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. Homecoming
    A terrific trio of performances go some way toward making the film’s more neatly schematic plotting feel organically, messily human.
  2. The New Boy
    In Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable The New Boy, spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.
  3. Robot Dreams
    Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Exodus
    Transposing Leon Uris' hefty novel to the screen was not an easy task. It is to the credit of director Otto Preminger and scenarist Dalton Trumbo that they have done as well as they have. One can, however, wish that they had been blessed with more dramatic incisiveness.
  5. Fallen Leaves
    It’s a nice but exceedingly minor movie. It leaves little imprint.
  6. The Animal Kingdom
    “The Animal Kingdom” isn’t a traditional genre movie so much as a coming-of-age story with a creature-feature twist — picture a moody French “Teen Wolf,” minus the laughs. ... Stumble even for a moment, and the whole movie could feel silly, which is what makes the fact that it works all the more remarkable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    National Velvet
    Story is told with warmth and understanding.
  8. Rotting in the Sun
    With its tricky tone and its wildly ambitious themes, it’s not surprising to find Silva’s outrageous, salacious film stumbling as it brings its many threads into focus. Like Sebastián’s art and his journal in the film, Rotting in the Sun remains a patchwork of quotes and ideas and provocations hastily if hilariously stitched together.
  9. I.S.S.
    While the landing isn’t as smooth as might be hoped for after the exemplary first act, neither does I.S.S. burn up on reentry.
  10. The Dive
    If The Dive’s final stretch feels a bit less urgent than what precedes it, one appreciates that the filmmakers did not pile on the usual melodramatic gotchas, hewing to a relatively realistic course of events.
  11. Stephen Curry: Underrated
    With enough fresh stories to keep basketball fanatics engaged and a coda that every soccer mom will appreciate, this is a film that’s worthy of its subject.
  12. As Far as I Can Walk
    As Far As I Can Walk is most affecting in its circuitous, open-ended irresolution — all too true to the refugee experience — even as it adopts the closed form of a hero’s journey.
  13. Sound of Freedom
    This is a genre thriller. That said, it’s an urgent and honest one, and Caviezel gives his most committed performance since “The Passion of the Christ.”
  14. The Line
    While The Line doesn’t offer an especially unique take on this milieu, it plays well and acts as a solid showcase for its young cast.
  15. The Boy and the Heron
    Better to think of The Boy and the Heron as the bonus round — a worthy but mid-range addition to a remarkable oeuvre that expands his filmography without necessarily topping it.
  16. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    That current of feeling and conviction is what powers the doc through some uneven construction.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stage Fright
    Alfred Hitchcock doesn't stress melodrama throughout. He plays a surprising number of sequences strictly for lightness. Also, he has a choice cast to put through its paces, and there's not a bad performance anywhere [In this adaption by Alma Reville of a novel by Selwyn Jepson]. The dialog has purpose, either for a chuckle or a thrill, and the pace is good.
  18. Best. Christmas. Ever.
    Lambert and screenwriters Todd Calgi Gallicano and Charles Shyer turn in a multi-faceted tale that blessedly never devolves into a one-dimensional story about two competitive, smart women sniping at each other while their clueless families watch from the sidelines.
  19. Peter Case: A Million Miles Away
    Watching this film satisfying tie up Case’s loose ends, you can still lament the lost promise of the Plimsouls, or wonder what might’ve happened with a more copacetic label/artist relationship.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wings
    When the action [from a story by John Monk Saunders] settles on terra firma there is nothing present that other war supers haven’t had, some to a greater degree. But nothing has possessed the graphic descriptive powers of aerial flying and combat that have been poured into this effort.
  21. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    "The Caine Mutiny,” for all the tinkering, remains a warhorse of a play. And that’s both a good and a limited thing. The way Friedkin has directed it, it certainly plays.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Mirror Crack'd
    Taylor has an uproarious good time as she trades bitchy insults with Kim Novak. Adroit supporting performances are given by Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson as Taylor’s husband and director, and Geraldine Chaplin.
  23. AGGRO DR1FT
    Because Korine’s never been one to subscribe to traditional narrative tropes, there’s an insidious sort of suspense running beneath the otherwise-thin plot, like some kind of high-voltage electric current.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
    The comedy team battles it out with the studio's roster of bogeymen in a rambunctious fracas that is funny and, at the same time, spine-tingling. Stalking through the piece to add menace are such characters as the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man and Dracula.
  25. The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
    The Storms of Jeremy Thomas persuasively makes the case for closer scrutiny of a producer’s career, though it leaves viewers with some homework to do.
  26. The Promised Land
    Notionally rooted in historical fact, but embellished with storybook romance and flouncing cartoon villainy, this roundly enjoyable Venice competition entry finally owes all its residual gravitas (and at least half its considerable handsomeness) to the expressive woodcut visage of one Mads Mikkelsen.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Carve Her Name with Pride
    Part of the pic's attraction is its lack of hysteria. It keeps resolutely to the facts [from a book by R.J. Minney] and refuses to allow the espionage and torture sequences to go past the bounds of credulity.
  28. Hit Man
    Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.
  29. Thanksgiving
    Thanksgiving follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have.
  30. One Life
    Although the film as a whole struggles to match the poignancy of its finale . . . it nevertheless serves as an urgent reminder of the importance of individual action at a time when the world refugee crisis is at a scale not seen since the Second World War.
  31. Lee
    Even at her character’s most vulnerable, the Oscar-winning actor presents Lee with an edge of defensiveness, her guard never fully down, likely tied to a traumatic event in childhood.
  32. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    While not as subversive as its predecessor, it delivers on the promise of a smart and salient sequel with bolder action, bigger stakes, and deeper resonance for all ages.
  33. Hell of a Summer
    The movie’s hella derivative, but still quite entertaining, with an appealing cast and memorable characters.
  34. Widow Clicquot
    Widow Clicquot certainly makes a virtue of its milieu and rolling landscape, richly shot throughout in dusky earth tones, and more substantively, of the rather romantic lore surrounding the widow in question.
  35. The Twits
    There’s humor in every detail, much of it skewing to the sordid, if not downright scatological, end of the spectrum, from exploding buttocks to anthropomorphic hairballs.
  36. The Toxic Avenger
    This is an inside joke of a film, but it’s also one that wants you to be in on it.
  37. Mean Girls
    You can rest assured that Mean Girls, the movie musical, sticks close to the spirit and to the letter of the movie that updated and mythologized the culture of gossip and backstabbing for a new generation. The new movie nudges the material into our own era in a handful of ways.
  38. Mountains
    [Mountains] carries an undeniable veracity and compassion. Its narrative proves less insightful, however: too wary to crack into its protagonist’s troubled psyche, softening the film’s worthwhile political anxieties into sympathetic messaging that seems ho-hum and predetermined.
  39. The Human Surge 3
    The Human Surge 3 doesn’t have defined characters or even very coherent conversations, but its swirling of reality conjures an absorbing dreamscape.
  40. Crumb Catcher
    If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale.
  41. Queen of the Deuce
    Psychotronic cinema fans may wish Queen of the Deuce spent more time on her celluloid stomping ground, and a bit less on family ties. Still, she did have a fascinating backstory, and surviving relatives’ (as well as some colleagues’) reminiscences are colorful.
  42. Anyone But You
    Anyone But You is a rom-com for the age of antipathy. It is, in many ways, as prefab as a lot of the rom-coms of the ’90s and aughts, but there’s something zesty and bracing about how it channels the anti-romanticism of the Tinder-meets-MeToo generation.
  43. The Convert
    There’s just enough of an interesting theme and strong production value (it’s impossible not to succumb to the breathtakingly imposing landscapes) to earn The Convert some grace.
  44. Un Amor
    Making no cozy compromises in its portrayal of a young woman socially and sexually exploited by rural patriarchy — while still foregrounding the consuming strength and autonomy of her desire — it’s a tricky balancing act that mostly works, thanks also to a crackling lead performance by Laia Costa.
  45. Silent Night
    Silly as it might be, Silent Night gives audiences reason to get excited about the Hong Kong innovator once again, ranking as one of the few bloody Christmas counterprogrammers since “Die Hard” that feels worthy of repeat viewing down the road.
  46. Reality Winner
    It’s an involving, empathetic if one-sided portrait.
  47. The Boys in the Boat
    The Boys in the Boat is a gentleman’s sports movie, with Clooney working hard to make one “like they used to.” He brings it off, even if there’s a lingering quaintness to it all.
  48. Elio
    Elio is right at home in the Pixar catalog, but lacks those undeniable signs of intelligent life (wit, surprise and the capacity to expand the medium) that set the studio’s best work apart.
  49. Subject
    It’s easy to form an opinion about the subject of a great many docs, but unsettling to realize how little we know about how they were treated.
  50. Terrifier 3
    Thornton gives a hell of a performance, like Marcel Marceau inhabited by the fiendish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his silent-clown way, he imitates ordinary human emotion — the grins and wide-eyed surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns — with a stylized frivolity.
  51. Showdown at the Grand
    While seldom going for big laughs, the film never takes itself too seriously, allowing its story to occupy the realm of cineaste fantasy.
  52. Leo
    Kanagaraj hails from the Michael Bay school of excess, using dramatic camera moves (like the oft-repeated trick where he pushes in on a character’s back as that person turns to glower toward the audience) and clever cutting to give the entire feature the energy typically reserved for a 2½-minute trailer.
  53. The Three Musketeers - Part 2: Milady
    For readers of Alexandre Dumas’ novel, extravagant French adaptation “The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady” packs its share of surprises: killing off important characters, sparing others and reimagining allegiances that have stood for nearly two centuries.
  54. I Saw the TV Glow
    This character-centered setup is where I Saw the TV Glow is most affecting, grounded by the tense, tacit bond between two highly guarded people — and given an electric jolt by Lundy-Paine’s fragile, volatile performance as someone certain there’s no accepting place for them outside the rectangular confines of the TV set. But
  55. Blitz
    McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex.
  56. MaXXXine
    Ti West is a good filmmaker, but it may be time for him to stop reconfiguring trash. He needs to try embedding A ideas in an A-movie.
  57. Rebel Ridge
    Ultimately muscular and effective if predictable, Saulnier’s latest reaffirms his bona fides as a deliverer of sturdy, tightly-controlled thrills.
  58. Filmlovers!
    Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber form than in his recent narrative features “Deception” and “Brother and Sister,” “Filmlovers!” is formed of two halves, nimbly interleaved by editor Laurence Briaud.
  59. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    The movie is just a lightweight riff on “Beetlejuice” — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
  60. Salaar: Part 1 – Ceasefire
    At 174 minutes long, with nested flashbacks overflowing with exposition, the movie has lengthy stretches that can feel like a chore. However, each extraneous segment eventually converges in some of the most exhilarating and cathartic on-screen violence Indian cinema has to offer.
  61. Fitting In
    While imperfect, Bloody Hell does entertainingly offer food for thought via an important overall point made in non-preachy form: Nature indeed does have room for variation in gender and sexual norms, no matter how loudly political or religious conservatives these days protest otherwise.
  62. Nightbitch
    Sinking her teeth into Mother the way Mother herself might a bloody steak, Adams courageously embodies Mother’s exasperation, finding the comedy in every setback.
  63. Kill
    The movie hardly ever turns its gaze out the windows, but the scenery never gets old, since Bhat has a head for creative close-quarters combat.
  64. Bye Bye Tiberias
    If there is any one takeaway from the film, it’s the importance of family attachments and the succor they provide.
  65. Veni Vidi Vici
    Capitalism, as depicted here, is inherently sociopathic. As the murders continue to claim ordinary middle-class folks, audiences can’t help but find themselves on edge, bracing for the sniper’s next attack.
  66. Gaucho Gaucho
    Some of these vignettes are more arresting than others; all are pleasurable in the patchwork impression they form of a lively and eccentric way of life. Anthropological excavation isn’t the objective here; Dweck and Kershaw are more than happy to buy into the community’s self-mythologizing, to absorb the hand-me-down stories and macho iconography that keep the romance of the gaucho alive.
  67. Ponyboi
    Sparkling like a rhinestone in the rough, Ponyboi stands out amid a lineup of cartoon gangsters, tough-guy dealers and gum-smacking prostitutes — lowlifes recycled from a hundred late-night cable movies with superficially similar plots.
  68. In a Violent Nature
    Its stripped-down approach to a familiar gist has a distinctiveness that is impressive, and is sure to please fans who are always up for a new slasher film — but wish most of them weren’t so interchangeable.
  69. Dìdi
    Wang does a nice job of balancing his naturally comedic sensibility with serious insights into how he triangulated his own identity at Wang-Wang’s age.
  70. Winner
    It’s not a typical whistleblower movie, like “The Insider” or “Official Secrets” (both excellent), but more of a prickly character portrait, imbued with humor and a headstrong sense of defiance (courtesy of co-writer Kerry Howley, channeling Winner’s voice).
  71. Out of My Mind
    Out of My Mind is a worthy and unique coming-of-age tale. Despite the speedbumps encountered, the filmmakers drive home the poignant message that a person’s disability shouldn’t impede their growth and independence.
  72. Eno
    The appeal of “Eno” — like the appeal of Brian Eno himself — is that the film conjures a wholehearted and accessible experience within an experimental veneer.
  73. A New Kind of Wilderness
    A New Kind of Wilderness still honors the ideals of its late subject, particularly in the camera crew’s organic, pine-fresh appreciation of the surrounding environment. But its tender observation of an evolving family shows there’s value in society too, in living across a wider corner of the world.
  74. Rob Peace
    A sense of tangible intellect looms just beneath its surface — not only Rob’s supposed genius, but the movie’s own identity as political cinema. But it never quite unearths this, even though “Rob Peace” establishes Ejiofor as a director with a knack for dramatic storytelling, in a way his previous film could not.
  75. Immaculate
    No small part of the satisfaction of Immaculate comes from witnessing someone find faith in herself.
  76. Ricky Stanicky
    Cena makes it impossible to imagine another person in the part. He’s game to go big, which fits Rod’s frustrated-actor persona, while also having the capacity to play vulnerable and sincere.
  77. Longlegs
    How many horror movies can claim to hijack your subconscious? With Longlegs, writer-director Osgood Perkins (“The Blackcoat’s Daughter”) delivers the kind of payoff we sought out as kids, daring ourselves to watch films about boogeymen that made us want to sleep with the lights on.
  78. Accidental Texan
    Undemandingly entertaining, director Mark Bristol’s well-crafted indie can be savored as a heaping helping of palate-cleansing sherbet, best enjoyed between viewings of bigger and louder but by no means better movies. And yes, that’s meant as a compliment.
  79. Unfrosted
    While broadly based in reality, the entire movie is a put-on, a wackazoid tall tale, a comedy that uses the breakfast wars as the jumping-off point for a high-camp exercise in nostalgic lunacy.
  80. Thelma the Unicorn
    Thelma the Unicorn avoids being rendered completely unoriginal by its overly familiar premise thanks to consistent splashes of acid humor and a plethora of wacky supporting characters.
  81. Cuckoo
    Part of the massive entertainment value of [Singer's] wild and unwieldy second feature is that it is refreshingly free of any kind of manifesto.
  82. Babes
    With Adlon there to spot them, Glazer and Buteau trust-fall into their respective parts, potentially unlikable qualities and all. At times, the pair get so filthy, you may not believe your ears. But strength, as the saying goes, comes from the mouth of babes.
  83. The Last Stop in Yuma County
    It’s a lean, tight, and stylishly clever B-movie about a bank robbery gone wrong.
  84. Carry-On
    Although Collet-Serra brings creative solutions to each of the action sequences, the project is actually most effective when audiences are honed in on the core characters.
  85. The Piano Lesson
    While most of the cast is the same that appeared on Broadway, the movie is undeniably Deadwyler’s show.
  86. Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World
    The film’s attitude seems to be: Come for the pierogis and goulash, stay for the humanitarian valor. Fair enough, but I wish the movie had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Every Time We Say Goodbye
    Culturally rich story is aided throughout by the pic’s all-Israel shoot, nicely highlighting the different worlds these two lovers come from.
  88. Omen
    At a fleet 91 minutes, Omen could stand a little more character-building. But the larger atmospheric payoff lingers; the film first gets under the skin, then sits in the skeleton like a trapped, restive spirit.
  89. Taking Venice
    Taking Venice is a very good documentary, though with a hint of pearl-clutching. There’s a “We were shocked, shocked…” undercurrent to the whole thing.
  90. Red Island
    Its autobiographical elements are keenly felt, as Campillo grapples intelligently not just with the blind spots of his personal past, but those of his national heritage.
  91. Grand Theft Hamlet
    The infrastructure of the game leaves things wide open for human creativity to take it in directions that couldn’t be predicted and people foster connections without any superficial prejudices getting in the way as Crane and Oosterveen assemble a cast.
  92. Magpie
    The first-time director, Sam Yates, working from a utilitarian script by Tom Bateman, slathers on mood, yet there’s a primitive charge to the film’s no-frills staging.
  93. I Don't Understand You
    Things spiral wildly out of control for Dom and Cole, but the foundation feels real.
  94. The Contestant
    Titley consistently anchors her unfolding chronicle to the kind of backstage emotional truths often hidden from the audience, and in the process, she crafts something halfway between sensationalist exposé and intimate confessional — a remedy to reality TV based on its own format — co-authored by her subjects
  95. I Wish You All the Best
    The pleasant, polished drama provides a compassionate take on a high schooler undergoing considerable change, its only debit being the arguably too-neat depiction of that transitional circumstance.
  96. I Love You Forever
    In observing how Mackenzie absorbs feelings of shame for any time she’s disappointed him, they consider all those who hold onto romantic notions too long, finding a fresh take on a toxic relationship.
  97. Oddity
    McCarthy and editor Brian Philip Davis deploy high-voltage moments with expert timing, using the dark to their favor in refreshing fashion.
  98. Transition
    Watching this steadfast person survive in such close quarters with those most unaccepting of his situation offers remarkable insight into issues of gender expression and acceptance, which might well translate to the social strictures back home.
  99. Just the Two of Us
    Even as it dabbles in genre tropes, the film presents an all-too-unremarkable reality for many women.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    After an extremely overdone prolog of violent mass murder on a bus, The Laughing Policeman becomes a handsomely made manhunt actioner, starring Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern in excellent performances as two San Francisco detectives.
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