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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Babylon
    Like the reggae music that pulses through it, Babylon is rich, rough and real. And like the streetlife of the young black Londoners it portrays, it’s threatening, touching, violent and funny. This one seems to explode in the gut with a powerful mix of pain and pleasure.
  2. Captain Marvel
    Boden and Fleck are low-key American neorealists, and in Captain Marvel they barely retain a vestige of their signature style. Yet they have brought off something exciting, embracing the Marvel house style and, within that, crafting a tale with enough tricks and moods and sleight-of-hand layers to keep us honestly absorbed.
  3. The Wedding Guest
    What’s lacking is personality from the human characters, which is a serious failing, considering how the film shifts into character mode as Apte slowly emerges as an equal to Patel, while both remain too guarded for audiences to fully appreciate as people.
  4. Giant Little Ones
    The story is somewhat predictable in its beats, and arrives at a free-at-last conclusion that’s not entirely convincing. But the Sault Ste. Marie-shot film is ultimately ingratiating and slickly crafted enough to rise above those limitations.
  5. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
    A Madea Family Funeral isn’t good, exactly, but it’s Perry good. It combines weaponized comedy and sexualized soap opera in a way that defuses all shame.
  6. Something
    Something has a few observations to make about the perils of contemporary parenthood, but instead of whipping them into tension it douses them in catch-as-catch-can thriller vagueness.
  7. Duke
    The film sustains more than enough dramatic tension from scene to scene to keep a viewer intrigued, despite the sporadic fuzziness of motivation and plot specifics.
  8. Saint Judy
    Monaghan radiates a winning measure of defiant resilience and dignity, even when she and her illustrious co-stars are reduced to mouthpieces for political sentiments (as in Common’s censure of ICE) — which is depressingly often.
  9. The Cannibal Club
    Guto Parente’s eighth feature is a mixed bag: a diverting, stylish, but ultimately rather trite satire whose social critique and grand guignol aspects never quite come to a full boil.
  10. Greta
    Falls squarely in B movie territory but, by virtue of its two lead performers, winds up being far more enjoyable than it has any right to be.
  11. The Wandering Earth
    Director Frant Gwo’s adaptation of the 2000 novella by Liu Cixin is no genre classic, but its furious pace, spectacular visuals, and fanciful plot deliver decent escapist entertainment.
  12. The Iron Orchard
    The narrative itself, however, is not without its bumpy stretches. The Iron Orchard is satisfyingly involving and entertaining as a whole — call it “Giant Lite” and you won’t be far off the mark — and the performances are sufficiently compelling to ease a viewer through some abrupt and elliptical transitions.
  13. Hail Satan?
    The Satanic Temple’s combination of shock tactics and anti-discrimination lawsuits is check-and-mate against America creeping towards a Christian theocracy.
  14. Mega Time Squad
    Fast-paced, determinedly silly, with sharp slangy dialogue and funny situations (particularly once we arrive at the ace sight gag of a half-dozen Johns stirring chaos), the film hits just the right absurdist notes to sustain its joke.
  15. The Aftermath
    The result is attractive and diverting, as any well-appointed film starring these actors in mouthwatering period finery could hardly fail to be — though for a story about people rebuilding their lives through grievous personal loss and moral torment, it’s hard not to wonder if its vast reserves of enviable knitwear are counting for more than they should.
  16. So Long, My Son
    Utterly wrenching.
  17. The Brink
    The Brink is an impeccably crafted verité ramble — an engaging and enraging, disturbing and highly revealing movie.
  18. Temblores
    This strong second feature from Guatemalan talent Jayro Bustamante doesn’t ask new questions, but its sensuous, reverberating atmospherics find fresh, angry ways to answer them.
  19. Varda by Agnès
    Slight as a Varda film, but shot through with its maker’s characteristic pluck and whimsy, Varda by Agnès gives her newly recruited fans everything they’ve come to see.
  20. Synonyms
    Breathtaking in the way it careens from one scene to the next in a whirlwind of personal and political meaning all but impossible to grasp in full measure, the film is an excoriation of Israel’s militant machismo and a self-teasing parody of Parisian stereotypes, embodied by actor Tom Mercier in this astonishingly audacious debut.
  21. The Plagiarists
    Wilfully student-video amateurish in form, but impishly sophisticated in content, a gleeful cultural curiosity fairly crackles off The Plagiarists, and it is highly contagious.
  22. Piranhas
    To watch young people fall into old patterns is still to watch those old patterns, and the film cannot escape the familiarity of its archetypal, rise-to-power, fall-from-grace narrative.
  23. Out Stealing Horses
    This is a film with a mature, heartbroken understanding of how we hold onto things.
  24. The Operative
    A proficient but unsurprising espionage thriller from Israeli writer-director Yuval Adler that offers another well-fitted showcase for Diane Kruger’s stern resolve as a performer.
  25. Mr. Jones
    As drama, Mr. Jones sometimes struggles to get out of its own way, but its message still lands with concrete force.
  26. Light of My Life
    Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.
  27. The Kindness of Strangers
    Too much of the kindness in “Strangers” feels sentimentally story-dictated rather than born of profound human observation, leaving you with mild, woolly good feeling but little to contemplate or chew on.
  28. I Was at Home, But
    I Was at Home, But… works as a mood piece in the truest sense of the term: once you stop trying to logically assemble the narrative and submit instead to its clashing, enveloping currents of feeling, they form a persuasive story of their own.
  29. Gully Boy
    A Bollywood movie about a rapper from the slums may sound derivative, but what does that matter when “Gully Boy” revels in high-wattage screen chemistry and an inclusive social message, all served up in a slickly enjoyable production showcasing Ranveer Singh’s many charms?
  30. The Golden Glove
    The Golden Glove may not celebrate its subject, but the intimate examination it offers him is itself a privilege — one for which this ugly, unenquiring film scarcely makes a case.
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