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. Dilili in Paris
    In its native France, “Dilili” was released in stereoscopic 3D, which may have helped things look less wooden, but it feels as if the director stuck to a style that works well in silhouette — where characters typically appeal in profile, and bend only at elbow, knee and waist. In any case, it hurts the brain, which is clearly the opposite of what Ocelot intended.
  2. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    “Memory” captures the hypnotic layers of history and meaning that were folded into the shock value of “Alien.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    Perry Henzell emerges a director with a solid visual flair who can mix action and inchoate rage sans excess to give the film a taut pacing and use the local color and a basically predictable tale with a few new twists.
  4. The Pretenders
    While the film’s sense of experimentation carries a fair amount of intrigue, it traps its central threesome in an Easter egg-filled intellectual exercise punctuated by melodramatic strokes. It’s skillful enough to tickle the mind and the emotions but not effective enough to fully engage them.
  5. Cuck
    Cuck is powerful so long as we’re simply trapped observing Ronnie’s all-too-palpable incomprehension and childlike tantrums over his dead-end circumstances. But when those circumstances start to feel rigged, the film’s value as analysis of a hot-button social phenomenon begins to cool.
  6. Monos
    A sublimely crafted saga about child soldiers discovering their own hearts of darkness in an unnamed, untamed Latin American wilderness, Monos presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.
  7. The Day Shall Come
    The title suggests that the revolution Moses is praying for will someday arrive, but that shouldn’t be nearly as scary to Americans as the fact that his own government is trying to push people like him over the edge. That day is already here.
  8. The Irishman
    Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.
  9. Sister Aimee
    Unfortunately, the invention on display is of a helter-skelter variety, as Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann’s film so madly lurches about in search of a tone that it feels like the first draft of a gonzo faux-biopic.
  10. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
    Prosaically straightforward but consistently interesting portrait of the maverick research scientist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine.
  11. Bliss
    Whether classified as straight-up genre piece or substance-abuse drama in disguise, this is a dive into psychedelic hedonism that succeeds in constantly topping itself, rather than succumbing to shock-value fatigue like the aforementioned Noé joints.
  12. The Death of Dick Long
    The distinguishing quality of its jokey, can-you-believe-this? tone is that the two millennial hayseeds at its center are so richly incompetent that they seem to be inventing a new low place on the totem pole of backwoods idiocy.
  13. Gemini Man
    Gemini Man is a case in which an awful lot of effort has gone into making an awfully lazy action movie.
  14. Black and Blue
    Black and Blue feels imbalanced and overlong, favoring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.
  15. The Disappearance of My Mother
    The Disappearance of My Mother is a successful piece of documentary filmmaking inasmuch as it’s entertaining and dextrously crafted. But its precise intent is unclear.
  16. The Times of Bill Cunningham
    The Times of Bill Cunningham is only 74 minutes long, yet it’s a snapshot of a life that leaves you grateful for having encountered it.
  17. In My Room
    In My Room presents and accepts its partial apocalypse with unquestioning calm — an extreme contrivance that merely enables an elegant, exacting character study.
  18. In the Shadow of the Moon
    The dedicated entertainment junkie now has more options than ever before. So if you’re wondering which logy, derivative, visually pedestrian piece of made-for-Netflix pulp you should avoid at all costs this week, it would be hard to top In the Shadow of the Moon.
  19. Promare
    Every bit as loud and ambitious as one might expect from a visual artist with such a hyperactive imagination, sci-fi action-adventure Promare checks all the conventional anime boxes — post-apocalyptic setting, mecha suits and plenty of fan service — but it’s still an exciting watch.
  20. Bloodline
    Well acted (though Garriga doesn’t quite make a coherent character out of Lauren, or create believable marital chemistry with Scott), this is a smooth movie that maybe should have been a little less tidy for maximum impact.
  21. Running with the Devil
    The result isn’t exactly a docudrama indictment like “Traffic,” a thriller a la “Sicario,” a plea for innocent victims, or a Tarantino-esque bloody crime comedy. Rather, Running With the Devil is all the above, confidently blending together many narrative and tonal elements into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
  22. Zeroville
    Franco has a truly radical streak in him, and considering how poorly the movie functions as a traditional crowdpleaser, he might as well have gone all out and pushed Zeroville to whatever event horizon the deranged project called for. His mistake wasn’t trying to adapt Erickson’s novel at all, but attempting to turn it into a tragic romance between Vikar and Soledad.
  23. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
    Between Two Ferns: The Movie has some laughs, but it’s essentially the tossed-together version of a hangout movie. It’s a roast served at room temperature.
  24. Send Me to the Clouds
    Bold by mainland standards for presenting a positive portrayal of a woman who’s chosen neither motherhood nor marriage, “Clouds” marks an impressive feature debut for female writer-director Teng Congcong.
  25. Always in Season
    This film offers an engrossing mix of history, investigation and activism.
  26. Rambo: Last Blood
    Here, it’s the screenwriters, not the cartel, who should be held accountable for conjuring a virginal relative only to violate and degrade her.
  27. The Song of Names
    It’s a fatally old-fashioned and lugubrious historical drama, muting the emotional payoff it labors so hard to deliver.
  28. The Kingmaker
    Marcos’ print-the-legend philosophy has particular resonance in a post-truth world, although such sinister undertones sneak up on audiences in a movie that begins, innocently enough, as the latest of Greenfield’s astonishing portraits of wealth run amok.
  29. Guns Akimbo
    This undeniably slick, energetic contraption plays somewhere between grating and numbing.
  30. Human Capital
    This “Capital” succeeds as a well-acted crisscrosser of a melodrama between two awkwardly entangled families in upstate New York. Where it falls well short is in attaining the level of biting social commentary Virzi drew from the same material.
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