Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Longlegs
    How many horror movies can claim to hijack your subconscious? With Longlegs, writer-director Osgood Perkins (“The Blackcoat’s Daughter”) delivers the kind of payoff we sought out as kids, daring ourselves to watch films about boogeymen that made us want to sleep with the lights on.
  2. Hollywoodgate
    The power of documentary filmmaking often lies in discovering seams of humanity running though even the bleakest environments. But the sledgehammer impact of Hollywoodgate comes from director Nash’at peering into the Taliban leadership’s inner circle for a year and finding not even a glimmer of goodness. Finding, in fact, nothing — a terrible emptiness.
  3. Panopticon
    Panopticon may not have quite the all-seeing eye its title implies, but its gaze is piercing and sharp and strange.
  4. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    With “Axel F.,” a parade of watchable clichés (not just retro-cop-thriller clichés but Eddie Murphy clichés) staged by director Mark Molloy in a slovenly utilitarian style, the series comes full circle: the product/schlock of the ’80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix. Welcome to nostalgia minus the soul!
  5. Babysitter
    The film is based on screenwriter Catherine Léger’s play, and perhaps the herky-jerk structure works on stage. On screen, however, it just feels undisciplined, as its Quentin Dupieux-style visual drollery never quite gels with its more obvious, broadly smutty farce.
  6. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    A movingly sincere valentine from a filmmaker now due his own equivalent tributes, shortening the distance between youthful discovery and senior nostalgia.
  7. Kill
    The movie hardly ever turns its gaze out the windows, but the scenery never gets old, since Bhat has a head for creative close-quarters combat.
  8. Kalki 2898 AD
    The aggressively spectacular (and, again, CGI-intensified) action set-pieces are generously plentiful and undeniably thrilling, and the lead players are charismatic enough, or over-the-top villainous enough, to seize and maintain interest.
  9. Family Portrait
    While free-floating and airy in its construction, the film’s deceiving familiarity slowly erodes, morphing into an unsettling, formally astute brain-tickler observing the placid domesticity of an affluent Texas family in their natural habitat.
  10. Confessions of a Good Samaritan
    Despite being a tad too long and a trifle repetitive, the documentary essay “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” from American helmer Penny Lane is a thought-provoking personal investigation into a subject rarely examined: the nature of altruism.
  11. The Vourdalak
    Everything about the film manages to be forward-thinking and old-school at the same time, giving the genre a bite in the neck it might not have wanted but certainly needed.
  12. A Family Affair
    Sadly, the film plays more like an artless quickie than a fully fleshed-out romance.
  13. A Sacrifice
    The result is a movie that ultimately falls short on both suspense and ideas, though it remains watchable enough.
  14. A Quiet Place: Day One
    “Day One” ought to have been the mind-blowing origin story, and instead it’s a Hallmark movie, where everyone seems to have nine lives — not just that darn cat.
  15. MaXXXine
    Ti West is a good filmmaker, but it may be time for him to stop reconfiguring trash. He needs to try embedding A ideas in an A-movie.
  16. The Nature of Love
    The Nature of Love refreshingly centers the female adulterer’s experience, in a richly comic mode.
  17. Ama Gloria
    The considerable power of Ama Gloria lies not in its take on colonial conscience, nor even in its insights into the complex economical and emotional dynamics of the child-nanny bond. It is in its unmatched portrait of one brave little heart, bruised but learning to beat on its own.
  18. Trigger Warning
    Indonesian director Mouly Surya’s well-crafted first English-language feature is too formulaically contrived to qualify as “elevated genre” or to boast the personal stamp of her prior work. Still, it’s an entertaining, pacey action melodrama.
  19. The Exorcism
    The darker the movie gets, the less there is at stake, and the more that Crowe seems to be going through the motions of trying to save not his soul but his career.
  20. I Am: Celine Dion
    Like all things Celine Dion, “I Am” feels intensely personal and sincere, but also managed to within an inch of its life.
  21. Despicable Me 4
    At times, it feels less like a feature than a collection of Looney Tunes-y shorts piled one on top of another.
  22. Jazzy
    At first glance, Jazzy might seem more polished and traditionally structured than its predecessor. But the two films share a proudly scrappy and loose-limbed spirit in their soulful, tranquil pace.
  23. Ultraman: Rising
    The movie winds up having it both ways once too often, to the extent that Ultraman’s fate and the movie’s message are ultimately unclear.
  24. Inside Out 2
    Inside Out 2 is a transporting fable about the desire to fit in, to be validated by the Cool Culture that’s, more and more, our collective seal of approval and success. And while the movie is an enchanting animated ride of the spirit (be prepared for it to help save summer at the box office), it may also be the most poignantly perceptive tale of the conundrums of early adolescence since “Eighth Grade.”
  25. The Kingdom
    It’s like “The Sopranos,” as seen through Meadow’s eyes. And though we’re all familiar with the lesson that the cost of vengeance is a never-ending circle of violence, Colonna’s retelling lands like a bullet in the head.
  26. Sweet Dreams
    It takes place on a sugar plantation, but Ena Sendijarević‘s magnificently composed, eerily satirical Sweet Dreams has something more like acid flowing through its veins.
  27. Tuesday
    There’s something undeniably exciting about Pusić’s vision, which confronts serious subjects with disarming irreverence. But her creative choices are peculiar, to say the least.
  28. I Used to Be Funny
    That convoluted storytelling tack at times threatens to muffle “Funny’s” potent narrative agenda. Yet in the end, this ambitious, imperfect drama does pull off a complex thematic mix.
  29. Starve Acre
    Daniel Kokotajlo‘s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement.
  30. The Watchers
    For a while, The Watchers is a reasonably well-made lost-in-the-woods horror movie, one that draws you in like a puzzle whose rules you need to learn (just as the characters do).
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