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. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Butterfly Vision
    It would be unfortunate if this contextual thicket were to obscure the merits of Butterfly Vision, which, while certainly not reinventing the war-is-hell wheel, is interesting to analyse in formal terms, especially in its sometimes effective, sometimes glib use of modern tech.
  14. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum.
  15. Assassin Club
    What Assassin Club lacks in fully developed characters, it more than makes up for in kinetic thrills. Golding proves that he can carry both the romantic and physical aspects of such a project, while looking delectable, and that’s probably as much as the audience for this film expects.
  16. Fast X
    Leterrier’s bad with story but reasonably strong on the action front. Characters are constantly jumping in and out of speeding vehicles in these movies, and Leterrier’s job here must have felt somewhat similar, clambering aboard the juggernaut that is the “Fast” franchise in full steam.
  17. Jeanne du Barry
    In attempting to reclaim this woman’s reputation, Maïwenn’s film feels unexpectedly tame — it risks turning a would-be scandal into a royal bore.
  18. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me
    Despite its efforts to present a well-rounded portrait of this determined starlet, the film ultimately feels like a glossier, slightly less salacious iteration of an “E! True Hollywood Story,” appealing primarily to those who relish tragic tales of the rich and famous.
  19. Crater
    It’s sci-fi informed by a Gen-Z sensibility, with a particular focus on those Zoomers who can’t imagine a bright future on the planet they actually inhabit — an ever-expanding demographic, one imagines.
  20. The Mother
    The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad.
  21. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    It’s all quite wispy and anecdotal, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Bill Holderman, the director of these films, and Erin Simms, his co-screenwriter and producer, had squeezed more texture into the anecdotes.
  22. One Ranger
    It’s a self-canceling combination of the earnest and the clueless, its technical competency shorn of any leavening style or personality.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ponniyin Selvan: Part II
    Two features spanning five and a half hours may sound like ample time to adapt “Ponniyin Selvan,” and yet, Ratnam might have been better off making this a trilogy, since the books leave so much more that he wasn’t able to include.
  24. Love Again
    An old-school, straight-faced studio romance featuring five new songs from Ms. Dion, writer-director Jim Strouse’s Love Again is all about such healing — to the extent that if it were a book instead of a movie, it would be filed in the self-help section.
  25. The Night of the 12th
    The Night of the 12th is a mostly compelling sit, though what lends the film its singular texture is that it keeps tricking us into thinking it’s a more conventional thriller than it is.
  26. 20,000 Species of Bees
    Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.
  27. Falcon Lake
    Coming-of-age movies are usually, like growing up itself, some combination of funny, sad, rueful, awkward or frightening, but rarely are they so successfully all those things at once as in Falcon Lake.
  28. Northern Comfort
    While Spall looks like he is having fun launching some clandestine military tactics, the comely Rumpf, known for her fierce work in French and German films such as “Raw,” “Tiger Girl” and “Soul of a Beast” is rather underserved here. But on the bright side, the part at least proves that she speaks fluent English and that the camera loves her no matter what she has on.
  29. Frybread Face and Me
    It’s 1990 and a summer that initially smacks of exile and punishment becomes one of discovery — self-discovery to be sure, but also cultural and familial.
  30. Freaks vs. the Reich
    A ghastly concoction of razzle-dazzle circus maximalism, poorly CG’d supernatural whimsy and sentimentality so cloyingly sweet you can feel it in your fillings, “Freaks Out” is, however, almost admirably unaware that its over-egged, unironically “Springtime for Hitler” production design, and its lazy invocation of the Holocaust as a narrative shortcut to high emotional stakes, might be in questionable taste. Instead, this is a sincere, if deeply misguided attempt to fabricate weepy wonderment amid the ruination of World War II.
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