Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,758 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: 9,121 out of 17758
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17758
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17758
17758 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. No Other Land
    Given the conditions of its production, No Other Land would be vital even in a more ragged form. But the filmmaking here is tight and considered, with nimble editing (by the directors themselves) that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself.
  2. Crossing
    With Crossing, writer-director Levan Akin wants to open our eyes to the easily overlooked.
  3. Black Tea
    The film aims for woozy sensualism but falls way short on the ambient richness and X-factor chemistry required to sell such an essentially confected exercise.
  4. Dahomey
    Dahomey is a striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living.
  5. Mea Culpa
    Perry knows what he’s doing. He can’t possibly think any of this is believable for one second. But it could be fun to discuss its outlandishness over a few glasses of wine.
  6. Lubo
    The story of the stolen children was a secret way too long buried to be thus buried once more within a movie that is, simply, way too long.
  7. Another End
    Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.
  8. Stopmotion
    Masterful as he is at creating the stuff of nightmares, Morgan (as well as co-writer Robin King) is much less assured handling the character actions, psychology and dialogue outside his heroine’s fevered psyche.
  9. Spaceman
    Spaceman, it’s my duty to report, is a glum and meandering science-fiction fairy tale of a movie.
  10. Drive-Away Dolls
    Drive-Away Dolls is 84 minutes long, and it’s styled to be an easy-to-watch caper, but it’s most definitely a trifle.
  11. Dune: Part Two
    Villeneuve treats each shot as if it could be a painting. Every design choice seems handed down through millennia of alternative human history, from arcane hieroglyphics to a slew of creative masks and veils meant to conceal the faces of those manipulating the levers of power, nearly all of them women.
  12. Ordinary Angels
    Gunn adeptly exercises a necessary modicum of visual dexterity to emphasize character drive.
  13. Lousy Carter
    We’ve all seen movies like “Lousy Carter” before, and this one’s adequate, without being particularly insightful or memorable.
  14. 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.
  15. Suspended Time
    Alternating a thinly fictionalised portrait of the artist isolating at his family’s country home with fully autobiographical narration by the director himself, this mildly amusing but vastly indulgent bagatelle feels a tardy entry in the first wave of lockdown cinema — too late to feel fresh, but still too soon to have accumulated much meaningful perspective on an experience we all remember too well.
  16. Monolith
    The film, a debut feature from director Matt Vesely and screenwriter Lucy Campbell, falls sway to the clickbait tropes it intends to send up: red herrings, a tone of suffocating gloom and a desperation to keep the audience on the hook.
  17. 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.
  18. This Is Me…Now: A Love Story
    To be fair, it feels like a person who’s generated her level of fame and success and attention will never truly be “knowable” to an ordinary person. But This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is the closest that they’ll likely come, and it’s a testament to Lopez’s talent that she’s able to take pop-star wisdom and make it seem like a window into her soul.
  19. Cuckoo
    Part of the massive entertainment value of [Singer's] wild and unwieldy second feature is that it is refreshingly free of any kind of manifesto.
  20. 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.
  21. Players
    Trish Sie’s middling and at times mawkish film not only makes us hate the game, but also its players.
  22. Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive
    Examining the looming shadow of the singer’s 1970s heyday as she embarks upon a new career as a gospel artist, Schechter chronicles the adversity — professional, romantic, even physical — that transformed Gaynor’s chart-topping dance tune into an anthem for female empowerment, the gay community and most of all Gaynor herself.
  23. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    That current of feeling and conviction is what powers the doc through some uneven construction.
  24. 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.
  25. Madame Web
    Madame Web feels like a cross between an extended soda commercial and a teaser trailer for still more spinoffs.
  26. Ennio
    The film devotes itself entirely to a celebration and exhaustive analysis of Morricone’s music — it’s a portrait of the artist as virtuoso soundtrack renegade.
  27. 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.
  28. Molli and Max in the Future
    In crafting two believable characters, giving them witty banter and getting Mamet and Athar to inhabit them, Litwak succeeds. The rest feels hit or miss.
  29. Bob Marley: One Love
    The point of the new biopic mode was to reveal totemic figures in a more complex way. “One Love” flirts with complexity but slides into the banality of hero worship.
  30. Lisa Frankenstein
    Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »