Variety's Scores

For 17,757 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:
17757 movie reviews
  1. The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.
  2. While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, The Weight has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement.
  3. Both as drama and as science fiction, In the Blink of an Eye doesn’t probe these questions, but rather, drops definitive answers like anvils, leaving little room to ruminate, wrestle, or consider.
  4. It’s the kind of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves.
  5. None of these elements feel very fresh, least of all in Ward Parry’s formulaic screenplay. But they’re executed with sufficient slick professionalism to make for a passable if unmemorable diversion.
  6. This outstanding debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella organically marries blood-curdling fright with incisive social commentary.
  7. While trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.
  8. There’s real wisdom to Chasing Summer, which Shlesinger and Decker offset with a handful of steamier-than-you’d-expect sex scenes.
  9. Delightfully insightful ... Whatever comes next (and the movie makes a beautiful kind of peace with not knowing), Green has given his subjects an incredible gift: the kind of immortality only cinema can provide.
  10. The intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases.
  11. This long-game project gives remarkable dimension and particularity to the kind of migrant story often only told in journalistic generalities — showing, year on year, how time heals some wounds, opens others, and creates plenty of its own.
  12. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.
  13. A film that mines reserves of tenderness in young female angst and cluelessness with loving empathy.
  14. Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.
  15. Saccharine proves James’ gifts are better served by more independent means, even if it falls short of the emotional and dramatic heft that gave “Relic” equal genre and arthouse appeal.
  16. Sure, the case can be made for this contrast between scatological humor and serious insight working as a mirror for how quickly a person’s reality can shift from joy to sorrow, but the overall effect is puzzling.
  17. What you see in the key art and the first-look impression you get from the teaser and trailers is a clear and accurate indicator of what you’ll get in the film. And for many action movie fans that’ll do just fine.
  18. Although it eventually leans into traditional genre hallmarks, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that makes ingenious use of visual and auditory negative space.
  19. Life has a way of getting complicated when you introduce temptation, and though Union County can be frustratingly simple at times, the stakes are life and death.
  20. Zi
    If the film weren’t so arresting to look at, it could often be absorbed with eyes closed: If its larger message is elusive, Zi advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace.
  21. What’s so much fun about Send Help, beyond its twisted B-movie premise and refreshing disinterest in anything more highfalutin than handing Linda a chance to turn the tables, is how unpredictable it manages to be for most of their time on the island (except for that darn ending).
  22. While some might find it triggering, “Josephine” dares to confront the life-shattering intersection of sex and violence in our culture, facing the toughest of “adult situations” with clear eyes.
  23. The Invite is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.
  24. Hoffman and Wilde’s commitment makes the film feel more important than it is. It’s better to think of this either as pure, irreverent escapism or a guiltless pleasure.
  25. With The History of Concrete, John Wilson takes the least interesting subject imaginable — the dull gray composite used for sidewalks, overpasses and that great big church in “The Brutalist” — and crafts what’s likely to be the most entertaining documentary of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
  26. In short, Carousel is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others.
  27. I actually think The Moment should have pushed further into crackpot satirical extremes. In that case, it wouldn’t have been a movie that featured a “real” version of Charli xcx. But it might have made you laugh more, because it would have been genuinely outlandish rather than just unconvincing.
  28. Its rags-to-riches-to-near-ruin storytelling is simplistic, the celluloid craftsmanship B-grade, the acting nothing to write home about. Still, there’s a sense of a fertile cultural moment being captured for posterity, however routinely.
  29. The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
  30. Substantial ideas underpin all the flippant historical cosplay, as Bezinović — himself a Croatian — ponders D’Annunzio’s reputation on either side of the Italo-Croatian border, and in turn the long-term societal effects of failed despots being either romanticized or forgotten entirely.

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