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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    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Miracle on 34th Street
    So you don't believe in Santa Claus? If you want to stay a non-believer don't see Miracle.
    • 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?
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    Taylor has a major credit with her portrayal of Maggie. The frustrations and desires, both as a person and a woman, the warmth and understanding she molds, the loveliness that is more than a well-turned nose – all these are part of a well-accented, perceptive interpretation.
  4. Antebellum
    While Antebellum is no zombie movie, it treats systemic racism as a kind of contagion that refuses to die, eating the brains of successive generations. There’s only one way to stop it, and that’s by blowing the minds of all those infected — which is precisely the impact Antebellum achieves.
  5. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
    Even though Chatwin is only seen in a handful of snapshots and one brief video snippet, Herzog brings him to vivid life.
  6. Slay the Dragon
    Slay the Dragon is an incisively made and morally suspenseful film, at once chilling and stirring.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Chinese Portrait
    The compositions are rich with multiple layers; they explore the depth of the cinematic space, and suggest invisible presences at the edge of the frame.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Death on the Nile
    Death on the Nile is a clever, witty, well-plotted, beautifully-produced and splendidly acted screen version of Agatha Christie's mystery. It's old-fashioned stylized entertainment with a big cast and lush locations.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    White Palace
    Outstanding performances by Susan Sarandon and James Spader, working from a relentlessly witty script, make White Palace one of the best films of its kind since The Graduate (1967).
  10. Those Who Remained
    In his sophomore feature, the France-born, Budapest-based helmer (perhaps best known for his prize-winning 2018 short “Chuchotage”) sensitively establishes and sustains an affecting but understated dramatic tone, aided by his superb leads.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Quigley Down Under
    Quigley Down Under is an exquisitely crafted, rousing western made in Oz.
  12. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    At once a celebration and a lament, simultaneously jubilant and ineffably sad, it’s a film worth sticking around to see.
  13. Minari
    Chung transforms the specificity of his upbringing into something warm, tender and universal.
  14. On the Record
    On the Record presents a searing, at times shocking exposé of alleged criminal acts. Yet here, as in those earlier chronicles, what’s extraordinary is the disturbingly intimate communion the film creates between the audience and the survivors. Not just the facts but the meaning of these alleged crimes comes scarily alive in the emotional details of their telling.
  15. The Painter and the Thief
    To get the desired emotional reaction, The Painter and the Thief proves able to deceive in ways that are best discovered for yourself. It works: In a genius final stroke, Ree pulls back to reveal the entire canvas, putting key aspects of this unconventional portrait into startling new perspective.
  16. The Dissident
    The Dissident is riveting, but it’s also a moving testament to a man whose courage burned too brightly to die with him.
  17. Welcome to Chechnya
    The ironically inviting title only hints at part of the story in this wholly devastating documentary: The crisis, it turns out, is all around us.
  18. A White, White Day
    In light of my own experience with the film, I recommend the following. See it twice: a virgin viewing, simply to take in the strange counterintuitive way the story unfolds, and then again, with a bit of distance, knowing where the journey is headed, so that you might fully appreciate the genius of its construction. I’m convinced that A White, White Day is the work of one of the most important voices of this emerging generation, arriving at a stage where we have yet to learn his language.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jagged Edge
    A well-crafted, hardboiled mystery by Joe Eszterhas, with sharp performances by murder suspect Jeff Bridges and tough-but- smitten defense attorney Glenn Close.
  20. Nine Days
    Nine Days is that rare work of art that invites you to re-consider your entire worldview.
  21. The Father
    The Father is a chamber piece, but it has the artistic verve to keep twisting the reality it shows us without becoming a stunt.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Crazy People
    Crazy People combines a hilarious dissection of advertising with a warm view of so-called insanity... Finished film is a credit to all hands.
  23. After Yang
    The movie’s pulse seldom rises above resting, but the director invites audiences to dive as deep as they want to go into the film’s themes, to read subtext into body language, silence and the space between characters.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Passage to India
    An impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel about the clash of East and West in colonial India.
  25. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    The laughs come at a clip few movies can sustain, stacked so dense, repeat viewing (and in some cases, strategic freeze-framing) is required to catch them all.
  26. 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lady Jane
    With its emphasis on youthful idealism despoiled by treacherous, manipulative adults, Lady Jane emerges as a tragic historical romance tinged with a strong 1960s feeling...Performances are all top-drawer, beginning with newcomer Helena Bonham Carter in the title role.
  28. Dolphin Reef
    A Disneynature documentary that drops on Disney Plus on April 3, simply get out of the way and let the ancient creatures of the sea seduce us with their surreal evolutionary form-follows-function wild splendor.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Family Plot
    Family Plot is a dazzling achievement for Alfred Hitchcock masterfully controlling shifts from comedy to drama thoughout a highly complex plot. Witty screenplay, transplanting Victor Canning's British novel, The Rainbird Pattern, to a California setting, is a model of construction, and the cast is uniformly superb.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Shop Around the Corner
    Although picture carries the indelible stamp of Ernst Lubitsch at his best in generating humor and human interest from what might appear to be unimportant situations, it carries further to impress via the outstanding characterizations by Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart in the starring spots.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lady Eve
    Laugh entertainment of top proportions with its combo of slick situations, spontaneous dialog and a few slapstick falls tossed in for good measure.
  32. We Are Little Zombies
    No pulsating, psychedelic, pop-punk phantasmagoria ought to be as moving and smart as We Are Little Zombies. But Makoto Nagahisa’s explosively ingenious and energetic debut (imagine it as the spiritual offspring of Richard Lester and a Harajuku Girl) holds the high score for visual and narrative invention, as well as boasting [insert gigantic-beating-heart GIF] and braaaains, too.
  33. The Wolf House
    It’s an endless metamorphosis that unfolds like some kind of real-time art installation, and in all honesty, it can be a touch overwhelming to take in at times — which is why the digital release of The Wolf House is a blessing in disguise, as audiences can rewind to fully appreciate this awe-inspiring film’s layers of details.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jubilee
    Derek Jarman's Jubilee is one of the most original, bold, and exciting features to have come out of Britain in the 1970s.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    42nd Street
    Everything about the production rings true. It's as authentic to the initiate as the novitiate.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wild Strawberries
    Pic sometimes talks too much in philosophical asides, but it remains a searching pictorial analysis of a man’s life. Expert directorial touches and notations of director Ingmar Bergman, and the dignified miming of oldtime director Sjostrom, plus other fine thespic additions, make this an offbeater. It’s a personal and profound work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Front Page
    A very entertaining picture for anyone anywhere. [25 Mar 1931, p.17]
    • Variety
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Nun's Story
    Fred Zinnemann's production is a soaring and luminous film. Audrey Hepburn has her most demanding film role, and she gives her finest performance. Despite the seriousness of the underlying theme, The Nun's Story [from the book by Kathryn C. Hulme] has the elements of absorbing drama, pathos, humor, and a gallery of memorable scenes and characters.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Patch of Blue
    Film has very good scripting plus excellent direction and performances, including an exceptional screen debut by Elizabeth Hartman as the gal.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The 39 Steps
    Yes, they can make pictures in England. This one proves it. International spy stories are most always good, and this is one of the best. [19 Jun 1935, p.21]
    • Variety
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tortilla Flat
    A sincere, tender, beguiling and at times exalting picture. It is sympathetically and adroitly adapted, handsomely produced, expertly directed and eloquently acted.
  43. Shanghai Triad
    Triad oozes a confidence that carries the viewer almost without pause to its shocking climax and ironic close.
  44. Sweat
    With her eerily flawless image and pathological narcissism, it would be all too easy to make Sylwia a monstrous figure of fun — yet the more circumstances turn against her, the more nuance and moral curiosity von Horn and Koleśnik find beneath her hyper-contoured surface.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Richard III
    At all times Shakespeare’s poetry, impeccably spoken by this outstanding cast, heightens the dramatic atmosphere. The production, and notably Roger Furse’s decor, is consistently spectacular. The climactic battle sequences rival the pageantry of Henry V.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
    Top-flight cinematic entertainment.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Roberta
    Roberta is musical picture-making at its best - fast, smart, good looking and tuneful.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    Orson Welles has reworked the docu material of Francois Reichenbach on noted art forger Elmyr De Houry, made for TV about 1968, into an intriguing, enjoyable look at illusion in general and his own, Clifford Irving’s and De Houry’s dealing with it in particular.
  49. All In: The Fight for Democracy
    A powerfully timely and absorbing documentary.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    All through the picture there's charm, romance, gaiety and eclat.
  51. Sunless Shadows
    It quietly but pointedly interrogates the notion of victimhood, while tacitly letting a damning essay on Iranian gender politics and hierarchies emerge through the words of his subjects.
  52. 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.
  53. Giraffe
    It’s a film of big themes on an intimate scale that lovingly acknowledges the unimaginable wealth of stories inside everyone we encounter, while also looking at how we negotiate the place of memory in our lives.
  54. A Thousand Cuts
    Ressa’s seemingly boundless energy, good humor and intelligence make her basically a power plant for the manufacture of inspiration in embattled times.
  55. Robin's Wish
    A documentary that’s honest and scary, wrenching and moving.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Horse Feathers
    The madcap Marxes, in one of their maddest screen frolics. The premise of Groucho Marx as the college prexy and his three aides and abettors putting Huxley College on the grid-iron map promises much and delivers more.
    • 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.
  58. Apocalypse '45
    The hell we see here isn’t heightened; it’s graphic and terrifying. Yet the greatest terror may be that it was necessary. Apocalypse ’45 is a haunting document of men who fought their way through hell to save all of us.
  59. Pieces of a Woman
    Mundruczó and Wéber gave her the pieces from which to assemble this character, but only Kirby could have taken that puzzle and turned it into such an astonishing portrait.
  60. 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.
  61. Our Time Machine
    Sun and Chiang strike a tricky balance between a high-stakes making-of documentary and an intimate, observational family portrait, but Maleonn is such a thoughtful, sensitive, brilliant subject that the film is compelling no matter where on the creative spectrum they find him.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back
    Pennebaker has fashioned a relentlessly honest, brilliantly edited documentary permeated with the troubador-poet's music.
  63. 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.
  64. The Disciple
    Tamhane patiently constructs his characters out of small details, relying on his audience to pick up on small changes and muted shifts of tone that signal the passage of time and Sharad’s interior journey.
  65. Gunda
    Its radiantly beautiful imagery and gently immersive storytelling aren’t in service of a single browbeating message, but a broader, holistic view of where we and the animals we rear, use and consume fit into a single circle of life.
  66. 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.”
  67. Apples
    What might have been the latest oddity of the Greek Weird Wave — or else a surreal collection of live-action “The Far Side” cartoons — instead feels soulfully relevant as reality aligns with the speculative world Nikou imagined.
  68. Shadow in the Cloud
    Hardly a minute of the movie registers as “realistic,” but that hardly matters, since Liang so fully commits to its over-the-top sensibility that you’ll be clutching the armrest and grinning with glee for most of the ride.
  69. Beans
    Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.
  70. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    Lovers Rock is nothing more (or less) than a snapshot of an era, a moment, a series of lives. Yet it lingers like a song you don’t want to get out of your head.
  71. Small Axe: Mangrove
    This may be “television” (in the sense that Amazon will release the films via streaming), but McQueen approaches it with all the seriousness of cinema.
  72. Small Axe: Education
    The brilliance of this particular episode is how it allows us to see ourselves in Kingsley and to consider the many unseen forces at play in our own socialization. For Black audiences, it confirms many of those invisible barriers. For white ones, it may lead them to question whether the myth of their “success” owes in part to keeping others back.
  73. The Prom
    The movie has a universalist spirit that’s wired into its very form. It turns doing the right thing into a fizzy and elating high-camp showbiz high.
  74. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
    What’s most moving about Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is that Sacks, whose extreme love of existence was there in every sentence he wrote, could embrace death because it would be the most out-there adventure of his life. What he saw is that we were all, in our ways, afflicted and all unique. And therefore all extraordinary.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    8½
    With 8 1/2 Federico Fellini tops even his trendsetting La Dolce Vita in artistry. Here is the author-director picture par excellence, an exciting, stimulating, monumental creation.
  76. White Noise
    White Noise is a deadly serious movie, but it is also, in a certain way, a funny one, because it captures the comedy of how much trouble even the influencers of hate now have squaring their lives with their belief systems
  77. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Borat has lost none of his bite, treading that same fine line between sophomoric humor and pointed political satire.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Man with the Golden Arm
    Clinical in its probing of the agonies, this is a gripping, fascinating film, expertly produced and directed and performed with marked conviction by Frank Sinatra as the drug slave.
  79. Malcolm & Marie
    Levinson gives his stars roughly equal time, carefully modulating the sense of balance throughout. His direction seldom seems showy, and yet, we sense the intention behind each cut as power and control shifts throughout the movie.
  80. 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.
  81. Land
    Bless Wright for paring Land down to a beautiful haiku, and for delivering a performance that’s ambiguous and understated in all the right ways.
  82. The Color Purple
    Barrino’s soul-felt R&B sensibility lends itself to the role, and the patience it took to reach this point mirrors Celie’s long path to finding herself. Barrino may have embodied the character on Broadway 15 years earlier, but the moment is now right, and everyone else in the terrific ensemble seems to have fallen into place around that choice.
  83. I Blame Society
    Aside from all its other virtues, this film is a truly inspiring example of committing to the bit.
  84. Stray
    Throughout the mostly wordless “Stray,” we wonder with compassion and considerable self-critique whom the society uplifts and supports vs. whom it chooses to disregard and deem invisible.
  85. Nightmare Alley
    A gorgeous, fantastically sinister moral fable about the cruel predictability of human nature and the way entire systems — from carnies and con men to shrinks and Sunday preachers — are engineered to exploit it.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Crimes of the Heart
    Thoughtfully cast, superbly acted and masterfully written and directed, Crimes of the Heart is a winner.
  87. The Road to Mandalay
    Midi Z has now delivered a tightly edited and emotionally rewarding drama that places him in the top rank of Asian social realists.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Captain Blood
    Captain Blood, from the Rafael Sabatini novel, is a big picture. It's a spectacle which will establish both Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Director Michael Curtiz hasn't spared the horses. It's a lavish, swashbuckling saga of the Spanish main.
  89. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.
  90. CODA
    Siân Heder, who came up as a writer and story editor on “Orange Is the New Black,” has directed just one previous feature (“Tallulah”), but she’s got the gift — the holy essence of how to shape and craft a drama that spins and burbles and flows.
  91. Mass
    The writing is so deft, and the actors so committed, that by the end you feel you’ve touched the burning core of something real.
  92. The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet
    It presents details so small they belong under a microscope, and events so large they belong in science fiction; that these chopped fragments can build to an experience so smooth and significant is only because of Katz’s radical re-centering of the drama, away from what happens and onto the life it happens to.
  93. 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.
  94. What's Love Got to Do with It
    A passionate personal and professional drama that hits both the high and low notes of an extraordinary life and career. An immensely enjoyable saga that's tough, funny and touching.
  95. Tina
    I went into Tina feeling like I knew this story in my bones, but the film kept opening my eyes — to new insights, new tremors of empathy, and a new appreciation for what a towering artist Tina Turner is.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Singles
    [A] dynamite romantic comedy.
  97. Hope
    Sødahl’s skill at making gesture and its absence count in the most subtle ways is an essential component in our investment with these protagonists, thanks to the superbly understated camerawork of Lars von Trier’s regular DP Manuel Alberto Claro.
  98. Sophie Jones
    The cinematic catharsis the Barrs and company have carefully crafted stands as a fully realized portrait of grief that’s universal in its texture. By focusing on living with the specter of grief and the discovery of its blessings, the filmmakers highlight the human struggle, breaking through to the gutting truth of the matter.
  99. Wojnarowicz
    “Wojnarowicz” is impressive as a tapestry woven near-whole from preexisting materials, amplifying its subject’s own voice in every creative form it took. Editor Dave Stanke merits kudos alongside McKim for their evocative, first-rate assembly.
  100. The Fever
    It is Myrupu’s beguiling performance what anchors this intimate and entrancing epic, a modern-day fable about the very concept of modernity and the promise of fabulation.
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