Variety's Scores

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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
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  1. American Fiction
    The helmer trusts his audience to bring themselves to the material. Ultimately, that’s what makes reading “American Fiction” so rewarding.
  2. Memory
    Memory invites debate, rather than imposing a specific interpretation. It’s also a film that lingers, shifting and expanding in significance, even as the details start to blur.
  3. Io Capitano
    Me Captain is surprisingly classical in construction and style, wisely guiding our attention away from its sure directorial touch and toward the story at hand — pieced together by a small army of screenwriters and collaborating contributors from first-hand migrant accounts.
  4. 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.
  5. Dumb Money
    [A] smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama.
  6. Enea
    The director himself has described the film as a “genre story without a genre,” and as such Ena effectively mirrors its protagonist’s equal detachment from all facets and possibilities of his fabulously floundering life. In theory, this makes sense. Dramatically, however, it’s a dead end, unaided by sporadic, leaden stabs at farce and whimsy.
  7. Green Border
    While you’re still in the vice-like grip of its multilevel narrative it may not feel like it, but a film like Agnieszka Holland’s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism.
  8. The Universal Theory
    An overlong but enjoyable metaphysical thriller that delivers pastiche so meticulous it becomes its own source of supremely cinematic pleasure.
  9. Adagio
    While the craft team here feel at the top of their game, delivering scene after scene of perfectly composed glossy, grimy, sweaty tableaux, the script could have used a bit more time to sharpen up. Still, there are some zingy, zesty sequences here that really pop.
  10. Finally Dawn
    One can sense what Costanzo’s trying to do, but he’s made a fatal miscalculation: Mimosa is not leading lady material, and 140 minutes is far too long to spend pretending otherwise.
  11. The Promised Land
    Notionally rooted in historical fact, but embellished with storybook romance and flouncing cartoon villainy, this roundly enjoyable Venice competition entry finally owes all its residual gravitas (and at least half its considerable handsomeness) to the expressive woodcut visage of one Mads Mikkelsen.
  12. Dicks: The Musical
    "Dicks” is an unapologetically puerile, hard-R novelty that’s just lo-fi enough to maintain its underground cred.
  13. Origin
    The film will get people thinking and talking. The way DuVernay directs it, Origin is a swirling tornado of ideas.
  14. The Boy and the Heron
    Better to think of The Boy and the Heron as the bonus round — a worthy but mid-range addition to a remarkable oeuvre that expands his filmography without necessarily topping it.
  15. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    This threequel is surprisingly lifeless and almost laugh-less.
  16. Sitting in Bars with Cake
    Where Jane feels thinly sketched in pastels, Corrine’s portrait has been detailed in bright permanent markers. A’zion roils with emotions and her character is funny, mercurial, reactive and real.
  17. The Nun II
    In some respects an improvement on its predecessor, in others not, this is finally one more good-enough if unmemorable entry sure to extend the series’ life in lucrative fashion.
  18. Rotting in the Sun
    With its tricky tone and its wildly ambitious themes, it’s not surprising to find Silva’s outrageous, salacious film stumbling as it brings its many threads into focus. Like Sebastián’s art and his journal in the film, Rotting in the Sun remains a patchwork of quotes and ideas and provocations hastily if hilariously stitched together.
  19. DogMan
    Maybe Dogman would be salvageable if Besson didn’t feel the need to thuddingly explain every single aspect of Doug’s quirk-laden personality, as though every last thing that a person is can be traced in a straight line back to a cause, because psychology is a long division sum that never leaves a remainder.
  20. Coup de Chance
    It’s not a comedy, but as you watch it you can almost see Woody Allen standing off to the side, chuckling at the human folly he’s showing you.
  21. Evil Does Not Exist
    It may not be wholly successful, but it certainly is bleakly fascinating to witness a master filmmaker paint so subtle and soothing a portrait of humanity, only to finally, bitterly remind us that there is no soothing nature – human or otherwise – when there’s a bullet in its belly.
  22. Rustin
    Directed by George C. Wolfe with the same passion and conviction that defined its subject, Rustin reminds that the pursuit for equality has never been and should never be satisfied with the advancement of a single group.
  23. The Bikeriders
    It goes a long way to humanize figures who’ve been long misrepresented on film, while giving audiences privileged access to this inner world.
  24. Hit Man
    Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.
  25. The Beast
    Laden with enticing ideas and images that never quite activate each other, “The Beast” instead coagulates into a thick 146-minute triptych of general, fidgeting malaise, and strands a hard-working Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in a cross-time, cross-purposes relationship that keeps shape-shifting without getting us terribly involved.
  26. AGGRO DR1FT
    Because Korine’s never been one to subscribe to traditional narrative tropes, there’s an insidious sort of suspense running beneath the otherwise-thin plot, like some kind of high-voltage electric current.
  27. Priscilla
    The daring thing Coppola does, given that we’re used to seeing even sophisticated biopics weave the lives they’re showing us into dramatic arcs, is to present the rise and fall of Priscilla and Elvis’s relationship as a diary, one that simply flows forward in a kind of objective Zen fashion, never trumping anything up.
  28. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers is a film about class and race, grief and resentment, opportunity and entitlement. It’s that rare exception to the oft-heard complaint that “they don’t make ’em like they used to.”
  29. The Killer
    In The Killer, David Fincher is hooked on his own obsession with technique, his mystique of filmmaking-as-virtuoso-procedure. It’s not that he’s anything less than great at it, but he may think there’s more shading, more revelation in how he has staged The Killer than there actually is.
  30. Saltburn
    Fennell’s debut promised a fearless original voice and style. Saltburn certainly has attitude, but nothing new to say.
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