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. Youth (Spring)
    Youth (Spring) uses the workshops of Zhili City to illustrate — again and again, to the point of dulling its impact — the desolate truth that in the lower echelons of China’s industrial sector, youth is not wasted on the young. It is methodically ripped from them, day by day, seam by seam, stitch by stitch.
  2. The Taste of Things
    Food is the subject, the objective and the driving motor of this scantly plotted but utterly captivating love story.
  3. Perfect Days
    This beguiling film may trade in the tranquil security of routine, but makes an occasional, heart-quickening case for the unexpected.
  4. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    Solid, stately and — like the collapsing Papal States of the Italian Peninsula in the late 1800s — just a little too tradition-bound for its own good.
  5. Fallen Leaves
    It’s a nice but exceedingly minor movie. It leaves little imprint.
  6. A Brighter Tomorrow
    Giovanni may be the main character of A Brighter Tomorrow — a conceit shamelessly lifted from Fellini’s “8 1/2” — but Moretti pokes fun at himself, privileging other characters’ points of view as well.
  7. Club Zero
    What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.
  8. About My Father
    Maniscalco hasn’t quite proven he can carry a movie that’s not inspired by or “about” him, but this first effort is charming and earnest enough to encourage viewers to meet him where he’s currently at in his career.
  9. The Delinquents
    Like its characters, Moreno’s banally surreal, madly sensible, big-little movie eschews the safe old daily grind in favor of the perilous unknown, and so, in a uniquely pleasurable way, reminds us that we too have options: Choose work, or choose the whole wide, weird world instead.
  10. Asteroid City
    Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.
  11. The Sweet East
    The film is intriguingly anthropological in its take on America as a subject, viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience — there’s a sense of disintegration and incipient violence seeping through everything, which occasionally explodes to entertaining effect, but there’s clearly deep affection there too.
  12. The New Boy
    In Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable The New Boy, spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.
  13. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
    It’s the unique rhythm of the way that this film is written and cut that elevates it beyond a standard millennial malaise movie.
  14. How to Have Sex
    How to Have Sex resists much of the obvious confrontation and catharsis you’d expect in movies of this type, instead trading in the thwarted impulses and micro-reactions of real life, and it’s all the more devastating for it.
  15. Homecoming
    A terrific trio of performances go some way toward making the film’s more neatly schematic plotting feel organically, messily human.
  16. The Goldman Case
    Kahn’s crafty, compelling portrait gives Goldman the floor, but his walls remain fixed around him.
  17. Four Daughters
    With so many moving parts, it’s hard to isolate just one reason why Ben Hania’s film — a vast improvement on her terminally uneven, unexpectedly Oscar-nominated “The Man Who Sold His Skin” — should prove so gripping.
  18. Firebrand
    Firebrand is clever to reframe Catherine as an important figure in England’s change. It just goes too far.
  19. The Little Mermaid
    Between Bailey’s wide-eyed urchin and McCarthy’s over-the-top octo-hussy, the movie comes alive — not in some zombified form, like re-animated Disney debacles “Dumbo” and “Pinocchio,” but in a way that gives young audiences something magical to identify with, and fresh mermaid dreams to aspire to.
  20. Asphalt City
    The flamboyantly heavy, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-it-ends drama of Black Flies isn’t much fun to sit through, but I think that’s ultimately because the movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake.
  21. Banel & Adama
    Sy’s film is a curious little fable, not quite fully formed in its final stages, and occasionally so sedate and opaque, under Bachar Mar-Khalifé’s melodic, piano-forward score, that it feels like it is drowsing. But it’s a striking debut nonetheless, especially as it revolves, with graceful poetry around the inner experiences of such a curious, unknowable woman.
  22. Anatomy of a Fall
    From the opening scene, set in an unfinished chalet in the French Alps, it often feels as if the movie is eavesdropping on moments too intimate to be shared.
  23. About Dry Grasses
    This is Ceylan at his most limber and mischievous, the filmmaking exhibiting a generosity and curiosity that belies the script’s defense of individualist, even isolationist, living, at whatever cost to one’s own happiness.
  24. May December
    It’s a thorough dive into the psychology of everyone involved, not least of all the woman who’d be drawn to play such a role.
  25. Occupied City
    In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it.
  26. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Stylistically, this feels like a young man’s movie. It’s engrossing from the get-go, the palpable tension methodically echoed by Robbie Robertson’s steady-heartbeat score. But it keeps going and going until everyone we care about is dead, dying or behind bars, with nearly an hour still in store.
  27. The Zone of Interest
    It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.
    • Variety
      • Posted May 20, 2023
  28. Monster
    By sharing only select pieces of each character’s private life, he all but obliges us to leap to incorrect conclusions, distracting with topics such as bullying, aggression and suicide when the real subject — how children are socialized, and the unfair pressures this puts on anyone who doesn’t fit the norm — is so much simpler than any of the intriguing dimensions teased along the way.
  29. White Men Can't Jump
    Director Calmatic’s 2023 remake not only fails to recapture the energy of the first film but seems to misunderstand the cinematic language of streetball, and is largely uninterested in utilizing stars Sinqua Walls and Jack Harlow except as delivery systems for exposition.
  30. The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
    Rather than let its timely concerns be embalmed in didacticism, Alegría has crafted a film about healing generational trauma through new modes of living and experiencing desire — of reshaping the world in a way that feels inclusive and expansive, and which does away with relics of a past that should be left to rot at the bottom of a river.
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