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. The Last Viking
    A madcap ride that is diverting but never quite enjoyable, the film finds the silliest and grisliest extremes of the Jensen formula this time fighting each other more than they balance each other out.
  2. Colony
    Yeon returns to action-horror with “Colony” an entertaining if empty-headed exercise in familiarity, with a few neat new tricks up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.
  3. Victorian Psycho
    The governess is thoroughly ungoverned in “Victorian Psycho,” a grisly ostensible horror comedy from director Zachary Wigon that’s neither frightening nor funny enough to pass muster — and not quite outrageous enough to garner the kind of notoriety it’s aiming for, either.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Breadwinner
    The comedian’s 'Mr. Mom' update offers a few opportunities to chuckle, but the gags mostly fall flat.
  5. Backrooms
    As an atmospheric freakout, Backrooms is extraordinarily effective.
  6. Pressure
    The film belongs to the ever-reliable Scott, who commendably doesn’t take the easily sympathetic route with the anxious, uptight Stagg, playing him with a suitably dour chill to match his grim forecast — but also a stern, stoic integrity that you’d trust with your life.
  7. Jim Queen
    As satire, it’s more loosely irreverent than devastatingly pointed, but alongside the satisfying potshots at the far right, Nguyen and Athané’s script also takes welcome aim at body fascism and other forms of discrimination within the gay community.
  8. The Birthday Party
    The overlap of the two households, which offers an exciting narrative possibility, peters out with predictable cynicisms, while the climax is borderline comedic in its forced symbolism about family bonds.
  9. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
    In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality.
  10. John Lennon: The Last Interview
    Soderbergh has done an ace job of illustrating “The Last Interview” by turning it into a dreamy archival collage, accompanying John’s words (and Yoko’s too) with hundreds of photographs I had never seen before. (He also uses a handful of fantasy images created by AI; if they’d been devised with older technology, no one would care, and no one should care now.)
  11. The Samurai and the Prisoner
    “Samurai” is classical, if pared-back, in approach — at once a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits, a tricksy game of mental cat-and-mouse and a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership, in all its solitude and sacrifice.
  12. Full Phil
    It’s middle-drawer mishegas — though part of what’s sort of fun about it, and also interesting (even when it gets overdone), is that the director, in this case, is truly coming on like he has something to say.
  13. The Dreamed Adventure
    Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic.
  14. Clarissa
    The Esiris cast a perceptive eye over the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center: loved by some, resented by others, admired by all — and totally alone.
  15. Cantona
    Enjoyable but mostly surface-level as it recounts the highs or lows (it’s sometimes debatable which is which) of his career while maintaining a respectfully awed distance from his inner life, it’s a film for fans that could mint some new ones — given Cantona’s own still-irresistible presence as a talking head and storyteller.
  16. Ashes
    The film plays out like a tale where too much has been relegated to the margins and left between the cuts, where the performances shine but their emotional foundations have been laid in reverse.
  17. Coward
    Dhont has a tactile, compassionate sense of how men — queer men especially, but not exclusively — watch other men, and Coward, by turns breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual, thrives on that understanding, encouraging audiences to share in its pleasure.
  18. Ask E. Jean
    With the sharply structured documentary Ask E. Jean, director Ivy Meeropol accomplishes the near-impossible, telling the story of Carroll in a manner as consistently enthralling and unapologetic as its subject.
  19. Ladies First
    Rather than stirring a debate, or even inspiring deeper cultural introspection, Sharrock and her collaborators deliver a trifle. For a satire about progress, “Ladies First” relies on far too many ideas from the past — cinematic even more than cultural.
  20. The Black Ball
    The Black Ball does not come or go quietly, which is largely its point: If the film wants for subtlety and serenity, there is also something quite poignant about its narrative and stylistic maximalism, honoring any number of queer ancestors who never got to live out loud.
  21. A Man of His Time
    Though it can be genuinely wearying and not a little depressing to spend 148 minutes in the company of a man so deeply wrongheaded and in such maddening self-denial (even Paulette, complicit in her own way in her husband’s ambition will eventually insist that he stops calling her his little lady) it is certainly instructive and horribly relevant.
  22. The Man I Love
    Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love is a stirringly offbeat drama, small and delicate and disarmingly precise, with a performance by Rami Malek that, if there’s any justice, should finally quiet down all the reviewers who’ve always been so snarky about him.
  23. Propeller One-Way Night Coach
    If Propeller One-Way Night Coach lets you know anything genuine, it’s that Travolta, at an early age, looked around at his life and thought it was magical. That, in its way, is a gift, one that in movie after movie he has reflected back to his fans.
  24. Her Private Hell
    Her Private Hell is a disaster, but even that’s part of its hipster factor. The film practically announces that it’s too cool to be coherent.
  25. The Unknown
    With all due apologies to any real-world sufferers of supernatural body-switching, who perhaps regard the film’s high-mindedness as a welcome corrective to the condition’s flippantly comedic treatment in pop culture more generally, the real unknown of The Unknown is the reason behind making a body-swap movie feel so wholly disembodied.
  26. Minotaur
    Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor, Minotaur is very much up to the task.
  27. Orphan
    There’s much horror here, and much beauty, but little meaningful tension between the two.
  28. Bitter Christmas
    An elaborately nested reflection on creative license, story ownership and art imitating life imitating art, Bitter Christmas is so exhaustively Almodóvarian, the viewer occasionally has to fight their way into its circular hall of mirrors. For those who do, there’s much fun to be had here.
  29. Moulin
    It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but one that doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon, given the linearity and literal nature of its approach to human anguish. At over two hours in length, its points are made with clarity before being repeated ad nauseam.
  30. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
    I found “The Mandalorian and Grogu” to be fun in a slightly flat way. But because the movie has so little pretense, it’s basically an invitation to wallow in the lite “Star Wars” nostalgia that’s there in every frame.
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