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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Road Games
    Road Games is an above-average suspenser concerning an offbeat truck driver who winds up stalking a murderer. Stacy Keach's characterization of the amusing, poetry-spouting man is particularly endearing but the film builds all too effectively to a rather disappointing climax.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Race
    The Great Race is a big, expensive, whopping, comedy extravaganza [from a screen story by Blake Edwards and Arthur Ross], long on slapstick and near-inspired tomfoolery whose tongue-in-cheek treatment liberally sprinkled with corn frequently garners belly laughs.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Town
    The pep, enthusiasm and apparent fun the makers of On the Town had in putting it together comes through to the audience and gives the picture its best asset.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackbeard's Ghost
    Blackbeard's Ghost, a lively and entertaining Walt Disney production, features Peter Ustinov in a tour de farce title role as the restless spirit of the famed pirate. Dean Jones and Suzanne Pleshette share top billing. Robert Stevenson's direction is highlighted by several very amusing chase and special effects sequences.
  5. Waldo on Weed
    More than the film’s activist message, however, it’s writer-director Tommy Avallone’s portrait of whatever-it-takes parental risk and sacrifice that will help it resonate with audiences no matter their views on marijuana.
  6. Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo
    The documentary tells the fascinating, and moving, tale of how Trejo got off the road to ruin and became the unlikeliest of Hollywood character actors.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Period of Adjustment
    Period of Adjustment is lower case Tennessee Williams, but it also illustrates that lower case Williams is superior to the upper case of most modern playwrights.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
    Night Warning is a fine psychological horror film. As the maniacally possessive aunt and guardian of a 17-year-old boy, Susan Tyrrell gives a tour-de-force performance.
  9. 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.
  10. A Quiet Place Part II
    It can be hard to believe that both the sequel and the instant-classic 2018 original were produced by Michael Bay, a filmmaker who has pushed the moviegoing experience to ear-splitting extremes, since Krasinski so effectively embraces the opposite strategy: Less is more, suggestion can be scarier than showing everything, and few things are more unnerving than silence.
  11. River of Grass
    River of Grass works much better as a jokey , theoretical piece of genre revisionism than as a real movie.
  12. Mad Hot Ballroom
    Perky and effortlessly smooth.
  13. Mr. Gaga
    The result here may not be fully revealing of his process, but it’s as close as we’re going to get.
  14. Bronson
    Too smart/arty for the slasher set, and too violent for high-brows, Bronson may have a tough time finding its niche, although it has "cult hit" written all over it.
  15. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    As classy a film as could be made from Stieg Larsson's sordid page-turner, David Fincher's much-anticipated return to serial-killer territory is a fastidiously grim pulp entertainment that plays like a first-class train ride through progressively bleaker circles of hell.
  16. The Cage Fighter
    An engaging and sympathetic documentary.
  17. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    It’s an investigation in the form of a highly personalized meditation.
  18. The Outpost
    Such a film may suffer from home viewing, and yet, The Outpost represents the most exhilarating new movie audiences have been offered since the shutdown began.
  19. The Spanish Prisoner
    The picture is a devilishly clever series of reversals that keeps you guessing to the very end.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Desperately Seeking Susan
    Rosanna Arquette does more than her share in the pivotal part of a bored Yuppie housewife who follows the personal ads, wondering about the identities behind a desperately seeking Susan item that runs from time to time.
  21. Predator: Badlands
    In the end, “Badlands” is about the value of teamwork and learning that “alpha” and “apex” don’t mean the same thing where Predators are concerned.
  22. The Booksellers
    The Booksellers is a documentary for anyone who can still look at a book and see a dream, a magic teleportation device, an object that contains the world.
  23. The Last Laugh
    Pearlstein’s very deft assembly manages to raise all these ideas and others for viewer consideration while underlining that there are few, if any, definitive responses to them.
  24. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    Here, the visuals outdo anything we’ve seen before, to such a degree that we might almost overlook the subtler innovations in the character animation: the nuances of expression on both the human and reptilian faces, and the wonderful nonverbal tactics these artists use to convey emotional intricacies neither Hiccup nor Toothless have had to communicate before, all of which pays off in an unforgettable final scene.
  25. Swingers
    Engaging, refreshingly human in its humor and becomingly modest in its aspirations, this hip look at being out of it announces some promising new talent and will play well with young audiences looking for comfortable entertainment that doesn't feel manufactured.
  26. Shadow Dancer
    Shadow Dancer is admittedly slow to gather force and momentum over its 101-minute running time, though by the third act, the deliberately paced drama has exerted a hypnotic grip.
  27. Syndromes and a Century
    By the end, nothing much has happened, but all the same, picture casts a witchy kind of spell with its deep-breath pacing and undertow of unspecified malaise.
  28. 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.
  29. Horton Hears a Who!
    The real stars of the movie are the animators, who imbue even the overgrowth in Horton's jungle with a certain floppy Seuss-ishness.
  30. The Wonder
    An evenhanded but ultimately preposterous adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, co-written by the author herself (with an assist from Alice Birch).
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