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. 22 July
    It’s intelligently stern, storm-gray filmmaking, as we’ve come to expect from Greengrass; if it feels a bit mechanical as well, perhaps this is a near-impossible story to film with both tact and soul.
  2. Boarding School
    Boarding School includes an odd mix of narrative elements within a classically Grimm child-endangerment scenario that would work best played as a modern fairy tale. Yet Yakin chooses to pace the film more slowly as a serious drama, which keeps the suspense from building real momentum and exacerbates the script’s implausibilities.
  3. Vox Lux
    Powered in its second half by a riveting performance of fiercely mannered bravado by Natalie Portman, as a kamikaze electropop diva running her Faustian fame off and under the rails, Vox Lux paints a sharp, shellacked portrait of a ghost in the celebrity machine.
  4. Sunset
    The chaos is there but without the coherence necessary to balance sensorial turmoil with genuine meaning.
  5. Free Solo
    For those who love the thrill of high-adrenaline adventure docs, National Geographic’s Free Solo will be a hard experience to top.
  6. What Keeps You Alive
    This thriller about a lesbian couple whose weekend takes a drastic turn is less one-note as a narrative conceit than “It Stains the Sand Red,” though it too ultimately stretches inspiration a tad thin. Nonetheless, it’s an entertaining and well-crafted effort.
  7. Dragged Across Concrete
    At a whopping 158 minutes, “Concrete’s” sleek, languorous anatomy of a heist represents the filmmaker’s most extreme exercise yet in painstaking genre deceleration, sparked as ever by the tangy movie-movie vernacular of his writing, the crunchy metal-on-asphalt dynamism of his craftsmanship, and the back-from-the-brink reanimation of his stars.
  8. At Eternity's Gate
    Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy.
  9. The Front Runner
    Hugh Jackman proves an inspired candidate to embody Hart, downplaying his brawny movie-star persona, while still conveying the twinkle-eyed sex appeal that was not only Hart’s undoing, but one of the qualities that would have made the photogenic and well-spoken senator from Colorado a logical choice to follow the country’s first movie-star president.
  10. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    It’s the human side of the character that makes this McCarthy’s best performance to date, revealing haunting insights into friendship, loneliness, and creative insecurity.
  11. Boy Erased
    Edgerton shows an admirable sense of restraint, even when hitting all the usual beats. He includes moments of quiet introspection for the characters and the audience alike.
  12. Destroyer
    Kidman has always been a chameleon, but in this case, she doesn’t merely change her color (or don a fake nose, à la “The Hours”); she disappears into an entirely new skin, rearranging her insides to fit the character’s tough hide.
  13. Ray & Liz
    Ray & Liz is formally arresting and rigorous, though not at the expense of its direct emotional force.
  14. MDMA
    None of the sizzle is as compelling as this character study of a young woman who confesses that her only childhood companion was the TV.
  15. The Sisters Brothers
    I enjoyed the film as far is it goes, especially John C. Reilly’s straight-shooter performance, yet I also found myself, at certain points, growing impatient with it.
  16. Suspiria
    Suspiria has been made with enough skill to get inside your head, but enough ominous pretension to leave you scratching it.
  17. Peterloo
    When Peterloo’s unaligned fingers form a fist, for a punching, unyielding, robustly choreographed finale of rage against the right-wing machine, the film makes good on its most taxing demands.
  18. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    It says more about the man behind it than any documentary to date, cut together with such a supreme understanding and care for its subject that director Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) seems half-justified in suggesting that his project may as well be the missing film.
  19. The Old Man & the Gun
    People don’t forget a performer like Redford, whose movie-star charisma idles low and sexy like a Harley Davidson motor even when he’s not doing anything, and that means a movie like David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun — a dapper, low-key riff on the bank-robber genre — can play things soft, counting on Redford’s charm to fuel the show.
  20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    Since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing. Yet The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie.
  21. A Star Is Born
    Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet.
  22. Non-Fiction
    This story of two couples dealing with change in their personal and professional lives, so packed with intellectual sparring, gets progressively lighter as it moves along, acknowledging the primacy of human interaction (foibles and all) over doctrine.
  23. Reprisal
    Reprisal is not a very good movie, but it leaves you with tantalizing hints that some people involved with it are capable of doing something much better.
  24. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.
  25. Let the Corpses Tan
    Even if the rewards are limited, the technique is impeccable.
  26. Inventing Tomorrow
    Inventing Tomorrow won’t win points for originality, but this snapshot of adolescent ingenuity and innovation, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, nonetheless proves equally entertaining and inspiring.
  27. Destination Wedding
    Destination Wedding barely holds together as a coherent film. It’s too callous for coos, too chipper to examine the dark corners of the soul. Yet it works as a valentine to old-fashioned star power — two modern legends, older if no wiser, daring the audience to somehow love them for all their faults, and on that level, somehow succeeding.
  28. The Laws of Thermodynamics
    The final result is a curiosity, sure, but a cute, quick-witted one, with much (maybe too much) on its mind.
  29. The Favourite
    It’s a perfectly cut diamond of a movie — a finely executed, coldly entertaining entry in the genre of savage misanthropic baroque costume drama.
  30. Kin
    The results are, in artistic terms, a modest success. In commercial terms, it’s a dicier prospect — viewers expecting the kind of bigger-budget spectacle that typically ensues when a screen teenager stumbles into sci-fi situations may be befuddled by what’s primarily a medium-scaled road trip drama with thriller elements … and a very special ray gun.
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