Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. Boogie
    Boogie is most assured when focusing on specific Chinese American routines, rituals and mindsets, yet it falters when crafting its larger portrait of Boogie’s predicament. Huang’s script routinely indulges in leaden exposition to get its message, as well as character details and dynamics, across.
  2. I'm Your Man
    Taking inspiration from a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky, Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg serve up a rich panoply of questions, answers and stray ideas. Rarely are these assembled into neat combinations, even if the script veers too far into thematic explication in the final third.
  3. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
    A simple premise can serve as a portal to profound social critique, for those willing to take the plunge.
  4. Chaos Walking
    When it comes to confrontations, the movie wimps out, putting more effort into New World-building than in the largely generic characters who populate it.
  5. Drift Away
    Beauvois brings everything together in the movie’s final minutes, although it’s hard to shake the feeling that Drift Away has dodged what should have been its central social concern. Renier, a former child actor who began his career a quarter-century ago in the Dardenne brothers’ “La Promesse,” only gets better with age.
  6. Sophie Jones
    The cinematic catharsis the Barrs and company have carefully crafted stands as a fully realized portrait of grief that’s universal in its texture. By focusing on living with the specter of grief and the discovery of its blessings, the filmmakers highlight the human struggle, breaking through to the gutting truth of the matter.
  7. Safer at Home
    Will Wernick’s film not only fails to use that format in clever or suspenseful ways, it blows the basics of maintaining plausibility and viewer interest.
  8. Hope
    Sødahl’s skill at making gesture and its absence count in the most subtle ways is an essential component in our investment with these protagonists, thanks to the superbly understated camerawork of Lars von Trier’s regular DP Manuel Alberto Claro.
  9. Moxie
    It’s a welcome entry into a familiar genre that will resonate with young audiences burdened by the unwritten rules of their respective educational institutions. And that’s thanks in large part to an immensely likable ensemble cast guided by Poehler’s sure-handed energy behind the camera, as well as the film’s ambitious aims to be intersectional in its social and political themes.
  10. Raya and the Last Dragon
    A lot of the storytelling is clumsy, rushed or inelegant, but the movie’s timely message of unity and trust still resonates because the filmmakers figured out such a satisfying ending — albeit one that ties things up a little too neatly: so much world-building in service of a one-off. Is this overloaded origin story really the last we’ll see of “The Last Dragon”?
  11. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is a capricious and touching surrealist kiddie ride that, in its sugar-high way, is as much a celebration of friendship as the “Toy Story” films.
  12. A First Farewell
    Told mostly through the eyes of primary school-aged characters, “Farewell” operates firstly as a film that can be deemed as suitable for children, while also offering plenty for adult audiences to read between the lines.
  13. Tom & Jerry
    No, Tom & Jerry won’t be winning any Oscars, even if Hanna-Barbera shorts in which they starred racked up seven during the series’ 1940-58 run. But it’s good enough to go down easy.
  14. Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry
    I’d call it a deftly sincere and canny portrait, one that works precisely because it takes the time to sweat the small stuff.
  15. Cherry
    There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.
  16. Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art
    Made You Look is a lively and fascinating stranger-than-fiction art-world doc, and what drives it are two essential mysteries: Who could have created fake paintings that looked this astonishing? And even then, how could all the experts have been fooled?
  17. The Obituary of Tunde Johnson
    The cumulative assassinations begin to ache like a mysterious bruise, making the audience feel the psychic weight of living in fear. Yet, the style of the film is more teen soap opera than vérité miserablism.
  18. Shepherds and Butchers
    Dowds’ harrowed, haunted performance as a boy overwhelmed not just by the wolves to which he has been thrown, but the ones he claims have unconsciously emerged within him, gives the film its anxious emotional center.
  19. Silk Road
    A fervently topical, at times intriguing, but ultimately rather sketchy drama about the online black market.
  20. Mafia Inc
    Somewhat fictionalizing a few elements from that decades-spanning exposé, Mafia Inc isn’t the most stylistically flamboyant, violent or memorable specimen within its screen genre. But it does provide an engrossing thicket of criminal intrigue that ultimately comes down to a conflict between two families.
  21. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    This is gripping stuff, to be sure, yet the movie, volatile as it is, lacks a full dramatic center and the momentum that would flow out of it.
  22. Sin
    Neither glowing hagiography nor gritty apologia, Sin wallows instead in Michelangelo’s melancholy, his vanity and later his paranoia.
  23. Test Pattern
    Test Pattern — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages just outside the door.
  24. I Blame Society
    Aside from all its other virtues, this film is a truly inspiring example of committing to the bit.
  25. Flora & Ulysses
    Pudi plays officer Miller like one of the cocky cops from “Reno 911!” laughably tough-acting behind his tinted aviator specs. He’s effectively a human cartoon character in a movie that’s most appealing when it shifts over to hand-drawn comic frames, and silly as much of the mayhem is, Khan deserves credit for translating such slapstick to live action.
  26. Adverse
    The very best thing in the entire movie is Rourke’s surprisingly affecting and consistently riveting portrayal of Kaden as a melancholy monster who is at once painfully self-aware and unapologetically amoral.
  27. A Writer's Odyssey
    “Odyssey” is packed with stunning sights including a 50-ft., four-armed CGI villain but is let down by a script that fails to fashion promising story elements into a consistently compelling whole.
  28. Sator
    Anyone can pull off a jump scare or three. Graham immediately manages the considerably more difficult task of conjuring a mood of general dread, suffusing ordinary settings with supernatural unease.
  29. Willy's Wonderland
    Willy’s Wonderland has the garish stop-and-go rhythm of an ’80s slasher film, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a gorefest to relax into with a can of Punch (or something stronger).
  30. Twilight's Kiss
    Strong performances by veterans Tai Bo and Ben Yuen make the protagonists’ struggle concrete and affecting.
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