Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    It’s a functional piece of exploitation — an efficient little crime-porn snuff-thriller potboiler. It’s like a fast-food meal that makes you think, “Okay, that wasn’t good for me, but I got what I paid for.” A film like this one is a junk-franchise burger: tasty, processed, and basically fake.
  2. Last Letter from Your Lover
    Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible — and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison.
  3. Old
    Old, like most Shyamalan movies, has a catchy hook along with some elegant filmmaking gambits. But instead of developing his premise in an insidious and powerful way, the writer-director just keeps throwing a lot of things at you.
  4. Jolt
    Once again displaying the kinetic grace, authoritative physicality and heavy-duty footwear that have made her a cult favorite for fans of the “Underworld” franchise, Beckinsale is fun to watch in both the real and fantasy fight sequences that take up much of the briskly paced Jolt.
  5. Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    Snake Eyes, as directed by Robert Schwentke (“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”), has style and verve, with a diabolical family plot that creates a reasonable quota of actual drama. The movie is also a synthetic but infectiously skillful big-studio hodgepodge of ninja films, wuxia films, yakuza films, and international revenge films.
  6. Stuntman
    In the end, both documentary and the jump itself feel like ambitious vanity projects that are admirably accomplished, yet feel a little hollow in the raison d’être department.
  7. France
    Dumont has studied the media enough to get in a few genuinely effective jabs, though it’s hard to engage with the half of France that concerns itself with her private life since she’s such a cold and inscrutable character.
  8. Homeroom
    The Oakland students — and director Nicks — rise to the demands of overlapping crises. With its vibrant if abbreviated portraits and final scenes of burgeoning activism, Homeroom suggest that kids may not be alright, but they are very much on the case.
  9. Three Floors
    Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature.
  10. A Chiara
    Carpignano’s focus here on 15-year-old Chiara (a radiant Swamy Rotolo . . . is a natural way of prepping the audience’s sympathies, but he aims beyond easy generational assumptions, and even more noticeably than in his sophomore work, he’s imbibed some lessons from Martin Scorsese (who also exec produced that earlier film) in refusing to presume a judgmental stance.
  11. The Story of My Wife
    Divided into seven quirkily titled chapters which are only useful as a kind of interminable countdown, “Story” falls into every trap of the over-reverential adaptation: individual scenes go on too long, there are far too many of them, and everyone sounds like they’re reading when they speak.
  12. The Restless
    It’s not one of those filmmaking-as-therapy grudge sessions, but a wrenchingly fair-minded look at complicated family dynamics.
  13. Petrov's Flu
    Through its heady stew of impulses and influences, however, Petrov’s Flu is cinema to the breathless last, riding the camera like a bucking horse as single shots carry us between locations, eras and states of mind — the thrilling, messy work of a man released.
  14. Paris, 13th District
    A silky, soulful black-and-white tapestry of single millennials seeking connection.
  15. Nitram
    In its quiet respect for the victims’ dignity, its uniformly outstanding performances and in apportioning responsibility only to those who shirked their responsibilities, and deploying a grief-struck compassion toward everyone else, Nitram may come to be recognized as one of the finest exemplars yet of the mass-shooting movie — inasmuch as we can stomach having an entire genre built around the phenomenon.
  16. Memoria
    In Memoria, the disruptive sounds Jessica hears are a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed.
  17. The Divide
    The characters can be so grating, watching The Divide feels like sticking your head in the garbage disposal. But as unwieldy as the multi-tentacled narrative can be — just think of the logistics required to stage it! — the experience adds up to something unshakeable.
  18. Casablanca Beats
    It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.
  19. Blue Bayou
    Blue Bayou holds little back as it rails against the cruelties and hypocrisies of American immigration law to stirring effect — though this emotional pile-driver of a film could stand to trust more in the undeniable power of its core story.
  20. Between Two Worlds
    The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.
  21. Great White
    Though boasting a few adequate action sequences, and foregoing the more gonzo schlockiness of peer projects like The Meg and Shark Night, the film’s human characters make for drab company, leaving one with little to do but admire the scenery, waiting for dinnertime.
  22. Fear Street Part Three: 1666
    Fear Street Part 3: 1666 isn’t just the best of the Netflix horror trilogy; it also recasts the prior two entries, “1994” and “1978,” in a more favorable light by deepening the mythology and underscoring just how crucial it is to watch all three chapters consecutively.
  23. Gunpowder Milkshake
    Men have been gorging on righteous, blood-splattering pulp action rides like this one for decades, and if women are now looking for the equivalent, Gunpowder Milkshake fits the bill. Its message is that there are a lot of Bills to kill.
  24. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions
    Part of the problem is that since everything is at so incessant a fever pitch, suspense flattens rather than builds, and we don’t care much about characters who spend nearly all their time yelling instructions at each other.
  25. The Story of Film: A New Generation
    There’s room for infinite points of view behind the camera, as well as among those who do the watching. Offering the tools for unpacking potentially challenging movies, Cousins teaches people how to be better spectators — not by telling them the right way to watch, but by encouraging them to engage more deeply with what they see.
  26. How to Deter a Robber
    With low stakes and even lower energy, writer-director Maria Bissell’s feature debut isn’t sure if it’s a thriller with amusing elements or a comedy of criminal absurdity. What it winds up being, therefore, is neither, stuck in a dull middle ground that will please no one.
  27. Casanova, Last Love
    Whatever the truth, there’s nothing in Jacquot’s vision of Charpillon to inspire devotion. There have been other unlikely Casanovas, yet the best of them conveyed not just the man’s charm but a depth of intelligence. Lindon’s downturned eyes have always exuded a world-weariness that fits with his characters, but there’s no spark here, no understanding of the man’s aura.
  28. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    Space Jam: A New Legacy is chaotic, rainbow sprinkle-colored nonsense that, unlike the original, manages to hold together as a movie.
  29. Red Rocket
    Everything in Red Rocket happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours.
  30. Titane
    With Titane, audiences occasionally just have to give themselves over to the movie’s demented momentum, taking whatever perverse pleasure they can from Ducournau’s willingness to push the boundaries
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