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. The Turning
    Lacking spine-tingling dread, taut tension, and the deservingly provocative ending needed to make its modern sentiments land, this re-imagining is less than a classic.
  2. John Henry
    Flashes of craft can’t make up for the director’s easy default to gore over story. Forbes and his co-writer knew how they wanted to depict Hell’s sadism but never nailed how to embrace the hero with the hammer.
  3. The Last Full Measure
    No amount of marquee talent, however, can fully compensate for the inert melodrama peddled by this inspired-by-true-events film
  4. Reality Queen!
    It’s very hard to satirize things that are already inherently ridiculous, and mockumentary Reality Queen! has the misfortune of being even more vacuous — not to mention less funny — than the empty-calorie celebrities it parodies.
  5. A Fall from Grace
    A Fall From Grace isn’t consequential moviemaking. This won’t come as a surprise to plenty of Perry’s detractors and maybe Perry doesn’t have to aim for that.
  6. Troop Zero
    Neither reinvents the wheel nor even attempts to redesign it all that much, but at least it gets where it wants to go, thanks in no small part to the work of Allison Janney, Viola Davis, and young actor Mckenna Grace.
  7. VHYes
    The best thing the film has going for it is editor Avner Shiloah’s scrambled channel-surfing assembly, which seldom sticks with any bit long enough for it to get too stale. Still, VHYes feels overextended even at the 66 slim minutes it takes to reach the final credits.
  8. The Wave
    This fever dream feels more derivative than distinctive, entertaining and eventful as it is. Still, it’s a well-cast, well-crafted stab at something offbeat.
  9. Jezebel
    That Jezebel is making its way around the country and will begin streaming is a sign of DuVernay’s pull and her commitment to black creatives. Tiffany’s journey has its ascents and plunges. Perrier and her star keep us caring where it will end: peak or valley?
  10. Dolittle
    What should have been an awe-filled adventure quickly curdles into an awful one, thanks to a pedestrian formula and the filmmakers’ fixation on fart jokes.
  11. La Belle Époque
    In the end, the story’s custom reenactment gimmick may not even have been necessary, so well-written and executed is the personal journey that underlies it.
  12. Bad Boys for Life
    Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bring their A game; they never let us feel as if they’re going through the motions. The marks may be standard issue, but they hit them with fury and flair.
  13. Corpus Christi
    All of this makes for compelling dramatic conflict, and it’s satisfying to watch an impostor shake up the status quo. But there’s also a soap opera-like dimension to Corpus Christi that threatens the more thoughtful aspects of the script.
  14. The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson
    It’s a cheap, unloving death march of a movie — scarcely made more intriguing by the half-cooked theory it posits as to who (or how many) did the deed.
  15. Chhapaak
    As Malti, Indian superstar Deepika Padukone relies less on exceptionally convincing makeup than straight-from-the-heart conviction to give her multifaceted performance the solid ring of truth.
  16. Those Who Remained
    In his sophomore feature, the France-born, Budapest-based helmer (perhaps best known for his prize-winning 2018 short “Chuchotage”) sensitively establishes and sustains an affecting but understated dramatic tone, aided by his superb leads.
  17. Three Christs
    As audiences, we trust filmmakers to do a reasonably accurate job of representing stories based in truth, and we get angry when they take the kind of liberties Avnet and company allow themselves here. As if it weren’t bad enough that Three Christs were boring, it’s impossible to believe, and for that, there is no cure.
  18. The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
    Reid meticulously investigates why Dr. Dagg’s groundbreaking work didn’t quite collect the widespread acclaim that it deserved. Underneath it all lies a heartbreaking tale of a driven woman stifled by institutional misogyny — a fascinating story stunt coordinator-turned-filmmaker Reid patiently approaches from various captivating angles.
  19. The Sonata
    It’s Looks 10, Personality 4, however, as director Andrew Desmond and collaborator Arthur Morin’s screenplay doesn’t quite provide enough incident to properly milk its own premise, making for a supernatural thriller that ends just as it’s beginning to work up a sweat.
  20. Weathering with You
    Shinkai hasn’t gone far enough into fantasy to excuse the enormous holes in his script, though he does a nice job of distracting us with detail.
  21. Amanda
    The film — in tandem with Lacoste’s lovely, unguarded performance — works as a magnified study in coping, charting the stages of his jumpstarted growing-up alongside the more meandering course of his grief.
  22. Vitalina Varela
    Costa’s elongation of time (made more acute since there’s rarely enough light coming from the screen to check your watch) combined with his habit of doling out a few narrative details without exploration, results in a film that distances spectators not already in his thrall.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mystify: Michael Hutchence
    While Mystify in many ways amplifies the tragedy of Hutchence’s death, it also goes a long way toward explaining and humanizing it.
  24. Like a Boss
    Its economic message might be fuzzy. Its feminism, too. But best-friend comedy Like a Boss rides Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrnes’s frisky and believable chemistry to laughs — some worn, some crude, but more than a few delivered deftly and consistently enough to keep audiences smiling if not doubled over.
  25. Underwater
    Underwater is a stupefying entertainment in which every claustrophobic space and apocalyptic crash of water registers as a slick visual trigger, yet it’s all built on top of a dramatic void. It’s boredom in Sensurround.
  26. The Vast of Night
    Patterson trusts that chemistry will compensate for a gentle thriller that chooses to impress with ingenuity and charm instead of special effects.
  27. The Grudge
    The Grudge plods on as if it were something more than formula gunk, cutting back and forth among the thinly written unfortunates who’ve been touched by the curse of that house.
  28. Advocate
    Tsemel’s hard demands on her family and co-workers alike are kept in view: “Advocate” isn’t a bland hagiography, but a textured nonfiction character study of complicated heroism. You can’t challenge the system, after all, without being a bit challenging yourself.
  29. The Informer
    For all The Informer lacks in surface style — shot and scored as it is in functional, straight-to-VOD fashion — it remains a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine.
  30. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
    The great pleasure of these films’ bright, largely wordless slapstick is that it plays universally whilst accommodating all manner of obsessive, idiosyncratic detailing at the edges.
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