Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Brightwood
    Awkwardly enamored by the thin novelties of its sci-fi trappings, Brightwood doesn’t possess the imagination to blossom beyond them, occupying an unflattering intersection of modest production resources and unrefined form.
  2. Story Ave
    [An] affecting debut feature.
  3. A Silence
    The film’s first half-hour keeps our emotional investment at bay as we work out the precise geometry of the characters and their unhappy histories. But there is a gasping power to its staggered reveals, and a searching sadness to the emerging family portrait that outweighs the film’s shock factor.
  4. The Successor
    Taken literally, The Successor is a chilling thing to watch. Step back and imagine what it’s saying on a metaphorical level, and it’s clear that writer-director Xavier Legrand has crafted one of the most damning depictions of patriarchal power imaginable.
  5. Un Amor
    Making no cozy compromises in its portrayal of a young woman socially and sexually exploited by rural patriarchy — while still foregrounding the consuming strength and autonomy of her desire — it’s a tricky balancing act that mostly works, thanks also to a crackling lead performance by Laia Costa.
  6. Reptile
    Reptile comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.
  7. Foe
    Foe wants to end with a big “Whoa.” Instead, it leaves us going “Huh, interesting” and “Whuuut?” at the same time.
  8. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    "The Caine Mutiny,” for all the tinkering, remains a warhorse of a play. And that’s both a good and a limited thing. The way Friedkin has directed it, it certainly plays.
  9. Heist 88
    It’s a crime film that finds little joy in criminality, crammed with characters who’ve been backed into a corner, hindered by an overarching morality that doesn’t match the material.
  10. Dancing in the Dust
    Dispensing with heavyhanded symbolism, Farhadi tells the tale engrossingly and with a lot of physicality through the two main actors.
  11. Saw X
    The torture set pieces in the “Saw” films are lavish gifts of baroque horror presented to the audience. They are, quite simply, the reason we came. Tobin Bell, with his stare of pitiless wisdom, is also a draw, but “Saw X” raises the issue of how much of John Kramer’s hand-wringing is too much. In the eyes of a lot of “Saw” fans, hand-wringing < hands cut off with mechanized garden shears.
  12. The Creator
    The emotional core of The Creator rests on the shoulders of a star who has just one gear: angry. The rest wants to be “Blade Runner,” but plays more like a cross between “Elysium” (with its floating futuristic fortress and specious political message) and “The Golden Child” (about an all-powerful Asian kiddo in desperate need of protecting).
  13. The Human Surge 3
    The Human Surge 3 doesn’t have defined characters or even very coherent conversations, but its swirling of reality conjures an absorbing dreamscape.
  14. Poolman
    I take no vicious pleasure in saying that Poolman, a movie that Pine co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is not only the worst film I saw during the fall festival season but would likely be one of the worst films in any year it came out.
  15. The Toxic Avenger
    This is an inside joke of a film, but it’s also one that wants you to be in on it.
  16. Fingernails
    A love story hinging on human chemistry as a disruptive force would fall to pieces if its stars didn’t have that very unquantifiable quiver of static between them. But Buckley and Ahmed play off each other exquisitely, gradually reflecting each other in motion and mien, each looking at the other with the kind of facially centered full-body want that no amount of dialogue can convey on its own.
  17. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines
    “Who asked for this?” is the question such projects invoke, and Lindsey Anderson Beer’s film never comes up with a satisfying answer.
  18. Together 99
    What’s strange about Together 99 is that it looks like a Lukas Moodysson film (natural light), it moves like a Lukas Moodysson film (the documentary-like flow), but it’s blanketed with a sodden forlorn Swedish bourgeois cynicism that makes you think Moodysson needs to get out more.
  19. No One Will Save You
    The film is most successful when it finds Brynn in survival mode.
  20. Expend4bles
    This is true 21st-century trash: a movie in which the action itself is expendable.
  21. The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
    The Storms of Jeremy Thomas persuasively makes the case for closer scrutiny of a producer’s career, though it leaves viewers with some homework to do.
  22. They Shot the Piano Player
    Jazz and animation make for strong bedfellows in They Shot the Piano Player, a film from Spanish directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal that represents an intriguing hybrid in all sorts of ways.
  23. The Royal Hotel
    Green is a storyteller with such control that we don’t leave the theater feeling patronized or hectored. She’s thought everything out, and planned it so that every scene in The Royal Hotel is as gripping as it is pointed.
  24. Shoshana
    In addition to sterling work by the three young principals, Ian Hart gives a standout performance as the British High Commissioner’s ubiquitous righthand man, offering a supercilious, world-weary gravitas that seemingly epitomizes the official British attitude to the Mandate.
  25. The Featherweight
    The film is convincingly fashioned as a candid all-access documentary, a promotional puff piece curdling before our eyes into an unintended study of mental breakdown.
  26. It Lives Inside
    Though the results aren’t terribly original or memorable, they do provide a creepy 90-odd minutes.
  27. Hesitation Wound
    In images tinged with the blue of sadness, the green of decay and the bilious yellow of institutional hallways, Nacar makes remarkably suspenseful drama out of one hyper-committed woman’s refusal to curry sympathy, as she crosses Rubicon after ethical Rubicon in one 24-hour period.
  28. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    While not as subversive as its predecessor, it delivers on the promise of a smart and salient sequel with bolder action, bigger stakes, and deeper resonance for all ages.
  29. Society of the Snow
    It’s up to the individual whether to see this story as a miracle or a tragedy, Numa says in voiceover; Bayona’s film, for all its forceful feeling, doesn’t decide for us.
  30. Nyad
    Audiences want to see Diana Nyad succeed, but the pleasure of the experience comes from watching actors become these characters. No matter how tricky such feats must have been to re-create, you get the impression that everyone involved was having a blast.
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