Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. The Ballad of Judas Priest
    If you think The Ballad of Judas Priest, from co-directors and Priest fans Tom Morello and Sam Dunn, is going to be anything other than an ode to everything that’s great about the British headbangers, you’ve got another thing coming.
  2. Joe's College Road Trip
    In Joe’s College Road Trip, Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s wildly, deliriously profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon.
  3. Paul McCartney: Man on the Run
    Neville’s movie serves as a splendid jukebox, offering rapid-fire clips that bowl you over anew with just how rapidly McCartney’s own synapses were firing on ingenious hit after hit.
  4. How to Make a Killing
    It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turning his pin-eyed handsomeness into a mask of yuppie treachery.
  5. Dracula
    It’s not as if we needed to see “Dracula” remade as a blood-soaked Valentine’s Day movie.
  6. Redux Redux
    Boasting a brawny aesthetic and the kind of loopy logic where it’s fun to fill in the gaps, the high-concept thriller gives a different take on the arc of history bending towards justice.
  7. Rosebush Pruning
    Rosebush Pruning makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle. Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty.
  8. Crime 101
    Crime 101 is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways.
  9. Butterfly
    Striking and often unpredictably moving — before an ungainly third act that frays into a profusion of endings — Søimer Guttormsen’s film places a lot of trust in its leads, erstwhile “Worst Person in the World” co-stars Renate Reinsve and Helene Bjørneby, to sell its wild swerves in mood and perspective. Both are up to the task.
  10. Solo Mio
    The directing brothers Charles and Daniel Kinnane have worked with James before (“Home Team”) and know what they have in the ridiculously amiable star. They also know there’s more, if not depth, soulfulness to his talents. In the place of pratfalls, they’ve found a kind of sheepish charm and hurt.
  11. Arco
    Arco looks at once fantastical and recognizable, removed just enough from what we know in our present, but grounded on familiar, childlike amazement.
  12. The Strangers: Chapter 3
    This is an unconscionably lazy piece of work, the kind of movie that makes you marvel how people will put months of work into creating a feature film whose script seems to have been written in a few hours’ uninspired haste.
  13. Wuthering Heights
    For nearly two centuries, Brontë’s book has been a romantic fantasy for readers. Fennell treats it as an erotic one as well, leaning into all that is sensual.
  14. GOAT
    In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.
  15. Exit 8
    Like the game, which is popular as kind of a one-off without much replayability, Exit 8 is designed to divert for a short time and does so enjoyably, with Kawamura proving a most judicious assessor of just how little backstory, plot explanation and character development he can get away with and still keep us engaged.
  16. Take Me Home
    This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.
  17. Frank & Louis
    It’s a script and a production tightly built around its performers, both superb individually, but most importantly, warmly attentive to each other on screen, and capable of sharing a silence.
  18. The Friend's House Is Here
    The Friend’s House Is Here is defined not by the many constraints that it battled during its production, but by the artistic vision of the resulting work.
  19. American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez
    Alvarado’s doc is standard in construction but lively in tone, reflecting his subject’s engagement with the sociopolitical challenges faced by Chicanos in the 20th century.
  20. Lady
    If her filmmaking style is relatively straightforward, it’s a rich, raw sense of place that gives this Sundance entry — premiering in world dramatic competition — vitality and danger.
  21. The Musical
    Like its eminently problematic anti-hero, The Musical says its piece with conviction to spare, and a welcome streak of cat-among-the-pigeons danger rarely found in contemporary American comedy.
  22. Soul Patrol
    [A] haunting, revelatory documentary.
  23. Once Upon a Time in Harlem
    Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”
  24. Melania
    Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show.
  25. Wicker
    The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.
  26. The Weight
    While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, The Weight has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement.
  27. In the Blink of an Eye
    Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.
  28. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
    It’s the kind of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves.
  29. Shelter
    None of these elements feel very fresh, least of all in Ward Parry’s formulaic screenplay. But they’re executed with sufficient slick professionalism to make for a passable if unmemorable diversion.
  30. Leviticus
    This outstanding debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella organically marries blood-curdling fright with incisive social commentary.
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