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. Lean on Pete
    It’s frustrating to watch, but designed in such a way that the boy’s loneliness will haunt long afterward.
  2. Sunset Story
    Tender, sensitive Sunset Story sidesteps a maudlin tone for a wide-ranging account of two fragile but opinionated retirees.
  3. Claire's Camera
    Characters often most reveal themselves when they’re saying nothing of any particular consequence in Hong’s short, loose script.
  4. Last and First Men
    A ravishing 70-minute audiovisual essay on human mortality, extinction and legacy — all the more poignant for being its maker’s final creative statement.
  5. Bergman Island
    If Bergman Island is a roman à clef about Mia Hansen-Løve and Olivier Assayas, it’s an oblique one. If it’s a “Before” film, it’s one that embeds a crucial element of emotional exploration in the educated guesswork of the audience. If it’s a cinephile shell game made with disarmingly clever sincerity — and I would say that’s just what it is — it’s one that leaves you grateful to have paid a visit to this island.
  6. 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.
  7. Barbie
    By showing a sense of humor about the brand’s past stumbles, it gives us permission to challenge what Barbie represents — not at all what you’d expect from a feature-length toy commercial.
  8. Minority Report
    May be a shade too serious and contemplative to completely enchant the thrill-seeking masses, while simultaneously seeming too mainstream-minded and genre-bound to be entirely embraced by highbrows.
  9. We the Animals
    As if by magic, Zagar has managed to foster a sense of familiarity among the boys that sells the illusion that they’re related, further reinforced by the editors’ trick of including moments of spontaneous, unscripted tomfoolery between the young actors.
  10. Wild Rose
    Wild Rose, the closest thing to a sleeper I’ve seen at Toronto this year, is a happy-sad drama of starstruck fever that lifts you up and sweeps you along, touching you down in a puddle of well-earned tears.
  11. The Simpsons Movie
    Put simply, if somebody had to make a "Simpsons" movie, this is pretty much what it should be -- clever, irreverent, satirical and outfitted with a larger-than-22-minutes plot, capable (just barely) of sustaining a narrative roughly four times the length of a standard episode.
  12. Strange Darling
    Writer-director JT Mollner flips the script on this tired genre, crafting the cleverest thriller of its kind in a while with a mighty assist from a pair of killer performances by co-leads Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner. Best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, Strange Darling demands a bit of patience, but it also rewards it.
  13. Riding Giants
    Offers a highly engaging immersion into a culture of larger-than-life characters driven by their thrill-seeking instincts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    Bring Me the Head of Alfred Garcia is turgid melodrama [from a story by Frank Kowalski and Sam Peckinpah] at its worst.
  15. Father
    Will Nikola, like Job, regain some measure of grace if he stoically endures enough suffering? The barely discernible uptick of optimism that closes the powerful but grueling Father is a small mercy in suggesting he might
  16. Boy and the World
    Beyond its sheer, intense variety and ingenuity, Abreu’s animation remains so appealing throughout because it always feels handmade.
  17. Finders Keepers
    [A] hysterical, insightful and genuinely empathetic documentary.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Babylon
    Like the reggae music that pulses through it, Babylon is rich, rough and real. And like the streetlife of the young black Londoners it portrays, it’s threatening, touching, violent and funny. This one seems to explode in the gut with a powerful mix of pain and pleasure.
  19. Room 237
    Handsomely produced and never less than hugely entertaining, Ascher's film is catnip for Kubrickians and critics both professional and otherwise.
  20. The Eternal Daughter
    This slight story examines the mystery of the mother-daughter bond without getting much closer to solving it, and when the mist clears is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.
  21. The Beast
    Laden with enticing ideas and images that never quite activate each other, “The Beast” instead coagulates into a thick 146-minute triptych of general, fidgeting malaise, and strands a hard-working Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in a cross-time, cross-purposes relationship that keeps shape-shifting without getting us terribly involved.
  22. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a soft-hearted fable that works on you in an enchanting way.
  23. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    Better late than never, this film is Blank’s shot, and by staying so true to her voice, her aim hits home.
  24. Take Out
    This day in the life of a young man attempting to earn cash for his family back home gathers impact by the reel.
  25. Compartment No. 6
    The humdrum and heartswelling Compartment No. 6 evokes a powerful nostalgia for a type of loneliness we don’t really have any more, and for the type of love that was its cure.
  26. Lucky
    Everything Harry Dean Stanton has done in his career, and his life, has brought him to his moment of triumph in “Lucky,” an unassumingly wonderful little film about nothing in particular and everything that’s important
  27. 7 Prisoners
    7 Prisoners’ unfolds satisfyingly, precisely by not offering us complete satisfaction or certainty. The question hovers of whether Mateus can ever escape his prison altogether, or merely into one with more comfortable furniture.
  28. Irma Vep
    A slender but appealing divertissement about a has-been auteur attempting to remake the French silent classic "Les Vampires," the film's wry digs at the institution of Gallic art movies and at the anarchic confusion of the filmmaking process should amuse hip fest audiences.
  29. The Band's Visit
    A warm and delightful take on cross-cultural relations that proves that sometimes a light touch is just what's needed to address serious topics.
  30. Anne at 13,000 ft
    Anne at 13,000 ft might look like mumblecore, but it plays as a psychological horror and a ticking-clock thriller that morphs into a wild, windswept tangle of incipient, but never quite arriving tragedy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dead Man Walking
    An intimate chamber piece for two, superbly acted by Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, this is a mature, well-crafted movie.
  32. In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
    In the Court of the Crimson King is really about as good as rock documentaries get, in capturing the essence of a group of musicians and how they relate to each other, the world and a muse whose demands result in literal and figurative calluses.
  33. Call Me Kuchu
    While a local filmmaker’s perspective may have brought more dimensions, the coverage of events here is impressive and on the mark.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Children of a Lesser God
    It’s another seamless performance for Hurt. Matlin, who makes her professional acting debut here and is in real life hearing impaired, as is much of the cast, is simply fresh and alive with fine shadings of expression.
  35. In the Mirror of Maya Deren
    This well researched, detailed examination of the life and work of the legendary avant-garde filmmaker, writer and dancer, Maya Deren, should provoke renewed interest in her -- she emerges as a beautiful, willful, wayward talent with an exceptional vision and a great love for life and for the avant-garde world.
  36. Berberian Sound Studio
    Icily disquieting rather than scary, the film is less an exercise in narrative than in tonal mastery.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    North Dallas Forty
    What distinguishes this screen adaptation of Peter Gent’s bestseller is the exploration of a human dimension almost never seen in sports pix. Most people understand that modern-day athletes are just cogs in a big business wheel, but getting that across on the screen is a whole different matter. And in large measure, that success is due to a bravura performance in the lead role by Nick Nolte.
  38. Tokyo Sonata
    Though there's nothing here that hasn’t been dealt with in other Japanese movies, picture benefits considerably from its pitch-perfect performances.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lorenzo's Oil
    Lorenzo's Oil is as grueling a medical case study as any audience would ever want to sit through. A true-life story brought to the screen intelligently and with passionate motivation by George Miller, pic details in a very precise way how a couple raced time to save the life of their young son after he contracted a rare, always fatal disease.
  40. Desert One
    You emerge from Desert One knowing certain aspects of the Iran-hostage crisis better than you did before. That makes it a worthy film, and an absorbing one.
  41. Il Futuro
    Even though mood trumps character psychology, the entire cast provides mesmerizing, evocative performances.
  42. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    Cheating flagrantly, helmer Michael Winterbottom has pulled off the trick -- sort of -- with the wickedly playful Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.
  43. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    A vital chapter of mid-century history is brought to life concisely, with intimacy and matter-of-fact artistry.
  44. Human Resources
    A cogent human drama.
  45. Firecrackers
    Mozaffari has an incredible eye for the details that bring a situation or place to life, working with inexperienced actors to create electrifying characters and a sense of edgy unpredictability.
  46. David Crosby: Remember My Name
    In David Crosby: Remember My Name, Crosby is more than just a rock ‘n’ roll survivor nursing a lifetime of second thoughts. He’s a romantic witness to a time that was genuinely about following the road of excess to the palace of wisdom.
  47. Aquarela
    A feast of HD imagery so crisp as to be almost disorienting, this is immersive experiential cinema with no firm storytelling trajectory, though viewers can read what environmental warnings they may into its rushing spectacle.
  48. The Pearl Button
    What “Nostalgia for the Light” did for the desert, The Pearl Button is meant to do for water, but the deft melding of past and present that characterized Patricio Guzman’s earlier film becomes muddied here by the Natural Science 101 voiceover and an unsatisfying bridge between two rather disparate subjects.
  49. Deep Water
    As it explores the limits of human endurance, the pic should suck even landlubbers into a whirlpool of gripping adventure, overblown ambitions and sheer human folly.
  50. The Force
    The strength, and fascination, of The Force is that the movie isn’t on anyone’s side. It’s cognizant of the brutality and violence that police officers, in our era, have been caught on phone cameras committing. At the same time, it’s not out to demonize the police — it’s out to capture the pressures they’re under, and to show us what their job looks like from the inside.
  51. Lorna's Silence
    The film doesn't pack the same cumulative wallop as the brothers' earlier work, but its low-key artistry, immaculate construction and fine performance by relative newcomer Arta Dobroshi should rouse the usual fest acclaim and arthouse interest.
  52. California Typewriter
    A lively and appealing analog-nostalgia documentary.
  53. Once Upon a Time in Venezuela
    Over the course of several years, Anabel Rodriguez Rios’ unsentimentally elegiac documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela quietly observes Congo Mirador being brought to its knees, to progressively powerful and enraging effect.
  54. Brief History of a Family
    No doubt comparisons to “Saltburn,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley” will abound, but what Lin conceived is far more subcutaneous, with a sobering tone and disinterested in building up to a grand plot twist — though the resolution is unexpected.
  55. Other People's Children
    Zlotowski’s deft, perceptive original screenplay is keenly attuned to the cutting emotional impact of a passing remark or overheard jab, and the unintended microaggressions that parents occasionally toss at their child-free peers.
  56. Bantú Mama
    At once an intimate portrait of a makeshift family and a treatise on motherhood and motherlands, Bantú Mama is a quiet achievement.
  57. 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Day of the Jackal
    The major asset of the film is that it succeeds in maintaining interest and suspense despite obvious viewer foreknowledge of the outcome.
  59. Holiday
    It’s a cool, hard trip, icy in the fullest glare of the afternoon sun, in which even the pallid, expensively tacky interior of the villa — hats off to production designer Josephine Farsø — invites tension and judgment.
  60. I Am Not a Witch
    Singular as that story might be, what makes I Am Not a Witch unique, however, is Nyoni’s abundant, maybe even overabundant directorial confidence. It’s rare and exhilarating that a new filmmaker arrives on the scene so sure of herself and so willing to take bold, counter-intuitive chances.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deliverance
    In the depiction of sudden, violent death, there is the rhapsodic wallowing in the deadly beauty of it all: protruding arrows, agonizing expiration, etc. It’s the stuff of which slapdash oaters and crime programmers are made but the obvious ambitions of Deliverance are supposed to be on a higher plane.
  62. Cutting Through Rocks
    The film’s irascible but deeply principled subject — thirty-something divorcee Sara Shahverdi — gives the film its energy, though its lulls aren’t quite as purposeful. However, despite feeling drawn-out, the doc features occasional bursts of visual panache that help emphasize its underlying story.
  63. Clouds of Sils Maria
    Binoche leaves audiences with the same exhilarating feeling here — of having witnessed something precious and rare — answering the challenge of Assayas’ script by revealing a character incredibly closer to her soul.
  64. 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.
  65. Jezebel
    That Jezebel is making its way around the country and will begin streaming is a sign of DuVernay’s pull and her commitment to black creatives. Tiffany’s journey has its ascents and plunges. Perrier and her star keep us caring where it will end: peak or valley?
  66. Demon
    Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.
  67. Eternity and a Day
    Eternity and a Day finds Angelopoulos refining his themes and style. Just as other great filmmakers have in the past explored similar themes time and again, so Angelopoulos has evolved and come up with one of his most lucid and emotional journeys thus far.
  68. The Ice Tower
    It can start to feel quite tedious, unless you allow your brain to engage with the movie on an almost subconscious level. That’s where the incredible attention paid to crafts — the cinematography, sets, costumes and sound design — kick in at last, and “The Ice Tower” becomes a sort of reverie in which we just might see ourselves reflected.
  69. Light From Light
    Neither thriller nor sentimental whimsy, Paul Harrill’s second feature (following 2014’s equally low-key “Something, Anything”) is a quietly matter-of-fact drama that utilizes a “haunting” story hook for non-religious yet affirming ends.
  70. Introducing, Selma Blair
    Rachel Fleit’s film Introducing, Selma Blair is eye-opening and empathetic — but it’s also intensely moving as a documentary in its own right, enriched by a human subject who appears to learn as much about herself in the course of filming as we do.
  71. Too Late to Die Young
    While the film is perhaps longer than necessary, and the adult characters could use some fleshing out, this is a satisfying sensorial work.
  72. The Nature of Love
    The Nature of Love refreshingly centers the female adulterer’s experience, in a richly comic mode.
  73. Goodbye First Love
    The present picture, filmed with supreme confidence, offers another unapologetically sentimental story stripped to its emotional core.
  74. 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.
  75. The Endless
    Moorhead and Benson may not be movie-star charismatic in the lead roles, but the bond between them is palpable, delivering just the dynamic the movie needs.
  76. Indivisible
    Despite their lack of experience, the Fontana sisters do a lovely job of sketching an intimate yet at times claustrophobic bond.
  77. Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass offers a one-of-a-kind experience.
  78. All Is Well
    A fascinating flip on themes contentiously raised in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” underpinned by a breakout performance of raw candor by Aenne Schwarz, this is grown-up filmmaking of sharp, subtle daring.
  79. Liyana
    It’s a simple but stirring tale, lent character by the boys’ endearingly eager telling and atmospheric texture by Coker’s inspired visual interpretation.
  80. The Old Man & the Gun
    People don’t forget a performer like Redford, whose movie-star charisma idles low and sexy like a Harley Davidson motor even when he’s not doing anything, and that means a movie like David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun — a dapper, low-key riff on the bank-robber genre — can play things soft, counting on Redford’s charm to fuel the show.
  81. Tarzan
    Swings, even if it doesn't always soar.
  82. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    Very kid-friendly, the wordless pic could strike some as an overly-intellectualized attempt to fetishize remnant semi-pagan traditions in a picturesque corner of Italy's Calabria province.
  83. The Box
    Superb ... 'The Box' may see [Vigas] relocating to Mexico, but it’s otherwise wholly of a piece with his debut in its terse, cut-to-the-quick refinement, its loaded, exquisitely composed images, and its fixation on shifting, complex man-versus-boy dynamics.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The War of the Roses
    Trying to wring yocks from a deranged couple locked in mortal combat over possession of their house is more suited to film noir than black comedy.
  85. Linoleum
    Consider this review primarily as an encouragement: Stick around. Your patience will be amply rewarded.
  86. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.
  87. Devo
    "Devo,” in its way, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too serious about any of this. Instead, the film traces the rocky road on which this unlikeliest of hit bands became a success.
  88. Cow
    A filmmaker infectiously attuned to movement, Arnold finds a horrible, hypnotic rhythm in these gruelingly looped procedures, though she doesn’t shoot them with any surplus beauty.
  89. West of Memphis
    Amy Berg's clear, captivating, indignant film carves out its own significant place in criminal-justice cinema, makes new and startling revelations into the triple-murder mystery, and is visually spectacular to boot.
  90. Frost/Nixon
    Frank Langella's meticulous performance will generate the sort of attention that will attract serious filmgoers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fever Heat [re-release]
    Lacks the suspense, characterization and deft direction of the predecessor "Rififi."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Siddhartha (re-release)
    Rooks has chosen to give this a surface elegance which sometimes robs the film of its needed earthiness and sensuality in its love angle and more robustness in detailing the vagaries of social aspects and values at the time.
  93. MASH
    In the end M.A.S.H. succeeds, in spite of its glaring faults, because Gould, Sutherland, Skerritt, Jo Ann Pflug as the delicious Lt. Dish, and Roger Bowen, as the goof-off commanding officer who is bright enough to recognize his junior officers' medical competence and stay out of their way, are all believable and bitingly funny in their casual disdain for the Army.
  94. Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington
    Sebastian Junger’s docu Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? offers a moving requiem for his “Restrepo” co-director.
  95. Papirosen
    Solnicki demonstrates that a work of art can be made from the humble materials of home-shot video and various 8mm formats, especially when the eye and ear behind the camera are as observant and unabashed as they are here.
  96. Sunday Ball
    Stunningly shot and marvelously edited to capture the rhythms of the game, the pic transcends its subject much in the way Roger Angell’s essays on baseball offer rare pleasures even to those uninterested in the game.
  97. Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy
    [A] concise, clearly told and deeply effective documentary.
  98. What Lies Upstream
    What Lies Upstream is a quietly devastating documentary that’s all the more attention-grabbing for being such a scrupulously restrained and slickly polished piece of work.
  99. Wildlife
    Dano, it’s immediately clear, is a natural-born filmmaker, with an eye for elegant spare compositions that refrain from being too showy; they rarely get in the way of the story he’s telling. The tale itself is resonant and absorbing, though in a highly deliberate way.
  100. The Great Buddha+
    This ballad of sad losers mixed with satire on parochial politics is convulsively funny yet uncompromisingly bleak, bridging art with entertainment.
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