Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,779 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. In the Pit
    Leo Heiblum's pulsating music and Samuel Larson's dense, fascinating sound editing rewardingly compliment Rulfo's electrifying visuals.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tazza: The High Rollers
    Writer-director Choi Dong-hoon, whose grifter dramedy "The Big Swindle" was an unheralded gem two years ago, considerably ups the ante in his second feature, a long-limbed yarn centered on a bunch of ruthless professional gamblers. But involving characters and devil-may-care tone make the long running time hardly a stretch.
  3. 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.
  4. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
    With a pronounced Baroque palette and his usual astonishing use of light, picture looks ravishing -- individual scenes make a deeper impact than the characters themselves.
  5. Private Property
    Boasting a script so clear and airtight that shrinks could use it for family therapy courses, the sole caveat is the unrelenting unpleasantness of the stronger-willed son.
  6. Joshua
    A creepy-little-kid suspenser decked out with sufficient class to lend it a certain distinction.
  7. Laura Smiles
    Sharp dialogue, idiosyncratic characters and a wickedly brilliant structure that subtly derails expectation make Laura Smiles a rarity among mellers.
  8. The Life of Reilly
    With equal measures of prickly wit, gleeful pride and bemused gratitude, Charles Nelson Reilly looks back at his life, and invites his audience to share the view, in this thoroughly engaging filmization of his one-man stage show.
  9. 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
    De Felitta seems a born documaker. He brilliantly constructs a tale born of a genuine love of jazz and a need to understand how Paris went from sensation to footnote in a generation.
  10. Protagonist
    The dangers of extremism and the virtues of uncertainty are the keys to the remarkable Protagonist, docu helmer Jessica Yu's exploration of four men's journey through dysfunction, obsession and redemption.
  11. Woman on the Beach
    A wonderful, serious-minded romantic comedy-drama.
  12. To the Limit
    A visually breathtaking essay about daredevils hooked on the thrill of speed rock-climbing.
  13. What We Do Is Secret
    Actor Shane West and writer-director Rodger Grossman have a clear, unwavering perspective on Crash that should entice curiosity seekers and old punks.
  14. Momma's Man
    Wryly comic, sometimes heartbreaking and altogether original film about a thirtysomething Angeleno who pays a visit to his aging New York parents and finds himself unwilling or unable to leave.
  15. Guest of Cindy Sherman
    If a doc manages to inform and entertain, it's ahead of the competition. If it features engaging personalities (or penguins), so much the better. And if it manages not to lose its assets while dipping its toe into murkier issues -- becoming, say, a brow-knitting thumb-sucker -- then it's really a work of art.
  16. Lymelife
    Intense perfs by Rory Culkin and Alec Baldwin are standouts in a movie that brims with vivid supporting turns.
  17. The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story
    Engaging documentary draws on plentiful archival footage and A-list interviewees, and should lure dedicated nostalgists.
  18. Quiet Chaos
    Beautifully modulated, fluidly told film expresses pain with warm understatement.
  19. Flame and Citron
    An absorbing, shades-of-gray look at home-front intrigue in Nazi-occupied Denmark during World War II. Ole Christian Madsen’s accomplished fourth feature plays out on a much larger canvas than he’s used previously and offers nuance and ambiguity in equal measure with violence and tragedy.
  20. Passing Strange
    This first-rate multicamera transcript of a terrific show should delight musical fans (and many who think they aren't) as a niche broadcast item.
  21. Second Skin
    The human dramas of individual gamers are what really make this technically polished documentary so fascinating and potentially commercial.
  22. Casi divas
    Gloriously flamboyant comedic extravaganza, fuses soap opera and "American Idol"-type competition, following four wildly different women vying for the star role in a feature filmization of a popular telenovela.
  23. Unmade Beds
    An exquisitely tender tale of two young Euro immigrants trying to find themselves (but not each other) in contempo London, Unmade Beds has a lively, romantic spirit that recalls the playfulness and spontaneity of the French New Wave.
  24. In Search of Beethoven
    Beautifully lensed and intelligently crafted.
  25. Bam gua nat
    Very Korean in its emotional content, while also preserving a quizzical distance that is quite French, picture is one of his lightest and most easily digestible metaphysical meals to date.
  26. In Search of Memory
    Petra Seeger's beautifully crafted documentary about neurobiologist Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory, interweaves experience and experiments, autobiography and science as seamlessly as the Nobel Prize winner's same-titled book.
  27. Ajami
    Time shifts may overcomplicate the narrative for some, but the pay-off packs a major punch.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terribly Happy
    Entertaining and full of surprising twists, this highly cinematic tale of a Copenhagen policeman working punishment duty in the provinces plays with genre in a manner that can be compared with the Coen brothers or David Lynch.
  29. Prodigal Sons
    Sad, compelling documentary leaves a few key questions frustratingly unanswered, but the raw materials here are sufficiently bracing.
  30. Warlords
    Laden with gritty action, but with an emotional undertow that carries the drama even through its weaker moments, picture reps a strong comeback by Hong Kong helmer-producer Peter Chan.
  31. See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary
    An outstanding documentary exploration of the travails of four deaf entertainers.
  32. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    A raucously entertaining postmodern survey of guerrilla street art that appears to be one thing, only to fold back on itself and examine would-be filmmaker Thierry Guetta instead.
  33. Mercy
    Its modesty is what makes its very real virtues -- a tart, literate script, an adroit balance of humor and pathos, a memorable onscreen collaboration between star-scribe Scott Caan and his father James -- so cumulatively impressive.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Nightmare on Elm Street
    A Nightmare on Elm Street is a highly imaginative horror film that provides the requisite shocks to keep fans of the genre happy.
  35. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    This worthy follow-up to Kosashvili's brilliant "Late Marriage" should delight auds worldwide.
  36. Mother and Child
    An insightfully observed and exceptionally acted ensemble piece precisely about what the title suggests.
  37. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    Jean Dujardin pulls off a charming, Peter Sellers-esque performance as he bumbles his way through retro cloak-and-dagger intrigue, displaying his character's uncanny ability to insult anyone -- and, especially in this episode, women and Jews -- who's not 100% Gallic, male and a diehard Charles de Gaulle fanatic.
  38. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    An energetic, nicely balanced documentary containing all the necessary elements for sports reportage with the added advantage of meatier issues attached.
  39. Kites
    The deliriously entertaining and shamelessly derivative Hindi Kites owes more to Hollywood than Bollywood, though director Anurag Basu borrows plenty from both, aiming to give Indian song-and-dance pics the same sort of crossover success "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" did for Asian martial-arts movies.
  40. Racing Dreams
    The perceptively balanced "Dreams" transitions seamlessly from domestic drama to 70-mph heats.
  41. Solitary Man
    A movie of no small generosity: It offers audiences the pleasures of a screenplay whose every acerbic line is firmly rooted in character, and it hands Michael Douglas one of his best roles in years.
  42. Father of My Children
    Marked by moments of remarkable stillness amid its emotional tumult, the film's classy, perceptive treatment of potentially maudlin material merits wider arthouse attention than it's likely to receive.
  43. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    With rare candor and a refreshing lack of piety, first-timers and combat-weary veterans exhibit their camaraderie, euphoria and burnout as the camera documents their struggles with logistics, horror, death and self-doubt.
  44. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
    Art aficionados the world over will want to catch the pic, which PBS airs later this month; given the impact Warhol had on the world, it's a must for culture vultures.
  45. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    Has Gordon Gekko gone soft? The answer is, sort of -- a development that takes some of the bite out of Oliver Stone's shrewdly opportunistic, glibly entertaining sequel, which offers another surface-skimming peek inside the power corridors of global finance.
  46. Buried
    In purely cinematic terms, Buried, set in late 2006, is an ingenious exercise in sustained tension that would make Alfred Hitchcock turn over in his grave.
  47. Stonewall Uprising
    In astounding detail, Stonewall Uprising recalls the now-famous three-day riots in June 1969 after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, as homosexuals finally, openly fought back.
  48. Wild Grass
    The picture is marked by superb performances and a dazzling technical display by the helmer and praiseworthy cinematographer Eric Gautier.
  49. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    Veering wildly between paranoia (being judged by "12 people who voted for George Bush") and self-aggrandizement (modestly comparing himself to Da Vinci, Bach and Galileo), Spector makes a fascinating subject.
  50. Despicable Me
    There's nothing like a little world domination to melt the most dastardly evildoer's heart. Since villains so often steal the show in animation, Despicable Me smartly turns the whole operation over to megalomaniacal rogue Gru.
  51. Winnebago Man
    A curious young helmer tracks down the profanity-spewing subject of a two-decade-old viral video with results at once scabrously funny and uncomfortably poignant.
  52. Farewell
    It's juicy, fascinating stuff, well orchestrated by Carion and finely thesped -- especially by Kusturica.
  53. Life During Wartime
    In revisiting his darkly comic 1998 ensembler "Happiness," Todd Solondz may have made his best film with Life During Wartime.
  54. Alamar (To the Sea)
    A lovely, soulful feature from multihyphenate Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio that plays on the border between documentary and fiction.
  55. Mugabe and the White African
    The documentary sometimes bears an eerie resemblance to Claire Denis' brilliant "White Material" in its tense evocation of menace stalking the periphery of the frame.
  56. Spoken Word
    Spoken Word benefits from an improbably perfect storm of production circumstances: The muscular, balanced script, the brainchild of an unusual alliance between professional poet Joe Ray Sandoval and TV writer William T. Conway, consistently plays to Nunez's strengths.
  57. Get Low
    With a mix of sly humor, homespun grace and affecting poignancy, Get Low casts a well-nigh irresistible spell.
  58. Peepli Live
    Debuting writer-director Anusha Rizvi manages to wrest a lively feature out of a gravely serious issue, capturing the desperation of India's village farmers, as well as the nation's shift from agriculture to industrialization, without losing sight of the entertainment principle.
  59. They Came to Play
    A delightful, well-crafted documentary.
  60. Centurion
    "Doomsday," horror-trained British helmer Neil Marshall flexes strong action muscles and carves copious flesh here, creating the sort of broadsword-based bedlam that will thrill fans of ancient martial movies.
  61. The Milk of Sorrow
    At first, the picture seems a slow-moving, particularly well-framed ethnographic study of life in the big city in Peru; it only gradually becomes clear that Llosa's second feature perfectly aligns form and content.
  62. The Town
    The behind-the-camera talent Ben Affleck displayed so bracingly in "Gone Baby Gone" is confirmed, if not significantly advanced, in The Town. Again proving a fine director of actors (this time with himself in a starring role), Affleck delivers another potent, serious-minded slice of pulp set on Boston's meanest streets, where loyalty among thieves runs thicker than blood.
  63. Somewhere
    The ever-perceptive writer-director further hones her gifts for ruefully funny observation and understated melancholy with this low-key portrait of a burned-out screen actor.
  64. The Green Hornet
    The film is a blast.
  65. Blue Valentine
    On balance, this is a meaty, strongly realized dramatic work of considerable accomplishment.
  66. White Wedding
    A highly engaging picture with a post-apartheid edge (certain scenes play like a farcical "Invictus").
  67. Heartbreaker
    Combining the glamour of "To Catch a Thief" with the ruckus of a Ben Stiller movie, TV vet Pascal Chaumeil's French Riviera-set intrigue stars Romain Duris.
  68. 127 Hours
    While Franco can sometimes be a wild card, getting increasingly self-conscious with recent roles, his take on Ralston feels both credible and compelling; few actors could have made us care so much, or disappeared so completely into the role.
  69. Letters to Father Jaakob
    The director's magisterial control over the proceedings makes something fresh and heartrending out of predictable material, particularly for older, thoughtful audiences.
  70. The King's Speech
    While far from easy, both roles provide a delightful opportunity for Firth and Rush to poke a bit of fun at their profession.
  71. 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.
  72. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    For all the information here, Gibney is unusual among investigative documentarians in that he never forgets he's making cinema.
  73. Rabbit Hole
    Grief may be the topic under examination, but humor -- incisive, observant and warm -- is the tool with which it's dissected in Rabbit Hole, a refreshingly positive-minded take on cinema's ultimate downer: overcoming the death of a child.
  74. Waste Land
    Lucy Walker's Waste Land takes his (Vik Muniz) project one step deeper by actually getting to know Muniz's models, which brings a compelling human-interest dimension to the sort of art documentary otherwise better suited for TV.
  75. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    A surprise, a delight and a whimsical experiment.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poison
    Haynes has composed three distinctive stories that constitute case studies of antisocial aberrations, shot them in three strikingly different styles and intercut them in surprisingly successful ways.
  77. The Time That Remains
    As in "Divine," there's an uneven quality to Suleiman's often surreal ideas, but in general there are way more hits than misses this time round, some of them laugh-out-loud.
  78. Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
    Briskly constructed and rich in Ochs' music and period notables, Kenneth Bowser's film will be a must for the artist's fans, but its fresh take on an overexamined decade should also appeal to Kennedy-era completists.
  79. Let the Bullets Fly
    A rollicking, violent, Western-cum-comedy that serves many masters, but adds up to an entertaining hot pot of wry political commentary and general mischief.
  80. In a Better World
    However didactic the film's final scenes, there's no denying the sheer dramatic intensity Bier achieves.
  81. Fast Five
    The 10-year run of the “Fast and Furious” roadshow isn’t slowing down a bit in Fast Five, by most measures the best of the bunch, combining fresh casting choices, interesting Rio locales and literally smashing bookended action sequences.
  82. Hanna
    An exuberantly crafted chase thriller that pulses with energy from its adrenaline-pumping first minutes to its muted bang of a finish.
  83. African Cats
    The film captures a wealth of spectacular and wrenching conflicts, and even if its ability to spin a story out of the footage falls somewhat short of the gold standard set by "March of the Penguins," it's nonetheless a remarkably cohesive piece of work.
  84. Haywire
    Paring down narrative and character concerns in favor of a breathtaking application of pure thriller technique, Soderbergh's latest picture is a lean, efficient exercise tossed off with his customary sangfroid and wickedly dry sense of humor.
  85. Strongman
    A strange and strangely beautiful movie.
  86. Orgasm Inc.
    This must-see expose entertains as it horrifies.
  87. Poetry
    Calmer and less shattering than his masterly psychodrama "Secret Sunshine" (2007), Poetry is a deceptively gentle tale with a tender ache at its center, as well as a performance from Yun Jung-hee that lingers long in the memory.
  88. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    With its accelerated rhythm, relentless flow of incident and wizard-war endgame, "Part 2" will strike many viewers as a much more exciting, involving picture than the slower, more atmospheric "Part 1."
  89. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Part 2 has the bonus of a livelier Stewart performance than fans have been accustomed to. No longer a mopey, lower-lip-biting emo girl, this Bella is twitchy, feral, formidable and fully energized, a goddess even among her exalted bloodsucker brethren.
  90. Cowboys & Aliens
    While Cowboys & Aliens offers little in the way of sociological insight (except perhaps giving the white man a taste of his own resource-stealing medicine), it's still a ripping good ride.
  91. The Help
    A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white audiences, The Help personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963.
  92. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    As classy a film as could be made from Stieg Larsson's sordid page-turner, David Fincher's much-anticipated return to serial-killer territory is a fastidiously grim pulp entertainment that plays like a first-class train ride through progressively bleaker circles of hell.
  93. The Amazing Spider-Man
    A mostly slick, entertaining and emotionally involving recombination of fresh and familiar elements.
  94. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    Old-fashioned as that might sound, there's a fresh, insightful feel to this multigenerational love story.
  95. Warrior
    An improbably effective and affecting mix of raw emotions and exciting smackdowns.
  96. Hobo with a Shotgun
    One must grudgingly admire director Jason Eisener's willingness to go over the top and beyond, and the film certainly delivers what it promises.
  97. Arthur Christmas
    Arthur Christmas embraces this unconditional faith and rewards it with creative explanations and a brisk computer-animated adventure clever enough to become essential yuletide viewing.
  98. The Grandmaster
    Venturing into fresh creative terrain without relinquishing his familiar themes and stylistic flourishes, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai exceeds expectations with The Grandmaster, fashioning a 1930s action saga into a refined piece of commercial filmmaking.
  99. Midnight in Paris
    Like a swoony lost chapter from "Paris, je t'aime" agreeably extended to feature length.
  100. Margin Call
    J.C. Chandor's precocious writing-directing debut is fastidious, smart and more than a bit portentous as it probes the human costs of unchecked greed.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »