Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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 2.4 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. Dunkirk
    This is what audiences want from a Nolan movie, of course, as a master of the fantastic leaves his mark on historical events for the first time.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an entertaining and emotionally involving western. Yet, while it is an enjoyable film it falls distinctly shy of its innate story potential.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Searchers
    The box office appeal of John Wayne combined with the imprint of John Ford makes The Searchers a contender for the big money stakes. It's a western in the grand scale - handsomely mounted and in the tradition of Shane.
  4. 45 Years
    Above all, 45 Years is a drama of quiet restraint.
  5. Taxi Driver
    It’s a powerful film, an excellent credit for Scorsese, and a terrific showcase for the versatility of star Robert De Niro.
  6. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    This is challenging but seductive art cinema that invites comparisons to such titans as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang and even Theo Angelopoulos, without feeling derivative of any.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Servant
    The Servant is for the most part strong dramatic fare, though the atmosphere and tension is not fully sustained to the end.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Manchurian Candidate
    One of the wildest fabrications any author has ever tried to palm off on a gullible public. But the fascinating thing is that, from uncertain premise to shattering conclusion, one does not question plausibility of the events being rooted in their own cinematic reality.
  9. Mr. Turner
    Leigh has made another highly personal study of art, commerce and the glacial progress of establishment tastes, built around a lead performance from longtime Leigh collaborator Timothy Spall that’s as majestic as one of Turner’s own swirling sunsets.
  10. The Irishman
    Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.
  11. Once Upon a Time in Harlem
    Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”
  12. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Brilliance of the action and effects are supplemented by a consistently superior and resourceful score by Tan Dun.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wild Child
    It progresses slowly but absorbingly. Truffaut underplays but exudes an interior tenderness and dedication. The boy is amazingly and intuitively well played by a tousled gypsy tyke named Jean-Pierre Cargol. Everybody connected with this unusual, off-beat film made in black-and-white rates kudos.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shadow of a Doubt
    Hitchcock deftly etches his small-town characters and homey surroundings. Wright provides a sincere and persuasive portrayal as the girl, while Cotten is excellent as the motivating factor in the proceedings.
  15. Inside Out
    In execution, Pixar’s 15th feature proves to be the greatest idea the toon studio has ever had: a stunningly original concept that will not only delight and entertain the company’s massive worldwide audience, but also promises to forever change the way people think about the way people think, delivering creative fireworks grounded by a wonderfully relatable family story.
  16. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    Loktev’s immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together.
  17. Sideways
    A beautifully observed, small-scale study of personal foibles, romantic uncertainty and two sides of the sadly predictable male animal.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Meet Me in St. Louis
    Meet Me in St. Louis is wholesome in story [from the book by Sally Benson], colorful both in background and its literal Technicolor, and as American as the World's Series.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sunset Boulevard
    Performances by the entire cast, and particularly William Holden and Gloria Swanson, are exceptionally fine.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Apartment
    Second half of the picture is loosely constructed and tends to lag as the rahers go through their paces in over-extending the major plot angle. Most of the time, it’s up to director Wilder to sustain a two-hour-plus film on treatment alone, a feat he manages to accomplish more often than not, and sometimes the results are amazing.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Apocalypse Now
    Apocalypse Now was worth the wait. Alternately a brilliant and bizarre film, Francis Coppola’s four year ‘work in progress’ offers the definitive validation to the old saw, “war is hell.”
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Gunfighter
    The Gunfighter is a sock melodrama of the old west. There's never a sag or off moment in the footage as it goes about depicting a lightning draw artist, the fastest man with a gun in the old west, and what his special ability has done to his life.
  23. We Were Here
    We Were Here concentrates on the impressive way a collective of disenfranchised individuals came together to support one another in this time of crisis. In that respect, the title has dual meanings, referring to both the film's "Shoah"-like survivors' testimony and the fact that the gay community was there for one another at a time that government and medicine were slow to respond.
  24. Faces Places
    Agnès Varda, in the glory of her golden years, has become a humanist magician.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Days of Heaven
    A dramatically moving and technically breathtaking American art film, one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1970s.
  26. Past Lives
    For all the films that have been made about love triangles, Song has fashioned hers in the form of a circle, defying so many of the clichés in her quietly devastating way.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chimes at Midnight
    A personal viewpoint, it mixes the grotesque, bawdy, comic and heroic, and does have a melancholy under its carousing and battles.
  28. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    Represents that filmmaking rarity -- a third part of a trilogy that is decisively the best of the lot. With epic conflict, staggering battles, striking landscapes and effects, and resolved character arcs all leading to a dramatic conclusion to more than nine hours of masterful storytelling.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Badlands
    Badlands is a unique American fairy tale...and it's an impressive debut.
  30. Call Me by Your Name
    Even as he beguiles us with mystery, Guadagnino recreates Elio’s life-changing summer with such intensity that we might as well be experiencing it first-hand. It’s a rare gift that earns him a place in the pantheon alongside such masters of sensuality as Pedro Amodóvar and François Ozon, while putting “Call Me by Your Name” on par with the best of their work.
  31. Carlos
    Bravura narrative filmmaking on a hugely ambitious scale, Carlos is a spectacular achievement.
  32. First Cousin Once Removed
    A fascinatingly fractured glimpse into a disengaged mind and a biopic-in-reverse of its subject, quite unlike any documentary seen before.
  33. 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.
  34. Marriage Story
    At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    Producer and screenwriter have added enough fictional flesh to provide director William Friedkin and his overall topnotch cast with plenty of material, and they make the most of it.
  36. La La Land
    La La Land isn’t a masterpiece (and on some level it wants to be). Yet it’s an exciting ramble of a movie, ardent and full of feeling, passionate but also exquisitely — at times overly — controlled.
  37. Petite Maman
    In their children, parents often see reflections of the kids they once were. But daughters can’t access those same memories without a little magic. And that’s just what Petite Maman delivers: the spell that makes such a reunion possible, if only in our imaginations.
  38. Lady Bird
    The real surprise is just how honest and personal this film proves to be — again, par for the course with Gerwig, and yet, fairly rare among first-time directors, who haven’t had nearly so much practice simply being real.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Ambersons
    This film hasn't a single moment of contrast; it piles on and on a tale of woe, but without once striking at least a true chord of sentimentality.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rio Bravo
    Producer-director Howard Hawks makes handsome use of force in logically unravelling his hard-hitting narrative, creating suspense at times and occasionally inserting lighter moments to give variety.
  41. All We Imagine as Light
    Just two features into her young career, Kapadia has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life.
  42. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    There’s nothing ironic about the title of American Utopia. It’s David Byrne and Spike Lee reveling in the majesty, and hidden magic, of the here and now.
  43. Shoplifters
    At once charming and heart-wrenching, this exquisitely performed film will steal the hearts of both art-house and mainstream audiences.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Duck Soup
    In place of the constant punning and dame chasing, Duck Soup has the Marxes madcapping through such bits as the old Schwartz Bros. mirror routine, so well done in the hands of Groucho, Harpo and Chico that it gathers a new and hilarious comedy momentum all over again.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The 39 Steps
    Yes, they can make pictures in England. This one proves it. International spy stories are most always good, and this is one of the best. [19 Jun 1935, p.21]
    • Variety
  46. Toni Erdmann
    The film takes precisely as much time as it needs for its muddled, maddeningly human characters, played with extraordinary courage and invention by Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller, to find their way into each other, and so into themselves.
  47. No Other Land
    Given the conditions of its production, No Other Land would be vital even in a more ragged form. But the filmmaking here is tight and considered, with nimble editing (by the directors themselves) that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself.
  48. Uncut Gems
    Uncut Gems feels like being locked inside the pinwheeling brain of a lunatic for more than two hours — and guess what: It’s a gas!
    • 93 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a disappointing mixture. A period story about a small northwest mountain village where stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie run the bordello, the production suffers from overlength; also a serious effort at moody photography which backfires into pretentiousness; plus a diffused comedy-drama plot line which is repeatedly shoved aside in favor of bawdiness.
  50. Inside Llewyn Davis
    Inside Llewyn Davis is a revelatory showcase for Isaac, who sings with an angelic voice and turns a potentially unlikable character into a consistently relatable, unmistakably human presence — a reminder that humility and genius rarely make for comfortable bedfellows.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Best Years of Our Lives
    One of the best pictures of our lives.
  52. Band of Outsiders
    After shooting his most expensive film, Godard returned to the streets of Paris for the rough-hewn Band of Outsiders, which is 95 minutes of brilliant visual jazz. [31 Mar 2003, p.42]
    • Variety
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stagecoach
    Sweeping and powerful drama of the American frontier, Stagecoach displays potentialities that can easily drive it through as one of the surprise big grossers of the year. Without strong marquee names, picture nevertheless presents wide range of exploitation to attract, and will carry far through word-of-mouth after it gets rolling.
  54. Our Body
    Simon’s nonjudgmental, empathetic curiosity is the film’s great strength. But it’s also shocking that still now, in 2023, it can be such a revelation, as women, to see “Our Body” portrayed without sexualization and without stigmatization — without, in a word, shame.
  55. The Burial Of Kojo
    Though the film deals in tragedy, its sheer cinematic exuberance is immensely hopeful. As too, is the story of how one of the most exciting directorial debuts in recent memory was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing and planted in a few theaters before blossoming on Netflix.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Here is an excellent film whose basic story could have been told within normal feature limits, but which, instead, is extended close to three hours. Longer or shorter, this panorama of British army life is depicted with a technical skill and artistry that marks it as one of the really fine pix to come out of a British studio.
  57. TÁR
    The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power.
  58. Sherpa
    This film from experienced Aussie documaker Jennifer Peedom packs an emotional punch to match its awe-inspiring imagery.
  59. There Will Be Blood
    Boldly and magnificently strange, There Will Be Blood marks a significant departure in the work of Paul Thomas Anderson.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tristana (re-release)
    Those seeking the Bunuel touches of black humor, digs at Church and Establishment, irreverence and criticism, and an overall condemnation of Spanish mores and hypocrisy, will find a modicum of scenes here to titillate their palates. Yet Bunuel, despite occasional digs, has remained more or less respectful.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Last Picture Show
    Notre Dame professor Edward Fischer has said that the best films, like the best books, tell how it is to be human under certain circumstances. Larry McMurtry did a beautiful job of this in his small novel (which he transferred to the screen), The Last Picture Show.
  62. Hard to Be a God
    In essence it’s an historical artifact created in a time capsule: impressive in its way, yet its retardataire mannerisms require more distance before judgment can be passed on whether it’s a major work engaged in earlier forms, or an intriguing footnote trapped in a spent modality.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Do the Right Thing
    Combines a forceful statement on race relations with solid entertainment values.
  64. Sita Sings the Blues
    Paley sustains a consistently funny, sometimes even self-deprecatory comic tone.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Decline of Western Civilization
    A bracing, stimulating and technically superb close-up look at the LA punk scene, pic is pitched at a perfect distance to allow for simultaneous engagement in the music and spectacle, and for rueful contemplation of what it all might mean.
  66. Werckmeister Harmonies
    A stunning feature -- another hypnotic meditation on popular demagogy and mental manipulation.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    This one can't miss and the reasons are three - Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin's 11 songs and sufficient comedy between numbers to hold the film together.
  68. Crumb
    A frank, intimate look at a phenomenal popular artist and his extraordinarily dysfunctional family, Crumb is an excellent countercultural documentary.
  69. No Bears
    If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, No Bears is where he slams on the brakes.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    8½
    With 8 1/2 Federico Fellini tops even his trendsetting La Dolce Vita in artistry. Here is the author-director picture par excellence, an exciting, stimulating, monumental creation.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yojimbo
    Though this lacks the epic stature of Seven Samurai, Kurosawa here again shows his mastery of the medium.
  72. Spotlight
    Like so many films consumed with the minutiae of daily journalism, Spotlight is a magnificently nerdy process movie — a tour de force of filing-cabinet cinema, made with absolute assurance that we’ll be held by scene after scene of people talking, taking notes, following tips, hounding sources, poring over records, filling out spreadsheets, and having one door after another slammed in their faces.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Band Wagon
    Astaire, as the film star, shows his ability with a song and dance character.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ikiru
    Kurosawa performs a tour-de-force in keeping a dramatic thread throughout and avoiding the mawkish. It is technically excellent with a telling Occidental-type musical score.
  75. Sunday's Illness
    With breathtaking elegance and stunning assurance, Ramón Salazar takes a melodramatic chestnut and makes it flower with unexpected emotion in Sunday’s Illness.
  76. One More Time with Feeling
    If it’s sometimes a rambling, indulgent experience, it’s also a beautiful one.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Wizard of Oz
    It’s a mixture of childish fantasy and adult satire and humor of a kind that never seems to grow old.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    It is Sam Peckinpah’s direction, however, that gives the film greatest artistry. He gives N. B. Stone Jr.’s script a measure beyond its adequacy, instilling bright moments of sharp humor and an overall significant empathetic flavor.
  79. Memoria
    In Memoria, the disruptive sounds Jessica hears are a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed.
  80. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Most compelling in its attempts to re-create the experience of paralysis onscreen, gorgeously lensed pic morphs into a dreamlike collage of memories and fantasies, distancing the viewer somewhat from Bauby's consciousness even as it seeks to take one deeper.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    This tense, offbeat piece of science-fiction is occasionally difficult to follow due to the strangeness of its scientific premise. Action nevertheless is increasingly exciting.
  82. The Class
    Talky in the best sense, the film exhilarates with its lively, authentic classroom banter while its emotional undercurrents build steadily but almost imperceptibly over a swift 129 minutes. One of the most substantive and purely entertaining movies in competition at Cannes this year.
  83. Platoon
    There is plenty of good work to be found here, and pic certainly grabs the viewer by the collar in a way not found everyday in contemporary films.
  84. No Country for Old Men
    A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor, No Country for Old Men reps a superior match of source material and filmmaking talent.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Chinatown
    An outstanding picture.
  86. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
    The film isn’t just richly textured, but rigorous in its unveiling of both history and modernity.
  87. 35 Shots of Rum
    Claire Denis’ latest may appear whisper-thin on the surface, yet it’s marvelously profound, illuminating the love between a father and daughter but also highlighting the difficulty of relinquishing what most people spend a lifetime putting into place.
  88. Remake
    Remake is extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement and still-unresolved confusion.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King Kong
    Highly imaginative and super-goofy yarn.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Umberto D (re-release)
    The ending is happy, but the general effect of the film is disturbing, so compelling is De Sica's description of a man's solitude.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Secrets & Lies
    Unquestionably a finely observed, deeply felt work, though with some nagging problems in pacing and structure.
  92. The Florida Project
    As a filmmaker, Baker is a graceful neorealist voyeur who thrives on improvisation, and his storytelling, in The Florida Project, is mostly just a series of anecdotes. But that turns out to be enough.
  93. Timbuktu
    In the hands of a master, indignation and tragedy can be rendered with clarity yet subtlety, setting hysteria aside for deeper, more richly shaded tones. Abderrahmane Sissako is just such a master.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Frenzy
    Armed with a superior script by Anthony Shaffer, an excellent cast, and a top technical crew, Alfred Hitchcock fashions a firstrate melodrama about an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex-strangulation murders.
  95. Days
    I confess my incapacity for his particular strain of slow cinema for two reasons: First, to let audiences know that it’s OK to be frustrated by the experience — you’re not alone. And second, so you might appreciate what it means that Days worked on me. Instead of leaning in, as I’m wont to do with challenging movies, I settled back into my chair and let the rhythm wash over me, lull me into its relaxing embrace.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brief Encounter
    Based on his playlet, Still Life from Tonight at 8.30, Brief Encounter does more for Noel Coward's reputation as a skilled film producer than In Which We Serve. His use of express trains thundering through a village station coupled with frantic, last-minute dashes for local trains is only one of the clever touches masking the inherent static quality of the drama.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cool Hand Luke
    Newman gives an excellent performance, assisted by a terrific supporting cast, including George Kennedy, outstanding as the unofficial leader of the cons who yields first place to Newman.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Women
    Intelligent, grown up rendition of the Louisa Alcott classic.
  99. The Act of Killing
    Never before has anyone made a documentary like The Act of Killing, and the filmmakers seem at a loss in terms of how to organize the many threads of what they capture...Still, essential and enraging, The Act of Killing is a film that begs to be seen, then never watched again.
  100. Maborosi
    This visually lush but sometimes ponderously slowfilm is a poetic saga of love and loss.
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