Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Love
    Love’s commentary on modern relations may be more complex and chewy than just “live and let live,” but the film’s calm embrace of whatever works for the individual is refreshingly humane, rhetorically exciting and more than a little hot.
  2. Klondike
    Without undue contrivance or melodrama, Er Gorbach overlaps escalating marital tension with the larger war closing in on the couple to claustrophobic life-or-death effect, building to a finale of staggering savagery.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wuthering Heights
    Dramatic episodes are vividly etched, without benefit of lightness. It’s heavy fare throughout.
  4. Pina
    Offering further proof that the latest 3D technology is good for a lot more than just lunging knives and fantastical storylines, Wim Wenders' dance docu Pina reps multidimensional entertainment that will send culture vultures swooning.
  5. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    The film wrings an almost bizarre amount of political, humanistic and spiritual substance out of this limited frame. Kendall’s eye for untold stories, as well as his instinct for catching evocatively framed images on the fly, mark him as a name to watch.
  6. Rosie
    This small, tough film provides no easy solutions.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Room with a View
    Distinguished by superb ensemble acting, intelligent writing and stunning design.
    • Variety
  8. Hugo
    In attempting to make his first film for all ages, Martin Scorsese has fashioned one for the ages. Simultaneously classical and modern, populist but also unapologetically personal, Hugo flagrantly defies the mind-numbing quality of most contempo kidpics.
  9. Wild Reeds
    As always, Techine is excellent at exploring “tiny” personal flashes that assume larger meaning when placed against the broader historical context.
  10. The LEGO Movie
    Phil Lord and Christopher Miller irreverently deconstruct the state of the modern blockbuster and deliver a smarter, more satisfying experience in its place, emerging with a fresh franchise for others to build upon.
  11. Ladybird Ladybird
    Though the movie sounds irredeemably depressing on paper, there’s a real warmth to the central relationship that lifts “Ladybird” above similar-sounding exercises in Brit self-loathing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Gloria
    Pitch-perfect, terrifically written.
  13. Drag Me to Hell
    The picture is single-mindedly devoted to pushing the audience's buttons, and who better than Raimi to do the honors?
  14. Taxidermia
    Taxidermia sets a benchmark for body horror in the cinema.
  15. Spider
    This slow but brilliantly sustained journey into madness is fronted by a remarkable performance from Ralph Fiennes and superb backup from Miranda Richardson in a triple role.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Manhattan
    Woody Allen uses New York City as a backdrop for the familiar story of the successful but neurotic urban over-achievers whose relationships always seem to end prematurely. The film is just as much about how wonderful a place the city is to live in as it is about the elusive search for love.
  17. The Day He Arrives
    An agreeably meandering exercise that brings some clever French New Wave fillips and structural repetitions to Hong's characteristically boozy party. Rougher but more approachable than his previous "Oki's Movie."
  18. The Selfish Giant
    The film’s turn toward the tragic is hardly untelegraphed, but its emotional blows still land with crushing precision.
  19. A.K.A. Doc Pomus
    [A] deft assemblage of homemovies, work tapes and interviews is further invigorated by 1980s interviews with Pomus and a dynamite soundtrack of his rock ‘n’ roll perennials.
  20. Ixcanul
    What emerges, finally, is a film that gives an urgent, original voice to a people too frequently marginalized in both movies and society at large.
  21. The Future Perfect
    Wohlatz’s sensitivity to language, the way it’s used and how the ability to express oneself literally changes the manner in which we deal with the world around us, is subtly yet rigorously demonstrated, not just with the words and tenses themselves but how they’re spoken.
  22. Bait
    The engaging and defiantly hand-crafted, offbeat experiment Bait may be black and white, but its insights, thankfully, come in subtly graded shades of gray.
  23. Evil Does Not Exist
    It may not be wholly successful, but it certainly is bleakly fascinating to witness a master filmmaker paint so subtle and soothing a portrait of humanity, only to finally, bitterly remind us that there is no soothing nature – human or otherwise – when there’s a bullet in its belly.
  24. Crossing
    With Crossing, writer-director Levan Akin wants to open our eyes to the easily overlooked.
  25. The Visitor
    So, is it all just high-concept pornography? Well, yes and no. The majority of the runtime consists of sex scenes, but they are punctuated with slogans which flash onscreen during and after the action, almost like demonstration placards at a march in support of sexual and political liberation.
  26. The Friend's House Is Here
    The Friend’s House Is Here is defined not by the many constraints that it battled during its production, but by the artistic vision of the resulting work.
  27. Seymour: An Introduction
    This first documentary directed by Ethan Hawke happily sidesteps any vanity-project pitfalls, granting full expression to Bernstein’s wise and witty commentary on a craft that he’s spent decades honing — as well as the proper application of that craft when the demands of art are often outweighed by the pressures of commerce.
  28. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    A treat, a delicious blend of perversity, playfulness and deadly passion concealed beneath the tranquil, moneyed surface of the Swiss bougeoisie.
  29. 56 Up
    Certain moments in the film resemble nothing so much as attending a school reunion, being buttonholed by an old acquaintance and shown snapshots of the grandkids. A complacently conservative acceptance sometimes seems to blanket all of 56 Up, as if maturity entails a serene blessing of the status quo.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Triad Election
    Distinguished by intelligence, wit and violence but is lightly wounded by some ill-fitting moments.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Serpico
    Pacino dominates the entire film. His inner personal torment is vividly detailed. (Review of Original Release)
  32. Up in the Air
    The timing in the Clooney-Farmiga scenes is like splendid tennis, with each player surprising the other with shots but keeping the rally going to breathtaking duration.
  33. Milk
    Brolin's work is superlatively expressive of the inchoate impulses roiling inside his sorry character. But good as most of the cast is, the show belongs squarely to Penn.
  34. Roll Red Roll
    The phenomenon of rape culture has emerged, more than anywhere, from the frat house (and from spring break, that ritualized bacchanal for kids who aren’t necessarily in frats), and it has been growing there — metastasizing — for decades. Roll Red Roll captures, with potent power, how the “If it feels good, wreck it” ethos of the beer-pong drink-till-you-submit forced “hookup” is finding more and more of a home among high schoolers.
  35. I Was a Simple Man
    All Yogi’s actors work in subtle, effective deference to his natural command of atmosphere and place: This is a film where Hawaiian rainfall has as prominent and evocative a voice as any human presence, and where the growth of a tree marks time as clearly as the deepening crevices in a character’s face.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lilya 4-Ever
    Hard-hitting, dark and tragic story that rarely lets up.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From Russia with Love
    From Russia with Love is a preposterous, skillful slab of hardhitting, sexy hokum. After a slowish start, it is directed by Terence Young at zingy pace.
  38. Who We Are Now
    Newton has made a beautiful little film about sacrifice and redemption, and he earns it one tiny brushstroke at a time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    Film carries all the explosive trappings that make for a hit in its intended market and is glossed with a melodramatic narrative to take full advantage of its theme.
  40. Cutie and the Boxer
    Zachary Heinzerling's five-years-in-the-making portrait of Brooklyn-based artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara is a warts-and-all portrait of love, sacrifice and the creative spirit.
  41. U2 3D
    The title says it all. Compact and exuberant, U2 3D may be no more than a pint-sized concert film with a lustrous surface, but the lensing is so vibrant and the music so buoyant, even nonfans may find their eyes popping and their heads bobbing.
  42. One Night in Miami
    King turns One Night in Miami into a real movie, staging it with a flowing visual confidence and vibrant emotional flair that gives it a fly-on-the-wall authenticity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    Good Samuel Fuller programmer about a prostie trying the straight route, The Naked Kiss is primarily a vehicle for Constance Towers. Hooker angles and sex perversion plot windup are handled with care, alternating with handicapped children 'good works' theme.
  44. Who Will Write Our History
    A vital and sobering documentary directed by Roberta Grossman, always knew that they were drafting the record of an existence whose memory — were it not for them — would be wiped away.
  45. The Reason I Jump
    Nimbly switching between different lenses and sonic streams, Rothwell invites viewers inside the psychological isolation and overwhelming sensory awareness felt by people at various points on the spectrum, as well as cathartic breakthroughs in expression and connection with others.
  46. Belle
    In a sense, movies aren’t so different from the virtual worlds a platform like U offers, and this one promises a special kind of escapism while going out of its way to keep it real.
  47. Babe
    The achievement here is a thoroughly compelling story in which the underlying technological razzle-dazzle never intrudes.
  48. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Originally conceived as one film, the two-parter that has finally emerged can now be seen as a truly epic work.
  49. Vera Drake
    Mike Leigh is at the peak of his powers with Vera Drake, a compassionate, morally complex drama that stands easily alongside his best work, "Secrets & Lies" and "Topsy-Turvy."
  50. Private Life
    It’s witty and moving but a touch repetitive, and it goes on for too long. That said, Jenkins has made the most intimate comedy imaginable about the fertility blues. Private Life hits some delicate nerves, and heals a few of them too.
  51. Moonage Daydream
    Watching Moonage Daydream, there are essential facts you won’t hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you’ll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was.
  52. Meeting with Pol Pot
    The result is a hauntingly timeless depiction of power and its mechanisms, filtered down to an intimate tale of journalistic integrity.
  53. BlacKkKlansman
    Lee’s latest is as much a compelling black empowerment story as it is an electrifying commentary on the problems of African-American representation across more than a century of cinema.
  54. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    It’s a delight to find these two, plus their penguin nemesis, back on the big screen.
  55. Janet Planet
    It’s striking proof of an original sensibility.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny Guitar (re-release)
    Love, hate and violence, with little sympathy for the characters, is stirred up during the overlong film.
  57. Echo
    Once a sense of rhythm is grasped, things fall into place, and audiences will exit the cinema debating their favorite scenes, recalling a wealth of graceful, humane interactions.
  58. The Novelist's Film
    Ultimately, The Novelist’s Film defends the idea of drift and hiatus, of time spent idling to hear your own thoughts, in their own sweet time.
  59. Lake of Fire
    An extraordinary docu achievement. Handsomely filmed on silvery 35mm and high-definition by Kaye himself, the shrewdly edited picture balances a full spectrum of views from all sides of the abortion debate without obviously taking a position itself.
  60. Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds
    A truly spectacular psychedelic excursion in the vein of head-trip classics “The Fantastic Planet” and “The Yellow Submarine.”
  61. Under the Skin
    Glazer has always been longer on atmosphere and uncanny moods than on narrative, but the fatal flaw of Under the Skin isn’t that not much happens; it’s that what does happen isn’t all that interesting.
  62. Red Army
    The strength of Red Army lies in its deep appreciation for the many ironies of the situation, the bone-deep complexities of national identity, and the fact that, on some level, home will always be home.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Miracle Worker
    Where the picture really excels, outside of its inherent story values, is in the realm of photographic technique. It is here that director Penn and cameraman Ernest Caparros have teamed to create artful, indelible strokes of visual storytelling and mood-molding.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
    It’s not just the thoroughness but the intimacy of the interviews that gives this film its definitiveness.
  65. Porco Rosso
    Not only does this rank among Miyazaki’s finest achievements, it reflects his personal love of aviation, his political concerns and his fullest expression to date of a non-fantasy world resembling our own.
  66. The Post
    The Pentagon Papers marked an iconic moment in American history: the press claiming its own freedom to call out the excesses of power. The Post celebrates what that means, tapping into an enlightened nostalgia for the glory days of newspapers, but the film also takes you back to a time when the outcome was precarious, and the freedoms we thought we took for granted hung in the balance. Just as they do today.
  67. Cunningham
    Kovgan’s ode to choreography master Merce Cunningham is sensational in every sense of the word. Renewing one’s appreciation of the many wonders of the human body and the space in which it fills and drifts, Cunningham celebrates all the things our joints and flexed muscles are capable of, as seen through the mind and poetic dances of an iconic creator.
  68. Fireworks
    This contemplative drama about a tough ex-cop tying up the loose ends of his life and taking his terminally ill wife on a farewell journey is pure poetry.
  69. Blind
    For all the obvious pleasure Vogt takes in bending and splintering the surface reality of the film, all his formal strategies issue directly from Inrgid and her fragile, profoundly human psyche.
  70. The Magdalene Sisters
    Mullan's increased maturity as a director is evident in his skill at manipulating light and dark dramatic tones, and shifting between moods of anger and plaintive melancholy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Superman II
    Superman II emerges as a solid, classy, cannily constructed piece of entertainment which gets down to action almost immediately.
  72. Tyson
    By getting Tyson to open up as he has, Toback has succeeded in illuminating one of the most polarizing, complex and -- the film almost forces one to admit -- misunderstood figures of our time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    101 Dalmatians
    While not as indelibly enchanting or inspired as some of the studio’s most unforgettable animated endeavors, this is nonetheless a painstaking creative effort.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Henry V
    Henry V is a stirring, gritty and enjoyable pic which offers a plethora of fine performances from some of the U.K.'s brightest talents.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Cast, although secondary to the story, works well.
  76. The Sting
    The Sting has all the signs of a blockbuster. Paul Newman and Robert Redford are superbly reteamed, this time as a pair of con artists in Chicago of the ’30s, out to fleece a bigtime racketeer brilliantly cast with and played by Robert Shaw. George Roy Hill’s outstanding direction of David S. Ward’s finely-crafted story of multiple deception and surprise ending will delight both mass and class audiences. Extremely handsome production values and a great supporting cast round out the virtues.
  77. Eastern Promises
    A superbly wrought yarn set in the milieu of first-generation Russian mobsters in London that is simultaneously tough-minded and compassionate about the human condition, Eastern Promises instantly takes its place among David Cronenberg's very best films.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shanghai Express
    Josef von Sternberg, the director, has made this effort interesting through a definite command of the lens. As to plot structure and dialog, Shanghai Express runs much too close to old meller and serial themes to command real attention. The finished product is an example of what can be done with a personality and photogenic face such as Marlene Dietrich possesses to circumvent a trashy story.
  79. Footnote
    Footnote is a decidedly male-centric film. Structurally, the picture is divided into named chapters that make for cute markers but give it the not-entirely satisfying feel of a jaunty satire.
  80. Being 17
    This vibrant portrait feels like something of a revelation, which is remarkable, really, considering how many more films have tackled coming-of-age than the relatively niche experience of coming out.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The White Diamond
    Herzog's eye for the weird sometimes makes the docu feel strained, but engaging characters imbue the pic with depth and emotional appeal.
  82. Luther: Never Too Much
    "Never Too Much” shows just how hard Luther Vandross worked to make his natural and irresistible talent seem effortless. That it took longer than he’d wanted to achieve certain results, not because of his shortcomings but the prevailing cultural forces of the time, is just one of many takeaways.
  83. Free Solo
    For those who love the thrill of high-adrenaline adventure docs, National Geographic’s Free Solo will be a hard experience to top.
  84. Trouble the Water
    Though tinged with the sheer gumption and personal resolve of amateur vidmaker and would-be rapper Kimberly Roberts, this is ultimately a minor doc contribution to the bulging library of Katrina-related films and TV reports.
  85. Saint Maud
    Skirting easy cynicism to view fire, brimstone and occasional grace through Maud’s awestruck eyes, this is finally as much a sympathetic character study, a mental heath mind-map, as it is any kind of chiller. Whatever the case, it’s one hell of a debut for Rose Glass.
  86. Misericordia
    Instead it’s a slippery, changeable parable about a particularly amoral cuckoo looking to feather a new nest.
  87. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    A movingly sincere valentine from a filmmaker now due his own equivalent tributes, shortening the distance between youthful discovery and senior nostalgia.
  88. Mustang
    the director proves especially skilled with her cast of newcomers (of the thesps playing the sisters, only young Iscan, from “My Only Sunshine,” is a veteran), whose powerful individualism as well as their vibrant bond together are perfect vessels for the script’s message.
  89. Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine
    One emerges from Breaking Point stunned and moved, with the realization that the Ukrainians are fighting for themselves, as they have for centuries, but also that they’re now fighting for all of us.
  90. Palm Springs
    It’s an irreverent take on a form where earlier iterations were obliged to take themselves seriously. And somehow that liberates what felt like a slick but ironic riff on a tired genre to do something sincere.
  91. The Kingdom
    It’s like “The Sopranos,” as seen through Meadow’s eyes. And though we’re all familiar with the lesson that the cost of vengeance is a never-ending circle of violence, Colonna’s retelling lands like a bullet in the head.
  92. James White
    Familiar in its general trajectory, but unusually raw and ragged in its emotional architecture, Mond’s fraught portrait of a mother and son in crisis sports a pair of knockout performances by Cynthia Nixon and “Girls” alumnus Christopher Abbott.
  93. It Follows
    It Follows is remarkably effective for most of its running time, ratcheting up the tension, then stinging the audience periodically with one of those jolts that sends everyone levitating a couple inches above their seats. But the excitement wears off after a point.
  94. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema.
  95. Driveways
    That uncommon and all-too-welcome gift — like some kind of fragile wildflower, emerging tentatively through cracks in the concrete: a film about kindness.
  96. Blue Sun Palace
    More akin to European art films than to American indies, “Palace” prioritizes mood over plot. Tsang allows her experienced actors plenty of breathing space to convey the melancholy of their existence in situations where dreams are more likely to be deferred than to come true, but are necessary nevertheless.
  97. Don't Think Twice
    Portraying a cutthroat business in which little is “fair,” Don’t Think Twice acknowledges the bloodshed, but applies the razor with enough empathetic delicacy to earn its cautiously upbeat fade.
  98. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    Kuosmanen’s unassuming yet immaculate command of tone and form here would impress at any stage of his career, but it’s entirely remarkable in a first feature.
  99. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Both sharp and fleet, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street proves a satisfying screen version of Stephen Sondheim’s landmark 1979 theatrical musical.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Charade
    Firsttime teaming of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, a natural, gives the sophisticated romantic caper an international appeal, plus the selling points of adventure, suspense and suberb comedy.
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