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. The Namesake
    A richly compelling story of family and self-discovery.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frances Ha
    Baumbach pushes beyond sincerity in search of truth, drawing from such stylistic forebears as the French New Wave, Woody Allen and Andy Warhol's Factory films to capture a reality that has eluded him on his more polished dramedies.
  3. Socrates
    Malheiros’ terrific turn makes this protagonist credibly tough by necessity, and mature beyond his years. Ordakji is also excellent as the not-much-older new friend whose reluctance to be more helpful is, like other backstory elements here, only partly explained later on. Despite the film’s raw realist air, these two actors aren’t amateur discoveries, but rather theater studies graduates making their screen debuts — at no doubt the beginning of long careers.
  4. C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon proves plenty poignant, but it’s less entertaining than it might have been.
  5. Hunger
    Picture represents a powerful, pertinent but not entirely perfect debut for British visual-artist-turned-feature-helmer Steve McQueen, who demonstrates a painterly touch with composition and real cinematic flair, but who stumbles in film's last furlough with trite symbolism.
  6. Howl's Moving Castle
    The tireless volley of ideas and inventions make this a delight that should connect with kids and adults in both dubbed and original-language versions.
  7. Cold Comfort Farm
    The fun that Schlesinger and his first-rate ensemble must have had while working on this production is infectious, for there isn't one dull -- or quiet -- moment in the film.
  8. A Hijacking
    Hostage thrillers are all-too-often shrill affairs, with clock-watching screenwriters wringing maximum melodrama from spiraling disorder. Not so Tobias Lindholm’s superb A Hijacking, which actually grows more chillingly subdued as its nightmare scenario unfolds.
  9. Nocturnes
    Its meditative, hyper-fixated approach to process — as seen through the eyes of seasoned lepidopterists — proves so hypnotic that any appeals or augments the movie makes are deeply felt before they’re intellectually understood.
  10. Black Box Diaries
    Without undue manipulation or sentimentality, Black Box Diaries pulls viewers’ emotions in sharp extremes that mirror the peaks and valleys of this hard-fought five-year case.
  11. Crimson Gold
    Succeeds as a universal account of frustration applicable to any urban center where the gap between haves and have-nots is tauntingly visible.
  12. Small Things Like These
    It’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives Small Things Like These its eventual, fist-in-the-gut power, even as the film evades melodramatic confrontation to the last, ending elegantly at a point where many other stories might choose to begin.
  13. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    The way Kuenne presents the material, with an aggressive style that lingers less than a second on most shots, it's impossible not to feel emotionally exhausted.
  14. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Well-shot and edited, Anvil! is an underdog saga even non-metalheads will root for. It tows that fine line between chuckling at its protags' somewhat absurd situation and celebrating their sheer unwillingness to give up.
  15. The Trip
    Michael Winterbottom's The Trip is about 20 minutes too long, but the other 90 are among the funniest in recent memory.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marty
    It’s a warm, human, sometimes sentimental and an enjoyable experience.
  17. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    Visually dazzling and considerably darker than the prior incarnations, the story suffers from a slightly disjointed feel that will prove less accessible to those not intimately familiar with every corner of author J.K. Rowling's world.
  18. Michael Clayton
    Features strong performances and a solid story, drawn from the familiar well of faceless corporations grinding ordinary people through their profit-making machinery. Yet Gilroy's fidelity to his script comes at the expense of the pacing.
  19. Levitated Mass
    Pray deftly maintains the integrity and momentum of his story’s various strands while moving backward and forward in time, and from one discreet subtopic to another, his segues as unpredictable as they are imperceptible.
  20. Downfall
    Not so much a Hitler movie as a portrait of a totalitarian machine's spiritual and emotional collapse, Downfall is a cumulatively powerful Goetterdammerung centered on the last 10 days of the bunkered Fuehrer and those around him.
  21. Knives Out
    Knives Out recalls a time when audiences could still be surprised by such mysteries, before the genre devolved into a corny parody of itself. Johnson keeps us guessing, which is good, but the thing that makes this a better mousetrap than most isn’t the complexity, but the fact he’s managed to rig it without the usual cheese.
  22. The Spectacular Now
    Skillfully adapted from Tim Tharp's novel, evocatively lensed in the working-class neighborhoods of Athens, Ga., and tenderly acted by Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, this bittersweet ode to the moment of childhood's end builds quietly to a pitch-perfect finale.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Man Godfrey
    William Powell and Carole Lombard are pleasantly teamed in this splendidly produced comedy. Story is balmy, but not too much so, and lends itself to the sophisticated screen treatment of Eric Hatch's novel.
  24. Apocalypse in the Tropics
    The film backs away from the overtly personal narration of its predecessor, in pursuit of a bigger picture.
  25. Face/Off
    A provocative premise, virtuoso direction and two dazzling lead performances go a long way toward offsetting a lack of dramatic structure and a sense of when to quit in Face/Off.
  26. 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.
  27. Sator
    Anyone can pull off a jump scare or three. Graham immediately manages the considerably more difficult task of conjuring a mood of general dread, suffusing ordinary settings with supernatural unease.
  28. Let the Right One In
    Calling to mind the work of Anne Rice and Stephen King, atmospheric adaptation of Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist's bestseller is well directed by his countryman Tomas Alfredson ("Four Shades of Brown") and should click with cult and arthouse auds.
  29. Rams
    As Hakonarson’s beautifully modulated film progresses, recurring images contrast and poignantly resonate with meaning.
  30. Big Words
    The dialogue — natural, vibrant and totally embedded in the moment, never sententious or showoff-y — is delivered with consummate believability by an excellent cast.
  31. Certified Copy
    More compelling as an intellectual exercise than an emotional one, Certified Copy finds deep-thinking writer-director Abbas Kiarostami asserting there's nothing new under the Tuscan sun, particularly not his own conventional romantic drama set in rural Italy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night Moves
    Night Moves is a paradox: a suspenseless suspenser, very well cast with players who lend sustained interest to largely synthetic theatrical characters.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Celebration
    A propulsively inventive but uneven family comedy-cum-melodrama.
  34. The Waldheim Waltz
    Thanks to her smart narration — clear, impassioned but never polemical — and the astute way she allows exceptional footage to play out to its full extent, The Waldheim Waltz has a sense of urgency made more pressing given political developments not just in Austria but Poland and Hungary as well.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Broadway Danny Rose
    Broadway Danny Rose is a delectable diversion which allows Woody Allen to present a reasonably humane, and amusing gentle character study without sacrificing himself to overly commercial concerns.
  36. Taxi to the Dark Side
    Photos and video of torture at Bagram and Abu Ghraib are the most viscerally disturbing elements of Taxi to the Dark Side, but the way soft-spoken soldiers were transformed into beasts with the tacit approval of the higher-ups is just as profoundly chilling.
  37. A Stray
    The result is modest, but has an earned emotional payoff.
  38. Nuts!
    This now-obscure historical chapter can’t help but be silly in the retelling, and Lane surrenders whole to that silliness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Repo Man
    Repo Man has the type of unerring energy that leaves audiences breathless and entertained.
  40. Challengers
    Another filmmaker might have subtracted himself in order to foreground the story, whereas Guadagnino goes big, leading with style (and a trendy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).
  41. Pig
    As a descent into the apparently high-stakes world of truffle-pig-poaching, Pig is unexpectedly touching; as a showcase for Cage’s brilliance, it’s a revelation.
  42. Give Me Liberty
    Give Me Liberty catches us off guard with its sense of humor, which amplifies the sheer absurdity of certain situations while respecting the fundamental humanity of its characters — further reflected in the choice of casting actors with disabilities.
  43. Marjorie Prime
    Though it mostly resists contrived “opening-out” devices, and preserves the decidedly low-tech visualization of the play’s sci-fi premise, Michael Almereyda’s well-cast film never finds a suitably complex cinematic language for its tangle of intellectual and emotional ideas.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    Henry Fonda and Jason Robards relish each screen minute as the heavies, and Charles Bronson plays Clint Eastwood's 'man with no name' role. (Review of Original Release)
  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. Steve Jobs
    Writer Aaron Sorkin, director Danny Boyle and star Michael Fassbender have given their subject the brilliant, maddening, ingeniously designed and monstrously self-aggrandizing movie he deserves.
  47. Marley
    Kevin Macdonald's generous, absorbing, family-authorized documentary on the late, still-reigning king of reggae music.
  48. The Agronomist
    Melds a great cause and Dominique's incandescent charisma with care using research from nine years of filming and reporting.
  49. Touching the Void
    Uses first-person on-camera accounts of the adventure by Simpson and fellow climber Simon Yates to backdrop newly shot you-are-there footage that brings home the awesome and harrowing aspects of their feat.
  50. Le Havre
    Mixing together some of helmer Aki Kaurismaki's favorite Gallic and Finnish thesps with a few newbies, Le Havre feels like a welcoming family reunion.
  51. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers is a film about class and race, grief and resentment, opportunity and entitlement. It’s that rare exception to the oft-heard complaint that “they don’t make ’em like they used to.”
  52. Sound of Metal
    Sound of Metal is two hours and 10 minutes long, and it moves at a snail’s pace, not because “nothing happens,” but because Marder hasn’t filled in the dramatic interior of what does happen. He has made a movie about deafness that’s at once experiential and too muffled to hear.
    • 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.
  54. Embrace of the Serpent
    The film would nonetheless benefit from occasional tightening, its digressions and longueurs occasionally moving beyond the lyrical and into the belabored. Nevertheless, as a vision of the past, “Embrace of the Serpent” offers a stately, striking panorama and an entirely persuasive one.
  55. Under African Skies
    Under African Skies is appreciably smarter than most celebrity musician documentaries.
  56. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Exhibiting Forgiveness sends you out on a note of hope, but it’s not exactly a feel-good movie. It’s a feel-the-reality movie, a drama willing to scald. That’s its quiet power.
  57. Sieranevada
    [Puiu] manages to weave a tapestry — or family quilt, if you will — in which deception and the hopeless search for truth is judged both on the micro level (as in extramarital affairs) and a more global scale (which is where questions of Romania’s Communist past, 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo fit into the picture), and where disturbances in either sphere ripple out into the world at large.
  58. Great Absence
    Even though Great Absence, is a little overlong and its framing device, an avant-garde theater piece, feels unnecessary, in another way its multiple strands and many endings are extraordinarily, poetically appropriate.
  59. Da 5 Bloods
    The result is overlong and erratic, but also frequently surprising for a contemporary riff on the classic greed-doesn’t-pay parable “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
  60. Side by Side
    Although laid out with such clarity that any layperson could catch the gist of what's being discussed, Side by Side is not afraid to get nitty-gritty about more technical matters.
  61. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    While Talbot and Fails claim to have walk-and-talked their way all over San Francisco, the script — and especially the dialogue — is the most disappointing element of their first feature.
  62. Days of Glory
    Committed performances and strong widescreen lensing carry the message with a righteous, if heavy weight.
  63. My Summer of Love
    Direction, performances and lensing blend into an immensely satisfying, if almost uncategorizable, whole in Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love.
  64. Isle of Dogs
    If mounds of garbage aren’t quite what viewers have come to associate with Planet Wes, the slight scuzziness of Isle of Dogs is its great surprise: From the occasional eye-watering blurriness of its fast tracking shots to the loopy, laissez-faire nature of its storytelling, the whole enterprise might just be as messy as the director lets himself get.
  65. Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    Has some style as well as compelling content.
  66. Blissfully Yours
    A rare example of indie filmmaking produced outside the Thai studio system, Blissfully Yours takes the good-humored nonsense of director Apichatpong Weeasethakul's first feature, "Mysterious Object at Noon," several steps further into the realm of non-communicative minimalism.
  67. Read My Lips
    Engaging chemistry between leads Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel.
  68. The Return
    Constructed like an eerie, metaphorical thriller, this tense, riveting character study offers viewers nearly two hours of emotions with a stunning pay-off no one will be expecting.
  69. Mademoiselle Chambon
    Mademoiselle Chambon offers a touching, soft-spoken portrait of two adults fighting to contain their carnal passions from spilling over into a full-blown affair.
  70. Mysteries of Lisbon
    A handsomely mounted adaptation of the like-titled Portuguese novel, Ruiz's 4 1/2-hour epic establishes the essential ambiguity of its chameleonic characters from the get-go and proceeds thereby, with riveting results and revelations that continue right to the end.
  71. Archipelago
    This is a beautifully distilled and literally still work that lingers in the mind long after its conclusion.
  72. Certain Women
    As with Reichardt’s more streamlined miniatures, regional detail accounts for much of the film’s lingering resonance, as her characters are molded by (and, in some cases, rail against) the landscape they inhabit.
  73. 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Life as a Dog
    An exquisite look at childhood, based loosely on Reidar Jonsson's 1983 novel about a rural-provincial 12-year-old equivalent of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield
  75. The Best Is Yet to Come
    The Best Is Yet to Come is superbly well-made, making a compelling case for recognizing the humanity of others even in the midst of illness, even when ignorance and politicized paranoia threaten your compassion. It’s not hard to discern the relevance.
  76. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself
    Not all the tricks translate, nor do they need to, since DelGaudio has shrewdly constructed the experience around the theme of identity, revealing deeply personal elements of his own history in such a way as to prime audiences to look inward as well. The result is a kind of epiphany that leaves them with a feeling of discovery rather than deception.
  77. Captain Volkonogov Escaped
    Merkulova and Chupov deliver the visceral aspects of this Dostoevskian tale particularly well ... But 'Captain Volkogonov Escaped' is so attuned to the physical that the more metaphysical aspects of Volkogonov’s journey are underdeveloped by comparison.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Story of Louis Pasteur
    It couldn't have been an easy film to make, and the fact that it holds as much general interest as it does speaks volumes. But the producers couldn't avoid some dull stretches of scientific discourse.
  79. Frozen River
    No trendsetter or breakthrough, this is more than anything else a welcome chance for the fine actor Melissa Leo to finally dominate a film in a terrific and affecting lead role.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Superman
    Magnify James Bond's extraordinary physical powers while curbing his sex drive and you have the essence of Superman, a wonderful, chuckling, preposterously exciting fantasy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Drugstore Cowboy
    No previous drug-themed film has the honesty or originality of Gus Van Sant's drama Drugstore Cowboy.
  82. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    The look and feel owes an obvious debt to the beloved films of Studio Ghibli, which have offered some of the most iconic representations of wartime Japan and its long, fraught recovery period. “Little Amélie” starts from a place of (mostly endearing) solipsism and builds empathy and emotional depth as it goes.
  83. Heal the Living
    It’s Quillévéré’s soaring visual and sonic acumen (with an assist from composer Alexandre Desplat, here in matchless form) that suffuses a potentially familiar hospital weeper with true grace.
  84. Love Is Strange
    Love Is Strange never feels anything less than authentic, like a true story shared by close friends.
  85. Navalny
    The film flashes back to the poisoning, and it could be the most sickening and calamitous suspense-thriller episode you ever saw.
  86. The Girl Without Hands
    Each shimmering frame is composed of multiple layers of diverse drawing and painting techniques and washes of color combined with 2D computer animation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    La Ronde
    Ophuls has used a dearth of closeups, brilliant decor playing a vital part. Film gains an opulence in the expert lensing of Christian Matras. There is much filming through carved glass, linen, silks and mirrors to create the aura of romance.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blow-Up
    As a commentary on a sordid, confused side of humanity in this modern age it's a bust.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tess
    Tess is a sensitive, intelligent screen treatment of a literary masterwork. Roman Polanski has practiced no betrayal in filming Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and his adaptation often has that infrequent quality of combining fidelity and beauty.
  90. The Assassin
    A mesmerizing slow burn of a martial-arts movie that boldly merges stasis and kinesis, turns momentum into abstraction, and achieves breathtaking new heights of compositional elegance: Shot for shot, it’s perhaps the most ravishingly beautiful film Hou has ever made, and certainly one of his most deeply transporting.
  91. In Jackson Heights
    In Jackson Heights is a classic example of Wiseman’s affinity for this type of subject, full of community organizers and advocacy meetings in which citizens and aspiring citizens learn to use their civic voices. In truth, the camera lingers longer than necessary in these gatherings, but the film has rewards on the macro and micro levels.
  92. The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
    It’s a bizarre story not entirely clear in the telling — partly because we can’t be entirely sure when the subject is telling the truth — but absorbing nonetheless.
  93. Late Marriage
    As wrenching as it is funny.
  94. One Day in September
    Never less than gripping as an account of what happened and what went terribly wrong.
  95. Concert for George
    Film gathers together only those who knew, loved and made music with "the quiet Beatle."
  96. Dazed and Confused
    One-liners and dry sight gags still abound, but the ennui-sodden formlessness of "Slacker" doesn't fly as well in this $ 6 million, smoothly lensed package, which calls for shapelier narrative and resolution.
  97. The Twilight Samurai
    A mellow, stately, contemplative study of a stoic, brave man, but it doesn't deliver in the action department.
  98. Madeline's Madeline
    Madeline’s Madeline mistakes intimacy for honesty, and it mis-assumes that audiences care nearly as much about the creative process as actors and directors do.
  99. Requiem
    Stunningly played story of faith vs. family.
  100. Captain Phillips
    There is something too dry and austere about Greengrass and Ray’s telescoped vision, which touches only fleetingly on the pirates’ motives, the suffering of the Somali people and the collateral damage of global capitalism.
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