Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
    [Siodmak] delivers a good job of fantastic writing to weave the necessary thriller ingredients into the piece, and finally brings the two legendary characters together for a battle climax.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Key Largo
    A tense film thriller has been developed from Maxwell Anderson's play, Key Largo. Emphasis is on tension in the telling, and effective use of melodramatic mood has been used to point up the suspense.
  3. Riefenstahl
    It’s a portrait that’s really a meditation on Riefenstahl — her life, her art, the question of her guilt. And one of the things it does is to remind you of what a singularly provocative and insidious and mysterious figure she was.
  4. Brave the Dark
    Brave the Dark is a low-key inspirational indie that sensitively elicits empathy and sympathy without ever pushing too hard or simplifying complexities.
  5. Millers in Marriage
    The film dips into the melodramatic as it inches closer to the end and choices have to be made, but if its players are revealed to be starring in a movie, they are also shown to be movie stars, making relatively mundane miseries well worth watching.
  6. Valiant One
    An unpretentious B-movie made with A-grade effort, “Valiant One” packs decent action and mostly sturdy drama into the tale of U.S. soldiers whose mission near the DMZ goes haywire and leaves them stranded in North Korea.
  7. Else
    A tad too heady but quite visually arresting, Emin’s dream-turn-nightmare body horror film is as much a lockdown pandemic fable as it is a philosophical treatise on individuality.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Invisible Man Returns
    Story and script are workmanlike efforts, with Joe May’s direction holding a steady and suspenseful pace with few dull moments.
  9. The Accountant 2
    The Accountant 2 is an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time.
  10. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    The musical finds rare shards of light — and an unlikely connection — in the most despairing of places.
  11. Plainclothes
    Plainclothes builds to an intense and ultimately cathartic climax, but there’s something retrograde about the shame Lucas feels. Emmi wants us to experience his protagonist’s sense of suffocation, when looking back from the present, we just want to shout: “It gets better!”
  12. The Wedding Banquet
    The Wedding Banquet slides down easily even if it doesn't leave much aftertaste.
  13. Jimpa
    The acting feels genuine across the board, with Lithgow (who wrestles an impossible-to-geolocate accent) emerging as the most fearless in an all-around daring ensemble.
  14. Brides
    Clearly inspired by cases like that of Shamima Begum, the London teen who traveled in secret to Syria to become an ISIS bride, Nadia Fall‘s debut feature seems on the surface like a hot-button provocation, but it’s surprisingly humane and good-humored in its attempt to understand the individual lives behind a sensational headline issue.
  15. Prime Minister
    As a portrait of struggles in the seat of power, the film presses all the right emotional buttons.
  16. Cutting Through Rocks
    The film’s irascible but deeply principled subject — thirty-something divorcee Sara Shahverdi — gives the film its energy, though its lulls aren’t quite as purposeful. However, despite feeling drawn-out, the doc features occasional bursts of visual panache that help emphasize its underlying story.
  17. Move Ya Body: The Birth of House
    While there’s more people talking than dancing and we never hear a full song, the editing adds a lively pulse to the storytelling that keeps it all moving forward entertainingly. That’s because the story itself is so amusing.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
    A Woman of Paris is a serious, sincere effort, with a bang story subtlety of idea-expression.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jezebel
    William Wyler’s direction draws an engrossing cross-section of old southern manners and hospitality. It’s undoubtedly faithful to a degree, and not without its charm. At times it’s even completely captivating.
  20. Mercy
    The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    King Solomon's Mines
    King Solomon's Mines has been filmed against an authentic African background, lending an extremely realistic air to the H. Rider Haggard classic novel of a dangerous safari and discovery of a legendary mine full of King Solomon's treasure.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
    More or less relegated but capital as the bulwark of the entire mission is Spencer Tracy's conception of Doolittle. Van Johnson is Ted Lawson and Phyllis Thaxter his wife. It's an inspired casting.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Time I Saw Paris
    The Last Time I Saw Paris is an engrossing romantic drama that tells a good story with fine performances and an overall honesty of dramatic purpose.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Neptune's Daughter
    Neptune's Daughter is a neat concoction of breezy, light entertainment. It combines comedy, songs and dances into an amusing froth.
  25. You, Me & Her
    It’s a small, slyly humorous movie that nonetheless ends on a note of more dramatic substance than you’d expect.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lili
    Aumont is delightful as the magician and his act with Gabor, staged almost as a production piece, is a high-light.
  27. The Ice Tower
    It can start to feel quite tedious, unless you allow your brain to engage with the movie on an almost subconscious level. That’s where the incredible attention paid to crafts — the cinematography, sets, costumes and sound design — kick in at last, and “The Ice Tower” becomes a sort of reverie in which we just might see ourselves reflected.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Search
    This simple film was made in the American zone of Germany, principally in and around the rubbled remains of Nuremberg. Only four of its actors are professionals, the others having been recruited on the spot.
  29. Being Maria
    Being Maria is a flawed but fascinating look at the turbulent life of actor Maria Schneider.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    El
    Luis Bunuel has fashioned an absorbing melodramatic psycho pic out of El. Although the story [from the novel Pensiamentos by Mercedes Pinto] borders on the banal, fine direction and acting keep this within bounds, and give a dimension to the harrowing tale of a madman's attempt to love.
  31. The Senior
    It’s basically a soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie, stocked with homilies about the game of football vs. the game of life. Yet it’s an effective soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie.
  32. Bullet Train Explosion
    Bullet Train Explosion feels like a blockbuster made for adults — or let’s say, not for a lowest-common-denominator audience — where the priority is throwing challenges and complications at smart characters instead of sparking conflict with cheap narrative shortcuts and bad, even dumb choices.
  33. Going All the Way
    Given that the story’s trajectory isn’t very surprising, it’s up to the character details and local color to imbue it with life, and in this the film largely succeeds.
  34. Nobody 2
    For a while, the movie is like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” if Clark Griswold had secretly been Steven Seagal. Is it remotely “believable”? No. But “Nobody 2,” like “Nobody” before it, unfolds in its own weirdly grounded action-fantasy universe. Odenkirk has the ability to make behaving glumly fretful seem like a form of slyness; he’s really creating a conspiracy with the audience.
  35. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    The affectionate reunion of alter-kocker rockers plays like a greatest hits of past laughs, building to a thrilling live performance of songs fans know by heart, featuring guest appearances from several bona fide music gods.
  36. The Rivals of Amziah King
    The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.
  37. The Threesome
    The results are mixed in ways the filmmakers probably didn’t intend, but they’re at once genuinely intriguing and enormously charming given the talent involved.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    Montgomery’s portrayal is a highlight in a group of excellent performances. Keyes displays plenty of charm. James Gleason scores as the fast-gabbing fight manager, who is bewildered by the proceedings. Direction by Alexander Hall sustains a fast pace throughout.
  39. Summer of 69
    It’s a big step backward from the likes of “Anora” in terms of respecting sex workers, but at least it scores as many laughs.
  40. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    Excerpted interviews with WWII and Vietnam veterans suggest that every war is hell, yet it is the specificity of the Iraq War combatants' reminiscences that makes their writing resonate so profoundly.
  41. The Naked Gun
    The Naked Gun has enough honest laughs to get by.
  42. Dangerous Animals
    The efficient and highly effective thriller scarcely allows a calm moment in which to question how deranged its premise truly is.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Angel on My Shoulder
    Rains shines as the Devil, shading the character with a likeable puckishness good for both sympathy and chuckles. Anne Baxter is excellent as the troubled fiancee.
  44. Queens of Drama
    The only way to enjoy Queens of Drama is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers.
  45. Neighborhood Watch
    There’s no great effort at building tension, or orchestrating major setpieces. But the narrative moves along at an engaging clip, and there’s a pleasing emotional payoff to the way things ultimately come together in Farley’s screenplay.
  46. Heads of State
    “Nobody” director Ilya Naishuller takes gags that have no business working . . . and milks them for laughs, adding original solutions to otherwise familiar action scenes.
  47. Him
    Tipping embraces the self-indulgent label of “elevated horror,” crafting a tense, trippy, ultra-stylized movie that’s so surreal at times, it might feel like you’re watching an extension of Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle.”
  48. Bono: Stories of Surrender
    While the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.
  49. Mountainhead
    The ambition of Mountainhead is much lower than diagnosing the underlying dysfunction of the privileged few who run the world, settling for putting their dysfunction on caustically hilarious display.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It Came from Outer Space
    Direction by Jack Arnold whips up an air of suspense and there is considerable atmosphere of reality created, which stands up well enough if the logic of it all is not examined too closely.
  51. Drop Dead City
    Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.
  52. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.
  53. Colours of Time
    Colours of Time doesn’t want to surprise so much as to please, and the multiple, largely antagonist-free storylines are just charming enough to keep the absence of real conflict from becoming a problem.
  54. A Private Life
    While the ultimate destination somewhat underwhelms, it’s a thrill to see Foster navigating a fully bilingual role, while tossing off the kind of personal insights only an expat could feel toward the French — a tiny glimpse into Foster’s private life, perhaps.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ring
    Hitchcock gets more out of Lilian Hall-Davis than any Continental director and at times makes her reminiscent of Lya de Putti.
  56. The Unholy Trinity
    It’s not just a wallow in nostalgia: It also stands on its own merits as a satisfying entertainment that could easily find a receptive audience among folks who’ve never seen, or even heard of, such golden oldies as “Seven Ways from Sundown” or “Gunfight at Comanche Creek.”
  57. Bone Lake
    While not perfect, the psychological thriller is cleverly conceived and confidently executed enough to make for a fun ride, one that eventually takes the full plunge into bloody black comedy terrain.
  58. Honey Don't!
    Honey Don’t! is a deliberate throwaway — a knowingly light and funny mock escapist thriller, one that’s just trying to show you a flaky good time.
  59. Marcella
    "Marcella” is most interesting, however, when it peels away the layers of achievement and adulation to show us the brisk, unpretentious woman who surprised nobody more than herself by becoming a culinary icon, and articulates something of the oddly intimate but entirely parasocial relationships we form with our most trusted cookery writers.
  60. Echo Valley
    When you’re simply looking for something semi-interesting to stream, stories like these don’t necessarily require great actors, but great actors are the reason some of them still reverberate in our memory decades later.
  61. Megadoc
    In the end, it’s inspiring to see a director of Coppola’s stature back at work, and better this than some impersonal job for hire.
  62. Desert of Namibia
    Like Kana, it’s gloomy, purposeless and hard to love — but that only makes the film, and its lead, feel more pulsating alive.
  63. To Live and Die and Live
    For all its tastefully exasperating gaps in character and storytelling specifics, “To Live & Die and Live” still has a persuasive overall vision, one that holds out the possibility of salvation for its hero — and its city — albeit only if history and the toll it still exacts are faced head-on.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Murder!
    Well photographed and mounted, it contains all the gadgets of the pet Alfred Hitchcock technique, from quick cutting to skillful dialog blending. The dialog is very well written. Long episodes have clever satirical values as attacks on the conventional and lower-class English.
  65. The Little Sister
    Sensitive and empathetic but a little timid in storytelling and style, The Little Sister rests considerably on its lead performance by first-time actor Nadia Melliti.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breathless
    There are too many epigrams and a bit too much palaver in all this. However, it is picaresque and has enough insight to keep it from being an out-and-out melodramatic quickie.
  67. Good Fortune
    Even though it’s fairly obvious where “Good Fortune” is headed, Ansari manages to surprise in how he gets there. Like his character, the writer-director-producer-star seems to be juggling one too many jobs here, and yet, it’s that very connection to overworked, undercompensated Americans that makes his movie so right for this moment.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Secret Agent
    Secret Agent dallies much on the way but rates as good spy entertainment, suave story telling, and, in one particular case, brilliant characterization.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Topaz
    Topaz tends to move more solidly and less infectiously than many of Alfred Hitchcock's best remembered pix. Yet Hitchcock brings in a full quota of twists and tingling moments.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jamaica Inn
    Superb direction, excellent casting, expressive playing and fine production offset an uneven screenplay to make Jamaica Inn a gripping version of the Daphne du Maurier novel.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Pacing his assignment at a steady gait, Hitchcock catches all of the laugh values from the above par script of Norman Krasna.
  72. Inside
    Inside has a suspense hook to drive it forward and a climactic violent set piece, if not quite the one we were expecting. But the question of who’s going to kill or get killed ultimately proves less important than how their pasts have shaped these men — or rather trapped them, like quicksand.
  73. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
    It is engrossing stuff, as a cautionary tale as well as a taste of the spirit that leads people into explorations more bold than wise. The lure of the ocean’s mysteries (and the Titanic’s enduring romance) are vividly conveyed.
  74. Queens of the Dead
    Its aesthetic approach seldom lives up to its gestures toward camp as a guiding principle or its weighty themes (except, perhaps, in its surprisingly raucous final act). However, its flimsy aesthetic foundations are supported by remarkably well-formed characters.
  75. The Travel Companion
    Even as it dabbles in toe-curling cringe comedy, The Travel Companion is ultimately too genial a work for such tonal extremes.
  76. Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything
    Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything is a documentary a lot like its subject. It’s sharp and inquiring in a playful way. It asks friendly questions but knows just when to toss in a tough one. It sizes up important people with clear-eyed worldly perception, but it’s also enthralled by the seductions of fame and money and power.
  77. Enigma
    Enigma, an HBO production that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, derives its strength mostly from Lear’s resolve to always be herself. And with that, the film can inspire courage in its audience, whatever their identity.
  78. La Grazia
    The movie will not exactly set your pulse racing. It’s staid. But there’s a hum of inspiration to its meditation.
  79. Prelude to a Kiss
    Thanks to a magnetic cast and intelligent adaptation, "Prelude to a Kiss" has made a solid transfer from stage to screen. Back in the 1930s or '40s, this sort of sophisticated, literary-oriented treatment of a simple romantic idea would have been the norm.
  80. Köln 75
    You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy Köln 75, but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.
  81. The Forbidden City
    The action sequences are well choreographed and intuitive enough to follow, but romance doesn’t work quite the way we might expect, which proves to be yet another of the film’s distinguishing features.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shoeshine
    With the shoeshine boys of Rome’s streets as background, this film is a preachment on Italian juvenile delinquency. Producers used real shoeshine boys and the absence of experienced actors works out okay. Scenes in Rome’s jail emphasize the need for drastic reforms there.
  83. Is This Thing On?
    It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s an inner softness to it, a slightly pandering quality.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Favorite Wife
    Irene Dunne and Cary Grant pick up the thread of marital comedy at about the point where they left off in The Awful Truth. With these two stars working again with Leo McCarey, a surefire laughing film is guaranteed.
  85. The Girls Are Alright
    The duly playful, freeform result occasionally skirts preciousness but is mostly rather affecting, bound by a palpable sense of female friendship and a perceptive interest in the dynamics thereof.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mrs. Parkington
    Mrs Parkington is a successful picture from any angle. Film version of Louis Bromfield's novel is an absorbing and warmful presentation of the history of an American empire builder. With Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon topping a strong cast of competent performers, there's a smooth-flowing script despite the extended running time.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's Always Fair Weather
    As well as spoofing television, It's Always Fair Weather also takes on advertising agencies and TV commercials, and what emerges is a delightful musical satire.
  88. Sarah's Oil
    The period detail is impressive, the storytelling is engrossing, and the overall impact is pleasantly enjoyable.
  89. Bulk
    Bulk is a stunt that makes even earlier oddball Wheatley works like “A Field in England” look quite conventional by comparison — but there’s more energy and wit in this hybrid of conspiracy thriller, time-bending sci-fi and goofy genre parody than we’ve seen from the director in a while.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hell's Angels
    It’s no sappy, imbecilic tale.
  91. Dead Man's Wire
    There’s no doubt that Dead Man’s Wire holds you. It’s Van Sant’s most vital piece of work for the big screen in some time. The movie plays, and part of it is that it triggers our anti-institutional anger.
  92. John Candy: I Like Me
    Hanks’ doc mostly shows how great it must have been to know John Candy when he was alive, although Conan O’Brien does a nice job of contextualizing how he inspired others. Amid all that adulation, Hanks might have scrapped the title “I Like Me” and called the movie “Everybody Likes Candy” instead.
  93. The Voice of Hind Rajab
    If The Voice of Hind Rajab opens one hitherto blinkered eye, or ear, to the atrocities in Gaza, it will have done its job. But it’s a blunt and discomfiting instrument.
  94. Dust Bunny
    The strength of the performances and the filmmaker’s smart handling of ambiguity (is there or is there not an actual monster at play here?) do enough to keep one engaged.
  95. My Sunshine
    Some films prioritize a strident political cause, others set out to terrify or thrill. This touching and simple story from Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Okuyama, premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, is a gentler affair, with modest ambitions that it realizes effectively.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kid Glove Killer
    Kid Glove Killer is one of those moderately-budgeted programmers that appear at long intervals to rise far above the level intended. Spotlight shines brightly on Van Heflin in the lead. His skillful timing and delivery of lines holds interest in many sequences that might easily have crumbled in less capable hands.
  97. Maddie's Secret
    As wild as things can get (tamer than you might expect), Early keeps the film emotionally grounded. Can Maddie be cured? Maybe not, but her secret’s safe with him.
  98. Calle Málaga
    It’s the most prominent and devoted leading showcase Maura has had in years, and one she carries with her invaluable brand of internally illuminated, can’t-be-taught charisma.
  99. Primate
    The movie is funny as only a bloody disgusting formulaic-but-halfway-clever slasher film can be.
  100. Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story
    Beyond just providing a welcome dip into nostalgia, maybe “Building a Mystery” could go some way toward building interest in a reboot.
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