserious movie it may be, but Brian and Charles leaves a serious trace through its pure sense of optimism.
  26. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds.
  27. 13: The Musical
    13: The Musical is just catchy enough to make you forget how facile it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.
  28. Double Team
    Shrewdly made with an eye for the global market, where the Belgian star is more of a draw than he is Stateside, pic features visually exciting set pieces in alluring tourist sites, putting the audience in a pleasantly mindless state of disbelief.
  29. God's Creatures
    The film’s formal flourishes are modest, centering the actors ahead of all else.
  30. Holy Spider
    Before a final act dealing with the fascinating social fallout once Saeed’s crimes are known and he becomes, in some quarters including his own household, a hero on a righteous moral crusade, Abbasi’s film hews close to this established template.
  31. The Silent Twins
    Layering one wild formal flourish over another — from macabre stop-motion animation to elaborately choreographed musical fantasies — to channel the inner lives of two young women who communicated only with each other, keeping the rest of the world outside their circle, it’s a swing for the fences that sometimes, almost by design, spins out of control.
  32. The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks
    While best enjoyed by the already converted, it provides enough showbiz insight and interpersonal drama to entertain newbies.
  33. The Passenger
    The Passenger doesn’t quite transcend its basic creature-feature premise, yet it does make getting to a familiar destination more fun than many a similar enterprise has managed.
  34. Smoking Causes Coughing
    It’s a film of fragmentary but funny rewards — funnier still, most likely, if accompanied by smoking of a different kind.
  35. War Pony
    If Larry Clark had ever found his way onto the Pine Ridge Reservation, he probably would have come away with a film like “War Pony,” which observes its young Native American characters hustling, skating and stealing drugs from otherwise distracted adults.
  36. M3GAN
    M3GAN, as you may have gathered, is overly steeped in pop-culture role models, but in its trivial way it’s a diverting genre film, one that possesses a healthy sense of its own absurdity.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    It is Sam Peckinpah’s direction, however, that gives the film greatest artistry. He gives N. B. Stone Jr.’s script a measure beyond its adequacy, instilling bright moments of sharp humor and an overall significant empathetic flavor.
  38. Elizabeth: A Portrait in Part(s)
    It’s a willfully idiosyncratic movie that feels like a strangely fitting final film, since it amounts to Michell’s cockeyed tip of the hat to the monarchy and what it means. You could have a good debate about what, exactly, he’s trying to express in “Elizabeth,” but what I saw is a level-headed adoration that is neither fussy nor old-fashioned, since it’s cut with an acerbic awareness of the absurdity of royalty in the contemporary age.
  39. Hunt
    A twisty, action-packed political thriller — one that keeps you guessing even as it spirals into ever-crazier realms.
  40. Take the Night
    This solid little thriller does a good job balancing character drama and suspense elements, its smooth craftsmanship belying the creator’s newbie status in multiple creative roles.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dark Passage
    Lauren Bacall's charm and Humphrey Bogart's ruggedness count heavily in a strange treatment of a murder story, which if it doesn't withstand scrutiny, does sustain mood and interest.
  42. Murder at Yellowstone City
    Director Richard Gray’s well-crafted and handsomely mounted indie is as much a solidly constructed mystery as it is it a conventionally satisfying oater, with much to recommend to fans of either genre who rarely get to sample such a mix.
  43. Nostalgia
    Even in its more generic stretches, Martone’s latest feels both inviting and convincingly inhabited, a siren song to the past that confronts us with a violent, unromantic present, paved under with the same old, blood-washed cobblestones.
  44. Private Desert
    The film comes alive in its second half, which deepens and complicates the story we thought we were watching, about a disgraced cop trying to run away from the violence that’s set to cost him his job and his reputation. For some, the tender empathy that runs through the film’s latter half may not be enough to offset its choice of sympathetic leading man.
  45. My Old School
    Like any good con-artist documentary, My Old School keeps its audience guessing, delighted to be deceived — although there’s a degree to which relying on animation cheats us of the question on everybody’s mind: How could so many have fallen for Brandon’s ruse?
  46. Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind
    This is Ethan’s chance to strut his solo stuff. And he does, in a very Ethan Coen way: clever, modest, borderline invisible, but with a kick that sneaks up on you. ... 'Trouble in Mind' plays like an undiluted shot of rock ‘n’ roll moonshine joy.
  47. Pacifiction
    Pacifiction is a film in many ways about floating, through life and water and power, inviting the viewer to idly drift right along with it.
  48. Revoir Paris
    It’s a modest film with a heart very much on its torn sleeve, given force and ballast by another fine dramatic turn from the hard-working Virginie Efira.
  49. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe
    Good cartoon characters tend to be ageless, and Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is just clever enough not to feel like an anachronism. The duo’s creator and forever naughty guiding light, the writer-director Mike Judge (who also does their voices), flows the characters into the present day without a hitch in style or a stitch in time.
  50. Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
    “Dreaming Walls” sets out to capture not the history of the Chelsea, or even the experience of the people who’ve lived there, so much as the afterglow of the Chelsea. The aging residents it shows us can check out anytime (or get kicked out), but they can never leave.
  51. Strange World
    Great as the people and places they explore may be, however, the relatively unimaginative story consigns this gorgeous toon to second-tier status — a notch below director Don Hall’s earlier “Big Hero 6” — instead of cracking the pantheon of Disney classics.
  52. On the Line: The Richard Williams Story
    In “On the Line,” Williams has his say. Unsurprisingly, he’s frank, occasionally funny, but also vulnerable, not least because he’s growing frail, having suffered from health issues.
  53. Smile
    Smile will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie.
  54. The Story Won't Die
    Braiding the reflections of nine variously affected individuals on the subject, David Henry Gerson’s film successfully keeps the big picture and the smaller canvas in conscientious balance, disrupting overwhelming tragedy with more hopeful flashes of invention and inspiration.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is Elvis
    A real curiosity item, This Is Elvis is a fast-paced gloss on Presley's life and career packed with enough fine music and unusual footage to satisfy anyone with an Interest in the late singing idol.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
    Chuckles get heartier and heartier as adult Grant plays at being a juvenile at basketball games, school picnics, etc. It’s done with slapstick touch that pays off.
  57. Tigers
    It’s a compelling tale, well cast and directed with vivid intensity by Ronnie Sandahl. Still, the somewhat frustratingly limited insight we get into our hero’s addled head may affect export prospects for a film that is more about psychology than athletics.
  58. Wedding Season
    It’s a processed confection that has come off the streaming assembly line. Yet if the comedy here is mostly routine, the romance is another thing. It really does work, because the actors don’t just phone in the love story — they dance with it, commit to it, and own it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Run Silent Run Deep
    Run Silent, Run Deep is a taut, exciting drama of submarine warfare in the Pacific during the Second World War.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fly
    One strong factor of the picture is its unusual believability. It is told as a mystery suspense story, so that it has a compelling interest aside from its macabre effects. There is an appealing and poignant romance between Owens and Hedison, which adds to the reality of the story, although the flashback technique purposely robs the picture of any doubt about the outcome.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jason and the Argonauts
    The $3 million film has a workable scenario and has been directed resourcefully and spiritedly by Don Chaffey, under whose leadership a colorful cast performs with zeal.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
    Voyage is a crescendo of mounting jeopardy, an effervescent adventure in an anything-but-Pacific Ocean.
  63. Rogue Agent
    As a revenge spy thriller of sorts (the kind that seems tailor-made for a TV miniseries these days), “Rogue Agent” is an engaging affair. Much of it is due to Arterton, whose steely performance firmly anchors the film even during its most improbable twists and turns — especially as it careens toward its inevitable conclusion and its all too pat final image.
  64. We Met in Virtual Reality
    We Met in Virtual Reality is a warmhearted, often humorous look at the sociology of such spaces. It can’t really be described as vérité — more fly-on-the-virtual-wall filmmaking.
  65. Railway Children
    Effectively piling nostalgia upon nostalgia upon nostalgia into a triple-layered Victorian sponge of particularly English sweetness, this good-natured, resolutely old-fashioned film will likely make any adults who grew up on Jeffries’ original a little misty-eyed.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pollyanna
    In Walt Disney's Pollyanna Hayley Mills' work more than compensates for the film's lack of tautness and, at certain points, what seems to be an uncertain sense of direction.
  67. 2 Days in the Valley
    2 Days in the Valley will rank high on any list of films containing the greatest number of scenes in which people are threatened at gunpoint. Marked by a wearying amount of hostile and antisocial behavior by its criminal and civilian characters alike, writer-director John Herzfeld's debut outing features a measure of unexpected humor and some good character work by the ensemble cast.
  68. Pearl
    Its distinctive look and oddly appealing antihero (picture Norman Bates as Shelley Duvall might have played him) could actually make this the more popular of the two films.
  69. Captain America: Brave New World
    It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.
  70. Medieval
    Medieval succeeds as a lively, handsome chunk of history (however freely imagined), with nary a dull moment between densely-packed intrigues, chases and battles.
  71. Joyride
    Joyride needs some deft actors driving it, and it has lucked out: An up-for-anything Olivia Colman and scrappy newcomer Charlie Reid make for an unlikely but appealing buddy duo.
  72. Free Chol Soo Lee
    It’s a well-crafted enterprise that leaves its human subject a bit of an enigma, albeit one we empathize with enough to feel sorely disappointed that his tumultuous life never arrived at a place of security or peace.
  73. Burial
    Not-quite-horror despite its macabre theme and mood, this sophomore directorial feature for Ben Parker is a handsomely produced period thriller that delivers in terms of action and atmospherics, even if his somewhat convoluted story doesn’t maximally pay off.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Testament of Orpheus
    [Cocteau] still has a flair for provoking strange moods in ordinary landscapes, as well as utilizing simple trick effects effectively and judiciously. He ribs himself at times but is quite clear in his summation that a poet is rarely recognized in his time.
  75. Blue Island
    While there is no shortage of frontline footage of arrests and protestors clashing with police, most of the running time is dedicated to placing recent events in historical and deeply personal contexts.
  76. The Blue Caftan
    The Blue Caftan dares to imagine a world where there’s room for both appreciation of the old ways and room to evolve.
  77. Goodnight Mommy
    Watts, a veteran of the genre despite never quite being a scream queen, is delightfully disturbing in a role that requires her to mask her character’s true nature as well as her face.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Out of the Past
    Out of the Past is a hardboiled melodrama [from the novel by Geoffrey Homes] strong on characterization. Direction by Jacques Tourneur pays close attention to mood development, achieving realistic flavor that is further emphasized by real life settings and topnotch lensing by Nicholas Musuraca.
  79. Late August, Early September
    A kaleidoscopic but engrossing study of the shifting sands of friendship among a group of Parisians, "Late August, Early September" reps a major advance by writer-director Olivier Assayas in warmth and maturity of observation.
  80. Alex's War
    So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age vérité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Substitute
    Though the setup is largely preposterous, the filmmakers go whole-hog for the idea and provide a kinetic entertainment.
  82. Kirikou and the Wild Beasts
    Animation, like dialogue and narration, is simple and direct. Messages of the value of teamwork, pride in shared labor, self-reliance and resourcefulness are nicely embedded into compact, suspenseful adventures.
  83. Rosaline
    There’s something fresh about the story’s unwillingness to pit a woman’s romantic quests against her career goals.
  84. The Harbinger
    The Harbinger disappoints only in that it’s good enough to make you wish it were better — that it left an indelible impression rather than a slightly vague one.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Witness for the Prosecution
    A courtroom meller played engagingly and building evenly to a surprising and arousing, albeit tricked-up, climax, Witness for the Prosecution has been transferred to the screen (from the Agatha Christie click play) with competence.
  86. The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales
    This engaging economics lesson, bolstered by articulate experts and amusing animated sequences, would be right at home in high school and college classrooms. Heck, it would be a nice addition to Disney Plus, breaking up all the hagiographic puff-pieces on offer there.
  87. A Couple
    The final film is elegant and empathetic, but never quite emotionally involving: For all its rich, heightened articulation of a woman’s distress and unrest, the sense of a life being academically magnified under glass never quite leaves the endeavor.
  88. Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
    Leads Kapoor and Bhatt have an excess of charm and style that leaps off the screen and grabs your heart.
  89. 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.
  90. A Jazzman's Blues
    A Jazzman’s Blues overflows with melodrama, yet it isn’t staged broadly. It’s closer to Perry’s version of a Douglas Sirk film, one that takes a romance and heightens it until the complications are growing and twisting around it like vines.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Red Dust
    Familiar plot stuff, but done so expertly it almost overcomes the basic script shortcomings and the familiar hot-love-in-the-isolated-tropics theme [from the play by Wilson Collison].
  92. Monica
    Conceived with uncommon sensitivity toward the interior lives of its characters, as well as to the shifting codes of trans representation, “Monica” is a film about making amends.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waterloo Bridge
    Elaborating on the basic premise of Robert Sherwood's play, and doing a slick job of cleansing to conform to present regulations of the Hays code, this is a persuasive and compelling romantic tragedy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadow of the Thin Man
    Harry Kurnitz has fashioned the story with a good deal of ingenuity, using the characters of the private detective and his wife, as created in the original yarn by Dashiell Hammett.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cat People
    This is a weird drama of thrill-chill caliber, with developments of surprises confined to psychology and mental reactions, rather than transformation to grotesque and marauding characters for visual impact on the audiences. Picture is well-made on moderate budget outlay.
  96. Mufasa: The Lion King
    At nearly every step, Mufasa’s challenges mirror those that Simba must later overcome, but the movie doesn’t celebrate Mufasa’s might so much as his modesty.
  97. Snow White
    As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature.
  98. Sick
    It’s best to let audiences discover the reaper’s motives in context; suffice to say that “Sick” not only factors in our still-evolving COVID-era rules but also serves as an amusing time capsule for the collective fear that has seized us these past three years.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trespass
    Throw together The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Rio Bravo, bring in the Ice crew, inject a noxious dose of racial hatred and stir in some sharp action direction and you've got Trespass.
  100. Spirited
    For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much exactly as they’d expect, but that doesn’t mean Spirited can’t still surprise.
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