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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    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Godfather: Part II
    Al Pacino again is outstanding as Michael Corleone, successor to crime family leadership.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hustler
    Unfoldment of the screenplay, based on novel by Walter S. Tevis, is far overlength, and despite the excellence of Newman’s portrayal of the boozing pool hustler the sordid aspects of overall picture are strictly downbeat.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red Beard
    It's hokum lifted to the highest denominator, the banal made into near art by great skill and craftsmanship by the Japanese master.
  4. Procession
    Procession is, in its own elegant and uneasy way, an inspiring film, idealistically invested in cinema itself as a medium for confession, confrontation and self-expression, not least when Greene hands over the camera to other filmmakers in need of its power.
  5. Bloody Sunday
    A stunning work, revisiting controversial events with journalistic objectivity and a meticulous eye for detail.
  6. My Voyage to Italy
    Scorsese's heartfelt love letter to Italian movies up to 1961.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
    A curious amalgam of the visually striking, the dramatically feeble and the offensively sadistic.
  8. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    It’s a simple, even predictable story, yet textured so exquisitely and acted so forcefully as to feel almost revelatory.
  9. American Splendor
    Sad, tender, wise and beautiful film... It's a profound tribute to lives lived on the fringes of society -- to the introspective loners who are the most observant chroniclers of our times.
  10. Phantom Thread
    Phantom Thread sweeps you up and carries you along, much more, to my mind, than “The Master” did. Yet it’s a thesis movie: the story of a bullying narcissist who lacks the ability to have a relationship, and the outrageous way he’s schooled into becoming a human being. It’s the story of a control freak made by a control freak.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    Though not as funny as Fete, due to a lesser story peg, this one generates a load of yocks, with fine observation of types at a vacation resort.
  12. Gosford Park
    Taking advantage of a splendid cast, a sharply focused script and the fresh English setting, "Gosford Park" emerges as one of the most satisfying of Robert Altman's numerous ensemble pictures.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Birds
    The premise is fascinating. The idea of billions of bird-brains refusing to eat crow any longer and adopting the hunt-and-peck system, with homo sapiens as their ornithological target, is fraught with potential. Cinematically, Hitchcock & Co have done a masterful job of meeting this formidable challenge. But dramatically, The Birds is little more than a shocker-for shock’s-sake.
  14. Silent Friend
    Strange, enrapturing, simultaneously vast and minute, Enyedi’s latest spends a lot of time considering how we perceive our surrounding flora — but just as much on how it perceives us, which is where it starts to get a bit special, and even a bit sexy.
  15. La Commune (Paris, 1871)
    Taped in stark black-and-white and clocking in 15 minutes shy of six hours, invigorating pic is big, passionate and brimming with compelling human details and broad sociopolitical idealism.
  16. Wojnarowicz
    “Wojnarowicz” is impressive as a tapestry woven near-whole from preexisting materials, amplifying its subject’s own voice in every creative form it took. Editor Dave Stanke merits kudos alongside McKim for their evocative, first-rate assembly.
  17. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Had James Thurber worked in animation, the waggish result might look and sound a bit like It’s Such a Beautiful Day, indie cartoonist Don Hertzfeldt’s alternately poignant and absurdist triptych.
  18. Paths of the Soul
    Filmed in simple documentary fashion and performed with immaculate conviction by a non-professional cast, the pic, helmed by Zhang Yang (“Shower,” “Getting Home”) is a stirring study in faith and spirituality that will inspire many viewers to think about big and small questions of life.
  19. The Souvenir: Part II
    Though fully distinct in its thematic and aesthetic fixations, The Souvenir Part II abuts its predecessor to form one of the medium’s most intimate, expressive portraits of the artist as a young woman — a mirror tilted just enough away from the filmmaker that the audience, too, can catch itself in the glass.
  20. This Is Not a Film
    Standing at his balcony, filming the revelry with his iPhone, he seems to be saying that directing is more defiant an act than lighting a firecracker or two. Truth be told, Panahi's poignant "Film" is infinitely more explosive.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    To Have and Have Not
    Warners give the pic its usually nifty productional accoutrements, and that includes casting, musical scoring and Howard Hawks’ direction but the basic story is too unsteady.
  22. Finding Nemo
    Very clever and imaginative indeed, and its pictures are so gorgeous that they alone could warrant a second viewing.
  23. Sound of Falling
    No finer point of craft, performance or poetic nuance has been rushed or neglected in a film that ultimately sounds a warning against the dimming or blunting or de-specification of memory — not just for oneself, but for communities or lineages with more shared stories than they might think, but an inclination to clam up and carry on.
  24. Topsy-Turvy
    This beautifully crafted and lively romp around the 1880s stage world should enjoy its longest life as a vid classic.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Samurai Rebellion
    This Toho-Mifune production represents all the best in the Japanese period film.
  26. Sugarcane
    Sugarcane” is the product of humane and insightful filmmakers who are determined to never let anyone forget, and put their moral outrage to exemplary good use. Still, you’re left with the forlorn suspicion that their best efforts to find justice for the living and the dead, however commendable, are part of a campaign that might be endless.
  27. Small Axe: Mangrove
    This may be “television” (in the sense that Amazon will release the films via streaming), but McQueen approaches it with all the seriousness of cinema.
  28. Being John Malkovich
    Devilishly inventive and so far out there it's almost off the scale.
  29. The Incredibles
    As deliriously smart escapist fare, The Incredibles is practically nonpareil.
  30. Green Border
    While you’re still in the vice-like grip of its multilevel narrative it may not feel like it, but a film like Agnieszka Holland’s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism.
  31. A Prophet
    Though less pleasurably offbeat than the helmer’s well-received “Read My Lips” and “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” this is solid, sinewy pulp fiction.
  32. Almost Famous
    More gentle and modestly insightful than it is exhilarating or revelatory.
  33. Oppenheimer
    Even when "Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paths of Glory
    While the subject is well handled and enacted in a series of outstanding characterizations, it seems dated and makes for grim screen fare.
  35. Cold War
    Cold War may return to “Ida’s” meticulous monochrome aesthetic of “Ida,” but it’s a companion piece with its own tonal and structural energy: less emotionally immediate, perhaps, but immersively informed by the broken jazz rhythms beloved of its protagonist.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Scarface
    Scarface contains more cruelty than any of its gangster picture predecessors, but there's a squarer for every killing. The blows are always softened by judicial preachments and sad endings for the sinners.
  37. The Truman Show
    A gemlike picture crafted with rare and immaculate precision.
  38. Once
    Winningly unpretentious tale uses a wispy romantic narrative as a vehicle for attractive original tunes.
  39. Sorry, Baby
    If Sorry, Baby works, it’s because Victor strikes such a tricky tone: Her debut is warm and compassionate, advancing a conversation for which we’re still trying to find the words.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hannah and Her Sisters
    He (Allen) makes nary a misstep from beginning to end in charting the amorous affiliations of three sisters and their men over a two-year period.
  41. Big Men
    Rachel Boynton’s extraordinary Big Men should come tagged with a warning: The side effects of global capitalism may include dizziness, nausea and seething outrage.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Circus
    In clinging to a tale of logical sequence, without the expected interpolations or detached incidents, Chaplin's Circus for speed, gags and laughs has not been equalled on the sheet. But it's very broad, for Chaplin makes no attempt at subtlety in this one.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Going My Way
    Bing Crosby gets a tailor-made role in Going My Way, and with major assistance from Barry Fitzgerald and Rise Stevens, clicks solidly to provide topnotch entertainment for wide audience appeal.
  44. The Tale
    Both a natural extension of Fox’s career to date and a complete about-face, The Tale marks her first narrative feature, but only because traditional documentary wouldn’t do justice to this messy, meandering investigation into her traumatic first sexual experience, for the incidents it depicts are true, “at least as far I know.”
  45. Paterson
    Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Blue Angel
    A standout picture.
  47. The Fits
    Even at its conclusion, Holmer’s film refuses to provide easy answers regarding its meaning, instead using poised formal techniques to impart that which is not spoken — and, in the process, portends impressive things to come from its confident, capable director.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Raging Bull
    But the boxing sequences are possibly the best ever filmed, and the film captures the intensity of a boxer's life with considerable force.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    Director Georges Franju has given this some suspense and not spared any shock details. But the stilted acting, asides to explain characters and motivations, and a repetition of effects lose the initial impact.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Gold Rush (1925)
    It is the greatest and most elaborate comedy ever filmed, and will stand for years as the biggest hit in its field.
  51. United 93
    The result is a tense, documentary-style drama that methodically builds a sense of dread despite the preordained outcome.
  52. Capturing the Friedmans
    There's a kind of rawness on the screen that most movies never approach.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lavender Hill Mob
    With The Lavender Hill Mob, Ealing clicks with another comedy winner.
  54. American Hustle
    It’s a rich, glorious mess, and its underlying craftsmanship is apparent in the characters’ beautifully delineated relationships, each with its own jangly rhythm and distinct feel.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Passenger (re-release)
    Nicholson plays the character with personal flair, as penetrating as Antonioni's handling of the film. (Review of Original Release)
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    A magnificent film. George Lucas set out to make the biggest possible adventure fantasy out of his memories of serials and older action epics, and he succeeded brilliantly.
  57. Persepolis
    This autobiographical tour de force is completely accessible and art of a very high order.
  58. The Age of Innocence
    Scorsese has met most of the challenges inherent in tackling such a formidable period piece, but the material remains cloaked by the very propriety, stiff manners and emotional starchiness the picture delineates in such copious detail.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Deer Hunter
    Among the considerable achievements of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter is the fact that the film remains intense, powerful and fascinating for more than three hours.
  60. Paris Calligrammes
    Ottinger takes us through this formative time of her life in a way that deftly balances past and present to paint a picture of a threshold era of both positives and negatives.
  61. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    If films about coping with memory loss and/or reverse-order storytelling now constitute a mini-genre, then Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is arguably the best of the lot.
  62. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
    Painstakingly conceived and teeming with raw, unbridled energy, Eyimofe offers a sumptuous, keen-eyed look at modern Lagosian life.
  63. The Best of Youth
    At nearly six hours, pic's extreme length lets Giordana and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli build up a novelistic rhythm, pulling the audience so deeply and forcefully into their story that it becomes like a enveloping dream; when it's over, parting with the characters is truly sweet and sorrowful.
  64. The Overnighters
    Lensed with a complete absence of frills that perfectly suits its honest, unvarnished tone, The Overnighters presents an indelible snapshot of a despairing moment in American history, as men abandon homes, families and dreams to stake their claim in an ever-shrinking land of opportunity.
  65. Whiplash
    Chazelle proves an exceptional builder of scenes, crafting loaded, need-to-succeed moments that grab our attention and hold it tight.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fat City
    Huston catches the feel of the community with a lean, no-nonsense economy, a hard-boiled but humanly alert feeling which raises the tale from a purely naturalistic lowlife depiction of the characters to make a statement on the life style of the drifters and those who accept a moderate place in the smalltown hierarchy.
  67. The Lives of Others
    Superbly cast drama… that looks to be a solid upscale attraction wherever the special chemistry of good writing and performances is appreciated.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    An excellent combination of in-depth contemporary story-telling and personality casting.
  69. House of Flying Daggers
    The tangled tale of love and disguise is awesome in its action sequences but doesn't touch the heart to the same degree.
  70. 63 Up
    If this is the final chapter, as Apted suggests it could be, it’s a worthy cap to one of the boldest experiments in world cinema.
  71. Minding the Gap
    It exists because it’s the movie Liu was born to make, the one he had to get off his chest before he could move on in his filmmaking career.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    Balkan probably gives her best performance to date to create a woman tormented by instability, sexual drive and psycho demons -- disjointedly portrayed in the script.
  73. Scheme Birds
    Superb ... An alternately lyrical and gut-punching coming-of-age study.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Treasure Island
    Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, has been handsomely mounted by Walt Disney. Settings are sumptuous and a British cast headed by American moppet Bobby Driscoll faithfully recaptures the bloodthirsty 18th-century era when pirates vied for the supremacy of the seas.
  75. La Mami
    Amid its textured, occasionally conflict-scarred portrait of female community, La Mami is rife with sharp, tacit socioeconomic criticism of an unequal, patriarchal society in which making joyless business out of pleasure is the best hope many women have.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love and Death
    Love and Death is another mile-a-minute visual-verbal whirl by the two comedy talents, this time through Czarist Russia in the days of the Napoleonic Wars.
    • Variety
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Searching for Bobby Fischer
    Unfortunately, as scripter, debuting director Steven Zaillian (who wrote Awakenings) also feels compelled to throw in Karate Kid-type flourishes, a rather stale genre that doesn’t lend itself all that well to chess. The narrative is ruthlessly edited, jumping around in a manner that skips needed exposition and abandons characters.
  78. Two Days, One Night
    The Dardennes once again find a richness of human experience that dwarfs most movies made on an epic canvas.
  79. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Stylistically, this feels like a young man’s movie. It’s engrossing from the get-go, the palpable tension methodically echoed by Robbie Robertson’s steady-heartbeat score. But it keeps going and going until everyone we care about is dead, dying or behind bars, with nearly an hour still in store.
  80. National Gallery
    The effect of National Gallery is to reinforce the notion that paintings are objects to know and understand.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Assault on Precinct 13
    Novelty of a gang swearing a blood oath to destroy a precinct station and all inside is sufficiently compelling for the gory-minded to assure acceptance. John Carpenter’s direction of his screenplay, after a pokey opening half, is responsible for realistic movement.
  82. Man on Wire
    One of the most wildly entertaining docs of recent years.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Y Tu Mamá También
    The film's biggest limitation is its oversexed, underdeveloped male duo. Playing like a south-of-the-border version of Beavis and Butt-head, the teenagers have but one thought in their heads.
  84. For Sama
    Simple in concept and shattering in execution, blending hard-headed reportage with unguarded personal testimony, it’s you-are-there cinema of the most literal order.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Force of Evil
    Force of Evil fails to develop the excitement hinted at in the title. Makers apparently couldn't decide on the best way to present an expose of the numbers racket, winding up with neither fish nor fowl as far as hard-hitting racketeer meller is concerned. A poetic, almost allegorical, interpretation keeps intruding on the tougher elements of the plot. This factor adds no distinction and only makes the going tougher.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Heat
    The tight-lipped scowl, the hunched shoulders that rear themselves for the kill, the gargoyle speech, the belching gunfire of a trigger-happy paranoiac - one with a mother complex, no less - these are the standard and still-popular ingredients that constitute the James Cagney of White Heat.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    the picture is really director Akira Kurosawa’s, who takes what could have been a terribly unwieldy subject and makes it believable and highly entertaining. Ichio Yamazaki’s camerawork is first-rate.
  88. Elle
    Knowingly incendiary but remarkably cool-headed, and built around yet another of Isabelle Huppert’s staggering psychological dissections, Paul Verhoeven’s long-awaited return to notional genre filmmaking pulls off a breathtaking bait-and-switch: Audiences arriving for a lurid slab of arthouse exploitation will be taken off-guard by the complex, compassionate, often corrosively funny examination of unconventional desires that awaits them.
  89. Still Walking
    Its modest surface belies the depths of a lovely seriocomedy that concisely lays bare all kinds of uncomfortable dynamics in seemingly casual, low-key fashion.
  90. Gangs of Wasseypur
    The love child of Bollywood and Hollywood, Gangs of Wasseypur is a brilliant collage of genres, by turns pulverizing and poetic in its depiction of violence.
  91. Icarus: The Aftermath
    Incredible and enraging in equal doses, the project plays like a tense spy thriller as Rodchenkov is assigned a security team and shuffled from one safe house to another, while enemies of the state — Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny — are poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Thelma & Louise
    Even those who don't rally to pic's fed-up feminist outcry will take to its comedy, momentum and dazzling visuals.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After Hours
    The cinema of paranoia and persecution reaches an apogee in After Hours, a nightmarish black comedy from Martin Scorsese. Anxiety-ridden picture would have been pretty funny if it didn't play like a confirmation of everyone's worst fears about contemporary urban life.
  94. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    Lee takes time to explain the stories behind the stories, to unearth revealing details under-reported in other accounts, and to identify individuals among the faceless masses of unfortunates.
  95. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
    Uproariously funny mockumentary.
  96. Minari
    Chung transforms the specificity of his upbringing into something warm, tender and universal.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Barry Lyndon
    Ryan O'Neal's excellent performance captures the shallow opportunism endemic to the title character who is brought down as much by his own flaws as by the mores of the ordered social structure of 18th-century England. Casting, concept and execution are all superb.
  98. The Farewell
    What makes The Farewell so effective is that in delving into such a specific case, the film invites audiences to reflect on the passing of relatives close to them.
  99. The Small Town (Kasaba)
    A remarkable first feature from director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The Town is a strikingly original, vibrantly sensitive look at an extended family living in a remote Turkish village.
  100. Marty Supreme
    One of the year’s few masterpieces.
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