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. Black Friday
    Despite its large cast and complex criss-crossing from past to present, the movie rarely catches fire as an involving human drama.
  2. Rembrandt's J'Accuse...!
    An enthralling docudrama that examines the Dutch master's most famous painting, "The Night Watch," for proof that it was responsible for his dramatic fall from grace.
  3. 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.
  4. This Ain't California
    “Dogtown and Z-Boys” meets “The Lives of Others” in This Ain’t California, a spirited not-quite-documentary portrait of the skateboarding subculture that flourished in East Germany in the early 1980s.
  5. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    “Waka” refers to an ancient form of poetry still widely popular today, and helmers Haptas and Samuelson, through their serene lensing and fluid editing, propose a visual thread linking the past to the present “as the crow flies.”
  6. The Death of Louis XIV
    The vividness of the realization — with a sound design that emphasizes every chew and tick of the clock — makes the movie continually engrossing.
  7. The Light of the Moon
    [ Jessica M. Thompson’s ] simply-structured film is harrowingly effective in its streamlined, low-frills way: sensitive without ever being sanctimonious, brutally frank without ever lapsing into exploitation.
  8. The Breaker Upperers
    It’s a terrific showcase for the duo and their entire cast, which, besides a pop-up bit from Clement, is curated from a local talent pool that Hollywood has yet to spelunk. After this, it should.
  9. TT3D: Closer to the Edge
    Even the most racing-averse auds will have to agree this entertaining whiz around the 2010 Isle of Man TT racing event puts across the thrill of the sport.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hell Is for Heroes
    Producer Henry Blanke has framed and mounted a gripping, fast-paced, hard-hitting dramatic portrait of an interesting World War II battlefield incident. But there are occasional duds in the film's dramatic arsenal.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    Minnelli could have timed many of the scenes so that laughs would not have stepped on dialog tag lines. Also he permits the wedding rehearsal sequence to play too long, lessening the comedic effect.
  12. The County
    Once again showing a keen eye for detail, Hákonarson naturalistically presents the rigors of farm work, the plainness of his solitary protagonists’ lives and their affection for their cows.
  13. Rebel Ridge
    Ultimately muscular and effective if predictable, Saulnier’s latest reaffirms his bona fides as a deliverer of sturdy, tightly-controlled thrills.
  14. Cartel Land
    There are no solutions posed; Cartel Land vividly conveys the sense that this cycle of violence can’t be stopped as long as anyone who tries to take charge (including, the film suggests, government forces in Mexico) is susceptible to corruption.
  15. Heat
    Stunningly made and incisively acted by a large and terrific cast, Michael Mann's ambitious study of the relativity of good and evil stands apart from other films of its type by virtue of its extraordinarily rich characterizations and its thoughtful, deeply melancholy take on modern life.
  16. Soul Power
    Joyously funky documentary.
  17. We Grown Now
    Even in its quietest moments, “We Grown Now” feels alive through the kids’ joint triumphant spirit and Baig’s discernible love and care for them.
  18. An Honest Liar
    An Honest Liar is a highly entertaining portrait of James “the Amazing” Randi.
  19. Shotgun Stories
    Thesping is pitch-perfect across the board.
  20. The Meaning of Hitler
    We go into The Meaning of Hitler craving that millimeter of insight, of intrigue and revelation. And the film provides it. It ruminates on Hitler and the Third Reich in ways that churn up your platitudes.
  21. The Price of Everything
    The Price of Everything exalts in the spirt of art over commerce, yet what’s thrilling about the film — and what echoes in your mind after it’s over — is that it captures all the ways those two forces can’t be separated.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What's Love Got to Do with It
    This immensely enjoyable biography of songstress Tina Turner [from her and Kurt Loder's book I, Tina] is a passionate personal and professional drama that hits both the high and low notes of an extraordinary career.
  23. Calibre
    If nothing here is exactly new, it’s the sheer, breathless precision and momentum of Calibre’s assembly that keeps it startling.
  24. The Mother of All Lies
    The Mother of All Lies is an astonishing work whose maturity comes from El Moudir’s wide-eyed approach to her family history, where memory and history are quite literally reduced to playthings in order to process the unspeakable events they conjure up.
  25. Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
    Force of personality and terrific vintage performance clips make a keeper of Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer.
  26. Housebound
    Separating Housebound from most films of its type is super-smart plotting and confident tonal control, as Johnstone’s screenplay throws one terrific curve ball after another and never allows its goofy humor to compromise its genuinely scary components.
  27. Hail Satan?
    The Satanic Temple’s combination of shock tactics and anti-discrimination lawsuits is check-and-mate against America creeping towards a Christian theocracy.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After the Thin Man
    It has the same stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy; the same style of breezy direction by W.S. Van Dyke; almost as many sparkling lines of dialog and amusing situations; but it hasn't, and probably couldn't have, the same freshness and originality of its predecessor.
  29. The Student
    The Student is a film that never stops to think; it thinks (and speaks, and shouts) while prodigiously on the move.
  30. Amrum
    There are no grand moments, enormous revelations or manipulatively overpowering scores in his delicately constructed and produced film — it is as narratively straightforward as movies come.
  31. The Whistlers
    As a low-key romp with a twisty, globetrotting plot The Whistlers is an enjoyable affair with just enough of a slant to feel a little offbeat. But Porumboiu aficionados chasing the same weird high he has delivered time and again before — wherein a single moment can transform a ridiculous scheme into a fairy tale, or a silly notion into a grand philosophical quest — are just going to have to whistle for it.
  32. The Dog
    A spunky yet surprisingly sad portrait of a sexually liberated man held captive by his past, forever chasing and trying to rewrite his own legend.
  33. Lovely Rita (2001)
    A deliciously observed, ironic take on middle-class Austrian life through an introverted teen's eyes, "Lovely Rita" reps a strong step up to the feature plate by 28-year-old Jessica Hausner after a couple of well-remarked shorts.
  34. Zola
    Sure, it’s fun to see a movie skewer the vapid soullessness of social media and the unregulated economy of male desire, but Zola ultimately rings hollow. The actors are fearless, and yet, how much do we know about these characters in the end? The answer: something of their values, but almost nothing of their lives.
  35. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
    The conflict at the core of the WikiLeaks saga is dramatically lacking.
  36. Talk to Me
    A somewhat mixed bag, as the script doesn’t fully ballast the serious tenor, this is nonetheless a confidently crafted effort with enough intriguing elements to keep viewers involved, if not particularly scared.
  37. Cinévardaphoto
    Varda renders the political personal and the personal universal.
  38. Ghostbox Cowboy
    This original if sometimes befuddling vision blurs the line between fiction and documentary elements, conventional storytelling and improvisational collage, all to oft-bracing effect.
  39. Midnight Special
    Nichols’ impressively restrained yet limitlessly imaginative fourth feature takes its energy from an ensemble of characters who hold fast to their convictions, even though their beliefs remain shrouded in mystery for much of the journey.
  40. Occupied City
    In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it.
  41. The Unforeseen
    Observing locally and thinking globally, Laura Dunn's astonishing debut doc feature The Unforeseen is the kind of transformative viewing experience that has made the current period a golden age for nonfiction film.
  42. Spa Night
    Spa Night serves as an homage to the sacrifices first-generation immigrants made in order that their children could achieve their full potential in the States, expanding the concept of “pride” far beyond its protagonist’s gay identity.
  43. Undertow
    Neither sexually explicit nor showily lyrical, Undertow nonetheless has a sensuous, romantic feel that balances same-sex love with an equally empathetic view toward the adoring, then bewildered, then enraged wife.
  44. Zhantai
    Thoughtful, melancholy drama.
  45. Japan
    Its powerfully visual storytelling delivers great rewards as the meditative drama moves into increasingly complex, at times confrontational territory.
  46. Inni
    Whereas 2007's well-traveled "Heima" reveled in scenic color imagery of the artists' homeland, this minimalist item strips the band down to its output, fashioning black-and-white performance footage into a uniquely spellbinding experience.
  47. Tickled
    An alarming cautionary tale about how easy it is in the Internet age to ruin people’s lives while hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, the pic boasts a humorously titillating entry hook that soon gives way to engrossing conspiracy-thriller-like content.
  48. Rojo
    Rojo is a witheringly provocative examination of temporary moral eclipse becoming permanent moral apocalypse.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brothers
    The second collaboration between helmer Susanne Bier and scriptwriter Anders Thomas Jensen once again shows what skilled artists can do with a story that might have ended up filled with cliches.
  50. The Last Station
    Solid middlebrow biographical fare in which meaty roles are acted to the hilt by a cast more than ready for the feast.
  51. Mucho Mucho Amor
    The doc gives Mercado’s story back to Mercado. Better, it shows that Mercado is still the same spiritualistic, highfalutin’ fashion-plate as a retiree eating breakfast at home as he was on TV. The film’s biggest revelation is that Mercado’s mystical, magnificent, big-hearted shtick was no fraud — he was always the real deal.
  52. The Guest
    The Guest is blood-soaked action trash of a high grade.
  53. 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.
  54. Red Penguins
    Red Penguins tells its story of outrageous, larger-than-life players in brisk, humorous fashion. Its assembly is always lively, aimed at engaging viewers with or without any interest in hockey.
  55. The Hand of God
    The Hand of God has some good scenes, but it’s the kind of portrait-of-an-artist drama where you watch the insults, the clashes, the assaultive attitude of it all and you think: Is this what it was actually like for the young Sorrentino growing up in Naples? Or does he simply have an aversion to scenes that don’t hit you over the head
  56. Listen Up Philip
    It’s a familiar tale, but one told by Perry with immense filmmaking verve and novelistic flourish, and acted by an exceptional ensemble cast.
  57. The Ritchie Boys
    Christian Bauer's engaging The Ritchie Boys captures the excitement, ironies and "good war" feel of World War II.
  58. Regular Lovers
    Regular Lovers evokes the '60s pretty well just through dialogue and rhythm -- better, in fact, than Bernardo Bertolucci's more reverently detailed "The Dreamers." However, the film's slow tempo induces the feeling one is living through the whole of 1968 in one sitting.
  59. Los Reyes
    You don’t have to be a “dog person” to find these two irresistible, although those with a soft spot for animals may be surprised by how deeply attached they get over the course of the film.
  60. The Vourdalak
    Everything about the film manages to be forward-thinking and old-school at the same time, giving the genre a bite in the neck it might not have wanted but certainly needed.
  61. The Wild Goose Lake
    It may refer inescapably to genre classics from elsewhere, but The Wild Goose Lake is like an organic feature of the Chinese cinematic landscape, as though it pooled onto the screen in all its oily, murky glory, having welled up from deep inside the ground. Suddenly, China feels like the noirest place on Earth.
  62. The Wonders
    An appealing yet oddly insubstantial work, like an early impressionist sketch in need of a little more focus, and perhaps a more suitable frame.
  63. Wonder Woman
    Wonder Woman is the first major studio superhero film directed by a woman, and it shows in a number of subtle, yet important ways.
  64. Murina
    Murina is rife with symbolism, but it’s a mark of Kusijanović’s command — an astonishing quality for a first-time feature director — that the recurring motifs and metaphors are worn so lightly and feel so organic to the film’s microcosmic universe.
  65. Something in the Dirt
    The bargain Benson and Moorhead make with audiences goes something like this: If we buy in, then we can participate in what often feels more like an elevated form of play than some attempt to compete with slick, studio product.
  66. Tito and the Birds
    Employing a darkly iridescent fusion of oil paint and digital embellishment, it renders a growing dystopia in shifting, seasick colors, distorted into about as much exquisite, Expressionist-inspired nightmare fuel as its family-film remit will allow.
  67. Temblores
    This strong second feature from Guatemalan talent Jayro Bustamante doesn’t ask new questions, but its sensuous, reverberating atmospherics find fresh, angry ways to answer them.
  68. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    [Corbijn's] creation of this delightful doc as an acolyte, if hardly copycat, will be a boon for an audience that grew up pondering the mysteries of the twisted monolith on Zeppelin’s “Presence” cover; LP porn, if we can call it that, could come to no finer culmination.
  69. The Iron Ministry
    While cerebral in intent and planning, the pic doesn’t feel overly straitjacketed by theory and offers unexpected moments of amusement.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Witness for the Prosecution
    A courtroom meller played engagingly and building evenly to a surprising and arousing, albeit tricked-up, climax, Witness for the Prosecution has been transferred to the screen (from the Agatha Christie click play) with competence.
  71. (500) Days of Summer
    Boy gets girl and boy loses girl in convoluted, sometimes cloying but ultimately winning fashion in 500 Days of Summer.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    With Alfred Hitchcock pulling the suspense strings, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a good thriller.
  73. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    Brings a fresh perspective to age-old human dilemmas.
  74. Spencer
    Spencer is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance.
  75. The Image Book
    Our world, in The Image Book, has finally caught up to Jean-Luc Godard’s doom-laden dream of it. He seems to be saying that we all have a choice: to change it, or to sit back in our TV armchairs and watch.
  76. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Director Alan Rudolph achieves fresh as well as humorous insights into family life and strategies for keeping a damaged relationship from expiring. But a tiresome final act proves trying.
  77. The Revenant
    In aiming to steer his dark, fatalistic vision toward something genuinely contemplative and cathartic, Inarritu has managed to appropriate the beauty of Malick’s filmmaking but none of its sublimity — another word for which might be humility. There is plenty of amazement here, to be sure, but all too little in the way of grace.
  78. Natasha
    A pair of rich central performances, an authentic eye for its second-generation immigrant milieu and a novelist’s comfort with ambiguity allow Natasha to modestly transcend its overpopulated genre.
  79. The Kingmaker
    Marcos’ print-the-legend philosophy has particular resonance in a post-truth world, although such sinister undertones sneak up on audiences in a movie that begins, innocently enough, as the latest of Greenfield’s astonishing portraits of wealth run amok.
  80. Incredible But True
    Incredible but True is a fun little trinket that unmistakably comes from Dupieux’s far-out perspective, but if you find yourself chiming more than usual with its quixotic quandaries, who’s to say whether that’s because Dupieux has mellowed, or because the past couple of years have driven us all so nuts that now we’re meeting him halfway.
  81. Cassandro
    In Williams’ hands, the laughs never come at Saúl’s expense, ridiculous as this arena might seem to audiences. Luchadores are entertainers, first and foremost, and “Cassandro” celebrates that while taking Armendáriz’s achievements seriously.
  82. Night Across the Street
    The valedictory sentiments at the heart of this mysterious experiment are conveyed with characteristically wry wit and great generosity of spirit.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    House Party
    House Party captures contemporary black teen culture in a way that’s fresh, commercial and very catchy.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Music Man
    Allowing something of slowness at the very start and the necessities of establishing the musical way of telling a story, plus the atmosphere of Iowa in 1912, that's about the only criticism of an otherwise building, punching, handsomely dressed and ultimately endearing super-musical.
  85. No Sudden Move
    No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.
  86. Safe
    The audaciousness that marked Todd Haynes’ earlier work has been supplanted by self-important preachiness in Safe.
  87. Stronger
    Green looks for small but meaningful ways to complicate and deepen the well-trod story he’s telling, and by the end, those complications help the film earn its uplift.
  88. Smoke Signals
    Breezy, often self-mocking tone proves fresh and invigorating.
  89. The Miners' Hymns
    Morrison sometimes slows down imagery to a hypnotic, frame-by-frame trance-like state; one can imagine townsfolk scrutinizing the faces of long-dead relatives magically raised.
  90. Nostalgia
    Even in its more generic stretches, Martone’s latest feels both inviting and convincingly inhabited, a siren song to the past that confronts us with a violent, unromantic present, paved under with the same old, blood-washed cobblestones.
  91. Horses of God
    Ultimately, the training and suicide mission are less interesting to Ayouch than the initial forming of character, and the fundamentalist cell members are only stock figures; what’s important is the group’s sense of disenfranchisement and the lure of inner peace.
  92. September 5
    In this case, revisiting it half a century later, knowing what happened doesn’t preclude us from wanting to get a better understanding of the specifics. But this movie’s insights are limited to the newsroom.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
    Crass, broad, irreverent, wacky fun - and absolutely hilarious from beginning to end.
  94. At Eternity's Gate
    Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy.
  95. The Dance of Reality
    At more than two hours, The Dance of Reality unquestionably has its longueurs, but on balance it is alive with enough images and ideas for several movies — as if Jodorowsky were afraid he might have to wait 20 more years before making another.
  96. In the Heat of the Night
    An excellent Sidney Poitier performance, and an outstanding one by Rod Steiger, overcome some noteworthy flaws to make In The Heat of the Night an absorbing contemporary murder drama, set in the deep, red-necked South.
  97. Pavements
    It’s impossible not to be won over by the director’s efforts, which come to include at least four separate modes of production.
  98. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    Aussie genre pics of the 1970s and '80s get a rip-roaring salute in Not Quite Hollywood, complete with endorsement by Quentin Tarantino as chief onscreen fanboy.
  99. Bernstein's Wall
    What the documentary captures, profoundly, is that Leonard Bernstein was a fierce hedonist who worked hard to live the life he wanted.
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