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. The Blackening
    The Blackening is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere.
  2. The Catholic School
    The Catholic School is about a landmark event that stunned a society, changed Italian rape law, and apparently blighted the lives of all who knew the killers, but it’s strangely uninterested in the two people for whom truly, after that summer, nothing would be the same.
  3. The Listener
    Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, The Listener plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era.
  4. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
    Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality.
  5. Milli Vanilli
    As a documentary, Milli Vanilli brings off something at once strategic, artful, and humane: It presents what happened to Milli Vanilli so that we empathize directly with these two young men who were drawn, like sacrificial virgins, into the pop maelstrom.
  6. Stan Lee
    Stan Lee is a fan-service documentary released by Disney+ (it drops on June 16), yet it’s very well-made, and watching it you’re confronted with a revelation: that the comic books that Lee began to create in 1961 didn’t just mark a seismic break with the comic books of the past.
  7. Users
    In her voiceover, Almada, who has made one fiction feature but mostly works in documentary form, shuffles through half-formed ideas too randomly to gather these scattered wonders into an identifiable thesis.
  8. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
    Using horror to satirize systemic racial failures in American society is a bold goal, but with its unbelievable final resolution, the film falters somewhat in execution.
  9. Will-o'-the-Wisp
    Rampantly horny and unapologetically silly, Will-o’-the-Wisp appeals to more primal desires and thought processes in its audience, even as it repurposes a Greta Thunberg speech or references the racially charged work of 18th-century Portuguese painter José Conrado Roza.
  10. The Flash
    The trouble with The Flash is that as the film moves forward, it exudes less of that “Back to the Future” playfulness and more of that mythological but arbitrary blockbuster self-importance.
  11. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    There’s a bombast built into the material, but let it be said that the “Transformers” movies have been transformed. They’re no longer the kind of fun you have to hate.
  12. Concerned Citizen
    With its piercing, probing final moments, which turn self-flagellating into thorny cathartic territory, Haguel has crafted an intimate portrait of privilege that’s as damning as it is discomfiting.
  13. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    They’ve done it. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t just extend the tale of Miles Morales. The film advances that story into newly jacked-up realms of wow-ness that make it a genuine spiritual companion piece to the first film. That one spun our heads and then some; this one spins our heads even more (and would fans, including me, have it any other way?).
  14. Elemental
    There’s poetry and soul here, but both are watered down by how much the movie seems to be multitasking. With Pixar, sincerity is elemental. The rest risks distracting from what really matters.
  15. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    This is challenging but seductive art cinema that invites comparisons to such titans as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang and even Theo Angelopoulos, without feeling derivative of any.
  16. The Animal Kingdom
    “The Animal Kingdom” isn’t a traditional genre movie so much as a coming-of-age story with a creature-feature twist — picture a moody French “Teen Wolf,” minus the laughs. ... Stumble even for a moment, and the whole movie could feel silly, which is what makes the fact that it works all the more remarkable.
  17. The Old Oak
    Ebla Mari, the actor who plays Yara, makes Yara’s despair over her missing and possibly murdered father, and her agony at having had to abandon her country, incredibly layered and precise. Her performance doesn’t allow us to phone in our empathy.
  18. The Boogeyman
    Savage’s confidence behind the camera sustains the film’s intensity even when the connective tissue between plot and theme, logic and tone is tenuous at best. But even working alongside sturdy collaborators like Messina and young Blair, it’s Thatcher who sells the improbable reality of an old-as-time spirit preying upon the frightened and grieving.
  19. La Chimera
    [Rohrwacher] offers all her earthly and otherworldly preoccupations in scattered, bejeweled fragments, for us to gather and assemble and interpret — and doesn’t much mind if some pieces stay buried.
  20. The Wrath of Becky
    The Wrath of Becky is entertaining enough. But perhaps inevitably, with its heroine grown to near-adulthood, the novelty is a bit dulled now.
  21. Last Summer
    It proves most daring in the ways the film departs from its more conventionally moralistic source, and especially in Breillat’s refusal to call either party a parasite.
  22. Anselm
    More a portrait of Kiefer’s work than a standard biographical study of Kiefer himself, “Anselm” is a very particular study of a singular man’s soul, told through images of his oeuvre, augmented by sensational use of archive rendered in 3D.
  23. Youth (Spring)
    Youth (Spring) uses the workshops of Zhili City to illustrate — again and again, to the point of dulling its impact — the desolate truth that in the lower echelons of China’s industrial sector, youth is not wasted on the young. It is methodically ripped from them, day by day, seam by seam, stitch by stitch.
  24. The Taste of Things
    Food is the subject, the objective and the driving motor of this scantly plotted but utterly captivating love story.
  25. Perfect Days
    This beguiling film may trade in the tranquil security of routine, but makes an occasional, heart-quickening case for the unexpected.
  26. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    Solid, stately and — like the collapsing Papal States of the Italian Peninsula in the late 1800s — just a little too tradition-bound for its own good.
  27. Fallen Leaves
    It’s a nice but exceedingly minor movie. It leaves little imprint.
  28. A Brighter Tomorrow
    Giovanni may be the main character of A Brighter Tomorrow — a conceit shamelessly lifted from Fellini’s “8 1/2” — but Moretti pokes fun at himself, privileging other characters’ points of view as well.
  29. Club Zero
    What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.
  30. About My Father
    Maniscalco hasn’t quite proven he can carry a movie that’s not inspired by or “about” him, but this first effort is charming and earnest enough to encourage viewers to meet him where he’s currently at in his career.
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