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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    • 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.
  2. Sweet Dreams
    Sweet Dreams finds and sustains a delicate balance, seizing on small moments of hope in a place where the horrors of 1994 are in many ways still an open wound.
  3. Souleymane's Story
    If the hero’s dire situation is a ticking clock, Lojkine’s intelligent and empathetic film places us right alongside him, with each cog of circumstance and each gear of good fortune grinding against him at every turn.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sanjuro
    The charm of this fascinating Toho production, stylishly directed by Akira Kurosawa, is the personality of the hero, powerfully played by Toshiro Mifune.
  5. In the Summers
    In the Summers is the type of personal, confidently executed first outing that should hopefully put the filmmaker on an auspicious track to produce other keenly humanist work.
  6. Court
    Managing to be both extremely rational and extremely humane, the film works so well thanks to an intelligent, superbly understated script and a feel for naturalism that extends beyond mere performance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Winchester '73
    Stewart brings real flavor and appeal to the role of Lin, in a lean, concentrated portrayal.
  8. Locke
    This ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise.
  9. 20,000 Days on Earth
    An aptly intense and innovative study of pioneering rock poet Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth playfully disguises itself as fiction while more than fulfilling the requirements of a biographical documentary.
  10. The Woman Who Left
    This occasionally transcendent opus finds Diaz’s formal powers — not least his own incisive monochrome lensing — at full strength.
  11. Inshallah a Boy
    Inshallah a Boy moves like a sleek thriller, but is full of the unsolved mysteries and dangling question marks of real life.
  12. The Apostle
    Beautifully detailed and deftly structured, every scene in The Apostle logically leads to the next one, each elaborating on the central theme of religious redemption.
  13. RRR
    The movie is such an irresistible and intoxicating celebration of cinematic excess that even after 187 minutes (including intermission or, as the title card announces, “InteRRRval”), you are left exhilarated, not exhausted.
  14. Election
    Brandishes the sort of intelligent wit and bracing nastiness that will make it more appealing to discerning adults than to teens who just want to have fun.
  15. Memento
    Deconstructs time and space with Einstein-caliber dexterity in the service of a delectably disturbing tale of revenge.
  16. Creed
    With his “Rocky” spinoff, Creed, writer-director Ryan Coogler confirms every bit of promise he displayed in his 2013 debut, “Fruitvale Station,” offering a smart, kinetic, exhilaratingly well-crafted piece of mainstream filmmaking, and providing actor Michael B. Jordan with yet another substantial stepping stone on his climb to stardom.
  17. Memories of Murder
    A powerful, slow-burning portrait of human fallibility.
  18. Pride & Prejudice
    A movie for the age, and a keeper for the ages, Pride & Prejudice brings Jane Austen's best-loved novel to vivid, widescreen life, as well as making an undisputed star of 20-year-old Keira Knightley.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sunrise at Campobello
    In the journey from stage to screen this chapter from the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses none of its poignant and inspirational qualities, none of its humor and pathos.
  20. Monsieur Lazhar
    Quietly intelligent and respectable.
  21. Leaving Las Vegas
    The film pulls no punches, takes no prisoners and flies in the face of feel-good pictures.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Gigi
    It has all the ingredients. It's a naughty but nice romp of the hyper-romantic naughty 90s of Paris-in-the-spring, in the Bois, in Maxim's, and in the boudoir. How can it miss?
  23. Transit
    A refugee portrait that piles contrivance upon contrivance to somehow land at a place of piercing emotional acuity.
  24. Venus
    Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout.
  25. Dear Comrades!
    Meticulous and majestic, epic in scope and tattoo-needle intimate in effect, this scrupulous recreation of the lead-up to and aftermath of the Novocherkassk massacre six decades ago is excoriating proof that not all filmmakers are made sloppy or slipshod by anger. Some are made ever more righteously, icily precise.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shoeshine
    With the shoeshine boys of Rome’s streets as background, this film is a preachment on Italian juvenile delinquency. Producers used real shoeshine boys and the absence of experienced actors works out okay. Scenes in Rome’s jail emphasize the need for drastic reforms there.
  27. The Love Witch
    The fact that the films that serve as her models often sported the same flaws doesn’t excuse this fairly poker-faced spoof’s sometimes borderline-torpid pace and disappointing fade-out.
  28. Hundreds of Beavers
    On paper, it would hardly be expected to remain funny for eight minutes, let alone 108. But this ingeniously home-made lark never runs out of steam.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diner
    Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser and Timothy Daly are terrific as the friends as are Ellen Barkin and Kathryn Dowling as the two females involved with different group members.
  30. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    Mixing archival photos and TV footage with straightforward to-the-camera remembrances, Greenfield-Sanders’ deft structural approach isn’t as daring as those found in Morrison’s own work.
  31. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    For most fans, this show isn’t so much about watching her career flash before their eyes — although there’s that — but their own roller-coaster lives. It’s sort of Broadway, kind of psychotherapy/church, and all too well-executed.
  32. Peter Hujar's Day
    In its tiny-scaled staged-documentary way, Peter Hujar’s Day is exquisitely done and arresting to watch.
  33. The Killing of Two Lovers
    Crawford’s dominating performance makes David no hick but a sensitive and accommodating man a bit intimidated by his admittedly “much smarter” wife, flailing in his efforts to hold together a family unit he can’t go on without.
  34. 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.”
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billy Liar (re-release)
    An imaginative, fascinating film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3 Women
    Absorbing moody and often compelling story.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flirting with Disaster
    Although it eventually throws more balls in the air than it can easily juggle, Flirting with Disaster is, most of the time, a diabolically clever satire that has its way with any number of contemporary shiboleths.
  38. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Takes a beautifully lensed look at the work of Scottish "landscape sculptor" Andy Goldsworthy, whose unique creations -- composed of icicles, leaves, sticks, rocks, etc. -- are often as not simply swept away by the next tide or wind gust.
  39. These Birds Walk
    Instead of explaining the system through conventional narration, which would have been extremely helpful, the filmmakers immerse auds in the world they found, capturing its subjects’ behavior with startling candor.
  40. The Second Mother
    The script is executed with enough naturalism to ward off complaints of contrivance — all the way up to a tidy, but quite satisfying, denouement.
  41. Window Horses
    Director-writer-animator Ann Marie Fleming creates an entertaining, educational, and poignant tale about identify and imagination that is filled with stories and poetry.
  42. Born and Bred
    Flirting with predictable tragedy but displaying an immense sense of empathy toward its central character, pic is finally an emotionally stunning journey of a father's return to his senses after a horrible accident.
  43. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
    Chuck Smith’s documentary is at once accessible and formally daring, echoing its subject’s style while simultaneously celebrating her radical achievements. It’s an enlightening nonfiction portrait of a feminist pioneer that, in this #MeToo era, should strike a timely chord.
  44. Broken Voices
    Provazník’s focus is not on trauma, and it’s fitting that such a sensitive, understated treatment of real-world abuse should end on a poignant note of solidarity.
  45. Three Times
    Less accessible than recent "Cafe Lumiere," picture will appeal strongly to fans.
  46. Anselm
    More a portrait of Kiefer’s work than a standard biographical study of Kiefer himself, “Anselm” is a very particular study of a singular man’s soul, told through images of his oeuvre, augmented by sensational use of archive rendered in 3D.
  47. Hit Man
    Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.
  48. Ghostlight
    Any critic sitting through their show probably wouldn’t have much patience for all the characters’ personal catharses, but seen from the right distance, as beautifully told as this, the experience amounts to something special.
  49. Afire
    It’s the film’s great, disorienting structural risks, its humoring of human untidiness and confusion, that make it so subtly thrilling and moving.
  50. Ajami
    Time shifts may overcomplicate the narrative for some, but the pay-off packs a major punch.
  51. Wrestle
    Suspenseful as the actual matches are, there’s more tension in worrying just how intact these near-adults will make it to the even bigger stakes of post-high-school life, or whether they’ll be hobbled before they even leave the gate.
  52. 127 Hours
    While Franco can sometimes be a wild card, getting increasingly self-conscious with recent roles, his take on Ralston feels both credible and compelling; few actors could have made us care so much, or disappeared so completely into the role.
  53. Tell No One
    Though almost laughably intricate in its plotting, this thoroughly Gallic adaptation of Harlan Coben's novel reps an entertaining sophomore outing for thesp-turned-director Guillaume Canet.
  54. Mars One
    Tracking the personal anxieties and challenges of the family members as they pursue differently shaped dreams of escape, it is sincerely meant and deeply affectionate toward its decent, striving foursome, but it’s a little disorienting that it should cue up a gut-punch only to deliver a hug.
  55. The Deep Blue Sea
    Davies is in fine form here, with luminous performances, especially from Rachel Weisz, rounding out a classy package whose only major problem is it may be a bit too true to its period sensibility and legit origins.
  56. The End of the Tour
    The two leads’ clashing styles might work if the film were entirely about two superficially similar people’s inability to truly find common ground. But as we’re finally intended to judge their meeting a profound connective one on at least some levels, the chemistry simply feels off.
  57. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    By turns amazing, amusing and appalling.
  58. Labyrinth of Cinema
    Opening with a riotous bombardment of sound and image that risks confusing and losing some viewers even as it sends others into rapturous delight, Labyrinth of Cinema then makes sense of the chaos and emerges as a touching plea for peace and an exuberant celebration of the artifice and transformative power of cinema.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Shawshank Redemption
    Central to the film's success is a riveting, unfussy performance from Robbins. Freeman has the showier role, allowing him a grace and dignity that come naturally.
    • Variety
  60. Vortex
    Vortex doesn’t let us off the hook. Gaspar Noé never does. But if he did, he might transcend his “Behold, you will know the dark side” brand.
  61. There Is No Evil
    There Is No Evil comes across as four films for the price of one, none of its segments anemic, and each contributing fresh insights to the paradoxes of capital punishment in Iran.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Thieves Like Us
    Thieves Like Us proves that when Robert Altman has a solid story and script, he can make an exceptional film, one mostly devoid of clutter, auterist mannerism, and other cinema chic.
  63. Acasă, My Home
    Balance and objectivity are laudable instincts, but they can put the film at a slightly frustrating remove.
  64. Maiden
    Shattering a glass ceiling has rarely been more engrossing — or grueling — than it is in Maiden.
  65. War for the Planet of the Apes
    It’s fitting that the visual effects have advanced so dramatically since 2011, as it allows the series to suggest that its ape protagonists have evolved to an equivalent degree, and yet, “War’s” story is beneath their intelligence.
  66. Duma
    A superior all-ages adventure pic made by a filmmaker who knows more than a thing or two about the genre.
  67. The Constant Gardener
    Succeeds in capturing the book's essential themes and concerns, albeit in a hectic style that could not be more antithetical to that of the literary master of international intrigue.
  68. You Won't Be Alone
    The film’s last act brings everything full circle in a way that should satisfy both horror and art-house audiences, but then the movie, like its protagonist, is never content to be just one thing.
  69. Grand Tour
    But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust-for-life.
  70. Short Term 12
    This compelling human drama finds fresh energy in the inspirational-teacher genre, constantly revealing new layers to its characters.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Parenthood
    An ambitious, keenly observed, and often very funny look at one of life's most daunting passages, Parenthood's masterstroke is that it covers the range of the family experience, offering the points of view of everyone in an extended and wildly diverse middle-class family.
  72. Two of Us
    The tale of two older women whose decades-long secret relationship is threatened after tragedy strikes covers emotional and thematic ground that transcends the sexual preferences of the two main characters.
  73. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
    A highly satisfying HBO documentary ... that wisely places roughly equal emphasis on how the sausage was made and how the culture was changed.
  74. House of Hummingbird
    A touch overlong, “House of Hummingbird” doesn’t leave the most powerful emotional mark. Still, it lands on a poignant aftertaste through Kim’s serene attentiveness to the rhythms and details of everyday life ... with a peaceful style reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-eda.
  75. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    We are active participants in the creation of this (or any) work of cinema. And given how much this movie loves the movies, as well as dogs, music, children, soccer, ice cream, the ancient Georgian town of Kutaisi, and the very process of falling in love, there is something immensely hopeful and moving about being thus invited to collude.
  76. A History of Violence
    Lack of depth, complexity or strangeness make this a relatively routine entry for the director.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    A worthy sequel to "Star Wars," equal in both technical mastery and characterization, suffering only from the familiarity with the effects generated in the original and imitated too much by others.
  78. Our Beloved Month of August
    A tantalizing mix of documentary, fiction and everything in between (including music video), Miguel Gomes’ 150-minute love song to rural Portugal, Our Beloved Month of August, scores viscerally as well as intellectually.
  79. Grand Theft Hamlet
    The infrastructure of the game leaves things wide open for human creativity to take it in directions that couldn’t be predicted and people foster connections without any superficial prejudices getting in the way as Crane and Oosterveen assemble a cast.
  80. Joyland
    Tartly funny and plungingly sad in equal measure, this is nuanced, humane queer filmmaking, more concerned with the textures and particulars of its own intimate story than with grander social statements — even if, as a tale of transgender desire in a Muslim country, its very premise makes it a boundary-breaker.
  81. Sugar
    Sympathetic, genial and exceedingly wholesome, it's a film that, once seen, will permanently and favorably influence the way viewers regard the characters' real-life counterparts.
  82. Marwencol
    Hogancamp is a complex character, and Marwencol introduces the man in layers, creating an incomplete yet sympathetic portrait specialty audiences and hipsters can agree on.
  83. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    Though tastily lensed and with a convincing cast led by Cillian Murphy, essentially small-scale picture lacks the involving sweep of Loach's earlier historical-political yarn, "Land and Freedom."
  84. Rye Lane
    Short, sweet and sparky, Raine Allen-Miller's immensely likable debut doesn't reinvent the wheel, but instant chemistry between stars Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson keeps it spinning.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    To Catch a Thief
    While a suspense thread is present, director Alfred Hitchcock doesn't emphasize it, letting the yarn play lightly for comedy more than thrills.
  86. The Lobster
    A wickedly funny protest against societal preference for nuclear coupledom that escalates, by its own sly logic, into a love story of profound tenderness and originality.
  87. Forrest Gump
    Manages the difficult feat of being an intimate, even delicate tale played with an appealingly light touch against an epic backdrop.
  88. Rose of Nevada
    The richest, most enduring pleasures here are formal ones, beginning with the exacting still-life compositions and oily, vehement primary hues of Jenkins’ 16mm lensing, which can make a painterly subject of a maritime squall or a mustard-yellow wading boot.
  89. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    If it were a normal holiday animated film, The Nightmare Before Christmas would be an entertaining, amusing, darker-than-usual offering indicating that Disney was willing to deviate slightly from its tried-and-true family-fare formula. But the dazzling techniques employed here create a striking look that’s never been seen in such sustained form, making this a unique curio that will appeal to kids and film enthusiasts alike.
  90. Breaking the Waves
    Watson is a major find as Bess. Graced with delicate, expressive features, she gives an extraordinary performance.
  91. The Squid and the Whale
    Pic makes up in strong performances and wry observation what it sometimes lacks in narrative drive. Result is a perceptive (and unexpectedly moving) portrait of lives in crisis.
  92. Winged Migration
    Visually stunning, practically dialogue-free and very family-friendly.
  93. School of Rock
    Combined with hilarious physical business and perfectly overearnest delivery of pseudocool lines like, "Let your fingers do the rocking!," he (Black) pretty much single-handedly keeps the formulaic progress funny.
  94. Life and Nothing More
    Whereas a Hollywood director might use subjective framing or emotional soundtrack cues to nudge audiences’ reactions in a certain way, Esparza strips away nearly all those techniques to a pure, neorealist approach: life and nothing more.
  95. The Girl with the Needle
    The extremity of suffering on display here makes for difficult viewing, scarcely leavened by the expressionistic beauty of its presentation. But von Horn’s film never plays as empty miserablism, in large part thanks to its grave understanding of the moral and spiritual reasoning behind unimaginable acts of violence.
  96. Star Trek
    Blasting onto the screen at warp speed and remaining there for two hours, the new and improved Star Trek will transport fans to sci-fi nirvana.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They Live by Night
    Nicholas Ray adapted the novel and directed, demonstrating a complete understanding of the characters. It’s a firstrate job of moody storytelling.
  98. A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.
  99. Riefenstahl
    It’s a portrait that’s really a meditation on Riefenstahl — her life, her art, the question of her guilt. And one of the things it does is to remind you of what a singularly provocative and insidious and mysterious figure she was.
  100. Carmine Street Guitars
    Carmine Street Guitars is a one-of-a-kind documentary that exudes a gentle, homespun magic.
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