Variety's Scores

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:
17847 movie reviews
  1. While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.
  2. There’s real wisdom to Chasing Summer, which Shlesinger and Decker offset with a handful of steamier-than-you’d-expect sex scenes.
  3. Delightfully insightful ... Whatever comes next (and the movie makes a beautiful kind of peace with not knowing), Green has given his subjects an incredible gift: the kind of immortality only cinema can provide.
  4. The intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases.
  5. This long-game project gives remarkable dimension and particularity to the kind of migrant story often only told in journalistic generalities — showing, year on year, how time heals some wounds, opens others, and creates plenty of its own.
  6. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.
  7. A film that mines reserves of tenderness in young female angst and cluelessness with loving empathy.
  8. Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.
  9. Saccharine proves James’ gifts are better served by more independent means, even if it falls short of the emotional and dramatic heft that gave “Relic” equal genre and arthouse appeal.
  10. Sure, the case can be made for this contrast between scatological humor and serious insight working as a mirror for how quickly a person’s reality can shift from joy to sorrow, but the overall effect is puzzling.
  11. What you see in the key art and the first-look impression you get from the teaser and trailers is a clear and accurate indicator of what you’ll get in the film. And for many action movie fans that’ll do just fine.
  12. Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.
  13. Life has a way of getting complicated when you introduce temptation, and though Union County can be frustratingly simple at times, the stakes are life and death.
  14. Zi
    If the film weren’t so arresting to look at, it could often be absorbed with eyes closed: If its larger message is elusive, Zi advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace.
  15. What’s so much fun about Send Help, beyond its twisted B-movie premise and refreshing disinterest in anything more highfalutin than handing Linda a chance to turn the tables, is how unpredictable it manages to be for most of their time on the island (except for that darn ending).
  16. While some might find it triggering, “Josephine” dares to confront the life-shattering intersection of sex and violence in our culture, facing the toughest of “adult situations” with clear eyes.
  17. The Invite is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.
  18. Hoffman and Wilde’s commitment makes the film feel more important than it is. It’s better to think of this either as pure, irreverent escapism or a guiltless pleasure.
  19. With The History of Concrete, John Wilson takes the least interesting subject imaginable — the dull gray composite used for sidewalks, overpasses and that great big church in “The Brutalist” — and crafts what’s likely to be the most entertaining documentary of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
  20. In short, Carousel is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others.
  21. I actually think The Moment should have pushed further into crackpot satirical extremes. In that case, it wouldn’t have been a movie that featured a “real” version of Charli xcx. But it might have made you laugh more, because it would have been genuinely outlandish rather than just unconvincing.
  22. Its rags-to-riches-to-near-ruin storytelling is simplistic, the celluloid craftsmanship B-grade, the acting nothing to write home about. Still, there’s a sense of a fertile cultural moment being captured for posterity, however routinely.
  23. The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
  24. Substantial ideas underpin all the flippant historical cosplay, as Bezinović — himself a Croatian — ponders D’Annunzio’s reputation on either side of the Italo-Croatian border, and in turn the long-term societal effects of failed despots being either romanticized or forgotten entirely.
  25. Written and directed by Kirk Jones (“Waking Ned Devine”), the film wrestles enthusiastically and mostly successfully with the potential pitfalls of making a funny yet respectful project about a condition that sometimes lends itself to laughter, even as it wreaks havoc with Davidson’s life in serious ways.
  26. If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won’t be disappointed.
  27. It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.
  28. Norm Li’s photography perfectly suits the tone, neither romancing the locations of Lu’s life nor making them look condescendingly squalid. And his aesthetic keeps pace with Brendan Mills’ excellent editing.
  29. It leaves a lot to the audience to figure out about Hamed beyond what’s publicly known, as it’s clearly more interested in Ingle. While far from being a knockout, the film lands enough solid punches to leave a mark.
  30. For genre aficianados, it’s bold, mind-bending work which satisfies that so-often-frustrated craving: for a zombie movie with brains.

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