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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  1. The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside gives us that catharsis; it’s a real rouser. Yet the film is rooted in a sobering grasp of the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph. The arc of the drama is built around an enormous curveball it throws at the audience. And that’s when the movie really gets good.
  2. 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.
  3. Queer
    The last third of “Queer” may prove to be a challenge for audiences — much more so than the film’s explicit eroticism. Yet Luca Guadagino is telling a version of the same compelling story that he told in “Call Me by Your Name”: that of a queer love that, instead of delivering the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world.
  4. The Substance
    The Substance is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us.
  5. Sasquatch Sunset
    Sasquatches may not exist, but miraculously enough, this movie does, and like the creatures it depicts, it must be seen to be believed.
  6. In the Shadow of Beirut
    Despite so much cause for grief, what’s striking about the protagonists is their cordiality and resilient hopefulness.
  7. Upgraded
    Director Carlson Young and screenwriters Christine Lenig, Justin Matthews and Luke Spencer Roberts ground sharp, soaring sentiments in a reachable reality, innovatively remixing the genre’s familiar formulas to create their own meaningful and rather endearing movie.
  8. Frida
    Even those already familiar with the trajectory of Kahlo’s existence may find the delivery here raw, vulnerable, and refreshing.
  9. Girls State
    The film’s seven protagonists are the result of McBaine and Moss’s broad and deep interview process. Demographically diverse, the women are immensely watchable and touchingly articulate.
  10. Luther: Never Too Much
    "Never Too Much” shows just how hard Luther Vandross worked to make his natural and irresistible talent seem effortless. That it took longer than he’d wanted to achieve certain results, not because of his shortcomings but the prevailing cultural forces of the time, is just one of many takeaways.
  11. Stress Positions
    In real life, anyone would hate to spend even a few minutes in their company. Yet in Hammel’s hands, they become easy to enjoy and laugh at while completely understanding their full awful personalities.
  12. Good One
    Collias impresses in a role that doesn’t grant her any great extremes of expression. Sam’s temperate demeanor may simply be her nature, but Collias’s tautly wired performance shows how it’s also a defense.
  13. Brief History of a Family
    No doubt comparisons to “Saltburn,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley” will abound, but what Lin conceived is far more subcutaneous, with a sobering tone and disinterested in building up to a grand plot twist — though the resolution is unexpected.
  14. Devo
    "Devo,” in its way, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too serious about any of this. Instead, the film traces the rocky road on which this unlikeliest of hit bands became a success.
  15. Will & Harper
    It can sound like a cliché to say that any given movie is what the world needs now, but “Will & Harper” earns that distinction.
  16. Never Look Away
    Never Look Away gives us as complete a portrait as seems humanly possible, for which Lawless merits abundant credit.
  17. Road House
    The action in Road House is beyond brutal; at moments, it’s vicious. Yet if the movie is far more violent than your average action film, in its slightly crackpot bare-knuckle way it’s also more humane.
  18. 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.
  19. Shirley
    In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.
  20. The Room Next Door
    The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.
  21. Hundreds of Beavers
    On paper, it would hardly be expected to remain funny for eight minutes, let alone 108. But this ingeniously home-made lark never runs out of steam.
  22. Rez Ball
    An almost comically brisk but genuinely rousing underdog story.
  23. Scoop
    The frustration of Scoop is also its point: It vividly conjures the adrenaline and awe of one hour of dynamite television, but can bring us no closer to complete truth, or complete justice.
  24. The Six Triple Eight
    Impressive in both its subject and suggested scope, Perry’s sweeping film reflects how the achievement of these women directly impacted the troops’ morale, despite the adversity they faced from skeptical superior officers.
  25. That Christmas
    Every season brings dozens of new Christmas offerings, most of which prove instantly forgettable. This one’s a keeper.
  26. The Space Race
    In telling the specific moving stories of a few men, The Space Race manages to provide such a rich perspective into their experience that it transcends its goals of shining a light on worthy lives and untold history, to entertain and educate.
  27. Small Things Like These
    It’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives Small Things Like These its eventual, fist-in-the-gut power, even as the film evades melodramatic confrontation to the last, ending elegantly at a point where many other stories might choose to begin.
  28. La Cocina
    A chaotic symphony of nearly two dozen characters, this black-and-white indie confection (garnished with sparing touches of color) mixes biting social critique with stylistic bravura.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Finian's Rainbow
    Overall, the $4 million film has an ethereal quality: it’s a blend of real elements, such as love, greed, compassion, prejudice, and other aspects of human nature both noble and otherwise; yet it’s also infused with mystical elements of magic, leprechauns, pixies and wishes that come true.
  30. Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin
    Using archival material and fresh interviews — including testimonials from at least two of his former lovers — Kates and Singer underscore Rustin’s matter-of-fact courage and self-effacing pragmatism.
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