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. A Poet
    Its tone shifts from absurdist to serious to satirical and back again. This odd mix should not work, but Soto pulls it off with a sure hand and precisely exacting storytelling. That it succeeds in being both funny and poignant makes A Poet even more of an achievement.
  2. Chasing Summer
    There’s real wisdom to Chasing Summer, which Shlesinger and Decker offset with a handful of steamier-than-you’d-expect sex scenes.
  3. Once Upon a Time in Harlem
    Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”
  4. One in a Million
    This long-game project gives remarkable dimension and particularity to the kind of migrant story often only told in journalistic generalities — showing, year on year, how time heals some wounds, opens others, and creates plenty of its own.
  5. Extra Geography
    A film that mines reserves of tenderness in young female angst and cluelessness with loving empathy.
  6. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
    It’s the kind of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves.
  7. American Doctor
    It is a necessary watch because it dares its audience not to look away, forcing the question not only of whose story is told, but whose deaths matter and make headlines.
  8. The Friend's House Is Here
    The Friend’s House Is Here is defined not by the many constraints that it battled during its production, but by the artistic vision of the resulting work.
  9. Soul Patrol
    [A] haunting, revelatory documentary.
  10. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
    The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.
  11. Rose
    At once armored, guarded and intensely vulnerable, Hüller’s performance is the human factor here — a volatile, unpredictable element, but one nonetheless attuned to the film’s meticulous shaping and mise-en-scène.
  12. Happy Birthday
    Goher, a screenwriter and producer making her feature debut, proves herself to be a director-writer of uncommon sensitivity.
  13. Barbara Forever
    Barbara Forever stands as a confident feature documentary for its filmmaker, yet also as a singular artistic statement after Hammer that should add new admirers for her work.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    'Round Midnight
    'Round Midnight is a superbly crafted music world drama in which Gallic director Bertrand Tavernier pays a moving dramatic tribute to the great black musicians who lived and performed in Paris in the late 1950s.
  15. Decorado
    An argument can be had about what will end up being the “best” animated feature released in 2026 — it’s early — but there’s little chance another film can dethrone Decorado as the most mind-bending.
  16. Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC
    In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.
  17. Invictus
    Inspirational on the face of it, Clint Eastwood's film has a predictable trajectory, but every scene brims with surprising details that accumulate into a rich fabric of history, cultural impressions and emotion.
  18. Shutter Island
    Even when it's clear Scorsese has decided to employ fakery and allow it to be obvious, it's done with elegance and beauty.
  19. Crazy Heart
    Ever-youthful in his looks and energy, Bridges now stands as one of Hollywood's great old pros, incapable of making a false move.
  20. An Education
    Carey Mulligan shines in a captivating performance.
  21. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    The film's style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season's defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it's a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one.
  22. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    With Ledger onscreen more than might have been expected, the film possesses strong curiosity value bolstered by generally lively action and excellent visual effects.
  23. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    An urban nightmare with a surfeit of soul, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire is like a diamond -- clear, bright, but oh so hard.
  24. Nine
    Sophisticated, sexy and stylishly decked out, Rob Marshall's disciplined, tightly focused film impresses and amuses.
  25. The Last Station
    Solid middlebrow biographical fare in which meaty roles are acted to the hilt by a cast more than ready for the feast.
  26. Inglourious Basterds
    A violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich.
  27. 2012
    The visual effects are pretty sensational, delivering the cutting-edge CGI goods auds want and expect. It will be hard to watch "Earthquake'' ever again after this one.
  28. The Messenger
    Nobody plays angry like Ben Foster, but compassion is something new for the actor, who softens his crazy-man shtick to deliver a complex and moving performance in The Messenger.
  29. Whip It
    Laced with good-natured hipster kitsch and endearingly goofy girl power, director Drew Barrymore's roller-derby dramedy, Whip It, is a gas.
  30. Pan's Labyrinth
    There's plenty of blood -- both literal and figurative -- coursing through the veins of Pan's Labyrinth, a richly imagined and exquisitely violent fantasy from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.
  31. Paranormal Activity
    Paranormal succeeds in staying unnervingly "real."
  32. This Is It
    There’s an incredible amount to enjoy here, and the star’s fans will be in rapture.
  33. Summer Hours
    A family ensembler of utter simplicity, Oliver Assayas' Summer Hours is a salutory (and belated) reminder that, as with his earlier Cold Water and Late August, Early September, some of this writer-director's best work comes in modest packages.
  34. Drag Me to Hell
    The picture is single-mindedly devoted to pushing the audience's buttons, and who better than Raimi to do the honors?
  35. Gomorrah
    Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano's muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families' insidious control.
  36. Séraphine
    An extraordinary performance by vet thesp Yolande Moreau in the title role.
  37. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Most compelling in its attempts to re-create the experience of paralysis onscreen, gorgeously lensed pic morphs into a dreamlike collage of memories and fantasies, distancing the viewer somewhat from Bauby's consciousness even as it seeks to take one deeper.
  38. Nobody Knows
    Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity, delivering the goods after a seemingly directionless first half.
  39. Coraline
    This eccentric and deliriously inventive fantasy finds stop-motion auteur Henry Selick scaling new heights of ghoulish whimsy, buoyed by a haunting score that works its own macabre magic.
  40. WALL-E
    Walks a fine line between the rarefied and the immediately accessible as it explores new territory for animation, yet remains sufficiently crowd-pleasing.
  41. Black Dynamite
    This film will delight both discriminating fans of the blaxploitation tradition and ordinary lovers of goofy, in-ya-face thrills.
  42. Children of Men
    Picture more than delivers on the action front -- not in bang-for-your-buck spectacle but in the kind of gritty, doculike sequences that haul viewers out of their seats and alongside the main protags.
  43. The Lives of Others
    Superbly cast drama… that looks to be a solid upscale attraction wherever the special chemistry of good writing and performances is appreciated.
  44. Waltz with Bashir
    It's these surreal touches, deployed with tactical restraint, that make the picture extraordinary and convey the febrile atmosphere of warfare, where by fear, horror -- and later guilt -- distort and distend perception and memory.
  45. Pride & Prejudice
    A movie for the age, and a keeper for the ages, Pride & Prejudice brings Jane Austen's best-loved novel to vivid, widescreen life, as well as making an undisputed star of 20-year-old Keira Knightley.
  46. Red Cliff
    Balances character, grit, spectacle and visceral action in a meaty, dramatically satisfying pie that delivers on the hype and will surprise many who felt the Hong Kong helmer progressively lost his mojo during his long years stateside.
  47. Brokeback Mountain
    This ostensible gay Western is marked by a heightened degree of sensitivity and tact, as well as an outstanding performance from Heath Ledger.
  48. Sin Nombre
    Fukunaga refrains from artificially amping up excitement for its own sake, maintaining an intimate, observational style that offers up a host of things to look at and think about.
  49. Revolutionary Road
    A near-perfect case study of the ways in which film is incapable of capturing certain crucial literary qualities, in this case the very things that elevate the book from being a merely insightful study of a deteriorating marriage into a remarkable one.
  50. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    This odd, epic tale of a man who ages backwards is presented in an impeccable classical manner, every detail tended to with fastidious devotion.
  51. Juno
    An ultra-smart-mouthed comedy about a planned adoption that goes weirdly awry.
  52. Murderball
    A blast and a half -- as entertaining as mainstream American docus get.
  53. Oldboy
    A wild, intensely cinematic ride into two men's burning desire to get even.
  54. Little Miss Sunshine
    Pic's distinguished by a flawless cast, a gentle spirit of rebellion and a smart script by first-time screenwriter Michael Arndt that knows never to push its character quirks too hard.
  55. The Edge of Heaven
    Superbly cast drama, in which the lives and emotional arcs of six people -- four Turks and two Germans -- criss-cross through love and tragedy.
  56. House of Flying Daggers
    The tangled tale of love and disguise is awesome in its action sequences but doesn't touch the heart to the same degree.
  57. 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.
  58. Away from Her
    What Away From Her achieves is quite admirable-- a low-key, intelligent setting for performances marked by those same qualities.
  59. 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.
  60. Gladiator
    John Mathieson's widescreen cinematography is magnificent, and the pacing across 2½ hours is well modulated.
  61. Sugar
    Sympathetic, genial and exceedingly wholesome, it's a film that, once seen, will permanently and favorably influence the way viewers regard the characters' real-life counterparts.
  62. The Host
    On almost every level, there's never quite been a monster movie like The Host. Egregiously subverting its own genre while still delivering shocks at a pure genre level, and marbled with straight-faced character humor that constantly throws the viewer off balance.
  63. The Boys Are Back
    This is polished yet authentically moving.
  64. Ong Bak
    Strongly recalls Hong Kong kung-fu movies of the late '60s and '70s, with physical grit, over-the-top heroics and inventive fight choreography providing the entertainment.
  65. Fear X
    A supremely elegant, meditative thriller.
  66. Machuca
    Richly human in focus, the drama steadily cranks up its political and emotional charge.
  67. Head-On
    Fine, gritty, contempo love story.
  68. Arakimentari
    Offers a fast, efficient and richly satisfying look at an iconoclastic artist and his groundbreaking work.
  69. The Nomi Song
    An absorbing homage to obscure but fascinating late '70s-early '80s German stage artiste Klaus Nomi.
  70. Nabbeun namja
    The most emotionally satisfying pic to date by Korean iconoclast Kim Ki-duk.
  71. Up and Down
    A vibrant, immediate treatise on love and cultural identity in a complex new world of fluid borders and deep suspicions in the stunning new Czech drama Up and Down.
  72. Dear Frankie
    Material that might have turned to standard dysfunctional family treacle in other hands is given stirring poignancy, warmth and emotional insight in Shona Auerbach's assured first feature.
  73. Robots
    It's meant as high praise to say that, very early in Robots, the extraordinary starts to seem perfectly ordinary.
  74. The Upside of Anger
    Increasingly exhibits a desire to amuse and distract rather than go deep, which ultimately generates disappointment in light of its announced intentions.
  75. Don't Move
    In his second outing as a director, top thesp Sergio Castellitto (also playing the surgeon) takes the viewer on an emotion-filled ride and brings a violently masculine perspective to the story. However, it is Penelope Cruz who gives the film's knockout performance.
  76. Melinda and Melinda
    Radha Mitchell stirs memories of complex Allen heroines from Annie Hall on down, even if the action is dispersed via a larger ensemble cast which he currently favors.
  77. Mondovino
    Consistently fascinating material provides an uncommonly eloquent, provocative statement against globalization that's sure to stimulate thinking audiences.
  78. Sin City
    For geeks, action freaks and sensation-seeking teenage boys of all ages, the price of admission will provide a one-way ticket to hard-boiled heaven.
  79. Dust to Glory
    With its exceptional multicamera coverage and dynamic editing, pic provides an amazing ride across the dusty roads and stunningly varied terrain of what could be the world's most demanding vehicle race.
  80. Control
    Crowd-pleasing, darkly comic joyride.
  81. Look at Me
    Punchy dialogue, excellent thesping and a real feel for the universal tuning fork of great classical music make this a prime candidate for international arthouse play.
  82. Fever Pitch
    The Farrelly brothers are growing up, which in this case isn't a bad thing. With a tacked-on ending made necessary by the Boston Red Sox's improbable World Series run last fall, Fever Pitch proves a charming romantic comedy against "A Beautiful Mind"-type framework.
  83. The Interpreter
    Coolly absorbing without being pulse-quickening.
  84. Winter Solstice
    Story of a still-grieving widower and his two troubled teenage sons is distinguished by its emotional integrity, sustained mood of aching melancholy and superbly understated performances.
  85. A Lot Like Love
    In essence, British director Nigel Cole has brought a breezy arthouse sensibility to this tale of fated love.
  86. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    By turns amazing, amusing and appalling.
  87. 3-Iron
    A rarefied love story, conducted with no dialogue between the principals.
  88. Funny Ha Ha
    A beautifully observant and wholly unpretentious film with roots more in Cassavetes than Sundance-style showbiz.
  89. Ladies in Lavender.
    Full of delightful moments that throw into high relief the actors' craft.
  90. The Tunnel
    A cracking slice of old-fashioned, widescreen entertainment.
  91. Kingdom of Heaven
    Genuinely spectacular and historically quite respectable, Ridley Scott's latest epic is at its strongest in conveying the savagery spawned by fanaticism.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brothers
    The second collaboration between helmer Susanne Bier and scriptwriter Anders Thomas Jensen once again shows what skilled artists can do with a story that might have ended up filled with cliches.
  93. Layer Cake
    There's a proper lived-in believability about Layer Cake's depiction of how the worlds of the rich, the criminal and the criminally rich intersect.
  94. The Longest Yard
    Sandler impressively assumes the Reynolds role here, with strong support by Reynolds himself and a slightly restrained but frequently hilarious Chris Rock.
  95. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    The overall effect makes for a far more resonant film than that offered by concurrent narrative feature "Hotel Rwanada."
  96. Bomb the System
    A richly textured drama with an angry poetic edge that gets inside the obsessive subculture of New York graffiti artists, Bomb the System signals the arrival of a talented filmmaker in NYU film graduate Adam Bhala Lough.
  97. The Ninth Day
    A thoughtfully written drama of ideas with vivid performances by August Diehl and Ulrich Matthes.
  98. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen
    Chris Browne's sense of humor captures perfectly the contradictions, absurdities and drama at the intersection of class, media, money and sports without dissing any of his player/subjects.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The White Diamond
    Herzog's eye for the weird sometimes makes the docu feel strained, but engaging characters imbue the pic with depth and emotional appeal.
  100. Rock School
    Irresistibly entertaining and full of unique character portraits.
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