Variety's Scores

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For 17,835 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: 9,166 out of 17835
  2. Mixed: 7,032 out of 17835
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17835
17835 movie reviews
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  1. Kirikou and the Wild Beasts
    Animation, like dialogue and narration, is simple and direct. Messages of the value of teamwork, pride in shared labor, self-reliance and resourcefulness are nicely embedded into compact, suspenseful adventures.
  2. Rosaline
    There’s something fresh about the story’s unwillingness to pit a woman’s romantic quests against her career goals.
  3. The Harbinger
    The Harbinger disappoints only in that it’s good enough to make you wish it were better — that it left an indelible impression rather than a slightly vague one.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Witness for the Prosecution
    A courtroom meller played engagingly and building evenly to a surprising and arousing, albeit tricked-up, climax, Witness for the Prosecution has been transferred to the screen (from the Agatha Christie click play) with competence.
  5. The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales
    This engaging economics lesson, bolstered by articulate experts and amusing animated sequences, would be right at home in high school and college classrooms. Heck, it would be a nice addition to Disney Plus, breaking up all the hagiographic puff-pieces on offer there.
  6. A Couple
    The final film is elegant and empathetic, but never quite emotionally involving: For all its rich, heightened articulation of a woman’s distress and unrest, the sense of a life being academically magnified under glass never quite leaves the endeavor.
  7. Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
    Leads Kapoor and Bhatt have an excess of charm and style that leaps off the screen and grabs your heart.
  8. Confess, Fletch
    There’s more than one way to get a job done — whether it’s solving a murder, recovering priceless art or repainting an old van — and Fletch’s strategy is guaranteed to be more original than whatever the next guy would try.
  9. A Jazzman's Blues
    A Jazzman’s Blues overflows with melodrama, yet it isn’t staged broadly. It’s closer to Perry’s version of a Douglas Sirk film, one that takes a romance and heightens it until the complications are growing and twisting around it like vines.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Red Dust
    Familiar plot stuff, but done so expertly it almost overcomes the basic script shortcomings and the familiar hot-love-in-the-isolated-tropics theme [from the play by Wilson Collison].
  11. Monica
    Conceived with uncommon sensitivity toward the interior lives of its characters, as well as to the shifting codes of trans representation, “Monica” is a film about making amends.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waterloo Bridge
    Elaborating on the basic premise of Robert Sherwood's play, and doing a slick job of cleansing to conform to present regulations of the Hays code, this is a persuasive and compelling romantic tragedy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadow of the Thin Man
    Harry Kurnitz has fashioned the story with a good deal of ingenuity, using the characters of the private detective and his wife, as created in the original yarn by Dashiell Hammett.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cat People
    This is a weird drama of thrill-chill caliber, with developments of surprises confined to psychology and mental reactions, rather than transformation to grotesque and marauding characters for visual impact on the audiences. Picture is well-made on moderate budget outlay.
  15. Mufasa: The Lion King
    At nearly every step, Mufasa’s challenges mirror those that Simba must later overcome, but the movie doesn’t celebrate Mufasa’s might so much as his modesty.
  16. Snow White
    As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature.
  17. Sick
    It’s best to let audiences discover the reaper’s motives in context; suffice to say that “Sick” not only factors in our still-evolving COVID-era rules but also serves as an amusing time capsule for the collective fear that has seized us these past three years.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trespass
    Throw together The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Rio Bravo, bring in the Ice crew, inject a noxious dose of racial hatred and stir in some sharp action direction and you've got Trespass.
  19. Spirited
    For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much exactly as they’d expect, but that doesn’t mean Spirited can’t still surprise.
  20. Deadpool & Wolverine
    This singular mutant satire works best as an irreverent homage to what’s come before, as opposed to the prototype for future superhero movies.
  21. The Girl with a Bracelet
    The Girl With a Bracelet comments intelligently on our culture’s propensity to sex-shame and emotionally instruct young women in particular — points which stand regardless of whether shedunnit or not.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miracle in Milan
    Miracle in Milan, an involved and rambling screenplay, originally written by Cesare Zavattini in 1940 and later published as a novel entitled Toto the Good, contrasts sharply with the simplicity and warm humanity of [the same writer-director team's] Bicycle Thief and gives director Vittorio De Sica less opportunities to guide his thespers to those extremely human, heart-warming performances which are his speciality. Whereas Thief was aimed at the audience heart, Miracle is aimed at the brain.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    La Ronde
    Ophuls has used a dearth of closeups, brilliant decor playing a vital part. Film gains an opulence in the expert lensing of Christian Matras. There is much filming through carved glass, linen, silks and mirrors to create the aura of romance.
  24. Falling for Christmas
    Its subversive spirit, female-forward smarts and sweet sentimentality remix the formulaic and festive, making all things merry and bright.
  25. A Haunting in Venice
    Playful turns from a shrewdly selected supporting cast elevate the case from just another murder mystery to suitably arch gothic horror.
  26. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    Though the movie is too long, I was more gratified than not to sink into its relatively old-fashioned dramatic restraint.
  27. The Other Tom
    The film’s intimate scenes of mother-son discord are remarkable, played with raw, nerve-pushing testiness by two first-time actors.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sisters
    Sisters is a good psychological murder melo- drama, starring Margot Kidder as the schizoid half of Siamese twins, and Jennifer Salt as a news hen driven to terror in her investigation of a bloody murder. Brian De Palma's direction emphasizes exploitation values which do not fully mask script weakness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big Country
    Although the story – based on Donald Hamilton’s novel, with Jessamyn West and Robert Wyler credited with the screen adaptation – is dwarfed by the scenic outpourings, The Big Country is nonetheless armed with a serviceable, adult western yarn.
  30. Jesus Revolution
    It’s one of the most appealing faith-based big-screen entertainments in a while, polished and persuasive without getting too preachy.
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