Variety's Scores

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For 17,758 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 17758
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17758
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17758
17758 movie reviews
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  1. Spoiler Alert
    Throughout, Spoiler Alert shows a maturity toward modern relationships, whether straight or queer, that’s refreshing and instructive. Unfortunately, too much of the movie simply doesn’t work.
  2. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    By forcing Puss to contemplate his priorities, the sequel more than justifies its own existence, while paving the way for how his path meets the big green guy’s.
  3. A House Made of Splinters
    This is a predominantly observational affair, marked by unusual tenderness and human interest, shot with a camera that feels all but invisible to its subjects — belying the director’s delicate, precise approach to light and framing.
  4. To the End
    To the End keeps its large canvas entertaining and informative. Even so, it preaches enough to the choir that this documentary can hardly serve as an introduction for those belatedly coming to terms with its central issues.
  5. Strange World
    Great as the people and places they explore may be, however, the relatively unimaginative story consigns this gorgeous toon to second-tier status — a notch below director Don Hall’s earlier “Big Hero 6” — instead of cracking the pantheon of Disney classics.
  6. Poker Face
    This Australia-shot mix of intrigue, soap opera, thriller and tearjerker never quite gels, despite enough surface gloss and cast expertise to hold attention.
  7. Bantú Mama
    At once an intimate portrait of a makeshift family and a treatise on motherhood and motherlands, Bantú Mama is a quiet achievement.
  8. Disenchanted
    Obvious in its comedy, at once overblown and undernourished in its fantasy, Disenchanted, at times, is like a kiddified “Don’t Worry Darling” crossed with “Cinderella Strikes Back.” At others, it’s a light show in search of a movie. The visual effects are all swirling sparkles and sprouting vines, but the real problem is that the film has a pandering impersonality, along with the busy skewed logic of a metaverse.
  9. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    The film is meticulously evenhanded and revealing.
  10. A Christmas Story Christmas
    A Christmas Story Christmas is like “A Christmas Story” with a softer center, but at least it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve had a glass of eggnog spiked with Long Island Iced Tea.
  11. Joyland
    Tartly funny and plungingly sad in equal measure, this is nuanced, humane queer filmmaking, more concerned with the textures and particulars of its own intimate story than with grander social statements — even if, as a tale of transgender desire in a Muslim country, its very premise makes it a boundary-breaker.
  12. Slumberland
    Slumberland is stronger at conjuring elaborate dream worlds than it is at crafting a satisfying emotional foundation, which is generally true of Lawrence’s past projects as well.
  13. Capturing the Killer Nurse
    Loughren is a compelling character. So are the cops, and so, in his way, is the documentary’s “star,” who we hear on tape (from Graeber’s extensive interviews with him), and who comes equipped with an earnest explanation for why he killed all those people.
  14. Nothing Lasts Forever
    Kohn has created the rare documentary that transforms the way we understand the world, questioning so many of our core beliefs, including the very notion of what is “real.” Through it all, diamonds won’t lose one iota of their sparkle, but you’ll never look at them the same way again.
  15. Retrograde
    There’s not a dull shot in the entire movie, which is remarkable, considering how little actual action Heineman films.
  16. Falling for Christmas
    Its subversive spirit, female-forward smarts and sweet sentimentality remix the formulaic and festive, making all things merry and bright.
  17. Incredible But True
    Incredible but True is a fun little trinket that unmistakably comes from Dupieux’s far-out perspective, but if you find yourself chiming more than usual with its quixotic quandaries, who’s to say whether that’s because Dupieux has mellowed, or because the past couple of years have driven us all so nuts that now we’re meeting him halfway.
  18. Spirited
    For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much exactly as they’d expect, but that doesn’t mean Spirited can’t still surprise.
  19. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    “Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.
  20. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    Examining the bone-breaking work that being a mother can be, Garza Cervera’s tale is most thrilling for the ways it refuses any tidy answers about a woman’s place and wallows (and finds plenty of terror) in the ambiguities therein.
  21. Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
    It’s far from the first music doc to reveal that it can be lonely at the top, but it is among the few to convey that there are no easy answers for that when mental illness is at the root. Of all the portrayals of pop superstars that have been produced in-house in recent years, “My Mind & Me” is probably the one with the least celebratory third act … which is something to celebrate.
  22. Prey for the Devil
    Rather good actors do indeed keep a straight face, as does the film overall. And Stamm’s jump scares aren’t bad, as they go. He hasn’t made a very suspenseful movie, but he’s avoided both dullness and unintentional laughs.
  23. Terrifier 2
    Terrifier 2 is essentially a series of grotesque homicidal set pieces stitched together into a threadbare narrative of midnight funhouse clichés.
  24. Unicorn Wars
    The visually striking, not-at-all-kid-friendly result is all kinds of wrong: Picture pastel-colored anime bears impaled on the horns of sleek black horses, backlit by raging hot-pink infernos. “The Care Bears” this ain’t, though the comparison can hardly be accidental with this ultra-graphic, Saturday morning cartoon-subverting satire for which irreverent Bronies may well be the ideal audience.
  25. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
    This is a baleful and unfortunate tale; one feels for Granda, who describes his suicidal ideation at one point. But director Billy Corben’s attempts to connect his collision with the boomer-generation Falwells to the broader story of evangelicals in the United States seems at times like a stretch.
  26. Run Sweetheart Run
    Nothing gels, as the film careens from cartoonishness to violent peril to attempted satire to sentimentality and so forth, all of it hyperbolic and inorganic.
  27. Peaceful
    The film is too emotionally blunt not to wring tears (or at least a solid lump in the throat) where required, though they don’t always feel artfully earned. Either way, at over two hours, it’s a long trudge toward an inevitable end.
  28. Scarlet
    Smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work.
  29. Voodoo Macbeth
    Yes, the film overall is more diverting than stirring. Still, there is a good deal more than novelty value going for this group effort.
  30. The Stranger
    The Stranger confirms that Wright has arrived, even if his treatment sometimes feels more oblique and self-consciously arty than the material demands.
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