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. birth/rebirth
    Laura Moss’ superbly performed, enjoyably queasy Birth/Rebirth proves just how well the classic tale of scientific hubris and the desire to conquer death maps onto a gory maternity morality play, reanimating the truism that there’s little more (un)deadly than a mother’s love.
  2. Warfare
    It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.
  3. The Deep End
    Taking film noir material and turning it inside out visually and morally, The Deep End is an absorbing, beautifully made melodrama that succeeds on formal levels more than it does with suspense or emotion.
  4. Aberdeen
    A humanistic, warts-and-all battle of wills between a dissolute father and an emotionally ravaged daughter.
  5. Beware of Mr. Baker
    When a documentary begins with its subject using his crutch to deliver a vicious blow to the director's nose, it's reasonably safe to expect less-than-smooth sailing ahead.
  6. Women Who Kill
    A shaggy, banter-driven quasi-thriller in the mode of “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (or the “Thin Man” movies, for that matter), Women Who Kill offers a drolly amusing, lightly macabre variation on the standard lesbian romantic comedy.
  7. Public Speaking
    Intermittently amusing and surely interesting, "Lebowitz" falls victim to the classic faux pas of overstaying its welcome.
  8. In the Fog
    In the Fog explores the moralities of wartime with restraint and exacting execution.
  9. A Bug's Life
    Entertaining in a very showbizzy way.
  10. Daratt
    Using a simple storytelling style that grows stronger with each passing scene, Dry Season draws the viewer into its small two-character drama set in post-war Chad, while it offers a deep reflection on injustice and frustrated revenge.
  11. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
    97-year-old Detroit fixture Grace Lee Boggs doesn’t just explode the docile-Asian-female stereotypes Lee set out to question with her earlier pic; she makes an inspiring case for self-determination and intellectual fortitude regardless of background.
  12. A New Kind of Wilderness
    A New Kind of Wilderness still honors the ideals of its late subject, particularly in the camera crew’s organic, pine-fresh appreciation of the surrounding environment. But its tender observation of an evolving family shows there’s value in society too, in living across a wider corner of the world.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The War Room
    If The War Room were a fictional feature, it would be a sure-fire star-making vehicle for James Carville. President Clinton’s crafty, straight-talking campaign manager dominates this absorbing but basically unrevelatory behind-the-scenes look at the former Arkansas governor’s long push for the presidency.
  14. 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.
  15. Funny Ha Ha
    A beautifully observant and wholly unpretentious film with roots more in Cassavetes than Sundance-style showbiz.
  16. Before I Forget
    If you've pondered how to order a round of fellatio as one orders a pizza or wondered what gay gentlemen of a certain age talk about, this touching glimpse of faded beauty and looming decrepitude fits the bill.
  17. Dìdi
    Wang does a nice job of balancing his naturally comedic sensibility with serious insights into how he triangulated his own identity at Wang-Wang’s age.
  18. Welcome to Leith
    The conflict between different notions of freedom, law-enforcement problems, and an atmosphere of escalating violent threat make Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker’s documentary as engrossing as a fictional thriller.
  19. After Yang
    The movie’s pulse seldom rises above resting, but the director invites audiences to dive as deep as they want to go into the film’s themes, to read subtext into body language, silence and the space between characters.
  20. Argentina, 1985
    That Argentina, 1985 managed to toggle between such emotionally raw material and more amped-up, tension-driven subplots — as Strassera and his family weather death threats and cars explode in public squares — without seeming callous or dramatically opportunistic is a credit to Mitre, whose grasp on his story is high-key and emotionally immediate, but never glib.
  21. Love, Antosha
    A touching and surprising portrait of an actor who had much more going on in his life – from a serious illness to some seriously left-field artistic inclinations – than was mentioned in his obituaries.
  22. Into Great Silence
    With a painterly eye and a deep appreciation for the hermetic world set apart from, rather than at odds with, modern life, helmer Philip Groening takes the viewer into their cloistered world.
  23. Gloria Bell
    Although García and Moore were born in the same year (under the same sign!), Lelio is more mature now than he was when he made the original film, and he brings that experience to the project in small but crucial ways.
  24. Monos
    A sublimely crafted saga about child soldiers discovering their own hearts of darkness in an unnamed, untamed Latin American wilderness, Monos presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.
  25. Il Buco
    A docufiction that tenderly, wordlessly and rather too obliquely recreates a 1961 speleological expedition to measure the depth of an unexplored crevasse in Italy’s Calabria region.
  26. Blue Jasmine
    Blanchett’s performance is so dominant in terms of screentime and emotional impact that the film succeeds as not only a virtuoso ensemble piece, but also an unflinchingly intimate study of the character in the title.
  27. The Innocents
    Hope and horror are commingled to quietly moving effect in Agnus Dei, a restrained but cumulatively powerful French-Polish drama about the various crises of faith that emerge when a house of God is ravaged by war.
  28. Little Hope Was Arson
    While the crimes were appalling, one leaves Little Hope Was Arson less concerned with them — especially as all the churches have since been rebuilt — than with larger questions of forgiveness.
  29. The Shadowless Tower
    As The Shadowless Tower ambles onward, it reveals its arcs of change not in dramatic showdowns or sudden revelations, but in ellipses, in the occasional mysterious fold in chronology and, most rewardingly, in the casual, unforced repetition of certain motifs.
  30. Dry Leaf
    Defiantly peculiar and only a little overlong at three hours, Dry Leaf is a joy for devotees of the strange, singular and sometimes transcendent. It’s a movie to ride shotgun alongside, with the windows down on a lazy trip to nowhere in particular, that ends up taking you everywhere in particular.
  31. Crazy, Not Insane
    You may not agree with everything Dorothy Lewis says in “Crazy, Not Insane,” but you come out of the movie alive to the place where evil and insanity meet and then fall back apart.
  32. Racing Dreams
    The perceptively balanced "Dreams" transitions seamlessly from domestic drama to 70-mph heats.
  33. Junun
    Favoring long, unbroken takes that allow the rhythmic, full-bodied songs to breathe as they ebb and flow from beginning to end, Anderson’s aesthetics unobtrusively capture the magic of Greenwood and company’s global partnership
  34. It Comes at Night
    It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.
  35. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    Not to disparage the f/x guys, but what's onscreen in Hellboy II is all about the seismic eruptions in del Toro's head. Comparing his work to most fantasy cinema is like comparing cave drawings to the Cathedral of Cologne.
  36. Please Give
    Keener, so deliciously nasty in Holofcener's "Lovely and Amazing," is no less engaging here in what is, surprisingly, the film's least bitchy role.
  37. Servants
    Servants is briskly shaped at just under 80 minutes, yet its alien-historical world-building is effective enough that you emerge from it feeling both out of time and out of breath: Any longer, and all humanity would bleed out of this earthly-but-ethereal conspiracy drama entirely.
  38. Painted Fire
    Grounded by a vigorous, physical performance from Choi Min-Sik, who brings both earthiness and grandeur to the central role, the film vividly evokes the world of an obsessive natural talent.
  39. Lumumba
    An impassioned, at times thrilling re-creation of the birth of the country that became Zaire and is now known as Congo again.
  40. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    McCormack is fantastic in a role so subtle it could appear flatlined and phony if people aren’t playing attention.
  41. Rocks in My Pockets
    Boasting a narrative of extraordinary complexity and density, stuffed with irony, humor and tales-within-tales, the imaginative animated memoir Rocks in My Pockets merges a mini-history of 20th-century Latvia with that of helmer Signe Baumane and her forebears.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Elephant Man
    Hopkins is splendid in a subtly nuanced portrayal of a man torn between humanitarianism and qualms that his motives in introducing the Elephant Man to society are no better than those of the brutish carny. The center-piece of the film, however, is the virtuoso performance by the almost unrecognizable John Hurt.
  43. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Even if the film itself is relatively conventional, its exposure of a squalid city's most benighted neighborhood and its introduction of hope into nearly hopeless lives give it strong human interest value.
  44. Putty Hill
    This curious blend of documentary and narrative, held together less by any plot device than by a rigorous aesthetic, proves all the more effective for being in service of casual naturalism.
  45. Breathe
    Melanie Laurent brings a sure, sensitive hand to tonally tricky material and draws superb work from relative newcomers Josephine Japy (“Cloclo”) and Lou De Laage (“Jappeloup”).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Freshman
    Pic’s weakest element is the recurring satire of film studies. Although Benedict is droll as an academic poseur, the mocking of film analysis is puerile and obvious.
  47. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.
  48. We Met in Virtual Reality
    We Met in Virtual Reality is a warmhearted, often humorous look at the sociology of such spaces. It can’t really be described as vérité — more fly-on-the-virtual-wall filmmaking.
  49. Enys Men
    Visually and sonically, Enys Men is utterly intoxicating, but a lack of any nourishing interplay between form and content makes it feel like getting drunk on an empty stomach, alone on an island where everything happens at the same time, and nothing really happens at all.
  50. Clash
    Boasting superb camerawork from d.p. Ahmed Gabr and stellar crowd direction, Clash might strike some as crossing too often into hysteria, yet this is bravura filmmaking with a kick-in-the-gut message about chaos and cruelty (with some humanity).
  51. Number 37
    Far more substantial than a run-of-the-mill Hitchcock homage, Number 37 is richly satisfying on its own terms as a singularly crafty and strikingly well-crafted thriller that signals the arrival of a promising filmmaking talent.
  52. The Grief of Others
    More experimental in form and wobbly in execution than its predecessor, this searching adaptation of Leah Hager Cohen’s 2011 novel nonetheless evokes a family’s fragile inner life in ineffably moving fashion, capturing how distant and isolated parents and children can feel from one another even when living under the same roof
  53. Shuffle
    It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.
  54. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    The film presents a psychological, almost novelistic portrait of how Bourdain evolved as a person during the years of his celebrity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Color Purple
    There are some great scenes and great performances in The Color Purple, but it is not a great film. Steven Spielberg’s turn at ‘serious’ filmmaking is marred in more than one place by overblown production that threatens to drown in its own emotions. But the characters created in Alice Walker’s novel are so vivid that even this doesn’t kill them off and there is still much to applaud (and cry about) here.
  56. Amanda Knox
    A gripping and incisive documentary.
  57. High Flying Bird
    It’s certainly more interested in ideas than characters, and the film stumbles when it makes half-hearted attempts at romantic intrigue or tragic backstories, but its subversive view of race, money and power in modern sports couldn’t be more timely.
  58. The Humans
    I’ll admit that Karam’s camera strays down one too many empty hallways for my taste, but I love the patience with which he lets things unfold, the respect he shows this family, and the way these characters don’t feel like characters at all, but real people — fellow humans.
  59. The Card Counter
    Part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything. It’s just a game. The Card Counter is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement.
  60. Beatles '64
    It takes this fabled, high-swoon moment of pop-music history, almost all of which we now view through a mythological lens, and humanizes it in an exhilarating way.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Near Dark
    Main point of interest will be the work of Bigelow, who has undoubtedly created the most hard-edged, violent actioner ever directed by an American woman.
  62. 5 Broken Cameras
    An undeniably powerful record of the Palestinian village of Bil'in's course of civil disobedience from 2005 to the present...the pic is also shamelessly sentimental and manipulative in its construction.
  63. How to Draw a Bunny
    Debuting helmer Walter assembles an aptly colorful package, with stylistic integration of elements from Johnson's delightful visual art. A major plus is the skittering percussion score by bebop jazz great Max Roach.
  64. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    Exhaustively informative and powerfully emotional.
  65. LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
    The balance between feeling and distance is never a contradiction here but, rather, the dynamic that makes this film an especially humanistic entry in the Maysles canon.
  66. Dirty Pretty Things
    An intelligent and extremely well-made romantic drama that tells an intriguing story with economy and insight.
  67. Punch-Drunk Love
    Entirely unpredictable and marked by audacious strokes of directorial bravado.
  68. Chungking Express
    Overall, Wong’s movie doesn’t leave as big a wash behind it as the more ambitious “Days” and his “Mean Streets”-like debut, “As Tears Go By,” but it’s an enjoyable cruise.
  69. O'Horten
    On screen non-stop, Owe is Buster Keaton-like perfection.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Princess Bride
    It also doesn't help that Cary Elwes and Robin Wright as the loving couple are nearly comatose and inspire little passion from each other, or the audience.
  71. In Between
    What makes this spiky dramedy so compelling are the Palestinian-Israeli protagonists, whose split lives have rarely been depicted on screen.
  72. Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Gini Reticker's lucidly impassioned film, filled with strong, eloquent spokeswomen, garnered Tribeca's docu award.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wings
    When the action [from a story by John Monk Saunders] settles on terra firma there is nothing present that other war supers haven’t had, some to a greater degree. But nothing has possessed the graphic descriptive powers of aerial flying and combat that have been poured into this effort.
  74. The Chronology of Water
    The Chronology of Water invites us to experience each moment as if it were happening, but the movie is really telling the story of a spirit — the one that tries to survive, and become whole, through each moment.
  75. The Thin Red Line
    Like a Rousseau painting splattered with carnage of warfare.
  76. Born to Fly
    Born to Fly teasingly suggests that some displays of avant-garde virtuosity could be enjoyed equally by venturesome aesthetes, dance enthusiasts and devotees of World Wrestling Entertainment.
  77. Diego Maradona
    It’s a heady, engrossing, indulgently sprawling profile of a modern athlete in all his glory and contradiction, but it’s also a film that leaves you with more questions than it should.
  78. The Phantom
    A fascinating and ultimately infuriating documentary.
  79. Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
    Part John Ford, part Sam Fuller, the film’s old-fashioned approach is oddly impressive: To tell this kind of story in such blunt-edged, straightforward style is a distinctive choice when the temptation to veer into revisionist war-is-hell commentary, Malickian nature-study or Herzogian descent-into-madness bombast must have been strong.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    After Dark, My Sweet
    Director-cowriter James Foley has given this near-perfect adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel a contempo setting and emotional realism that make it as potent as a snakebite.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Passage to India
    An impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel about the clash of East and West in colonial India.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spellbound
    Alfred Hitchcock handles his players and action in suspenseful manner and, except for a few episodes of much scientific dialogue, maintains a steady pace in keeping the camera moving.
  83. I, Daniel Blake
    I, Daniel Blake is one of Loach’s finest films, a drama of tender devastation that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity that goes right back to the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.
  84. The Counterfeiters
    The moral quandary of Nazi complicity is revisited in taut drama The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of a disparate group of imprisoned artists, financiers and swindlers secretly assembled in a concentration camp to forge millions of pound and dollar notes to support the German war effort.
  85. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    A mesmerizing portrait of the director as acclaimed artist and tortured human being.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After the Wedding
    Thanks to a tight script, sharp direction and excellent actors, new film by Danish helmer Susanne Bier manages to be both emotional and engaging.
  87. Playing with Sharks
    If the tone of the film is uniformly admiring, Taylor is often critical of the younger woman who appears in these frames, frankly expressing regrets and self-recrimination about those less enlightened days when sub-aquatic hunting was her bread and butter.
  88. The Dark Knight Rises
    While The Dark Knight Rises raises the dramatic stakes considerably, at least in terms of its potential body count, it doesn't have its predecessor's breathless sense of menace or its demonic showmanship, and with the exception of one audacious sleight-of-hand twist, the story can at times seem more complicated than intricate.
  89. The Lost City of Z
    The Lost City of Z is a finely crafted, elegantly shot, sharply sincere movie that is more absorbing than powerful. It makes no major dramatic missteps, yet it could have used an added dimension — something to make the two-hour-and-20-minute running time feel like a transformative journey rather than an epic anecdotal crusade.
  90. Devil in a Blue Dress
    On its own terms, the plotting of "Devil" is absorbing, and the pieces actually fit together pretty decently. On the other hand, when scenes directly call to mind similar ones in "Chinatown," this effort's stepchild relationship to the classic is forcibly demonstrated.
  91. Miroirs No. 3
    This 86-minute puzzle piece isn’t one of the director’s major works, but is distinguished by his trademark pleasures of texture and tone — and pushes his ongoing collaboration with star Paula Beer into ever more enigmatic territory.
  92. Avengers: Endgame
    After nearly two and a half hours of hardcore comicbook entertainment — alternating earnest storytelling with self-deprecating zingers designed to show that Marvel doesn’t take itself too seriously — “Endgame” wraps all that logic-bending nonsense with a series of powerful emotional scenes.
  93. A Time for Drunken Horses
    It is all the more heart-wrenching for being realistic. Its portrait of child labor brooks no sentimentality and no cliches.
  94. Blind Shaft
    Has a low-key power that comes as much from its off-handed approach to the dark material as from any manipulative techniques.
  95. Memories Look at Me
    A gossamer debut feature that compensates for its lo-fi look with glimpses of profound humanism.
  96. Donbass
    Corruption and humiliation are the guiding forces of Donbass, resulting in a scathing portrait of a society where human interaction has descended to a level of barbarity more in keeping with late antiquity than the so-called contemporary civilized world.
  97. The Guard
    A crusty jewel of a performance by Brendan Gleeson goes a long way toward enlivening an otherwise routine tale of murder, blackmail, drug trafficking and rural police corruption in The Guard.
  98. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    Alive with plenty of droll British humor and with a music-filled, picturesque finale that is sincerely earned, The Ballad of Wallis Island is the best kind of crowd-pleaser: disarming, joyful and full of compassion for its oddball characters. This Sundance charmer doesn’t hit a false note.
  99. Bathtubs Over Broadway
    Anyone who loves musical theater owes it to themselves to see Bathtubs Over Broadway, a delightful deep-dive documentary into one man’s obsession with the obscure world of industrial musicals — corporate-sponsored song-and-dance revues from the golden age of American capitalism.
  100. Blue Ruin
    A lean and suspenseful genre piece that follows a bloody trail of vengeance to its cruel, absurd and logical conclusion.
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