Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,757 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: 9,120 out of 17757
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17757
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17757
17757 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. Remarkably Bright Creatures
    Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.
  3. Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is a concert film that doesn’t look and feel like other concert films. It’s a true experience, because of a combination of the show itself and the way that Cameron has filmed it.
  4. Mortal Kombat II
    Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot, is still an old-school video-game trash extravaganza: all sound and fury and flying bodies and jargony world-building, propped up by a sludgy excuse for a story.
  5. The Last One for the Road
    You don’t leave The Last One for the Road with the feeling that you have seen something life-affirmingly original. But there is still a sense of disarming comfort in the film’s down-to-earth demeanor, and Giulio’s rewarding if predictable arc.
  6. Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC
    In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.
  7. Swapped
    On the story level, Swapped is simple to a fault, yet there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, but on that score it’s visually ravishing and actually rather touching.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Tears of the Azure Sea
    The series’ fourth season is still being rolled out through the summer, making “Azure Sea” play like a long-weekend getaway as opposed to a true feature-length fable. The fans are sure to clock in for its extra nuggets of lore, but there are few reasons for a non-Slimehead to take the plunge.
  9. Blue Film
    Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.
  10. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    The film's chief pleasures are those of practiced professionals doing their job, and doing it well. None of the stars here is slacking, and their combined, easily resumed chemistry ensures that this sequel, for good long stretches, feels like old times — even if it's hard to imagine fans of its predecessor cherishing repeat viewings to quite the same extent.
  11. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
    A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.
  12. Two Pianos
    The melodrama begins at such a high pitch in Desplechin’s latest, you might think it has nowhere to go but down, yet this earnestly inflamed tale of art, grief, betrayal and all-consuming amour on steroids keeps finding new, hysterical ways to surprise.
  13. The Sheep Detectives
    The filmmakers have lightened and brightened their source material to a kid-friendly degree — even the English countryside, as glisteningly shot by George Steel, has never looked less overcast. Yet there’s wisdom amid the silliness, as the story gently makes a case for the necessity of grief, mindfulness and mortal awareness, even in a life otherwise unburdened by adult human responsibility.
  14. Deep Water
    Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.
  15. Apex
    Kormákur’s film doesn’t trade in surprises, but offers more than enough heart-in-mouth action spectacle to compensate.
  16. Michael
    Simply put, this is not a movie about Michael Jackson’s dark side. Yet the surprise of “Michael” is how well it plays, and what an engrossing middle-of-the-road biopic it is. It’s basically an ’80s-TV-movie version of the Michael Jackson story with sharper acting and snazzier photography. It
  17. Roommates
    By turns tenderly observed, improbably dark and perkily sitcom-esque, it’s certainly erratic, and uncertainly much else.
  18. Couture
    Jolie, drawing on a family history of cancer for which she herself underwent preventative surgeries, gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to. Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together.
  19. 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.
  20. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
    Brashly violent, clattery and pleasingly untied to any direct predecessor, the result is more generic than its braggy auteur claims might promise, but there’s a lot here for gorehounds to feast on.
  21. Balls Up
    A mostly pretty innocuous affair — give or take some par-for-the-course ethnic stereotyping and at least one close-up involving a prosthetic glans — it’s neither good nor bad to any memorable degree, not as riotous as it could have been but not devoid of low-hanging laughs either.
  22. Mother Mary
    “Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.
  23. Outcome
    A generally brittle, distant affair, Outcome largely saps Reeves of his genial, unaffected charisma, leaving him to play the carapace of a man who’s lost any real sense of who he is when not in character.
  24. You, Me & Tuscany
    You, Me & Tuscany passes the time painlessly enough, but it’s never quite the escape it wants to be: It’s packaged so familiarly and so cautiously, we hardly believe its celebration of free, restlessly wandering impulse.
  25. Faces of Death
    Faces of Death is “ambitious” trash, with the courage of its own gaudy thematic grandiloquence.
  26. DJ Ahmet
    The sort of film that urges one to tell everyone about it so that they too can bask in its wondrous pleasures, “DJ Ahmet” is a revelation in that it seamlessly straddles the line between laugh-out-loud crowd-pleaser and art-house gem with affecting gravitas.
  27. Touch Me
    In trying to do too much, the filmmakers end up with much less than they could have.
  28. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
    It’s a mad jumble, an eager product-tie-in mess.
  29. The Drama
    You’ve got to say this much for Kristoffer Borgli: In The Drama he’s an original, like the bastard stepchild of Dogme 95 and “Wedding Crashers.”
  30. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
    The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.
  31. Tow
    Tow is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.
  32. Pretty Lethal
    Pretty Lethal is a wonderfully original idea, but its execution falls flat.
  33. The Fox
    The issue becomes throwing in a little too much, both for the characters and for writer-director Dario Russo, who may have a few too many good story ideas to fully flesh out. Yet, he delivers a promising and imaginative feature debut.
  34. Brian
    That such a hefty topic can be used to create such breathless, eye-watering comedy without tipping into self-indulgence — and without robbing the film of its most meaningful drama — is practically a miracle.
  35. They Will Kill You
    The twists of its premise soon end up souring it conceptually, resulting in rapidly-diminishing returns, with derivative formal flourishes that largely recall other, better films. It is, by the time its credits roll, completely exhausting.
  36. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead.
    Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is an extended pilot, however, it’s a pleasingly cinematic one: unresolved and ragged with small open wounds, but self-contained in its fevered, filling-to-burst energy.
  37. Pizza Movie
    Pizza Movie is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.
  38. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
    With its many references, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice takes a cue from its lead character Nick, who sees the past as something to build on rather than recycle, and ends up delivering quite a good time.
  39. Kill Me
    There are times when the film can feel weighted down by its clever framework. Externalizing the steps of deeply internal emotional progress Jimmy and Margot make with one another’s help can occasionally seem like a separate pursuit from satisfying genre expectations when it really does appear there’s a killer on the loose. However, the approach proves fresh more often than not.
  40. Power Ballad
    What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.
  41. Hokum
    Buoyed by Scott’s level-headed turn — he doesn’t transform into a scream king — Hokum is a proficient horror exploit, which hinges on atmosphere instead of gore, even if its many frightening threads feel disjointed, like rooms in distinctly different hotels.
  42. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
    “Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.
  43. The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel
    "The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is totally worth seeing, but the film feels like an indirect act of contrition, which may be why it turns into an overdone lament.
  44. I Love Boosters
    It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.
  45. Marc by Sofia
    Marc by Sofia isn’t particularly penetrating or eye-opening on Jacobs as an artist, businessman or human being, but it is a pleasant and casually glamorous hang.
  46. Reminders of Him
    Reminders of Him is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.
  47. Closure
    With a standout central protagonist and an urgent quest that is every parent’s nightmare, the film plays like a thriller but manages to deliver honest and piercing emotions at almost every sequence along the way.
  48. Barbara Forever
    Barbara Forever stands as a confident feature documentary for its filmmaker, yet also as a singular artistic statement after Hammer that should add new admirers for her work.
  49. Project Hail Mary
    Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.
  50. Gugu's World
    Gugu’s World is such a crowd pleaser that it deserves to be seen widely by audiences. They’ll be in for a real treat.
  51. Happy Birthday
    Goher, a screenwriter and producer making her feature debut, proves herself to be a director-writer of uncommon sensitivity.
  52. Midwinter Break
    Midwinter Break does nothing earth-shattering (it remains wee), but the movie touchingly colors in how it might be possible for two people to know each other too well and also not well enough.
  53. A Magnificent Life
    Magnificent as Pagnol’s achievements may have been, it’s a pity that the decades-spanning account of one of France’s greatest storytellers didn’t make for a better story unto itself.
  54. Dreams
    At times, the dramatic tension is so strong, “Dreams” could almost be a thriller.
  55. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
    "The Immortal Man” serves as a handsome reminder of what always felt quite cinematic about the series — both in its beefy-but-pulpy storytelling and its robust, well-patinated production values.
  56. The Bride!
    It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.
  57. For Worse
    For Worse might be a tiny step among its kind, but it still feels like a leap for its thoughtful auteur, ultimately celebrating new beginnings as an ageless milestone.
  58. An American Pastoral
    Edler and editor Barbara Bascou maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by foregrounding human convictions and frailties amid a surfeit of increasingly ugly rhetoric.
  59. Our Hero, Balthazar
    It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.
  60. Hoppers
    Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.
  61. Idiotka
    Popov delivers a boisterous tale of a woman coming into her own, told with real humor and heart.
  62. Scream 7
    Simply put, Scream 7 isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).
  63. Late Shift
    In its cool, propulsive procedural tracking of ward activity, Late Shift quite sufficiently makes its point regarding the monumental challenge and value of Floria’s work, and that of thousands like her.
  64. American Doctor
    It is a necessary watch because it dares its audience not to look away, forcing the question not only of whose story is told, but whose deaths matter and make headlines.
  65. Rose
    At once armored, guarded and intensely vulnerable, Hüller’s performance is the human factor here — a volatile, unpredictable element, but one nonetheless attuned to the film’s meticulous shaping and mise-en-scène.
  66. Yellow Letters
    At its core is the kind of cinema that has long sustained the medium at large: the family drama. But it’s presented here with invigorating flourishes that encircle the story within specific moments in time, while also granting it a stirring dramatic transcendence. The scope of its ambition is met, at every turn, by deft control over what is witnessed, and how.
  67. The Ballad of Judas Priest
    If you think The Ballad of Judas Priest, from co-directors and Priest fans Tom Morello and Sam Dunn, is going to be anything other than an ode to everything that’s great about the British headbangers, you’ve got another thing coming.
  68. Joe's College Road Trip
    In Joe’s College Road Trip, Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s wildly, deliriously profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon.
  69. Paul McCartney: Man on the Run
    Neville’s movie serves as a splendid jukebox, offering rapid-fire clips that bowl you over anew with just how rapidly McCartney’s own synapses were firing on ingenious hit after hit.
  70. How to Make a Killing
    It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turning his pin-eyed handsomeness into a mask of yuppie treachery.
  71. Dracula
    It’s not as if we needed to see “Dracula” remade as a blood-soaked Valentine’s Day movie.
  72. Redux Redux
    Boasting a brawny aesthetic and the kind of loopy logic where it’s fun to fill in the gaps, the high-concept thriller gives a different take on the arc of history bending towards justice.
  73. Rosebush Pruning
    Rosebush Pruning makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle. Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty.
  74. Crime 101
    Crime 101 is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways.
  75. Butterfly
    Striking and often unpredictably moving — before an ungainly third act that frays into a profusion of endings — Søimer Guttormsen’s film places a lot of trust in its leads, erstwhile “Worst Person in the World” co-stars Renate Reinsve and Helene Bjørneby, to sell its wild swerves in mood and perspective. Both are up to the task.
  76. Solo Mio
    The directing brothers Charles and Daniel Kinnane have worked with James before (“Home Team”) and know what they have in the ridiculously amiable star. They also know there’s more, if not depth, soulfulness to his talents. In the place of pratfalls, they’ve found a kind of sheepish charm and hurt.
  77. Arco
    Arco looks at once fantastical and recognizable, removed just enough from what we know in our present, but grounded on familiar, childlike amazement.
  78. The Strangers: Chapter 3
    This is an unconscionably lazy piece of work, the kind of movie that makes you marvel how people will put months of work into creating a feature film whose script seems to have been written in a few hours’ uninspired haste.
  79. Wuthering Heights
    For nearly two centuries, Brontë’s book has been a romantic fantasy for readers. Fennell treats it as an erotic one as well, leaning into all that is sensual.
  80. GOAT
    In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.
  81. Exit 8
    Like the game, which is popular as kind of a one-off without much replayability, Exit 8 is designed to divert for a short time and does so enjoyably, with Kawamura proving a most judicious assessor of just how little backstory, plot explanation and character development he can get away with and still keep us engaged.
  82. Take Me Home
    This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.
  83. Frank & Louis
    It’s a script and a production tightly built around its performers, both superb individually, but most importantly, warmly attentive to each other on screen, and capable of sharing a silence.
  84. The Friend's House Is Here
    The Friend’s House Is Here is defined not by the many constraints that it battled during its production, but by the artistic vision of the resulting work.
  85. American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez
    Alvarado’s doc is standard in construction but lively in tone, reflecting his subject’s engagement with the sociopolitical challenges faced by Chicanos in the 20th century.
  86. Lady
    If her filmmaking style is relatively straightforward, it’s a rich, raw sense of place that gives this Sundance entry — premiering in world dramatic competition — vitality and danger.
  87. The Musical
    Like its eminently problematic anti-hero, The Musical says its piece with conviction to spare, and a welcome streak of cat-among-the-pigeons danger rarely found in contemporary American comedy.
  88. Soul Patrol
    [A] haunting, revelatory documentary.
  89. Once Upon a Time in Harlem
    Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”
  90. Melania
    Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show.
  91. Wicker
    The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.
  92. The Weight
    While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, The Weight has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement.
  93. In the Blink of an Eye
    Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.
  94. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
    It’s the kind of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves.
  95. Shelter
    None of these elements feel very fresh, least of all in Ward Parry’s formulaic screenplay. But they’re executed with sufficient slick professionalism to make for a passable if unmemorable diversion.
  96. Leviticus
    This outstanding debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella organically marries blood-curdling fright with incisive social commentary.
  97. Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!
    While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.
  98. Chasing Summer
    There’s real wisdom to Chasing Summer, which Shlesinger and Decker offset with a handful of steamier-than-you’d-expect sex scenes.
  99. The Oldest Person in the World
    Delightfully insightful ... Whatever comes next (and the movie makes a beautiful kind of peace with not knowing), Green has given his subjects an incredible gift: the kind of immortality only cinema can provide.
  100. The Gallerist
    The intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »