Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Foxcatcher
    If the screenplay, by Dan Futterman (“Capote”) and E. Max Frye, is relatively spare in terms of dialogue, it’s satisfyingly rich and thorny in its conception of the tightly wound triangle at its center, while Miller’s direction evinces the same sustained intensity and consummate control of his material that defined his first two features.
  2. Bamako
    Rather miraculously, picture succeeds in painlessly educating its viewers about global politics and economics while it describes contemporary Africa with freshness and clarity.
  3. Autumn Tale
    A typically deftly layered meditation on men, women, friendship and the prospect of romance.
  4. Beginners
    Rarely do you find such self-plunging material beyond the realm of documentary or far-fringe museum fare, and despite his background in that arena, Mills sheds all preciosity in service of genuinely revealing introspection.
  5. Twinsters
    The overriding effect of Twinsters is a sense of pleasure at having borne witness to emotional epiphanies of the most affecting and intimate sort.
  6. Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids
    Demme proves he’s still a wily master of the craft, and the director’s work here makes this more than just a fans-only proposition.
  7. Dolores
    Dolores crams a great deal of information, themes, and diverse archival materials into a sharp, cogent whole.
  8. United Skates
    Like such trendsetting classics as “Paris Is Burning” and “Rize,” this kaleidoscopically vibrant, essential-viewing survey plunges audiences into a dazzling underground scene, celebrating the endangered art form it finds there.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Paris, Texas
    It’s indeed a beautiful film, one that will surely convince doubters that Muller is one of the cinema’s best cameramen. He gives the story a surface polish that hints of Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe Americana paintings. Some images are positively breathtaking.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Captains Courageous
    The Kipling yarn, built around a wealthy, motherless brat who accidentaly lands with a cod-fishing fleet, and undergoes regeneration during an enforced three months’ piscatorial quest, has been given splendid production, performance, photography and dramatic composition.
  11. Rule of Two Walls
    With the concise, but still singularly haunting Rule of Two Walls, Ukrainian American director David Gutnik has assembled a collection of portraits highlighting the experiences of artists from across the country who’ve found shelter in the city of Lviv, including some of the people behind the making of this very documentary.
  12. Bright Star
    Breaking through any period-piece mustiness with piercing insight into the emotions and behavior of her characters, the writer-director examines the final years in the short life of 19th-century romantic poet John Keats through the eyes of his beloved, Fanny Brawne, played by Abbie Cornish in an outstanding performance.
  13. MLK/FBI
    MLK/FBI leaves you wanting more, but it provides a gripping chapter in the story of how the forces of American power set out to destroy one of America’s greatest leaders, even as his private behavior had the effect of handing them a weapon.
  14. The Headless Woman
    A simpler and more taut, if slightly less interesting version of the oblique but mesmerizing studies of family life in fetid, hothouse atmospheres the Argentine helmer offered up in "La cienaga" and "The Holy Girl."
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wait Until Dark
    Wait Until Dark emerges as an excellent suspense drama, effective in casting, scripting, direction and genuine emotional impact.
    • Variety
  16. Jackie
    Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.
  17. Tropical Malady
    Takes the viewer on a mysterious and sporadically fascinating trip into the darkness of the human heart and Thai legend.
  18. Weekend
    Earnest and understated, Weekend has the intimate look and feel of a two-character stage play that has been opened up -- but only slightly, with minimal addition of supporting players -- for a mostly faithful filmization.
  19. Happiness
    Baker does an amazingly sensitive job with the ticklish part and is joined in this by Read, who is superlative as his inquisitive young son.
  20. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    The film is meticulously evenhanded and revealing.
  21. Beginning
    Beginning is not a derivative work. Its slow-cinema trappings aren’t merely plucked from the films that have taught its maker along the way, but prove a rhythmically apt, intuitive way into the headspace of its protagonist, a woman who feels her very life has been put on pause.
  22. Raw
    Raw is a deliciously fevered stew of nightmare fuel that hangs together with a breezily confident sense of superior craft.
  23. Chicken People
    An illuminating and amusingly entertaining look at the thriving subculture of competitive poultry breeders.
  24. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    The film is a master class in comic timing, employing pacing and repetition with the skill of a practiced concert pianist.
  25. Test Pattern
    Test Pattern — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages just outside the door.
  26. R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is a slow-motion snapshot of a deeply riven community flying apart in all directions, as though some bomb, detonated years or perhaps even centuries ago, has never stopped exploding.
  27. Inherent Vice
    Anderson’s seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp that has less in common with “The Big Lebowski” than with the strain of fatalistic, ’70s-era California noirs (“Chinatown,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Night Moves”) in which the question of “whodunit?” inevitably leads to an existential vanishing point.
  28. Under the Sun
    While at about the two-thirds mark, Under the Sun begins to seem a bit attenuated, its obvious (if only implied) points already made, the ending is a stunner.
  29. Three Identical Strangers
    A gripping, stranger-than-fiction account of a real-world medical conspiracy, the film begins as a human-interest story and builds to an impressive work of investigative journalism into how and why they were placed with the families who raised them.
  30. Wrinkles
    Although nothing here quite matches the moving, life-in-five-minutes montage in Pixar’s “Up,” one swooping flashback sequence comes very close.
  31. Little Trouble Girls
    This is a striking statement of intent from its Slovenian writer-director — there’s an airy delicacy here that invites comparisons to early Céline Sciamma, but with its own raw, restless edge.
  32. Midnight Family
    Portraits of institutional dysfunction don’t come much more urgent, and quietly bleak, than this.
  33. 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.
  34. American Fiction
    The helmer trusts his audience to bring themselves to the material. Ultimately, that’s what makes reading “American Fiction” so rewarding.
  35. Il Divo
    An intensely political film so wildly inventive and witty that it will become a touchstone for years to come, Il Divo is a masterpiece for maverick helmer-scribe Paolo Sorrentino.
  36. Leviathan
    Picture's title comes from the sea creature mentioned in the book of Job, which is briefly quoted at the film's opening. Cast list cheekily includes not only the names of the men aboard the vessel where the documentary was filmed, but also the Latin names of the species caught.
  37. Fish Tank
    What makes the picture feel special is its unflinching honesty and lack of sentimentality or moralizing, along with assured direction and excellent performances.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweetie
    Sweetie is an original, audacious tragicomedy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Shop of Horrors
    Little Shop of Horrors is a fractured, funny production transported rather reluctantly from the stage to the screen.
  40. The Things You Kill
    With The Things You Kill Khatami turns in an absorbing and twisty take on introspection.
  41. No
    After "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem," his devastating portraits of how the Pinochet regime psychologically brutalized the people of Chile from 1973-90, Chilean helmer Pablo Larrain satisfyingly completes the trilogy with an affirmative victory for democracy in No.
  42. Riders of Justice
    The film’s significant humor comes from amusingly implausible situations coupled with rapid-paced droll dialogue; its equally sizable heart derives from the script’s respect for society’s outcasts and Jensen’s way of nimbly endowing every character with their own emotional backstory, all in need of healing.
  43. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a nimble documentary made with a personal touch of nostalgia, and it should prove nothing less than catnip to Sondheim obsessives.
  44. A River Below
    In the stories of both men, Grieco’s film highlights the double-edged nature of eye-opening visuals, which are just as apt to enrage others and endanger the messenger as they are to achieve noble ends.
  45. A Crime on the Bayou
    [An] engrossing, flavorful document.
  46. Ama Gloria
    The considerable power of Ama Gloria lies not in its take on colonial conscience, nor even in its insights into the complex economical and emotional dynamics of the child-nanny bond. It is in its unmatched portrait of one brave little heart, bruised but learning to beat on its own.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The China Syndrome
    A moderately compelling thriller about the potential perils of nuclear energy, whose major fault is an overweening sense of its own self-importance.
  48. My Architect
    This fascinating portrait of an eccentric visionary and his chaotic triple family life is an accomplished, enormously satisfying non-fiction work.
  49. In Fabric
    There’s no reason a movie about a devil dress should work, and yet Strickland strikes the right tone, inviting laughter by taking it all so seriously.
  50. Hot Fuzz
    A sustained genre parody that's equally funny but (maybe in deference to the genre) much more pumped up.
  51. Police, Adjective
    Porumboiu is one of the few helmers working today who so completely understands both the power of language and the power of visuals.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Four Weddings and a Funeral
    Truly beguiling romantic comedy.
  53. Django Unchained
    An immensely satisfying taste of antebellum empowerment packaged as spaghetti-Western homage... A bloody hilarious (and hilariously bloody) Christmas counter-programmer.
  54. Play
    Pic is a little too pleased with its own evenhanded presentation of liberal moral conundrums, but there’s no gainsaying Ostlund’s remarkable achievement in coaxing entirely naturalistic perfs from his young core cast
  55. The Peacemaker
    What brings a documentary like this one to life is a central character with something going on that’s thornier than his official idealism. Fortunately, that’s Padraig O’Malley.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hill
    It is a harsh, sadistic and brutal entertainment, superbly acted and made without any concessions to officialdom.
  57. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    It etches a sweet, sad and solemnly fatalistic love story between feeding times.
  58. Us
    Terrifying...The less you know going in — and the less energy you spend thinking about it after the fact — the better the movie works, trading on some uncanny combination of Peele’s imagination and our own to suggest a horror infinitely larger and more insidious than the film is capable of representing.
  59. The Wedding Banquet
    The Wedding Banquet slides down easily even if it doesn't leave much aftertaste.
  60. The Human Body
    It's the soundtrack, as much as the opticals, which makes this brief Imax trip a thoroughly sensory experience.
  61. The Big Short
    There’s an unmistakable, scathing sense of outrage behind the whole endeavor, and it’s impossible not to admire McKay’s reckless willingness to do everything short of jumping through flaming hoops on a motorcycle while reading aloud from Keynes if that’s what it takes to get people to finally pay attention.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Orpheus
    Pic is somewhat cerebral, being mainly helped by the fresh playing of the cast, especially Yank actress Dawn. Color is excellent, and director Marcel Camus gives this movement. (Review of Original Release)
  63. The Dawn Wall
    It’s a riveting and spectacular documentary.
  64. The Devil's Miner
    An unforgettable journey through hell under the earth, where Satan is worshipped as king. Straight-as-an-arrow filmmaking raises this docu above the crowd.
  65. Closed Curtain
    Less satisfying than his previous pic, yet still a bold, melancholy statement.
  66. Moana
    As princess movies go, this one broadens the studio’s horizons, and as Moana herself sings in the film, “no one knows, how far it goes.”
  67. Aisha
    While passive and/or helpless characters rarely make for the most engaging protagonists, the sensitivity with which this story is told coupled with Wright’s performance makes for an experience that’s never less than engaging.
  68. The Wailing
    On the one hand, the film is a gripping whodunnit, exemplified by a scene of classic Hitchcockian suspense, when Jong-gu makes a frightening discovery while snooping around the Japanese man. At the same time it treads into supernatural territory through nightmarish dream sequences that feel unnervingly real.
  69. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    Made with gentle grace and sensitivity.
  70. The Empty Hours
    Fernandez (“Used Parts”) has a masterful handle on narrative, structure and character, skillfully blending them all in a tale with atmosphere to spare.
  71. White Sun
    Skillfully blending intimate human drama with sharp political observations, Deepak Rauniyar’s outstanding second feature sends a powerful message about the need for tolerance if Nepal is to overcome divisions that remain long after the Comprehensive Peace Accord of 2006
  72. Shadow
    Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou’s breathtakingly beautiful Shadow is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time.
  73. Still Life
    Has almost zero plot but molto mood. It will appeal to the most faithful of the director's camp-followers and no one else.
  74. 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.
  75. Gimme the Loot
    While Leon’s script can’t help but be episodic as the characters scheme their way out of one scrape after another, their shenanigans are compulsively watchable, brimming with enough details to make this modest film grow large in the memory.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reservoir Dogs
    An intense, bloody, in-your-face crime drama about a botched robbery and its aftermath, colorfully written in vulgar gangster vernacular and well played by a terrific cast.
  77. Premature
    While Premature may seem less professional than your average Sundance movie (much less entry-level studio fare), that doesn’t diminish what’s fresh, vulnerable and true about the film.
  78. Tchoupitoulas
    Filmed over the course of nine months' worth of night shoots, the resulting coverage is hypnotically immersive.
  79. Blood of My Blood
    With consummate artistry and the self-assurance that comes from experience, master helmer Marco Bellocchio continues to play with form and content with an originality that make younger directors look like they’re grasping at ephemeral straws.
  80. The Eel
    While the symbolism of the eel itself is a bit obvious, Imamura has created a rich tapestry of characters and situations, all of it vividly brought to life with pristine visuals and a generous emotional warmth.
  81. Cousin Jules
    Yet even as the timelessness of the human activity on display seduces with its serenity, it evokes in modern viewers a definite impatience with the impracticality of traditional rites and rhythms, perhaps only enjoyable in 90-minute doses.
  82. Skyfall
    Putting the "intelligence" in MI6, Skyfall reps a smart, savvy and incredibly satisfying addition to the 007 oeuvre, one that places Judi Dench's M at the center of the action.
  83. Thunder Soul
    Mark Landsman's spirited Thunder Soul offers a heaping helping of uplift while documenting the past triumphs and recent reunion of a predominantly black Houston high school's singularly accomplished jazz stage band.
  84. Of Time and the City
    Result is by turns moving, droll and charming, and niftily assembled, but not necessarily that profound.
  85. Closure
    With a standout central protagonist and an urgent quest that is every parent’s nightmare, the film plays like a thriller but manages to deliver honest and piercing emotions at almost every sequence along the way.
  86. Consuming Spirits
    This labor of love from do-it-all animator Chris Sullivan has the same rough-edged, cantankerous charms as the characters that populate it. Narrative alone is too uneven to captivate fully for the picture's two-hour-plus duration, though there's so much to see that "Spirits" should nonetheless prove a draw for adult audiences.
  87. Memoir of a Snail
    Elements that might feel frivolous on first mention invariably pay off later, as Elliot brings things around in thoughtful and emotional ways, to the point you forget you’re watching people made of Plasticine.
  88. The Janes
    In sticking to the facts, it remains plenty rousing.
  89. A Fantastic Woman
    Vega’s tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It’s a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina’s condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn’t herself go.
  90. Your Name.
    This vividly realized and emotionally satisfying feature ought to make Shinkai a household name — certainly in Japan, and with any luck, in other countries as well.
  91. The Scent of Green Papaya
    Precision lensing by Benoit Delhomme, and charming, contained playing by the amateur cast, add up to a tasty package.
  92. Melancholia
    For all the tyrannical disdain he's shown other filmmakers over the years, von Trier once again demonstrates a mastery of classical technique, extracting incredibly strong performances from his cast while serving up a sturdy blend of fly-on-the-wall naturalism and jaw-dropping visual effects.
  93. You, the Living
    Results are painfully amusing, frequently random and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious.
  94. The Go-Go's
    In the fresh bopping beauty of their punk romantic sound, they kicked open a door of perception. They said to a generation: We got the beat, and you can too.
  95. Upstream Color
    This is a warmer, less foreboding picture than "Primer," not moving in any conventional sense, but suffused with emotion all the same.
  96. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    For the most part, pic’s sheer good-naturedness pulls off a not particularly inspired crusty-old-coot-thawed-by-young-scamp concept, maintaining an agreeable tonal balance despite occasional wobbles between spoof, sentimentality and silliness.
  97. Ballets Russes
    Enormously absorbing.
  98. The General
    Rarely has a veteran filmmaker rejuvenated his career to such startling effect as John Boorman with The General, a fresh-off-the-slab biopic of maverick Irish crime lord Martin Cahill that both challenges and entertains the audience at a variety of levels, as well as reviving the vitality of the helmer's earliest, mid-'60s pics.
  99. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Last year's "The Prisoner of Azkaban" seemed dark, but this excellent fourth film derived from J.K. Rowling's books is the darkest "Potter" yet, intense enough to warrant a PG-13 rating.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mikey and Nicky
    The interplay between the stars is excellent, Cassavetes slowly but steadily digging his own grave as he reveals his shallowness in dealings with Falk, girl friend Carol Grace (a beautiful performance) and estranged wife Joyce Van Patten (a brief but excellent characterization).
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