Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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 2.4 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. Wild Indian
    Wild Indian doesn’t quite add up, but it heralds an important new voice — not just because of his Native American heritage (although that plays a central role in this project’s concerns), but even more on account of the complexity he’s willing to acknowledge in his characters.
  2. Together Together
    Beckwith puts forth something rare and full of feeling. This is a genuine love story between two straight individuals of the opposite sex that doesn’t involve sex (let’s call it friendship for kicks), an insightful redefinition of masculinity as well as a gentle, intimate celebration of a unique, 21st-century family in the making.
  3. Strawberry Mansion
    Even as their film stretches its flights of fancy past breaking point, there are pleasures to be taken from the blithe, handmade execution of its vision, throwing everything in the pot from creaky animal puppetry to 8-bit effects.
  4. R#J
    Even the most eagle-eyed and engaged viewers might run out of patience with R#J. Thankfully, Williams’ magnificent cast counters the disorder with their confident screen presence and theatrical muscles that stand out within the film’s unique atmosphere.
  5. Misha and the Wolves
    Much of the lure of Misha and the Wolves is that it’s simply a tricky good yarn spun around the unbelievable things that human beings will do. But the movie also, in its way, taps into the soul of an era when fake reality is threatening to dislodge actual reality.
  6. The Cursed
    Horror is most effective when the graphic scares are matched with an emotional dimension, something at which Ellis aims but doesn’t quite arrive — a shortcoming that also undersells the marvels of his first-rate ensemble cast.
  7. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
    A highly satisfying HBO documentary ... that wisely places roughly equal emphasis on how the sausage was made and how the culture was changed.
  8. The Sparks Brothers
    After the 140 minutes of “The Sparks Brothers” zip by like a tight half-hour, even the previously uninitiated may well feel like they’ve known Sparks all along – or at least that they should have.
  9. John and the Hole
    It’s calculated and precise and meticulously constructed in a way that will be of considerable interest to audiences who appreciate stories that unsettle, and those who recognize the precision of Sisto’s approach.
  10. The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet
    It presents details so small they belong under a microscope, and events so large they belong in science fiction; that these chopped fragments can build to an experience so smooth and significant is only because of Katz’s radical re-centering of the drama, away from what happens and onto the life it happens to.
  11. Pleasure
    It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it does to them, and what it’s doing to all of us.
  12. Bliss
    Cahill gets so bogged down in hair-splitting rules and exposition that he loses track of the bigger themes.
  13. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    Somehow, it doesn’t actually seem surprising that Cage would partner with Sono. But the creative choices they make together, from an exploding gumball machine to endangered testicles — well, they must be seen to be believed.
  14. Passing
    This radically intimate exploration of the desperately fraught concept of “passing” — being Black but pretending to be white — ought to be too ambitious for a first-time filmmaker, but Hall’s touch is unerring, deceptively delicate, quiet and immaculate, like that final fall of snow.
  15. Judas and the Black Messiah
    The powerful film puts the current moment into fresh historical context and suggests that ambivalence can be its own form of betrayal.
  16. On the Count of Three
    Carmichael, working from a script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, directs the movie with an aimless sly verve. He roots the combustible melancholia in the everyday.
  17. Mass
    The writing is so deft, and the actors so committed, that by the end you feel you’ve touched the burning core of something real.
  18. Land
    Bless Wright for paring Land down to a beautiful haiku, and for delivering a performance that’s ambiguous and understated in all the right ways.
  19. How It Ends
    Sweet and personal, How It Ends is hardly an entertaining movie, or one that will go down as one of the defining films of these unpredictably strange times. But you can’t really blame the artists for trying to make some therapeutic sense of it all, with a little help from one another.
  20. In the Same Breath
    The film’s form is glancing, exploratory, open to the moment. Yet Nanfu Wang captures things that other documentaries leave out, like the private emotions bred by policies of neglect. And her theme, in the end, is larger than you think. It’s that big governments failed to control the virus because their real investment was in controlling everything else.
  21. In the Earth
    The film feels right in line with the kind of mayhem that Wheatley has been serving up his entire career, including some graphically gory details that are hard to unsee. And in that way, it’s not unlike the pandemic itself, infecting our brains with sick ideas — which, of course, is just what a certain audience wants from a horror movie.
  22. My Favorite War
    The result of a nine-year labor of love from a Norwegian-Latvian team, it combines distinctive cutout animation with family photos and archival footage to forge a look at an authoritarian society through a young girl’s eyes. It also encompasses her eventual realization of the painful history repressed beneath the platitudes and propaganda of her school days.
  23. Earwig and the Witch
    Something’s clearly missing, and the most obvious answer is magic, both on-screen and in the project’s conception.
  24. Flee
    In the end, however we take Amin’s story, the film is an incredibly intimate act of sharing. The question shouldn’t be whether we can trust Amin, but whether he can trust us enough to reveal himself fully. Truth be told, we don’t need to see or know everything to respect the gift of hearing all that he’s been through.
  25. Cryptozoo
    In this zoo, the story may be tame, but the images, and the imagination that releases them, run wild.
  26. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    It’s a music documentary like no other, because while it’s a joyful, cataclysmic, and soulfully seductive concert movie, what it’s really about is a key turning point in Black life in America.
  27. CODA
    Siân Heder, who came up as a writer and story editor on “Orange Is the New Black,” has directed just one previous feature (“Tallulah”), but she’s got the gift — the holy essence of how to shape and craft a drama that spins and burbles and flows.
  28. Censor
    Censor is a stylish calling card for all involved, one that certainly demonstrates an impressive level of directorial control for a debut filmmaker. But that control does sometimes feel like constriction.
  29. Savage State
    A gonzo mashup of gothic melodrama, Wild West survival story, and voodoo-flavored supernaturalism, with a side order of slasher-movie tropes and a sprinkling of kinky sex insinuations.
  30. Finding 'Ohana
    While imperfect and at times predictable, the adventure these filmmakers and performers take us on feels like a warm tropical breeze.
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