Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bang the Drum Slowly
    The baseball version of Brian’s Song has reduced more than a few tough guys to tears.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Roaring Twenties
    Because of James Cagney and the story’s circumstances, The Roaring Twenties is reminiscent of Public Enemy. Story and dialog are good. Raoul Walsh turns in a fine directorial job; the performances are uniformly excellent.
  3. 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Train
    After a slow start, The Train picks up to become a colorful, actionful big-scale adventure opus.
  5. Junebug
    Has a washed-out look that may be off-putting to auds who might otherwise enjoy the pic's uncondescending view of Southern characters and customs.
  6. Dinner in America
    Beyond finding a godsend in Gellner, Rehmeier gets good mileage from nearly the entire supporting cast. They grasp the slightly warped humor he’s aiming for here, hitting a suitable range of comedic notes from the deadpan to the broadly farcical.
  7. Café Lumière
    Hou fans will find what they're looking for; others will wonder when the action starts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Footlight Parade
    Footlight Parade is not as good as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers but the three socko numbers here eclipse some of the preceding Busby Berkeley staging for spectacle.
  9. Children of the Mist
    It’s an auspicious arrival for first-time feature director Diem, who handles delicate subject matter (not to mention vulnerable human subjects) with a frankness that stops short of button-pushing. That tact is crucial in a film operating as both close-quarters character study and wider ethnographic portrait, offering a rare, dedicated view of Vietnam’s little-represented Hmong population.
  10. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    An entertaining if hardly exhaustive overview of how the unlikely success came to be. The story it tells might easily have filled an engrossing documentary twice the length of this competent, not-particularly-inspired one.
  11. Bad Press
    Following events over the course of several years, this cautionary tale has an impact not unlike watching the rise of similar anti-transparency policies and politicians elsewhere of late: dismaying, yet with all the lurid appeal and colorful personalities of any juicy public scandal.
  12. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Don’t miss this strange, special little film.
  13. Promises
    Provides deeply humanistic insight into the complexities of the Middle East conflict that political analysis or front-line news coverage often lacks.
  14. The Secret in Their Eyes
    A deeply rewarding throwback to the unself-conscious days when cinema still strove to be magical, The Secrets in their Eyes is simply mesmerizing.
  15. Good Time
    These restlessly independent auteurs have passed the genre-foray test with flying neon colors, at no cost or compromise to their abrasively humane worldview.
  16. Food, Inc.
    A civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry.
  17. Tony Takitani
    Ultimately, this is a striking-looking film -- consciously recalling the paintings of Edward Hopper in its architectural use of space -- which, like its protag, is a little short on real feeling.
  18. Everlasting Moments
    Artistically on a plane with or near the vet filmmaker's best work, this period drama about a woman slowly discovering her metier is an artisanal creation par excellence.
  19. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Although beautifully rendered throughout, with delicate, elegantly drawn watercolor-like illustrations, the picture may seem too plain and simple for the oversophisticated tastes of kids in Europe and North America, while Arrietty herself reps a slightly insipid heroine.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forbidden Planet
    Imaginative gadgets galore, plus plenty of suspense and thrills, make the production a top offering in the space travel category. Best of all the gadgets is Robby, the Robot, and he's well-used for some comedy touches.
  21. The Mastermind
    Very possibly her most accessible and enjoyable film to date, still it remains an unmistakably Reichardtian investigation into the fabric of ordinariness and what happens when it frays.
  22. We Come as Friends
    A masterfully composed and suitably outraged look at the neocolonialist exploitation of South Sudan.
  23. The Wound
    The Wound is rich in such small, observational details.
    • 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.
  25. Dying
    A film of remarkable performance and subject matter, laid low by unremarkable filmmaking.
  26. Perfect Days
    This beguiling film may trade in the tranquil security of routine, but makes an occasional, heart-quickening case for the unexpected.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    All through the picture there's charm, romance, gaiety and eclat.
  28. Four Daughters
    With so many moving parts, it’s hard to isolate just one reason why Ben Hania’s film — a vast improvement on her terminally uneven, unexpectedly Oscar-nominated “The Man Who Sold His Skin” — should prove so gripping.
  29. Central Station
    Montenegro carries the film su-perbly with her portrait of gritty strength being worn down to a state of tattered vulnerability, while newcomer de Oliveira, a shoeshine boy who won the role over 1,500 other aspirants, is engagingly natural and happily doesn't beg for viewer sympathy.
  30. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    Now, 50 years later, the Justice Department has decided to reopen the case, due largely to Keith Beauchamp's documentary, which contains testimony from hitherto unseen witnesses.
  31. 20,000 Species of Bees
    Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.
  32. Household Saints
    After building up some cockeyed charm through the first half, Nancy Savoca’s third feature peels off into obscure and particularized religious mysticism, leaving the viewer grasping in vain for a handle to hold onto for the second hour.
  33. Passages
    Sachs excels at investigating thorny, uncomfortable situations, and he treats all three characters fairly here, which allows audiences to decide which one they identify with.
  34. The Queen of Versailles
    This timely and involving documentary elicits both sympathy and schadenfreude, as Greenfield regards her all-too-vilifiable subjects with a complexity that should impress viewers of all economic and political persuasions.
  35. Theeb
    Like all well-done adventure tales, especially those with an intimate human focus and an expansive, epic vision, “Theeb” works on multiple levels.
  36. Incendies
    Incendies vaults Denis Villeneuve to the status of serious director.
  37. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    A charming look at the mildly eccentric man who gained modest feature-page celebrity for his familiarity with San Francisco's tropical parrot flock.
  38. Nine Queens
    A seductively structured and superbly acted suspenser that breathtakingly piles swindle upon scam without giving away the game until the very end.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Fish Called Wanda
    Curtis steals the show with her keen sense of comic timing and sneaky little grins and asides.
  40. Trophy
    Trophy’s wealth of conflicting facts, figures, and arguments routinely force one to re-calibrate their feelings about the issues at hand. The result is a lament for both the animals at the center of so many crosshairs, and for a modern world seemingly only capable of saving lives by taking them.
  41. Incredibles 2
    What was organic, and even obsessive, in the first outing comes off as pat and elaborate formula here. The new movie, energized as it is, too often feels like warmed-over sloppy seconds, with a what-do-we-do-now? riff that turns into an overly on-the-nose plot.
  42. Totally Under Control
    Subsequent docs will surely tell a different story, after survivors have risen up and confronted the individual they deem responsible — and Gibney et al. want this film to be instrumental in that solution.
  43. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    It’s to the credit of “She’s Beautiful” that it seems neither hectic nor glib despite the enormous amounts of material that doubtless had to be excluded to fit a single feature’s frame.
  44. Gleason
    Tweel masterfully assembles roughly four years of footage, much of it shot by Gleason himself, and the result is painfully raw at times but undeniably rewarding.
  45. Casino Royale
    Craig comes closer to the author's original conception of this exceptionally long-lived male fantasy figure than anyone since early Sean Connery.
  46. Much Ado About Nothing
    A film that is continuously enjoyable from its action-filled opening to the dazzling final shot, one that offers a very generous welcome to newcomers to the play, and reminds those familiar with it of its heady pleasures. Only real drawback, and not an insignificant one, is pic’s visual quality, which is unaccountably undistinguished, even ugly, especially considering the sun-drenched Tuscan location.
  47. Concerning Violence
    Though Fanon’s words serve to justify the seemingly unconscionable — violence — the film ends with a very different call to action, one that stresses the need for “new concepts,” as if trying to calm the blood the film has brought to a boil over the dense and daunting 80-odd minutes that have come before.
  48. Big Night
    This unlikely collaboration between actors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott is extremely well directed, making for a smartly made, delightfully acted period piece whose sensibility neatly straddles art films and the mainstream.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    3:10 to Yuma
    Aside from the fact that this is an upper-drawer western, 3:10 to Yuma will strike many for its resemblance to High Noon. That the climax fizzles must be laid on doorstep of Halsted Welles, who adapts Elmore Leonard's story quite well until that point.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cinema Paradiso
    Tornatore is an able storyteller who knows the value of cute kids and easy emotion.
  51. The Strange Little Cat
    Despite all that it withholds, The Strange Little Cat ultimately proves a far more revealing form of family portrait.
  52. Drowning Dry
    Audiences open to a different sort of world cinema that repays careful attention should find it a stimulating and imaginative work.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Saraband
    A bitter but finally moving story about lost love, hatred between generations and a curious kind of liberation, Saraband officially closes one of the most prestigious and influential careers in the history of cinema.
  54. Ad Astra
    Gray proves beyond measure that he’s got the chops to make a movie like this. He also has a vision, of sorts — one that’s expressed, nearly inadvertently, in the metaphor of that space antenna. Watching Ad Astra, you may think you’ve signed on for a journey that’s out of this world, but it turns out that the film’s concerns are somberly tethered to Earth.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brute Force
    A closeup on prison life and prison methods, Brute Force is a showmanly mixture of gangster melodramatics, sociological exposition, and sex [from a story by Robert Patterson].
  56. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Unfussy in form, open in expression and gentle in reach as its maker revisits such recurring preoccupations as loneliness, regret and the value of love in life and art.
  57. The Secret of Roan Inish
    John Sayles’ latest marks his entry into family-pic terrain, a crossing that draws pleasant but unexciting results.
  58. Nine Lives
    Though the episodic structure results in a whole not quite equal to some of its parts, pic is an unusually tender, perceptive character study buoyed by stellar performances from a who's who of talented (and many underused) actresses.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harlan County U.S.A. (re-release)
    The stars of the film are the men and women of Harlan County, portrayed here not as patronized mountain folks but as human beings. (Review of Original Release)
  60. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    A throughly researched and extremely informative survey of the life and work of one of the great figures of world cinema, Richard Schickel's Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin is a must for lovers of cinema.
  61. In the Company of Men
    Pics greatest achievement is its sharply poignant dialogue which, despite the horrible consequences of the contest it describes, is also darkly amusing.
  62. A Bronx Tale
    A "GoodFellas" with heart, A Bronx Tale represents a wonderfully vivid snapshot of a colorful place and time, as well as a very satisfying directorial debut by Robert De Niro. Overflowing with behavioral riches and the flavor of a deep-dyed New York Italian neighborhood, the film also trades intelligently in pertinent moral and social issues that raise it above the level of nostalgia or the mere memoir.
  63. Love & Mercy
    A wonderfully innervating cure for the common musical biopic, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy vibrantly illuminates two major breakthroughs — one artistic, one personal — in the life of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.
  64. Pervert Park
    The documentary broadens well beyond a portrait of this particular facility to address the underlying causes of these crimes and to question how society might more constructively deal with the issues, where offering counseling to abuse victims becomes as important as, if not more so than, persecuting their abusers.
  65. Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
    Steeped in both unfaltering and pleasant humanity, Vargas’ characters are what some might deem “problematic.” But they ultimately depict complicated mentalities, with shades of true-to-life negative and redeeming traits.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bugsy
    A melancholy and intimate gangster saga about a romantic dreamer with fatal flaws, Bugsy emerges as a smooth, safe portrait of a volatile, dangerous character. An absorbing narrative flow and a parade of colorful underworld characters vie for screen time with an unsatisfactory central romance.
  67. Costa Brava, Lebanon
    The gentle wisdom it contains is less to do with activist and environmentalist issues and more attuned to country, family and lifestyle choices as abstract concepts, as all the things we mean by the word “home,” which is where Akl’s heart is.
  68. American Honey
    Part dreamy millennial picaresque, part distorted tapestry of Americana and part exquisitely illustrated iTunes musical, “Honey” daringly commits only to the loosest of narratives across its luxurious 162-minute running time. Yet it’s constantly, engrossingly active, spinning and sparking and exploding in cycles like a Fourth of July Catherine wheel.
  69. You Hurt My Feelings
    You Hurt My Feelings stays true to the droll casualness of its title. It’s not a major Holofcener movie; it’s closer to a lively and digressive short story. Yet it’s compelling to see Holofcener merge the fates of all her characters through a grand tweak of the piety of positivity.
  70. Monrovia, Indiana
    Its methodical gathering of material never quite brings us to a more stirring understanding of the lives under its lens.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cabaret
    It is literate, bawdy, sophisticated, sensual, cynical, heart-warming, and disturbingly thought-provoking.
  72. Peter and the Farm
    With this rueful, cantankerous yet hugely charismatic figure at its center, Tony Stone’s beautiful documentary reveals the twin burdens of working the farm alone while beating back an encroaching inner darkness.
  73. True Grit
    Rather than a case of the Dude doing the Duke, Bridges' irascible old cuss is a genuine original who feels larger than the familiar saga that contains him.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mystery Train
    Mystery Train is a three-episode pic handled by indie writer-director Jim Jarmusch in his usual playful, minimalist style.
  75. A Hidden Life
    Whether or not he is specifically referring to the present day, its demagogues, and the way certain evangelicals have once again sold out their core values for political advantage, “A Hidden Life” feels stunningly relevant as it thrusts this problem into the light.
  76. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    With no shtick to fall back on, Sandler is forced to act, and it’s a glorious thing to watch.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hombre
    Hombre develops the theme that socially and morally disparate types are often thrown into uneasy, explosive alliance due to emergencies. Paul Newman is excellent as the scorned (but only supposed) Apache. Fredric March, essaying an Indian agent who has embezzled food appropriations for his charges, also scores in a strong, unsympathetic – but eventually pathetic – role. Richard Boone is very powerful, yet admirably restrained as the heavy.
  78. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    More scrupulously reported than your average Michael Moore film but every bit as entertaining, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* is as commercial as documentaries come.
  79. The Blair Witch Project
    An intensely imaginative piece of conceptual filmmaking that also delivers the goods as a dread-drenched horror movie.
  80. I Wish
    This tale of two elementary-school brothers plotting to end the physical separation their parents' divorce has forced on them effortlessly pulls off the naturalism and charm desired from material that might have easily curdled into calculated preciousness.
  81. What Richard Did
    In the end, the material feels a bit attenuated, like a short that’s been stretched to feature length, even if the characters are enjoyable, sympathetic enough company for the pic’s 84-minute running time.
  82. Bending the Arc
    With the gripping appeal of a great epic novel, Kief Davidson and Pedro Kos’ documentary spans three decades of diligent work on the frontlines of global health crises to prove, in moving detail, the difference dedicated professionals can make in seemingly hopeless situations.
  83. Housekeeping for Beginners
    Stolevski’s lively, garrulous script may be plot-heavy, but the film isn’t propelled as much by grand narrative turns as it is by the powderkeg reactivity of its characters. Each scrap and squabble and occasional flash of understanding between them activates the film anew, so no interpersonal dynamic here ever feels comfortably settled.
  84. Iris
    A joyous celebration of creativity and razor-sharp wit sustained into old age, as evinced by outspoken nonagenarian fashion icon Iris Apfel, Iris also offers proof of Albert Maysles’ continued vitality as a documentarian.
  85. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    The reassuring familiarity of Abrams’ approach has its limitations: Marvelous as it is to catch up with Han Solo, Leia and the rest of the gang, fan service takes priority here over a somewhat thin, derivative story that, despite the presence of two appealing new stars, doesn’t exactly fire the imagination anew.
  86. My Favourite Cake
    What it lacks in edge, the film certainly makes up for in the quality of its performances and watching Farhadpour and Mehrabi mutually glow off each other is a pleasure that it feels almost cruel to have so abruptly denied.
  87. Last Men in Aleppo
    May not be the most comprehensively explanatory or analytical film yet made on the war, but it’s the one that provides viewers with the most sensorily vivid and empathetic sense yet of how it feels to live (and die) through the carnage.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    Hard-driving, riveting film will be tough for many to take, but Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer marks the arrival of a major film talent in the person of director, coproducer and cowriter John McNaughton.
  89. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    It succeeds emotionally in the cause of what seems to be its primary aim, to advance an attitudinal change in Australians not normally sympathetic to the aboriginal cause.
  90. Spellbound
    Docu dispassionately examines this strange phenomenon of anachronistic Americana, created as a newspaper promotion in 1925.
  91. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
    Making Waves is a brisk 94 minutes, the last half hour of which is a quick-study primer on the categories of movie sound. The film is quite educational.
  92. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    For Scientologists, going clear refers to a coveted status awarded to those who have completed a certain level of auditing. But for the men and women on screen here, it means something else: reclaiming their own voices and demanding to be heard.
  93. My Dog Tulip
    Charming if not especially kid-friendly toon.
  94. White God
    Not merely a story of interspecies hierarchy, then, White God also puts forward a simple but elegant metaphor for racial and class oppression, as the outcast (or even outcaste) masses, sidelined in favor of the elite few, band together to assert their collective strength.
  95. The Century of the Self
    Consistently engaging due to the wealth of generally unfamiliar archival footage, which reveals social trends, sweeping overview should provoke healthy debate.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freaks
    Freaks is sumptuously produced, admirably directed, and no cost was spared. But Metro failed to realize that even with a different sort of offering the story still is important. Here it is not sufficiently strong to get and hold the interest, partly because interest cannot easily be gained for a too fantastic romance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Public Enemy
    There's no lace on this picture. It's raw and brutal. It's low-brow material given such workmanship as to make it high-brow.
  98. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror
    A slippery thesis doesn’t detract from the pleasures of this documentary from genre scholar and programmer Kier-La Janisse. She draws on alluring clips from more than 100 films, plus myriad interviews, to survey an alternately lurid and surreal cinematic (as well as television) field of mostly rural tales inspired by traditional superstitions and lore.
  99. Whale Rider
    Combines straightforward coming-of-age narrative with Maori mysticism to most engaging effect.
  100. The Mill and the Cross
    Neither conventional costume drama nor abstract objet d'art, this visually ravishing, surprisingly beguiling gamble won't fit any standard arthouse niche. Still it could prove the Polish helmer's belated international breakthrough.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »