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. Fuze
    The action is entertaining enough in the moment, but not especially memorable.
  2. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    There’s a purity and natural-born dazzle to EPiC. What you see is what you get: Elvis in the raw, driven by the awareness that it doesn’t get any better than that.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. The Sun Rises on Us All
    With the actors so convincing in their roles and with Xin especially able to command the screen despite the often miserable un-glamor of her surroundings, the film becomes a rich portrait of a connection that was once so tender and now just revolves in a slowly decaying orbit around the broken axis of his resentment and her guilt.
  6. Islands
    A lean but revealing film of unexpected existential heft.
  7. Eternity
    Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has at nearly two hours. It’s a bauble that tries to stretch itself into a boutique dream.
  8. Normal
    Because it’s Wheatley directing, the already funny script gets an extra dose of dark humor from its over-the-top kills.
  9. Nuremberg
    The film presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today. But Nuremberg, competent and watchable as it is, isn’t big on psychological tension or insight.
  10. 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.
  11. The Christophers
    Some things you simply can’t fake. Take talent: There’s no room for anything shy of genius in The Christophers.
  12. At Work
    It bristles with testy economic politics, though they largely itch beneath the surface of an unassuming, intimately observed character portrait.
  13. Pompei: Below the Clouds
    While among his warmest works, rich in pleasures of place and weather and human motion, it’s no empty travelogue, notwithstanding the sometimes glistening beauty of Rosi’s black-and-white cinematography.
  14. Roofman
    In the end, it’s the through-the-roof chemistry between the two leads that makes the film worthy of repeat viewing.
  15. Rental Family
    A movie like Rental Family lives or dies by its tone, and the one Hikari strikes is reflected in the concerned creases of Fraser’s forehead: It’s maudlin and unconvincing, means well but isn’t above manipulating us for the desired emotional outcome.
  16. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is an enticingly clever and droll, nearly pitch-perfect piece of murder-mystery fun — a whodunit that lives up to the expectations set six years ago by “Knives Out,” which offered its own perfect revival of the Agatha Christie spirit, with a tasty frosting of meta cheekiness.
  17. The Man in My Basement
    The result is a tale made up of numerous endpoints and thematic conclusions, whose dots don’t feel meaningfully connected, and whose situational oddities rarely yield excitement or intrigue.
  18. The Lost Bus
    The Lost Bus resembles several other Greengrass films in that it’s also slim on character (only one of the kids has a name and personality), but succeeds in plunging audiences into the action — which, in this case, means trying to steer an unwieldy vehicle through hell itself.
  19. Steve
    A profoundly moving and superbly acted diamond in the rough, Steve is better than anything the streamer has pushed for best picture to date.
  20. Christy
    It’s a wrenching portrait of abuse, enabling, gaslighting, and just how far domestic violence can go. Yet part of the force of it is that Michôd has not contorted Christy Martin’s life into some false arc; what was going on beneath her triumph is portrayed with a desperate and idiosyncratic honesty.
  21. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
    Despite the nostalgic glow that prettily coddles the film, there is a delectably unsubtle passing-the-baton theme that runs through the richly populated affair.
  22. Cover-Up
    As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.
  23. 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.
  24. The Stranger
    Confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling, the experience of watching François Ozon’s The Stranger is not entirely dissimilar to that of reading Albert Camus’ 1942 classic.
  25. 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.
  26. Blue Heron
    Sophy Romvari‘s graceful, singularly heartsore debut feature has a sharp understanding of how memories form and age: Often it’s the incidental, ambient details you recall as vividly as the more significant events at hand.
  27. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    That this highly derivative horror series bottoms out by over-investing in the Warrens — its most reliable creation, the only one that’s undeniably its own — is a sure sign that it is well past its utility.
  28. A House of Dynamite
    It’s easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.
  29. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    Even as The Wizard of the Kremlin flirts with being a movie of ideas, it flits in and out of things. It rarely stays in one place long enough to let us suck in our breath at how Putin’s Russia heralded what may turn out to be the new autocratic world.
  30. The Smashing Machine
    The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavolvian response of triumph out of us. It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way.
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