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. Meeting the Beatles in India
    There’s some fan value here, all spiritual quests aside, in seeing how accepting the individual Beatles could be of someone they could have taken as an interloper in their lofty midst. Maybe that’s the revelation, then: Sweet, the Beatles.
  2. Yellow Rose
    Like Andrew Ahn’s “Driveways” earlier this year, Yellow Rose is ultimately a film about kindness. The world can be cruel, but the film’s characters tend not to be. Group those movies with Sundance prize-winner “Minari,” and audiences have three terrific indies about growing up Asian in America — although this is the only one that sets the experience to music.
  3. Books of Blood
    With a certain kind of horror, a laugh’s as good as a scream, and Books of Blood delivers plenty of the former.
  4. Siempre, Luis
    Siempre, Luis winds up sidelining the bulk of Luis’ life to focus disproportionately on a recent achievement: his part, alongside that of his son, in bringing “Hamilton” to a Puerto Rican audience. The perky but lopsided result isn’t particularly revelatory on either front, and so relentlessly glowing that it’s hard not to feel some of Luis’ political expertise at play.
  5. The Lie
    The Lie is far from a total success, but it has enough tension and talent to make you hope that Blumhouse keeps aiming a quiet thriller or two at adults.
  6. Totally Under Control
    Subsequent docs will surely tell a different story, after survivors have risen up and confronted the individual they deem responsible — and Gibney et al. want this film to be instrumental in that solution.
  7. Hubie Halloween
    Director Steve Brill (another regular Sandler ally) keeps a lot of colorful balls in the air, even if the pacing is lumpier than you’d like in an enterprise this sketchy: Set pieces and one-off visual gags are simply stuffed in wherever they fit, like the cinematic equivalent of Hubie’s over-decorated Halloween front yard.
  8. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    The movie does get some zingers in there, and it balances the humor with some nicely atmospheric creepy small town vibes (courtesy of DP Natalie Kingston), but the tone is all over the place and a far cry from the “Fargo”-y Coen brothers feel Cummings seems to be going for.
  9. Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Yet Red, White and Blue mostly lacks the gritty period flavor of the other Small Axe films. It’s a little glossed over. The (minor) daring of the movie is its downbeat narrative. It’s structured like the air seeping out of a tire, so that it presents us with a character of idealistic strength, commitment, and personal heroism only to plop him into a set of circumstances that won’t allow him to be a hero.
  10. Death of Me
    Bousman’s film pulls off some effectively nasty jolts and jabs: its feverish, whispery, eventually shrieking island-of-lost-souls claustrophobia may be rooted in cliché, but cliché takes root for a reason.
  11. Sno Babies
    It’s the casualness of the drug use, extreme yet just another part of life, that’s the 2020 element. Kristen wants to have her dope and eat it too. And that means turning herself into an invisible junkie.
  12. 2067
    The result is a movie that seems unaware just how generic the should-be-distinguishing details of its earnest eco-cautionary tale have turned out.
  13. Possessor Uncut
    On a technical level, the film is just astonishing, especially as regards the two lead actors’ performances.
  14. A Call to Spy
    In a world hungering for depictions of national valor and compassion, the movie’s variations on heroism are a boon.
  15. Rocks
    The film wants to prove that hope isn’t fools gold. And when it does, Rocks glows.
  16. Jiang Ziya
    Directors Teng Cheng and Li Wei have dedicated serious attention to creating a stunning dramatic atmosphere for a story that, truth be told, is still plenty confusing to non-Chinese audiences.
  17. Eternal Beauty
    With an assist from Sally Hawkins’ valiantly committed lead performance, the result occasionally summons the genuinely disoriented perspective of an unstable protagonist, but more often, it’s the filmmaking that seems to spiral out of control.
  18. The Human Voice
    The Human Voice, in all its delicious absurdity and kitsch extravagance, ties into the concerns of emotional abandonment and disrupted communication that have long run through his [Almodóvar's] more ostensibly serious works.
  19. Lupin III: The First
    The unflaggingly perky caper has no down time, so one can’t help wishing for more the laid-back gamesmanship and boyish banter of the older renditions.
  20. Small Axe: Mangrove
    This may be “television” (in the sense that Amazon will release the films via streaming), but McQueen approaches it with all the seriousness of cinema.
  21. The Artist's Wife
    It’s entirely possible that The Artist’s Wife would have hit the same pitch-perfect notes had it been set during a long hot summer. But the wintery ambiance enhanced by Ryan Earl Parker’s evocative cinematography feels altogether appropriate for a story about one life winding down, and another on the verge of a restorative spring.
  22. The Boys in the Band
    What holds the movie together, apart from Quinto’s dreamy geek mystique and delectable delivery of every line, is the tormented passion that Jim Parsons brings to it.
  23. Misbehaviour
    Misbehaviour says good riddance to a bad era in the brightest, politest way possible: too politely, perhaps, if you’re seeking a feminist comedy that actually lives up to the raucous promise of its title.
  24. Night of the Kings
    With this project, in which magical realism lends everything a mystical dimension, Lacôte confidently delivers on the promise of his 2014 Cannes-selected “Run.”
  25. Shortcut
    With lackluster character development, a few ill-conceived situations in the second half and dialogue that sounds like it’s been run through Google Translate, there’s only a modest amount of entertainment value found therein.
  26. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful and authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today.
  27. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
    What’s most moving about Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is that Sacks, whose extreme love of existence was there in every sentence he wrote, could embrace death because it would be the most out-there adventure of his life. What he saw is that we were all, in our ways, afflicted and all unique. And therefore all extraordinary.
  28. The Last Shift
    A gut punch with a side of anguish.
  29. On the Rocks
    On the Rocks turns into a boozy humanistic hang-out caper movie, one that’s light-spirited and compelling, mordantly alive to the ins and outs of marriage, and a winning showcase for Murray’s aging-like-fine-whisky brand of world-weary deviltry.
  30. Supernova
    But it’s Firth’s Sam who finally carries the film’s heart, and exquisitely so, as his fear, anger and mounting insecurity lash out the more he tries to remain undemonstrative. (He also pulls off some able, plaintive piano-playing by his own hand.)
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