Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. Firebrand
    Firebrand is clever to reframe Catherine as an important figure in England’s change. It just goes too far.
  4. Faraway, So Close!
    Overlong and ultra-slow, this meditation on the sad state of things will tax the patience of even dedicated Wenders fans.
  5. Sympathy for the Devil
    The tension that should fire up this joint throughout never quite catches hold, because there are never any tangible stakes. These characters and their crisis remain just a premise, too incompletely worked out to either generate urgent suspense or enter the realm of surreal fantasia as Cage did in a long-ago road nightmare, “Wild at Heart.”
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
    Although the film is punched up by some energetic cutting and hip-hop music, many dialogue scenes, particularly early on, are badly written and awkwardly staged.
  7. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
    Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality.
  8. Users
    In her voiceover, Almada, who has made one fiction feature but mostly works in documentary form, shuffles through half-formed ideas too randomly to gather these scattered wonders into an identifiable thesis.
  9. The Listener
    Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, The Listener plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era.
  10. The Amateur
    It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in The Amateur seems…arbitrary.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hour of the Gun
    Unfortunately, for any filmmaker, probing too deeply into the character of folk heroes reveals them to be fallible human beings – which they are, of course – but to mass audiences, who create fantasies, such exposition is unsettling. Reality often makes for poor drama.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Irma la Douce
    Two hours and 23 minutes is an awfully long haul for a frivolous farce.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eureka
    Even by his own standards, Nicolas Roeg's Eureka is an indulgent melodrama [based on a book by Marshall Houts] about the anticlimactic life of a greedy gold prospector after he has struck it rich.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Something Wicked This Way Comes
    Film version of Ray Bradbury's popular novel Something Wicked This Way Comes must be chalked up as something of a disappointment. Possibilities for a dark, child's view fantasy set in rural America of yore are visible throughout the $20 million production but various elements have not entirely congealed into a unified achievement.
  15. The Beekeeper
    The Beekeeper is the best kind of bad movie — which is to say, it’s the sort that puts entertainment ahead of pretentiousness, embracing the laughter sure to accompany such an unapologetically stupid, ultra-violent premise.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    At the Earth's Core
    At the Earth's Core, from the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, is an okay fantasy adventure film. Made in England, it's a fast-paced, slightly tongue-in-cheek tale about stalwart hero Doug McClure's battles with underground monsters.
  17. The Becomers
    A sort of shaggy dog story whose appeal wanes as one gradually realizes it’s unlikely to go anywhere in particular, The Becomers is equally mild as sci-fi, spoof and sociopolitical satire. It’s off-kilter enough to catch one’s attention, but in the end too underdeveloped to strongly reward it.
  18. Suitable Flesh
    There’s no lack of effort here, but too often Suitable Flesh just feels effortful, rather than the outrageous good time aimed for.
  19. Mob Land
    Maggio has cobbled together a modestly diverting, effectively atmospheric but blatantly derivative crime drama sprinkled with a few joltingly nasty plot twists.
  20. Saltburn
    Fennell’s debut promised a fearless original voice and style. Saltburn certainly has attitude, but nothing new to say.
  21. Foe
    Foe wants to end with a big “Whoa.” Instead, it leaves us going “Huh, interesting” and “Whuuut?” at the same time.
  22. Migration
    At least the backgrounds are eye-catching, as a waddle of mallards crack jokes amid beautiful fall foliage.
  23. 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.
  24. Vacation Friends 2
    If anything, delving into action/comedy territory distracts from what made the original kinda-sorta touching at a few key moments: the heart beneath the hijinks. It’s still beating here, but not as strongly as it did the first time.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love and Bullets
    Director Stuart Rosenberg could have glossed over the plot’s less believable twists with a brisker style and a lot more attack.
  26. Love in Taipei
    The story’s core strengths are undervalued in the translation from book to screen.
  27. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver is a storytelling mediocrity, but as spectacle it has tumult and rhythm.
  28. The Marsh King's Daughter
    The movie is being marketed as a “psychological” thriller, but psychology is what it doesn’t have. It’s more like “Cape Fear” reduced to a “Predator” sequel.
  29. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The director, Adam Wingard (who made “Godzilla vs. Kong”), knows how to choreograph a beastie battle so that it does maximum damage in a way that appeals to your inner toy-smashing seven-year-old.
  30. June Zero
    Though it occasionally brushes up against intricate ideas about memory and memorialization — who gets to be commemorated, who must not and the genesis of the “never forget” ethos — June Zero itself leaves a quickly fading impression.
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