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. End of the Road
    Director and cast do their best — well, maybe not their best, but their competent professional duty — with a formulaic, contrived screenplay. Still, the results do no one much credit, landing closer to overripe cheese than taut suspense, or even guilty-pleasure terrain.
  2. Traveling Light
    Traveling Light is an experimental attempt at social commentary that fails to provide any insight, emotion or even entertainment of the most basic kind.
  3. Return to Seoul
    While Chou’s elliptical screenplay gently explodes many preconceived assumptions about the effects of adoption on adoptees, it is too clear-sighted to ignore the fact that whether biology affects identity or not, the mere possibility that such a link exists could exert a powerful attraction on a searching spirit not quite sure what it is searching for.
  4. Blonde
    With a passion that’s inquisitive, nearly meditative, and often powerful, Blonde focuses on the mystery we now think of when we think of Marilyn Monroe: Who was she, exactly, as a personality and as a human being? Why did her life descend into a tragedy that seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it is haunting?
  5. Dead for A Dollar
    Hill wants to “do justice” to each of these people, but the result is that Dead for a Dollar doesn’t have a dramatic core. It has actors we like to watch, doing what they do well (like Waltz playing a civilized badass), but it isn’t structured so that any of their fates gets a rise out of us.
  6. Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
    Leads Kapoor and Bhatt have an excess of charm and style that leaps off the screen and grabs your heart.
  7. Barbarian
    To Cregger’s credit, the sense of dread he creates is the stuff that the very best horror movies are made of.
  8. Clerks III
    Is this all wildly self-indulgent? A bit. Does it feel like the product of a filmmaker with plenty of fresh ideas? Not really. Has Smith lost his fastball as a writer? You could certainly make that case, and the screenplay’s attempts to recapture some of the rapid-fire pop culture references and x-rated musings of the director’s heyday often land painfully wide of the mark. But there’s something strangely poignant about it all the same.
  9. Pinocchio
    Roping a game Tom Hanks into the fold as the kindly woodworker Geppetto, and employing countless digital artisans to recreate the iconic character design of the protagonist to eerily lifeless effect, “Pinocchio” is a lavish yet hollow retread that will surely give the original a boost when it arrives on Disney+ this weekend.
  10. Burial
    Not-quite-horror despite its macabre theme and mood, this sophomore directorial feature for Ben Parker is a handsomely produced period thriller that delivers in terms of action and atmospherics, even if his somewhat convoluted story doesn’t maximally pay off.
  11. The Son
    I watching The Son play out, this family’s tragedy becomes our own, and Zeller’s warning becomes impossible to ignore.
  12. See How They Run
    See How They Run is a retro homage that surprises audiences with giggles and suspense.
  13. The Eternal Daughter
    This slight story examines the mystery of the mother-daughter bond without getting much closer to solving it, and when the mist clears is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.
  14. Icarus: The Aftermath
    Incredible and enraging in equal doses, the project plays like a tense spy thriller as Rodchenkov is assigned a security team and shuffled from one safe house to another, while enemies of the state — Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny — are poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok.
  15. Don't Worry Darling
    The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.
  16. After Ever Happy
    When that final “to be continued…” title appears — and never has a girly, curly typeface looked more like a ransom note — it’s by far the most heart-clutching #Hessa moment so far, because we realize we’re still at least one whole movie away from release from our collective captivity to this absolute nonentity of a franchise.
  17. Medieval
    Medieval succeeds as a lively, handsome chunk of history (however freely imagined), with nary a dull moment between densely-packed intrigues, chases and battles.
  18. The Banshees of Inisherin
    The result feels closer than any of his previous films to the barbed, intimate lyricism of McDonagh’s work as a playwright, and more deeply, sorrowfully felt to boot.
  19. Argentina, 1985
    That Argentina, 1985 managed to toggle between such emotionally raw material and more amped-up, tension-driven subplots — as Strassera and his family weather death threats and cars explode in public squares — without seeming callous or dramatically opportunistic is a credit to Mitre, whose grasp on his story is high-key and emotionally immediate, but never glib.
  20. The Whale
    Most of The Whale simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.
  21. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    In the end, the couple’s chemistry is off the charts, and that’s all that matters — though there’s still a too-tasteful David Hamilton-like quality to it all.
  22. A Couple
    The final film is elegant and empathetic, but never quite emotionally involving: For all its rich, heightened articulation of a woman’s distress and unrest, the sense of a life being academically magnified under glass never quite leaves the endeavor.
  23. Empire of Light
    In the era when content is king, Sam Mendes still believes in moving pictures. Empire of Light is the proof.
  24. Pearl
    Its distinctive look and oddly appealing antihero (picture Norman Bates as Shelley Duvall might have played him) could actually make this the more popular of the two films.
  25. Women Talking
    The whole scenario is designed to get your blood boiling, while the resulting conversation can’t help but instill hope, as Polley gives these women a rare opportunity to reinvent their world.
  26. The Wonder
    An evenhanded but ultimately preposterous adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, co-written by the author herself (with an assist from Alice Birch).
  27. Athena
    The result is nothing short of an urban war movie, as charismatic characters decide to do something about the outrage people have been expressing toward law enforcement in the real world.
  28. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.
  29. Gigi & Nate
    What happens once the film vilifies the animal rights contingent, however, is an example of how movies can protect their heroes and create their scapegoats (pardon the expression) to the detriment of dramatic complexity.
  30. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    So why is “Bardo,” for all its skill, reach-for-the-stars aspiration, and majestic sweep, such a windy, confounding, and — okay, I’ll just say it — monotonous experience? The movie is full of good things, but it’s three hours long and mostly it’s full of itself.
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