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. Nothing Lasts Forever
    Kohn has created the rare documentary that transforms the way we understand the world, questioning so many of our core beliefs, including the very notion of what is “real.” Through it all, diamonds won’t lose one iota of their sparkle, but you’ll never look at them the same way again.
  2. Retrograde
    There’s not a dull shot in the entire movie, which is remarkable, considering how little actual action Heineman films.
  3. Falling for Christmas
    Its subversive spirit, female-forward smarts and sweet sentimentality remix the formulaic and festive, making all things merry and bright.
  4. Incredible But True
    Incredible but True is a fun little trinket that unmistakably comes from Dupieux’s far-out perspective, but if you find yourself chiming more than usual with its quixotic quandaries, who’s to say whether that’s because Dupieux has mellowed, or because the past couple of years have driven us all so nuts that now we’re meeting him halfway.
  5. Spirited
    For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much exactly as they’d expect, but that doesn’t mean Spirited can’t still surprise.
  6. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    “Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.
  7. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    Examining the bone-breaking work that being a mother can be, Garza Cervera’s tale is most thrilling for the ways it refuses any tidy answers about a woman’s place and wallows (and finds plenty of terror) in the ambiguities therein.
  8. Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
    It’s far from the first music doc to reveal that it can be lonely at the top, but it is among the few to convey that there are no easy answers for that when mental illness is at the root. Of all the portrayals of pop superstars that have been produced in-house in recent years, “My Mind & Me” is probably the one with the least celebratory third act … which is something to celebrate.
  9. Prey for the Devil
    Rather good actors do indeed keep a straight face, as does the film overall. And Stamm’s jump scares aren’t bad, as they go. He hasn’t made a very suspenseful movie, but he’s avoided both dullness and unintentional laughs.
  10. Terrifier 2
    Terrifier 2 is essentially a series of grotesque homicidal set pieces stitched together into a threadbare narrative of midnight funhouse clichés.
  11. Unicorn Wars
    The visually striking, not-at-all-kid-friendly result is all kinds of wrong: Picture pastel-colored anime bears impaled on the horns of sleek black horses, backlit by raging hot-pink infernos. “The Care Bears” this ain’t, though the comparison can hardly be accidental with this ultra-graphic, Saturday morning cartoon-subverting satire for which irreverent Bronies may well be the ideal audience.
  12. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
    This is a baleful and unfortunate tale; one feels for Granda, who describes his suicidal ideation at one point. But director Billy Corben’s attempts to connect his collision with the boomer-generation Falwells to the broader story of evangelicals in the United States seems at times like a stretch.
  13. Run Sweetheart Run
    Nothing gels, as the film careens from cartoonishness to violent peril to attempted satire to sentimentality and so forth, all of it hyperbolic and inorganic.
  14. Peaceful
    The film is too emotionally blunt not to wring tears (or at least a solid lump in the throat) where required, though they don’t always feel artfully earned. Either way, at over two hours, it’s a long trudge toward an inevitable end.
  15. Scarlet
    Smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work.
  16. Voodoo Macbeth
    Yes, the film overall is more diverting than stirring. Still, there is a good deal more than novelty value going for this group effort.
  17. The Stranger
    The Stranger confirms that Wright has arrived, even if his treatment sometimes feels more oblique and self-consciously arty than the material demands.
  18. The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile
    There are remarkably few serious hiccups along the way in achieving the career reclamation Carlile envisions for Tucker at the start. But any heightened sense of drama isn’t really necessary when it comes to the pleasures of spending time with two such strong musical personalities in what amounts to a documentary two-hander, fully justifying tagging the younger artist’s name onto the film’s title as an awkward but fitting addendum.
  19. The School for Good and Evil
    Sure, it’s a “Harry Potter” rip-off, but had Feig taken the time to let the film breathe, it might have stood on its own. Unlike Hogwarts, where fresh surprises lay waiting around every corner, this school seems to exist in concept only — and not a particularly good one at that.
  20. Black Adam
    The surprisingly serious-minded (but still plenty pulpy) project deprives Johnson of his greatest superpower — his sense of humor — while giving the now-straight-faced star a chance to play a character with some interesting contradictions.
  21. The Same Storm
    It’s an often-touching time capsule of a harrowing moment in which rampant death and police brutality, white privilege and surging activism answered the call of so much grief.
  22. She Said
    Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.
  23. Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.
  24. The Other Tom
    The film’s intimate scenes of mother-son discord are remarkable, played with raw, nerve-pushing testiness by two first-time actors.
  25. My Father's Dragon
    [A] winningly sweet-natured, visually transporting adaptation.
  26. Rosaline
    There’s something fresh about the story’s unwillingness to pit a woman’s romantic quests against her career goals.
  27. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema.
  28. The Bohemian
    Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic Il Boemo seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.
  29. Lynch/Oz
    Lynch/Oz is bursting with ideas about it, and about how it colonized the consciousness of David Lynch, but the movie is too pie-in-the-sky to quite make it over the rainbow.
  30. Last Flight Home
    It is a tribute, a grappling with mortality, an exercise in self-surveillance, a messy home movie, a brief account of aviation history and a lesson in letting go and grief.
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