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. Man Finds Tape
    Hall and Gandersman compel enough interest to pull viewers through, even if they may find the fadeout less than satisfying.
  2. A Sad and Beautiful World
    For his evocative and wistful romance to yield its intended effect, writer-director Cyril Aris’ biggest ask of the viewer is to surrender to the serendipitous nature of the couple’s connection — a request that is later supported with a concept that expands the film’s magical realist vein. Contrived by design, the premise eventually earns enough goodwill for one to play along.
  3. Little Trouble Girls
    This is a striking statement of intent from its Slovenian writer-director — there’s an airy delicacy here that invites comparisons to early Céline Sciamma, but with its own raw, restless edge.
  4. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness. No, the movie isn’t dumb fun. It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film.
  5. Marty Supreme
    One of the year’s few masterpieces.
  6. Zootopia 2
    These movies are comedies first and crime-film homages second, but it’s their tertiary value as social commentary that makes the franchise so indispensable: Behind the laughs are teachable moments.
  7. Happy Holidays
    Copti and cinematographer Tim Kuhn shoot each interaction with an up-close, handheld intimacy that not only magnifies the subtle, powerful performances of the cast (many of them first-time actors), but welcomes the viewer into each scene, as though it were a complicated family reunion.
  8. Cutting Through Rocks
    The film’s irascible but deeply principled subject — thirty-something divorcee Sara Shahverdi — gives the film its energy, though its lulls aren’t quite as purposeful. However, despite feeling drawn-out, the doc features occasional bursts of visual panache that help emphasize its underlying story.
  9. Wicked: For Good
    The emotions are real; everything else is movie magic, representing where we now stand — at the apex of artificiality — for better or worse.
  10. The White House Effect
    Engrossing as well as damning.
  11. Newport & the Great Folk Dream
    Newport & the Great Folk Dream is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power.
  12. Come See Me in the Good Light
    Come See Me in the Good Light, is very good on the existential. But Gibson and Falley are even more generous in sharing their journey through the medical morass.
  13. Keeper
    The mood is low-key and naturalistic, yet a streak of trippy weirdness keeps intruding. And here’s the thing: The weird parts don’t add up. That’s likely by design, but that doesn’t make it good.
  14. The Alabama Solution
    The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.
  15. Belén
    Belén might never regain the vivid rage and terror of its opening minutes, but Fonzi’s film ends up carrying viewers on its own wave of pride and upright conviction, ultimately delivering the hope its promises
  16. Sarah's Oil
    The period detail is impressive, the storytelling is engrossing, and the overall impact is pleasantly enjoyable.
  17. Violent Ends
    Writer-director John-Michael Powell maintains a likably low-key interest in the local flavor of his home state, but it’s small potatoes in terms of personality. His self-serious approach proves a terminal match for his crime yarn’s familiar, simplistic plotting.
  18. The Running Man
    It hangs together and mostly obeys the rules of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet it’s clear that what drew Wright to the project was his infatuation with the sci-fi sociology of a retro-future USA.
  19. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.
  20. Tyler Perry's Finding Joy
    It’s Perry’s version of a holiday movie and a connect-the-dots love story, but it’s cliché-driven in such a minimal way that it almost makes you yearn for the Perry movies that can feel like a long night of channel surfing all rolled into one.
  21. I Wish You All the Best
    The pleasant, polished drama provides a compassionate take on a high schooler undergoing considerable change, its only debit being the arguably too-neat depiction of that transitional circumstance.
  22. The Plague
    Drawn from experience and benefiting from some standout performances among its well-selected young cast, The Plague has a familiar coming-of-age narrative, but stranger, subtler undercurrents of creeping dismay at the men these boys will become when, at this formative age, cruelty chlorinates the water they swim in.
  23. Selena y Los Dinos
    This definitive doc about Selena feels comprehensive and illuminating, thanks to candid family interactions found in home movies from their earliest performances at their restaurant, recordings of local Texas TV station appearances, and eventually images captured on the road while traveling in a makeshift tour bus.
  24. The Currents
    This is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction
  25. Cactus Pears
    It eventually takes on radiant form, with emotional complexities born out of characters walking around the truth, if only because euphemisms are the only language they have.
  26. Predator: Badlands
    In the end, “Badlands” is about the value of teamwork and learning that “alpha” and “apex” don’t mean the same thing where Predators are concerned.
  27. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
    Hassona is both fashionable and immensely talented (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the more we see of her over the movie’s 110 minutes, the more devastating it becomes that we will never meet her, or never truly get to know her.
  28. The Wrecker
    This tale of mob-related malfeasance and solo vengeance in Vegas is slick but thoroughly ridick. However, it’s pacy and colorful enough that those in the mood for a deep-fried knuckle sandwich with extra cheese may have fun.
  29. Hedda
    Not everyone knows Ibsen going in, but that needn’t diminish the satisfaction of watching “Hedda Gabler” so vividly reinvented.
  30. Stitch Head
    Stitch Head, while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to.
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