Variety's Scores

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For 17,757 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: 9,120 out of 17757
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17757
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17757
17757 movie reviews
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  1. Blue Heron
    Sophy Romvari‘s graceful, singularly heartsore debut feature has a sharp understanding of how memories form and age: Often it’s the incidental, ambient details you recall as vividly as the more significant events at hand.
  2. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    That this highly derivative horror series bottoms out by over-investing in the Warrens — its most reliable creation, the only one that’s undeniably its own — is a sure sign that it is well past its utility.
  3. A House of Dynamite
    It’s easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.
  4. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    Even as The Wizard of the Kremlin flirts with being a movie of ideas, it flits in and out of things. It rarely stays in one place long enough to let us suck in our breath at how Putin’s Russia heralded what may turn out to be the new autocratic world.
  5. The Smashing Machine
    The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavolvian response of triumph out of us. It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way.
  6. The Testament of Ann Lee
    The Testament of Ann Lee is rich in agnostic questioning and bemused human interest, but at such radiant peaks, Fastvold makes believers of us all.
  7. Late Fame
    Kent Jones is a filmmaker who’s deeply and dramatically curious, and that’s a quality he shares with the film’s screenwriter, Samy Burch, who wrote May December.
  8. Ballad of a Small Player
    Ballad of a Small Player looks great, but lacks the fundamental human insight to make it a winner.
  9. Father Mother Sister Brother
    Father Mother Sister Brother is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening.
  10. Preparation for the Next Life
    Thanks to its terrific stars and Liu’s patient direction, which luxuriates in the smallest of gestures, “Preparation” transcends its most predictable beats.
  11. The Summer Book
    Charlie McDowell makes an equally respectful and respectable stab at the task, capturing some of the wistful, soft-sun warmth of Jansson’s writing — though not quite matching its unassuming poetic depths.
  12. Frankenstein
    Technically, “Frankenstein” was made for Netflix, and though the streamer will give it whatever theatrical run it’s contractually obliged to honor, the visual effects weren’t rendered for big-screen consumption. Alexandre Desplat’s baroque score, on the other hand, makes up for it in grandeur.
  13. Hamnet
    Ultimately, the filmmaker invites the world to feel loss in a new way, and in letting go, liberates something fundamental in all of us.
  14. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    The technical side isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, and there’s only limited interest in watching White navigate the icon’s first serious bout of depression. That is, unless one understands just how much that record represents to the next generations of musicians and why.
  15. No Other Choice
    The more chaos descends, the more meticulous Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture.
  16. After the Hunt
    After the Hunt has been made with a fair amount of craft and intrigue, but it’s also a weirdly muddled experience — a tale that’s tense and compelling at times, but dotted with contrivances and too many vague unanswered questions. That’s why, in the end, it’s a less than satisfying movie.
  17. Jay Kelly
    Jay Kelly is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy.
  18. Bugonia
    As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance.
  19. La Grazia
    The movie will not exactly set your pulse racing. It’s staid. But there’s a hum of inspiration to its meditation.
  20. The Truth About Jussie Smollett?
    That this punctuation is, frankly, a little clumsy is also a key part of the experience of this doc, which gathers plenty of raw reporting, but assembles it into a story only as best it can, ultimately undone by the challenges its particular story presents.
  21. Caught Stealing
    Caught Stealing might feel like a break from the “Pi” director’s intensely subjective character portraits, which range from “The Wrestler” to “The Whale,” but in fact, Aronofsky brings us as close to Hank as he has to any of his characters.
  22. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
    Precisely the sort of intelligent, human-scale adult drama audiences insist no one makes anymore.
  23. Ne Zha 2
    What’s remarkable is that even if one fails at grasping in full the plot and its many conflicts, Ne Zha 2 has the power to flood the senses and convince anyone who watches it that they have just witnessed an animated production that holds absolutely nothing back.
  24. Bulk
    Bulk is a stunt that makes even earlier oddball Wheatley works like “A Field in England” look quite conventional by comparison — but there’s more energy and wit in this hybrid of conspiracy thriller, time-bending sci-fi and goofy genre parody than we’ve seen from the director in a while.
  25. The Map That Leads to You
    Hallström’s tender touch and assured knack for leading with character-driven narrative action give the proceedings a grounded sense of naturalism. He and his ensemble finesse the more inevitable aspects so they ring as resonant and don’t feel expected.
  26. The Forbidden City
    The action sequences are well choreographed and intuitive enough to follow, but romance doesn’t work quite the way we might expect, which proves to be yet another of the film’s distinguishing features.
  27. Saint Clare
    Despite a stronger premise this time, “Clare” echoes the filmmaker’s prior feature in remaining on a highly worked surface — one that doesn’t illuminate people and events so much as treats them like decorative pawns in a game whose rules, as well as its casualties, ultimately feel inconsequential.
  28. Before/After
    Though the film is mostly scripted fiction, its leads are two non-professional actors undergoing hair transplant surgery themselves, and the procedures and transformations depicted on screen are their own. That lends proceedings a bracing, candid authenticity, as well as unusually heightened human stakes — the anxieties shown at all stages of the process here are real.
  29. Between the Lights
    The film is perhaps subtle to a fault. The romance is nicely played and the leads have good chemistry, but it’s also fairly polite and restrained.
  30. Night Always Comes
    It’s a compelling tale of increasingly hazardous desperation, even if the star and her fellow-Brit director Benjamin Caron (oth veterans of royalty drama series “The Crown) aren’t necessarily an ideal fit for this very American, down-and-out milieu.
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