Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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 2.3 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Hollywoodgate
    The power of documentary filmmaking often lies in discovering seams of humanity running though even the bleakest environments. But the sledgehammer impact of Hollywoodgate comes from director Nash’at peering into the Taliban leadership’s inner circle for a year and finding not even a glimmer of goodness. Finding, in fact, nothing — a terrible emptiness.
  3. Panopticon
    Panopticon may not have quite the all-seeing eye its title implies, but its gaze is piercing and sharp and strange.
  4. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    With “Axel F.,” a parade of watchable clichés (not just retro-cop-thriller clichés but Eddie Murphy clichés) staged by director Mark Molloy in a slovenly utilitarian style, the series comes full circle: the product/schlock of the ’80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix. Welcome to nostalgia minus the soul!
  5. Babysitter
    The film is based on screenwriter Catherine Léger’s play, and perhaps the herky-jerk structure works on stage. On screen, however, it just feels undisciplined, as its Quentin Dupieux-style visual drollery never quite gels with its more obvious, broadly smutty farce.
  6. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    A movingly sincere valentine from a filmmaker now due his own equivalent tributes, shortening the distance between youthful discovery and senior nostalgia.
  7. 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.
  8. Kalki 2898 AD
    The aggressively spectacular (and, again, CGI-intensified) action set-pieces are generously plentiful and undeniably thrilling, and the lead players are charismatic enough, or over-the-top villainous enough, to seize and maintain interest.
  9. Family Portrait
    While free-floating and airy in its construction, the film’s deceiving familiarity slowly erodes, morphing into an unsettling, formally astute brain-tickler observing the placid domesticity of an affluent Texas family in their natural habitat.
  10. Confessions of a Good Samaritan
    Despite being a tad too long and a trifle repetitive, the documentary essay “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” from American helmer Penny Lane is a thought-provoking personal investigation into a subject rarely examined: the nature of altruism.
  11. The Vourdalak
    Everything about the film manages to be forward-thinking and old-school at the same time, giving the genre a bite in the neck it might not have wanted but certainly needed.
  12. A Family Affair
    Sadly, the film plays more like an artless quickie than a fully fleshed-out romance.
  13. A Sacrifice
    The result is a movie that ultimately falls short on both suspense and ideas, though it remains watchable enough.
  14. A Quiet Place: Day One
    “Day One” ought to have been the mind-blowing origin story, and instead it’s a Hallmark movie, where everyone seems to have nine lives — not just that darn cat.
  15. 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.
  16. The Nature of Love
    The Nature of Love refreshingly centers the female adulterer’s experience, in a richly comic mode.
  17. Ama Gloria
    The considerable power of Ama Gloria lies not in its take on colonial conscience, nor even in its insights into the complex economical and emotional dynamics of the child-nanny bond. It is in its unmatched portrait of one brave little heart, bruised but learning to beat on its own.
  18. Trigger Warning
    Indonesian director Mouly Surya’s well-crafted first English-language feature is too formulaically contrived to qualify as “elevated genre” or to boast the personal stamp of her prior work. Still, it’s an entertaining, pacey action melodrama.
  19. The Exorcism
    The darker the movie gets, the less there is at stake, and the more that Crowe seems to be going through the motions of trying to save not his soul but his career.
  20. I Am: Celine Dion
    Like all things Celine Dion, “I Am” feels intensely personal and sincere, but also managed to within an inch of its life.
  21. Despicable Me 4
    At times, it feels less like a feature than a collection of Looney Tunes-y shorts piled one on top of another.
  22. Jazzy
    At first glance, Jazzy might seem more polished and traditionally structured than its predecessor. But the two films share a proudly scrappy and loose-limbed spirit in their soulful, tranquil pace.
  23. Ultraman: Rising
    The movie winds up having it both ways once too often, to the extent that Ultraman’s fate and the movie’s message are ultimately unclear.
  24. Inside Out 2
    Inside Out 2 is a transporting fable about the desire to fit in, to be validated by the Cool Culture that’s, more and more, our collective seal of approval and success. And while the movie is an enchanting animated ride of the spirit (be prepared for it to help save summer at the box office), it may also be the most poignantly perceptive tale of the conundrums of early adolescence since “Eighth Grade.”
  25. The Kingdom
    It’s like “The Sopranos,” as seen through Meadow’s eyes. And though we’re all familiar with the lesson that the cost of vengeance is a never-ending circle of violence, Colonna’s retelling lands like a bullet in the head.
  26. Sweet Dreams
    It takes place on a sugar plantation, but Ena Sendijarević‘s magnificently composed, eerily satirical Sweet Dreams has something more like acid flowing through its veins.
  27. Tuesday
    There’s something undeniably exciting about Pusić’s vision, which confronts serious subjects with disarming irreverence. But her creative choices are peculiar, to say the least.
  28. I Used to Be Funny
    That convoluted storytelling tack at times threatens to muffle “Funny’s” potent narrative agenda. Yet in the end, this ambitious, imperfect drama does pull off a complex thematic mix.
  29. Starve Acre
    Daniel Kokotajlo‘s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement.
  30. The Watchers
    For a while, The Watchers is a reasonably well-made lost-in-the-woods horror movie, one that draws you in like a puzzle whose rules you need to learn (just as the characters do).
  31. Under Paris
    As a sensory experience, Under Paris is never less than seaworthy.
  32. To a Land Unknown
    To a Land Unknown is a film crafted with tremendous empathy.
  33. Look Into My Eyes
    Agnostic but empathetic, Wilson’s film suggests communing with the dead may just be a roundabout way of reaching the living.
  34. Let the Canary Sing
    Let the Canary Sing does an excellent job of tracing how Cyndi Lauper came to be…Cyndi Lauper. Yet it’s sort of an idiosyncratic movie, because that’s all it does.
  35. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    These two actors, with nothing matching but their goatees, have a spiky bromantic chemistry. They don’t just ping off one another’s lines — they lock and load each other.
  36. Invisible Nation
    There are no fancy flourishes in Invisible Nation. This is strong, effective observational documentary filmmaking that does not employ voiceover or text narration, and allows viewers to form their own views.
  37. Backspot
    It is Jacobs’ performance that makes “Backspot” such an exciting watch, even as it hits well-known beats and otherwise expected character arcs.
  38. Big Boys
    With low-budget Big Boys, Sherman crafts a memorable outing on limited means, brought to life by an unusually endearing cast.
  39. June Zero
    Though it occasionally brushes up against intricate ideas about memory and memorialization — who gets to be commemorated, who must not and the genesis of the “never forget” ethos — June Zero itself leaves a quickly fading impression.
  40. The Dead Don't Hurt
    That nonlinear narrative choice in an otherwise understated art-house Western serves to confuse more than it reveals, complicating things for the meat-and-potatoes crowd that regularly turn out for cowboy stories.
  41. 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.
  42. Just the Two of Us
    Even as it dabbles in genre tropes, the film presents an all-too-unremarkable reality for many women.
  43. Summer Camp
    It’s surely a worthy enough premise for a good time, but one “Summer Camp” squanders through dull jokes, an uninspiring story without any real stakes and an overall phony feeling that the film can’t shake.
  44. What You Wish For
    Filmmaker Nicholas Tomnay’s sophomore feature percolates with atmospheric dread and austerity, but only superficially explores the twisted amorality of the 1% and those who service their whims. While not always successful in cooking up tantalizing commentary on human behavior, it offers a decent helping of Hitchcockian intrigue.
  45. Ezra
    The underlying integrity of “Ezra,” what makes it an honest film despite some formula devices, is that its message about how to help children with special needs is that there’s no magic way. Beyond celebrating them for who they are and showing them who you are.
  46. Young Woman and the Sea
    Throughout Rønning’s sophisticated film and alongside Ridley’s stunning performance — a career highlight for her — we all hold our collective breath and swim with Trudy. Talk about the kind of film they hardly ever make anymore.
  47. 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.
  48. Jim Henson Idea Man
    If it’s easy to wish “Idea Man” were as bold as its subject, though, it’s just as easy to be won over by this deservedly heartfelt tribute to him.
  49. Misericordia
    Instead it’s a slippery, changeable parable about a particularly amoral cuckoo looking to feather a new nest.
  50. Souleymane's Story
    If the hero’s dire situation is a ticking clock, Lojkine’s intelligent and empathetic film places us right alongside him, with each cog of circumstance and each gear of good fortune grinding against him at every turn.
  51. Santosh
    While often more intellectually stimulating than emotionally engaging, Santosh lays bare the dark heart of communal divisions in modern India.
  52. Everybody Loves Touda
    The film holds back from showing us Touda’s soul in its chaotic, capricious entirety — her life as a single mother, in particular, is rather sketchily drawn — and remains most fixated on her in performance mode, where’s she’s fully in her power.
  53. Black Dog
    Achieving a delicate balance between drama and deadpan comedy, Guan’s approach gives the scenes of violence or tragedy a certain antic, Buster Keaton quality, which is enhanced by both Peng’s impassive yet physically expressive performance, and that of his wonderful canine co-star.
  54. Universal Language
    Rankin may have conceived Universal Language in the spirit of homage, but there’s something undeniably original about the end result. Don’t be surprised if that translates into a modest cult following and more creative ideas in the future.
  55. The Other Way Around
    Trueba has drawn a funny little valentine, shot through by a bright, sharp arrow of feeling.
  56. The Most Precious of Cargoes
    Director Michel Hazanavicius finds a poignant way to address not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but the kindness that combated it, crafting an indelible parable destined to be watched and shared by generations to come.
  57. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The situation Rasoulof depicts is hardly limited to Iran. There are echoes of Nazi Germany and modern-day China in the way average citizens submit, while the pressures to inform on one’s neighbors recall pre-perestroika Soviet policies. Rasoulof’s genius comes in focusing on how this dynamic plays out within a family, which makes it personal.
  58. Beating Hearts
    Beating Hearts never bores, least of all when François Civil and the ever-electric Adèle Exarchopoulos take over as the young lovers’ adult (but far from grown-up) incarnations, while the consistent, cartwheeling kineticism with which Lellouche and DP Laurent Tangy shoot the whole thing is an ongoing rush.
  59. All We Imagine as Light
    Just two features into her young career, Kapadia has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life.
  60. Marcello Mio
    Marcello Mio winds up saying very little about industry power structures, or even about the barbed nature of celebrity.
  61. Atlas
    Atlas is predictable, overlong and bland, the kind of experience it’s hard to get excited about when the star player seems to be perfunctorily running the bases.
  62. 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.
  63. Motel Destino
    As an erotic thriller, it’s more preoccupied with the first half of that term than the second, and that’s just fine.
  64. Armand
    The movie, while elegantly photographed, is mostly a shambles. It keeps throwing things at you in an oblique and random way, and it’s constructed like a puzzle with no solution.
  65. Grand Tour
    But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust-for-life.
  66. Rumours
    The massed foibles and outright idiocies of the seven principals — all sharp individual comic creations, but collectively a devastating hot-air hydra of enfeebled contemporary democracy — add up to a frustrated protest against our elected elite fiddling while Rome (or the planet, rather) burns, offering mealy-mouthed sentiments that gesture toward coordinated action without ever getting there.
  67. Limonov: The Ballad
    Given all its omissions and elisions, and the sense of coolness-cosplay that permeates this noisy but lifeless film, “Limonov” might not be a total misapprehension of the mercurial, charismatic and infuriating Eduard Limonov, but it is at least a mispronunciation.
  68. Eephus
    Its pearls of practical wisdom and jewels of melancholic wit make Eephus a gem, which is fitting, for a movie about a game played on a diamond.
  69. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    Tyler Taormina‘s delightful stocking-stuffer Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is as alive to the domesticated magic of the season as a classic carol.
  70. The Balconettes
    The directorial energy being channelled here is closer to that of early Pedro Almodóvar, as Merlant piles up saturated, hot-hued melodrama, garrulous female bonding and cheerful lashings of blood and sex.
  71. Parthenope
    Parthenope is a film that rumbles with the hum of nostalgia, recapturing the feeling of youthful, summer freedom while refusing to shy away from the uncertainties of young adulthood. But it’s no mere coming-of-age story; rather, it’s a film about coming-to-oneself.
  72. Anora
    Baker’s subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce makes "Pretty Woman" look like a Disney movie.
  73. The Shrouds
    As The Shrouds goes on, it becomes more earnest and more nutty. I think Cronenberg thinks he’s making movies that audiences will experience as feature-length versions of his own dreams. Here’s the difference: When you’re in a dream, you believe what’s happening.
  74. The Apprentice
    For its first half, “The Apprentice” is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting. Yet I have an issue with the movie, and it all pivots around the mystery of Trump. I don’t think “The Apprentice” ever penetrates it.
    • Variety
      • Posted May 20, 2024
  75. Emilia Pérez
    Audiard wonders how much people really change when they transition. In Emilia’s case, less than she’d like, but enough to inspire positive change in society.
  76. The Substance
    The Substance is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us.
  77. The Garfield Movie
    It’s a Garfield movie for audiences who have never heard of Garfield, which reads as an attempt at erasing history and reintroducing him in this high-octane, overly stimulated form for a generation with reduced attention spans.
  78. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    There’s a hallowed place in cinema for multi-character dramas. But “Horizon,” simply put, doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries. Much of what happens is wispy and not very forceful; the film doesn’t build in impact, and it seldom seems to aim in a clear direction.
  79. Caught by the Tides
    Jia’s risky experiment is so uncannily successful that it is possible to come away from “Tides” with the whimsical impression that this was the film he was building toward all this time, as though all those lauded previous movies were simply him amassing the raw material for this one.
  80. The Surfer
    The film is trying for something, but it’s also sketchy in the extreme.
  81. Oh, Canada
    Oh, Canada presents a dying artist’s final testimony as a multifaceted film-within-a-film, honoring Banks while also revealing so many of Schrader’s own thoughts on mortality.
  82. The Damned
    The Damned has a tendency to meander, but in so doing, it strives toward something authentic.
  83. Three Kilometres to the End of the World
    For all its cool, compelling proficiency, there’s little about the film that feels idiosyncratic, either stylistically or in its surface-level human portraiture.
  84. When the Light Breaks
    Rúnarsson’s film eschews easy melodrama for a more tacit, sensory exploration of the sudden connections that death forges among the living. The future waits in limbo; simply getting through the day is drama enough.
  85. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Blending molasses-dark comedy with searing poetic realism to capture contemporary Zambian society at a generational impasse between staunch tradition and social progress, this is palpably new, future-minded filmmaking, at once intrepidly daring and rigorously poised.
  86. The Girl with the Needle
    The extremity of suffering on display here makes for difficult viewing, scarcely leavened by the expressionistic beauty of its presentation. But von Horn’s film never plays as empty miserablism, in large part thanks to its grave understanding of the moral and spiritual reasoning behind unimaginable acts of violence.
  87. Wild Diamond
    After all the despair, the piling up of glitzy delusion, there’s a feeling of redemption to it connected to what a good movie can do.
  88. Bird
    The film is Arnold trying to have the integrity of her severity and eat it too. Bird is a feel-bad movie that turns into a feel-good movie. What it never feels like is a totally authentic movie.
  89. 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.
  90. The Blue Angels
    Paul Crowder’s Imax documentary feels both more honest than most in its intentions and more effective in highlighting that organization’s excellence.
  91. Kinds of Kindness
    Lanthimos trades in discomfort, trusting his audience enough to take his brand of provocation as they please.
  92. Megalopolis
    To call this garish, idea-bloated monstrosity a mere “fable” is to grossly undersell the project’s expansive insights into art, life and legacy.
  93. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    "Chapter 1” can’t help feeling like an ersatz imitation at times, but it seems the franchise’s well hasn’t run dry just yet.
  94. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    “Furiosa,” like “Beyond Thunderdome,” wants to be something loftier than an action blowout, but the movie is naggingly episodic, and though it’s got two indomitable villains, neither one quite becomes the delirious badass you want.
  95. IF
    Krasinski’s concept borrows generously from Pixar films like “Monsters Inc.,” but is so chaotic and half-considered that you don’t feel as inspired as you should be, making it hard to submit to the film’s alternate reality.
  96. The Second Act
    Dupieux’s strategy seems to be flipping or repeating certain punchlines for fresh effect, which is fine for a while, until you realize that neither The Second Act nor those second-degree readings have much to say.
  97. The Sales Girl
    It takes its time to get there, but in the end, The Sales Girl is about taking charge of one’s own life, where sex is just one dimension of a well-rounded process of self-discovery.
  98. The Last Stop in Yuma County
    It’s a lean, tight, and stylishly clever B-movie about a bank robbery gone wrong.
  99. Aisha
    While passive and/or helpless characters rarely make for the most engaging protagonists, the sensitivity with which this story is told coupled with Wright’s performance makes for an experience that’s never less than engaging.
  100. Treasure
    A film with heart but no real teeth, the commendable sensitivity of which turns too easily toward the sentimental.
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