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. Love in the Villa
    Love in the Villa’s building blocks may be as phony and manufactured as that balcony, but romantics will assuredly see and feel that the sentimental thematic resonance surrounding love and destiny comes from a genuine place.
  2. TÁR
    The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power.
  3. White Noise
    As a movie, White Noise announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them.
  4. The Invitation
    The predictability of events during the film’s first hour of gothic-thriller setup is all the more annoying because of the plodding pace. Evie finally stands up for herself during some modestly clever third-act turnabouts, but, really, that’s not quite enough to regenerate a rooting interest in the character.
  5. Me Time
    The disarray is baffling for the audience, and downright punishing for Hart, whose lead character is forced to shape-shift between scenes, veering from milquetoast to petty to tyrannical to pushed-around.
  6. Samaritan
    Samaritan is basic enough that it often plays like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. But the movie builds to a very good twist, and Stallone, in his way, brings a vibe to it, complete with an ’80s kiss-off line (“Have a blast!”) delivered in a growl so deliberate it practically etches itself into the scenery.
  7. No Way Out
    There’s enough sex and violence here to hold attention for an hour and a half, but the care or conviction to explain why it all happens — let alone why viewers should care — proves elusive.
  8. Emergency Declaration
    Believe it or not, Emergency Declaration was conceived before the pandemic, but it’s just about the most thrilling way a film can capitalize on our fears — of the virus, of flying, of governments making a problem worse — without directly exploiting the international nightmare we’ve all been living lately.
  9. The Harbinger
    The Harbinger disappoints only in that it’s good enough to make you wish it were better — that it left an indelible impression rather than a slightly vague one.
  10. 13: The Musical
    13: The Musical is just catchy enough to make you forget how facile it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.
  11. Fall
    Fall is a technical feat of a thriller, yet it’s not without a human center. It earns your clenched gut and your white knuckles.
  12. Glorious
    Even at 80 minutes, Glorious feels four times too long for what it is.
  13. The Next 365 Days
    Just because almost everyone’s exhausted by this crummy cash-cow franchise, doesn’t mean the franchise is exhausted in turn. The hope that The Next 365 Days will be the last “365 Days” merely because it’s based on the final book is a slim one, especially given how it ends.
  14. Orphan: First Kill
    Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.
  15. Beast
    If you can get past the idea that the two-ton lion threatening Idris Elba and his family in the movie is a singularly frightening combination of ones and zeros, not killer instinct and claws, then Beast is a blast.
  16. Look Both Ways
    While the filmmakers’ heads and hearts are in the right place with their resonant sentiments on taking risks and embracing fate, their execution of narrative basics proves lackluster.
  17. Kirikou and the Men and Women
    A broad-minded but pretty vanilla third film in the French toon series from Gallic helmer Michel Ocelot.
  18. Private Desert
    The film comes alive in its second half, which deepens and complicates the story we thought we were watching, about a disgraced cop trying to run away from the violence that’s set to cost him his job and his reputation. For some, the tender empathy that runs through the film’s latter half may not be enough to offset its choice of sympathetic leading man.
  19. Inu-oh
    Basically, Inu-oh is to Noh as spray-painted graffiti is to traditional Japanese calligraphy.
  20. Rogue Agent
    As a revenge spy thriller of sorts (the kind that seems tailor-made for a TV miniseries these days), “Rogue Agent” is an engaging affair. Much of it is due to Arterton, whose steely performance firmly anchors the film even during its most improbable twists and turns — especially as it careens toward its inevitable conclusion and its all too pat final image.
  21. Secret Headquarters
    With a solid cast, healthy sense of humor and polished visual effects, the film rises above so many of the sub-cinematic slogs littering the streaming fray. Expecting it to be memorable proves to be a big ask from the filmmakers, despite their hunger for a Marvel-style, Amblin-esque franchise starter. Still, the ease with which we forget its blights might just be the project’s real superpower.
  22. Day Shift
    At heart, though, it’s a knowingly eccentric goof of a movie, to the point that it’s hard, for a while, not to find it agreeable, even as you register what a preposterous piece of fluff it is. Unfortunately, it’s also an arduous piece of fluff. It’s full of blow-you-away action scenes, and it’s also full of rules — a satirical vampire cosmology that’s fun, until it starts to be just convoluted enough to give you a headache, especially when the rules are applied as inconsistently as they are here.
  23. Mack & Rita
    The film does, at minimum, convince us that most people would want to transform into Keaton if given the opportunity.
  24. The Swallows of Kabul
    An involving adaptation of Yasmina Khadra’s elegant literary fiction.
  25. Wedding Season
    It’s a processed confection that has come off the streaming assembly line. Yet if the comedy here is mostly routine, the romance is another thing. It really does work, because the actors don’t just phone in the love story — they dance with it, commit to it, and own it.
  26. Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie
    “Rise” is a serviceable — if also forgettable — entry in the cowabunga canon.
  27. Faith
    Faith is as disciplined and intriguingly opaque as the men and women it studies, attempting to unlock the nature of the group through mesmeric observation of routine and ritual.
  28. The Magician
    A talkative Melbourne hit man and his long-suffering marks are engaging company in "The Magician," an Aussie mockumentary cut from the same cloth as 1992 Belgian cult item "Man Bites Dog." Lacking the latter film's graphic violence, this pic opts for straight-on comedy and largely succeeds. [18 July 2005]
    • Variety
      • Posted Aug 4, 2022
  29. Easter Sunday
    Instead of character and chemistry, the film employs a series of running gags meant to support the star’s likability and not compete with his wisecracks.
  30. Alex's War
    So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age vérité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality.
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