Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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 2.3 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    There are some unsatisfactory elements–slow spots occur during the middle stretch, the mild anti-establishment stance is getting to be a bit cliche and one never knows whether E.T.’s mortal illness is physical or psychological in nature, or both. But, as with “Close Encounters,” the truly lovely and moving ending more than makes up for everything. Chalk up another smash for Spielberg.
  2. Apocalypse Now Redux
    If the original Apocalypse Now was a narrow, swiftly flowing river that gradually closed in on the patrol boat carrying Captain Willard into the heart of darkness, Apocalypse Now Redux is a wide river of greater depth, more variable currents and some fascinating new ports of call.
  3. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    At once dreamlike and ruthlessly naturalistic, steadily composed yet shot through with roiling currents of anxiety, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a quietly devastating gem.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Annie Hall
    In a decade largely devoted to male buddy-buddy films, brutal rape fantasies, and impersonal special effects extravaganzas, Woody Allen has almost single-handedly kept alive the idea of heterosexual romance in American films. Annie Hall is a touching and hilarious love story that is Allen’s most three-dimensional film to date.
  5. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Looks to please the book's legions of fans with its imaginatively scrupulous rendering of the tome's characters and worlds on the screen, as well as the uninitiated with its uninterrupted flow of incident and spectacle.
  6. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    The novelty of helmer Gardner’s approach to 9/11, her insider’s look at the almost unimaginable difficulties faced by Cantor Fitzgerald in the weeks following the attack, and the abundance of coverage spanning 10 years of inhouse interactions more than compensate for the docu’s occasional unevenness.
  7. The Zone of Interest
    It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.
    • Variety
      • Posted May 20, 2023
  8. Let It Fall: L.A. 1982-1992
    There are moments in “Let It Fall” that feel like a significant reframing of the riots, both in terms of what actually happened and in terms of who’s really to blame.
  9. Quiz Show
    Robert Redford's handsome, smartly constructed new film stands likely to capture the imagination of the educated, culturally inclined public.
  10. Leviathan
    This is the director’s most accessible and naturalistic film, using everyday characters to test how well modern-day Russia is maintaining the social contract with its citizens.
  11. Toy Story 3
    This tertiary adventure delivers welcome yet nonessential fun, landing well after its creators have grown up and succeeded toying with more sophisticated stories.
  12. The Souvenir
    Achingly well-observed in its study of a young artist inspired, derailed and finally strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is at once the coming-of-age story of many women and a specific creative manifesto for one of modern British cinema’s most singular writer-directors.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    This Is Spinal Tap
    A vastly amusing satire of heavy metal bands.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goodfellas
    Simultaneously fascinating and repellent, Goodfellas is Martin Scorsese's colorful but dramatically unsatisfying inside look at Mafia life in 1955-1980 New York City.
  15. A Man Vanishes (1967)
    Imamura's square-framed, black-and-white imagery, in all its various stylistic incarnations, proves as compelling through the docu's myriad detours as in any of his better-known psychological thrillers.
  16. The Look of Silence
    So involving is the raw content of The Look of Silence that some might view its formal elegance as mere luxury, yet the film reveals Oppenheimer to be a documentary stylist of evolving grace and sophistication.
  17. Tower
    A gripping dramatic reconstruction, a tribute to the heroes and the fallen, and inevitably an expression of nostalgia for the days when a mass shooting still had the power to shock, Keith Maitland’s film weaves rotoscopic animation, archival footage and present-day interviews into a uniquely cinematic memorial.
  18. The Secret Agent
    Mendonça crams the film with vivid time-capsule details.
  19. Burning
    The degree to which Burning succeeds will depend largely on one’s capacity to identify with the unspoken but strongly conveyed sense of jealousy and frustration its lower-class protagonist feels, coupled with a need to impose some sense of order on events beyond our control.
  20. Drive My Car
    Hamaguchi’s filmmaking, always accomplished, reaches new heights of refinement and sensory richness here, principally via Shinomiya’s immaculate, opaline lensing.
  21. Moolaadé
    This richly textured parable feels every inch the work of a master.
  22. It Was Just an Accident
    While the simple premise recalls certain post-WWII dramas in which survivors recognize the Nazi culprits who once terrorized them, the film’s chilling last scene feels like a call to action.
  23. A Summer's Tale
    The thoughts may not be profound, but they are profoundly true to life,and the writer-director’s approach to young people’s concerns is remarkably universal and timeless.
  24. Saint Omer
    Saint Omer challenges accepted ideas of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity — and even of what cinema can be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t accept those accepted ideas.
  25. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    The first-ever screenplay written in the Inuit language, Inuktitut -- and the first time's a charm.
  26. L.A. Confidential
    An irresistible treat with enough narrative twists and memorable characters for a half-dozen films.
  27. Three Colors: White
    The entertaining second seg of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy is involving, bittersweet and droll. A fine lead perf from Zbigniew Zamachowski anchors an ingenious rags-to-riches tale of revenge filtered through abiding love.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Killing
    This story of a $2 million race track holdup and steps leading up to the robbery, occasionally told in a documentary style which at first tends to be somewhat confusing, soon settles into a tense and suspenseful vein which carries through to an unexpected and ironic windup.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Swing Time
    Swing Time is another winner for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers combo. It's smart, modern, and impressive in every respect, from its boy-loses-girl background to its tunefulness, dancipation, production quality and general high standards.
  30. Lost in Translation
    The film's unhurried pace will target it for discerning audiences only, but its wry humor and coolly amused observation of contemporary Japan should score with smart urbanites.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breaking Away
    Though its plot wins no points for originality, Breaking Away is a thoroughly delightful light comedy, lifted by fine performances from Dennis Christopher and Paul Dooley. The story is nothing more than a triumph for the underdog through sports, this time cycle racing.
  32. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    Far more than a showcase of his talent and productivity, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus lets Sakamoto deliver an elegy, and in the process, an autobiography of his creative journey, as captured through the precision and poetry of director Neo Sora’s camera.
  33. Son of Saul
    The result is as grim and unyielding a depiction of the Holocaust as has yet been made on that cinematically overworked subject — a masterful exercise in narrative deprivation and sensory overload that recasts familiar horrors in daringly existential terms.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Affair
    Dunne is excellent in a role that requires both comedy and dramatic ability. Boyer is particularly effective as the modern Casanova.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frankenstein
    Looks like a Dracula plus, touching a new peak in horror plays and handled in production with supreme craftsmanship.
  36. Her
    What begins like an arrested adolescent dream soon blossoms into Jonze’s richest and most emotionally mature work to date, burrowing deep into the give and take of relationships, the dawning of middle-aged ennui, and that eternal dilemma shared by both man and machine: the struggle to know one’s own true self.
  37. The Echo
    Examining the unique ties that bind farming families, where everyone’s welfare hangs on the same unkind elements, this exquisitely textured film observes how children’s lives echo those of their parents, repeating for generations on the same constantly inconstant land, until somebody breaks the pattern.
  38. Little Women
    Gerwig’s script is far more comical than any previously committed to film. This she achieves by emphasizing the humor inherent in the source material.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The African Queen
    An engrossing motion picture. Just offbeat enough in story, locale and star teaming of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn to stimulate the imagination. It is a picture with an unassuming warmth and naturalness that can have a bright boxoffice chance
  40. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    Writer and director Johan Grimonprez sets himself a difficult task with Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, yet accomplishes it with astonishing success. The film plays like both a dense historical text and a lively jazz concert while proving itself to be an invigorating piece of documentary filmmaking.
  41. The Triplets of Belleville
    Almost completely dialogue-free but graced with terrific sound design and a swell score.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Basically an excuse for set pieces, some amusing, others overdone.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Man Who Would Be King
    Whether it was the intention of John Huston or not, the tale of action and adventure is a too-broad comedy, mostly due to the poor performance of Michael Caine.
  44. Flee
    In the end, however we take Amin’s story, the film is an incredibly intimate act of sharing. The question shouldn’t be whether we can trust Amin, but whether he can trust us enough to reveal himself fully. Truth be told, we don’t need to see or know everything to respect the gift of hearing all that he’s been through.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    A harrowing, gruesome, morbid tale of war, so compelling in its realism, bigness and repulsiveness that Universal’s Western Front becomes at once a money picture.
  46. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    This is an enriching way to spend three-plus hours.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Repulsion (re-release)
    Repulsion is a classy, truly horrific psychological drama in which Polish director Roman Polanski draws out a remarkable performance from young French thesp, Catherine Deneuve. (Review of Original Release)
    • 91 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Mr. Lincoln
    With judicious eye to authenticity and dignity the major shortcoming of this Lincoln film is at the altar of faithfulness, hampered by the rather lethargic production and direction.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ladykillers
    This is an amusing piece of hokum, being a parody of American gangsterdom interwoven with whimsy and exaggeration that makes it more of a macabre farce. Alec Guinness sinks his personality almost to the level of anonymity.
  50. Graves Without a Name
    Sudden surges of emotion seem to guide its shuffling of symbols, techniques and points of view.
  51. Tótem
    Rich with detail while also being intensely specific to the large middle-class family it observes, Avilés’ lifelike and lived-in second feature alternates among roughly half a dozen characters, inviting audiences to pick their own points of identification in the ensemble.
  52. Stories We Tell
    The alternately playful and elegiac Stories We Tell is wholly of a piece with her fiction work, and just as rewarding.
  53. Nickel Boys
    For the first hour or so, Nickel Boys feels like the most exciting narrative debut since “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Then Ross tries something bold that doesn’t quite work, and the experiment collapses upon itself.
  54. The Boy and the Heron
    Better to think of The Boy and the Heron as the bonus round — a worthy but mid-range addition to a remarkable oeuvre that expands his filmography without necessarily topping it.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Waterfront
    Under Elia Kazan's direction, Marlon Brando puts on a spectacular show, giving a fascinating, multi-faceted performance.
  56. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    A film of quiet but profound outrage, laughing on the surface, but howling in anger just beneath.
  57. Ida
    It’s one thing to set up a striking black-and-white composition and quite another to draw people into it, and dialing things back as much as this film does risks losing the vast majority of viewers along the way, offering an intellectual exercise in lieu of an emotional experience to all but the most rarefied cineastes.
  58. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    What’s profound, and incendiary, about “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is the way that Laura Poitras excavates the story of how deeply Nan Goldin’s photographs are rooted in trauma.
  59. 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.
  60. Hit the Road
    Like this extraordinary, ordinary family, latticed together by love yet supremely alive in their own individual hearts, Panah Panahi is not just part of a tradition, but his own filmmaker, finding new resonances in territory so familiar its power to surprise should have been thoroughly exhausted by now, but that here feels like a whole new universe.
  61. They Shall Not Grow Old
    if They Shall Not Grow Old is head-spinning for its jolting animation of creakily shot battle scenes — tricked out with ingeniously integrated sound editing and seamlessly retimed from 13 frames a second to 24 — its greatest revelation isn’t one of sound and fury. Rather, it’s the film’s faces that stick longest in the mind.
  62. This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection
    A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born writer-director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is as classical in theme as it is adventurous in presentation.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An Autumn Afternoon
    This view of contemporary middle class life in Japan is too leisurely paced, too sentimental in design and its humorous social comments too infrequent.
  64. Anora
    Baker’s subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce makes "Pretty Woman" look like a Disney movie.
  65. The Favourite
    It’s a perfectly cut diamond of a movie — a finely executed, coldly entertaining entry in the genre of savage misanthropic baroque costume drama.
  66. Over the Limit
    The intense abuse captured in Marta Prus’s brilliant, diamond-hard documentary portrait of a Russian rhythmic gymnast’s punishing road to the 2016 Olympics is all too vividly real — just watching it induces veritable stomach cramps, though it’s impossible to turn away from the film’s whipcrack construction and expert manipulation of perspective.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Halloween
    After a promising opening, Halloween becomes just another maniac-on-the-loose suspenser. However, despite the prosaic plot, director John Carpenter has timed the film's gore so that the 93-minute item is packed with enough thrills.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Sweet Hereafter
    Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan's most ambitious work to date, The Sweet Hereafter is a rich, complex meditation on the impact of a terrible tragedy on a small town.
  69. Ghost World
    By sharp turns poignant, disturbing and hysterically funny.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Right Stuff
    The Right Stuff is a humdinger. Full of beauty, intelligence and excitement, this big-scale look at the development of the US space program and its pioneering aviators provides a fresh, entertaining look back at the recent past.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bambi
    Bambi is gem-like in its reflection of the color and movement of sylvan plant and animal life. The transcription of nature in its moments of turbulence and peace heightens the brilliance of the canvas. The story [by Felix Salten] is full of tenderness and the characters tickle the heart.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bringing Up Baby
    Bringing Up Baby is constructed for maximum of laughs, with Ruggles and Catlett adding to the starring team’s zany antics. There is little rhyme or reason to most of the action, but it’s all highly palatable.
  73. Nostalgia for the Light
    Part of the beauty of Nostalgia is that the many metaphors and surprising parallels between the universe, archaeology and Chile’s recent past rise organically from the material.
  74. The Gatekeepers
    While no film from the narrow perspective of Israeli intelligence could purport to offer a thorough view of the conflict, what makes The Gatekeepers ultimately so compelling is its pervasive sense of moral ambiguity.
  75. The Brutalist
    It’s clear that Corbet made this movie because he wants it to mean something big. Whether it does may be in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, The Brutalist lets you feel that you’re seeing a man’s life pass before your eyes. That may be meaning enough.
  76. Before Sunset
    A savvy sequel that should speak to anyone who's let that one great love slip away.
  77. Fatherland
    Fatherland is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It’s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet Fatherland, as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it’s more heady than haunting.
  78. La Chimera
    [Rohrwacher] offers all her earthly and otherworldly preoccupations in scattered, bejeweled fragments, for us to gather and assemble and interpret — and doesn’t much mind if some pieces stay buried.
  79. The Worst Person in the World
    In essaying Julie, a character at once watery and opaque, shaped by everything around her but vocally resistant to influence, Reinsve has a tricky assignment that she nails with remarkable fluidity and grace.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    David Copperfield
    It was almost an adventure to try to bring to the screen the expansively optimistic Micawber, but he lives again in W.C. Fields, who only once yields to his penchant for horseplay.
  81. Saving Private Ryan
    A searingly visceral combat picture, Steven Spielberg’s third World War II drama is arguably second to none as a vivid, realistic and bloody portrait of armed conflict.
  82. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice Pizza delivers a piping-hot, jumbo slice-of-life look at how it felt to grow up on the fringes of the film industry circa 1973.
  83. The Girls in the Band
    Plentiful screen time for three generations of femme jazzers, led by energetic and witty gals from the golden age of big band and swing who unlock a treasure trove of memories, make this a real crowdpleaser.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ben-Hur
    Ben-Hur is a majestic achievement, representing a superb blending of the motion picture arts by master craftsmen.
  85. The Alabama Solution
    The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.
  86. 32 Sounds
    Full to bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity, 32 Sounds is a uniquely mind-expanding plunge into a dimension of the human experience so many of us take for granted, a rare and rewarding sonic journey with the potential to enrich our lives.
  87. Seeds
    Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white, this portrait of a people is affecting and achy.
  88. The Crying Game
    An astonishingly good and daring film that richly develops several intertwined thematic lines, The Crying Game takes giant risks that are stunningly rewarded.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Great Expectations
    Only rabid Dickensians will find fault with the present adaptation, and paradoxically only lovers of Dickens will derive maximum pleasure from the film.
  90. First Cow
    Reichardt specializes in pared-down narratives, sometimes stripping away so much that boredom sets in. First Cow may be lean, but it offers ample room to ruminate in the comparison between its two time periods.
  91. Mad Max: Fury Road
    There is gargantuan excess here, to be sure — and no shortage of madness — but there is also an astonishing level of discipline.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Le Samouraï
    It is intermittently successful.
  93. Winter's Bone
    Raw but utterly enveloping.
  94. The Queen
    Tradition and informality collide -- and mutually benefit -- in the deliciously written and expertly played The Queen.
  95. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    The beautifully modulated script, ripe with moments of liberating humor, builds to a crescendo of indignation, allowing Elkabetz several cathartic outbursts, but they’re no more riveting than the actress’ silences.
  96. I Called Him Morgan
    It’s fitting that Kasper Collin’s excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage.
  97. All of Us Strangers
    The entire journey is not based in logic so much as a kind of emotional intuition, and as such, no two viewers will experience it the same way. What strikes some as manipulative will crack open others, as the film offers a kind of connection that’s all too rare, and maybe even impossible.
  98. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Steven Spielberg's film climaxes in final 35 minutes with an almost ethereal confrontation with life forms from another world; the first 100 minutes, however, are somewhat redundant in exposition and irritating in tone.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Godfather: Part II
    Al Pacino again is outstanding as Michael Corleone, successor to crime family leadership.
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