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. Styx
    This is "All Is Lost” with a spinning moral compass and a topical dimension that proves even more gripping than its brilliantly achieved visceral action.
  2. Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
    As someone who’s absorbed bits and pieces of the Miles Davis story over the years but never felt like I had the big picture, I found “Birth of the Cool” to be intensely gratifying. Nelson is a filmmaker with a sixth sense for how to nudge history into the present.
  3. One Cut of the Dead
    “One Cut” captures all the craziness and exhilaration of movie-making on a minuscule budget. High-energy performances from a cast of little-knowns are perfectly tuned to the material. The outstanding technical package is a great example of how to create a Poverty Row look for what’s actually a very sophisticated filmmaking exercise.
  4. Blinded by the Light
    It’s the sort of unguarded drama they used to make in the ‘80s — a coming-of-age tale of unabashed earnestness — but it’s also a delirious and romantic rock ‘n’ roll parable.
  5. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    This terrifically engaging debut feature by playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo is the best kind of “crowdpleaser”: one that earns every emotional beat that might seem formulaic in four out of five similar enterprises.
  6. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    Cold Case Hammarskjöld doesn’t offer the last word about the issues it raises. But it’s a movie that should be seen, grappled with, argued with, and experienced, because the questions it plants in us are dark enough to reverberate as powerfully as answers.
  7. Divine Love
    The new age of Brazilian protest cinema begins here, and “Divine Love” has kicked it off in dancing shoes.
  8. Knock Down the House
    Knock Down the House has a clear political agenda. It wants to promote the hard work, courage and progressive policies of these women, who have all experienced financial hardship. Still, the film lets its subjects do the talking instead of cluttering things with statistics.
  9. Luce
    The film is sleek and shadowy, benefiting from the fact Onah chose to shoot on celluloid and driven by stellar performances across the board.
  10. Midnight Family
    Portraits of institutional dysfunction don’t come much more urgent, and quietly bleak, than this.
  11. The Brink
    The Brink is an impeccably crafted verité ramble — an engaging and enraging, disturbing and highly revealing movie.
  12. The Gospel of Eureka
    This cheerful small town portrait makes for an idealistic crowd-pleaser (after all, Eureka Springs is the rumored home of healing waters), but this beautiful, and beautifully shot, documentary is a cure for the angry headline blues.
  13. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    Director Christopher McQuarrie delivers a formidable concept and several hall-of-fame set-pieces while somehow also managing to tie the storylines back into these movies’ core mythology.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    An excellent combination of in-depth contemporary story-telling and personality casting.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Prince of the City
    The film is a concentrated, unrelievedly serious and cerebrally involving entry, exhaustively detailing the true-life saga of a Gotham detective who turned Justice Dept informer to eke out widespread corruption in his special investigating unit during the 1960s.
  16. The Plagiarists
    Wilfully student-video amateurish in form, but impishly sophisticated in content, a gleeful cultural curiosity fairly crackles off The Plagiarists, and it is highly contagious.
  17. Synonyms
    Breathtaking in the way it careens from one scene to the next in a whirlwind of personal and political meaning all but impossible to grasp in full measure, the film is an excoriation of Israel’s militant machismo and a self-teasing parody of Parisian stereotypes, embodied by actor Tom Mercier in this astonishingly audacious debut.
  18. So Long, My Son
    Utterly wrenching.
  19. The Art of Self-Defense
    This singular black comedy balances off-kilter humor with an unexpectedly thriller-esque undercurrent, to the extent that audiences will find it tough to anticipate either the jokes or the dark, “Fight Club”-like turn things eventually take — all to strikingly original effect.
  20. Rudy
    Rudy is one of those beating-the-odds tales that no one does better than Hollywood. A film that hits all the right emotional buttons, it's an intelligent , sentimental drama that lifts an audience to its feet cheering. In the current filmgoing climate, this is an easy winning touchdown that should score big returns.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Babylon
    Like the reggae music that pulses through it, Babylon is rich, rough and real. And like the streetlife of the young black Londoners it portrays, it’s threatening, touching, violent and funny. This one seems to explode in the gut with a powerful mix of pain and pleasure.
  22. Booksmart
    Not since “Superbad” has a high school comedy so perfectly nailed how exhilarating it feels to act out at that age ... In this year’s class of first-time feature directors, Wilde handily earns the title of Most Likely to Succeed.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Room at the Top
    Neil Paterson's literate, well-molded screenplay is enhanced by subtle, intelligent direction from first-timer Jack Clayton and a batch of topnotch performances.
  24. Get Duked!
    That kind of all-around ineptitude puts the Get Duked! ensemble in the company of such classic Zucker and Abrahams movies as “Airplane” and “The Naked Gun,” and should appeal to lovers of old-fashioned lowbrow farce, provided they’re willing to accept a few lame hip-hop references.
  25. Vision Portraits
    Bolstered by the writer-director’s own journey, recounted via a collage-like aesthetic that eloquently conveys his circumscribed condition, it’s a nonfiction study of artistic creation and, also, of individual courage and perseverance.
  26. Children of the Sea
    This wide-eyed loner may be “just” an anime character, but she’s as relatable as any live-action teenager you might meet on screen this year, thanks to the splendid attention to detail and seemingly boundless imagination that characterizes Children of the Sea, director Ayumu Watanabe’s stunning adaptation of the prize-winning manga by Daisuke Igarashi.
  27. Honeyland
    The opening frames of Honeyland are so rustically sumptuous that you wonder, for a second, if they’ve somehow been art-directed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    El Dorado
    An excellent oater drama, laced with adroit comedy and action relief, and set off by strong casting, superior direction and solid production.
  29. Penguin Highway
    To simplify matters: If you see just one anime feature this year, it ought to be Penguin Highway. It’s not that the style or story is mind-blowingly original, the way the best Miyazaki movies are; rather, this well-written cartoon playfully complements the kind of storytelling that Westerners are already enjoying via American-made, live-action series, while incorporating lots of delightfully Japan-specific details along the way.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nashville
    Nashville is one of Altman’s best films, free of the rambling insider fooling around that sometimes mars entire chunks of every second or third picture. When he navigates rigorously to defined goals, however, the results are superb.
  31. Wild Rose
    Wild Rose, the closest thing to a sleeper I’ve seen at Toronto this year, is a happy-sad drama of starstruck fever that lifts you up and sweeps you along, touching you down in a puddle of well-earned tears.
    • 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.
  33. Midnight Traveler
    Shot on three mobile phones, Fazili’s Midnight Traveler is a documentary that feels like a modern-day message in a bottle, an urgent appeal for help from a family that’s still searching for a home.
  34. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Rolling Thunder Revue celebrates the let’s-try-it-on, let-it-all-hang-out spirit of the era, and as a time capsule the film is a gift that keeps on giving.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    The naked power and oblique tenderness of Edward Albee's incisive, inhuman drama have been transformed from legit into a brilliant motion picture. Keen adaptation and handsome production by Ernest Lehman, outstanding direction by Mike Nichols in his feature debut, and four topflight performances score an artistic bullseye.
  36. Scheme Birds
    Superb ... An alternately lyrical and gut-punching coming-of-age study.
  37. Rewind
    Watching the movie is like staring at a blurred image of the past that gradually, over 86 minutes, comes into terrifying focus.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Children of a Lesser God
    It’s another seamless performance for Hurt. Matlin, who makes her professional acting debut here and is in real life hearing impaired, as is much of the cast, is simply fresh and alive with fine shadings of expression.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Birdman of Alcatraz
    Birdman of Alcatraz is not really a prison picture in the traditional and accepted sense of the term. Birdman reverses the formula and brings a new breadth and depth to the form. In telling, with reasonable objectivity but understandably deep compassion the true story of Robert Stroud, it achieves a human dimension way beyond its predecessors.
    • 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.
  42. Pain and Glory
    A mature work of meticulously tuned meta-fiction.
  43. Parasite
    Bong is back and on brilliant form, but he is unmistakably, roaringly furious, and it registers because the target is so deserving, so enormous, so 2019: Parasite is a tick fat with the bitter blood of class rage.
  44. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    Though this gorgeous, slow-burn lesbian romance works strongly enough on a surface level, one can hardly ignore the fact, as true then as it is now, that the world looks different when seen through a woman’s eyes.
  45. Sorry We Missed You
    Another intimate and powerful drama about what’s going on in people’s everyday lives. ... Loach stages all of this with supreme confidence and flow.
  46. Beanpole
    Beanpole is incredibly bleak, but crafted with such care that it’s also deeply compelling. Events so disturbing that you long to look away are presented in images so striking that you cannot.
  47. La Belle Époque
    In the end, the story’s custom reenactment gimmick may not even have been necessary, so well-written and executed is the personal journey that underlies it.
  48. The Lighthouse
    The movie, building on “The Witch,” proves that Robert Eggers possesses something more than impeccable genre skill. He has the ability to lock you into the fever of what’s happening onscreen.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Misfits
    At face value, The Misfits, is a robust, high-voltage adventure drama, vibrating with explosively emotional histrionics, conceived and executed with a refreshing disdain for superficial technical and photographic slickness in favor of an uncommonly honest and direct cinematic approach. Within this framework, however, lurks a complex mass of introspective conflicts, symbolic parallels and motivational contradictions, the nuances of which may seriously confound general audiences.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Samurai Rebellion
    This Toho-Mifune production represents all the best in the Japanese period film.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Giant
    It is also, for the most part, an excellent film which registers strongly on all levels, whether it's in its breathtaking panoramic shots of the dusty Texas plains; the personal, dramatic impact of the story itself, or the resounding message it has to impart.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shane
    George Stevens handles the story and players in a manner that gives his production and direction a tremendous integrity. The casting is exceptionally good and the male stars have never been seen to better advantage.
  53. 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.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Face in the Crowd
    Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg, who teamed to bring forth On the Waterfront, have another provocative and hardhitting entry, based on Schulberg's short story The Arkansas Traveler. It's a devastating commentary on hero-worship and success cults in America.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Anatomy of a Murder
    Preminger purposely creates situations that flicker with uncertainty, that may be evaluated in different ways. Motives are mixed and dubious, and, therefore, sustain interest.
  57. The Edge of Democracy
    The Edge of Democracy makes no claims to objectivity. This is documentary cinema in which facts tangle compellingly with feeling, while passages of solemn, stately mood-building split the difference.
  58. All Is Well
    A fascinating flip on themes contentiously raised in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” underpinned by a breakout performance of raw candor by Aenne Schwarz, this is grown-up filmmaking of sharp, subtle daring.
  59. The Raft
    The surprisingly short leap from radical academic study to lurid exploitation is navigated with wit, sensitivity and rueful social awareness in Swedish director Marcus Lindeen’s gripping debut feature The Raft.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Defiant Ones
    The performances by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are virtually flawless. Poitier captures all of the moody violence of the convict, serving time because he assaulted a white man who had insulted him. It is a cunning, totally intelligent portrayal that rings powerfully true.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    El Cid
    El Cid is a fast-action color-rich, corpse-strewn, battle picture. The Spanish scenery is magnificent, the costumes are vivid, the chain mail and Toledo steel gear impressive. Perhaps the 11th century of art directors Veniero Colasanti and John Moore exceeds reality, but only scholars will complain of that. Action rather than acting characterizes this film.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
    A very special kind of picture, combining photographic ingenuity, imaginative story telling and fiscal daring.
  64. Local Hero
    While modest in intent and gentle in feel, Local Hero is loaded with wry, offbeat humor and is the sort of satisfying, personal picture that is becoming an increasingly rare commodity these days.
  65. This Is Not Berlin
    Hari Sama’s fourth feature as writer-director is something special, and one of the best of its particular subgenre.
  66. Jay Myself
    After watching Jay Myself, you yourself may begin to see the world in a whole new way, as if you’d woken up to all the images that might have been invisible before, but only because you passed them by.
  67. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    Of viciously pointed relevance anywhere populism is on the rise, “Barbarians” is a fiercely intelligent, engaging and challenging wake-up call, a film that leaves you smarter at the end than when you went in, but also sadder and significantly more terrified.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Breaker Morant
    As a sheer exercise in manipulation, it approaches the masterful and is extremely effective.
  69. Thor: Love and Thunder
    It’s the mix of tones — the cheeky and the deadly, the flip and the romantic — that elevates “Thor: Love and Thunder” by keeping it not just brashly unpredictable but emotionally alive.
  70. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a soft-hearted fable that works on you in an enchanting way.
  71. Aquarela
    A feast of HD imagery so crisp as to be almost disorienting, this is immersive experiential cinema with no firm storytelling trajectory, though viewers can read what environmental warnings they may into its rushing spectacle.
  72. Angels Are Made of Light
    Angels Are Made of Light serves as a lament for a prosperous past that can’t be reclaimed, a volatile present that affords few prospects for joy or success, and a future that’s terrifyingly uncertain.
  73. Bad Education
    Bad Education doesn’t shy away from the humor of the situation, but it doesn’t go for the cheap laughs either.
  74. About Endlessness
    If we’ve been here before, the immaculate, somehow tender-hearted execution of About Endlessness ensures this is not a complaint.
  75. Genèse (Genesis)
    Lesage’s filmmaking, with its unhurried editing and eerily echoing music cues, is in expert sympathy with his hovering, out-of-time protagonists.
  76. Greener Grass
    Presented as if filtered through a sunny Instagram setting, Greener Grass won’t exactly make you envious of the over-idealized lifestyle it skewers, and yet it’s such a delightful place to inhabit, you won’t want to leave when the credits roll.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Casualties of War
    Casting Fox was a brilliant coup on De Palma’s part, since he brings with him an image of all-American boyishness and eager-beaver conservatism. Fox’s beautifully acted cowardly passivity in the face of the unthinkable challenges and implicates the viewer to examine his own conscience on the subject of Vietnam.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mutiny on the Bounty
    Mutiny takes its time, and plenty of it, without being guilty of a single dull moment.
  79. Western Stars
    Western Stars isn’t a rockin’-out extravaganza; it’s intimate in its embrace. Yet it’s a moving testament to how much Bruce Springsteen has still got it. It’s a concert film you’ll want to experience with others, as a ray of light in the dark.
  80. Babyteeth
    Babyteeth works best as an abrasive four-hander, though Murphy’s limber, sensually electric direction leaves the film with little clear evidence of its theatrical origins.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Out of Towners
    The Out of Towners is a total delight.
  82. Dark Waters
    What gives Dark Waters its singular texture is that Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”), who has never made a drama remotely like this, colors in the scenario with an underlying dimension of personalized obsession.
  83. The Two Popes
    While its subject may be religious, The Two Popes doesn’t want to convert the viewer. Rather, as an extraordinary piece of writing — and an even more impressive showcase for its actors — it eloquently communicates the importance of giving people something to believe in.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    The Panic in Needle Park is a total triumph. Gritty, gutsy, compelling, and vivid to the point of revulsion, it is an overpowering tragedy about urban drug addiction.
  86. Proxima
    An unostentatious but quietly dazzling meditation on womanhood in the largely patriarchal space race, Alice Winocour’s highly satisfying third feature outdoes many more lavish Hollywood efforts in evoking the otherworldly emotional disconnect that comes with space travel, all without leaving terra firma for the vast bulk of its running time.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Sundowners
    Jon Cleary's novel is the basic source from which director Fred Zinnemann's inspiration springs. Between Cleary and Zinnemann lies Isobel Lennart's perceptive, virile screenplay, loaded with bright, telling lines of dialog and gentle philosophical comment. But, fine as the scenario is, it is Zinnemann's poetic glances into the souls of his characters, little hints of deep longings, hidden despairs, indomitable spirit that make the picture the achievement it is.
  88. The Cave
    This is both an immensely humanist film, and a tough, heartbreaking watch.
  89. Anne at 13,000 ft
    Anne at 13,000 ft might look like mumblecore, but it plays as a psychological horror and a ticking-clock thriller that morphs into a wild, windswept tangle of incipient, but never quite arriving tragedy.
  90. 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.
  91. The Kingmaker
    Marcos’ print-the-legend philosophy has particular resonance in a post-truth world, although such sinister undertones sneak up on audiences in a movie that begins, innocently enough, as the latest of Greenfield’s astonishing portraits of wealth run amok.
  92. The Hottest August
    Story’s an original, and the film is a revelation — a movie that’s as deep as we’re willing to read into it, and an invaluable time capsule for summers far in our future, assuming we ever get there.
  93. In My Room
    In My Room presents and accepts its partial apocalypse with unquestioning calm — an extreme contrivance that merely enables an elegant, exacting character study.
  94. Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary
    A classic piece of Americana, a down-home documentary that not only produces gales of laughter but also manages, by the end, to come together as a highly unlikely metaphor for the rigors of human existence.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Victim
    This is telling, moving stuff.
  96. Bombshell
    Bombshell is a scalding and powerful movie about what selling, in America, has become. The film is about selling sex, selling a candidate, selling yourself, selling the truth. And about how at Fox News all those things came together.
  97. The Cat and the Moon
    Wolff has made a debut feature as impressive in its deliberate modesty and unpretentiousness as it is in matters of psychological nuance and technical skill.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Treasure Island
    Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, has been handsomely mounted by Walt Disney. Settings are sumptuous and a British cast headed by American moppet Bobby Driscoll faithfully recaptures the bloodthirsty 18th-century era when pirates vied for the supremacy of the seas.
  99. 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Old Yeller
    Disney organization's flair for taking a homely subject and building a heartwarming film is again aptly demonstrated in this moving story set in 1869 of a Texas frontier family and an old yeller dog. Based on Fred Gipson's novel of same tag, this is a careful blending of fun, laughter, love, adventure and tragedy.
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