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. Breathe In
    While the plot — too low-key to be called a thriller — points toward obvious extramarital cliches, delicate changes in the overall mood reveal deeper truths.
  2. The Crash Reel
    By turns pulse-quickening and contemplative, The Crash Reel is a thoroughly winning docu portrait of former pro snowboarder Kevin Pearce.
  3. Terms and Conditions May Apply
    Deftly balancing twin goals of informing and entertaining, the pic matter-of-factly details the various ways that marketers, multinational corporations, police departments and government-run intelligence-gathering organizations obtain and exploit info.
  4. Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp
    “Portrait” abounds in the sort of ironies and contrasts that can make a biodoc fascinating even to auds totally unfamiliar with its subject.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pusher
    The subject has been done before, but Refn avoids the cliches, both in the story itself and its telling.
  6. Drug War
    A nail-biter that’s actually quite light on action but so well-scripted and shot, it’s nonetheless edge-of-your-seat material.
  7. Godzilla
    Edwards seems to have miscalculated our investment in his cast...simultaneously underestimating how satisfying some good old-fashioned monster-on-MUTO action can be.
  8. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    The director’s double vision establishes a level of equality on film that in some ways defies the disparity in power between the two opposing forces.
  9. The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
    Director Jesse James Miller’s bio of ‘80s-era World Boxing Council lightweight champ Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini connects on emotional levels in the telling of an up-from-nothing brawler whose colorful career climaxed in tragedy.
  10. Paradise: Faith
    The constant juxtaposition of scenes showing the dark and light aspects of the characters endows the pic with a juicy moral complexity that will stimulate post-screening debates.
  11. C.O.G.
    The source material may be David Sedaris (this marks the first time the essayist has allowed one of his pieces to be adapted), but the tone couldn’t be more Kyle Patrick Alvarez, who once again steers auds to some gloriously uncomfortable places.
  12. Five Dances
    The sensual movement of bodies through space creates a visual language whose infinite variations seduce and fascinate over the course of the film’s numerous rehearsals.
  13. 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.”
  14. Night Moves
    Kelly Reichardt blends her lucid observational approach with a topical-thriller format to engrossing effect in Night Moves.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Idolmaker
    Though it's marred by an overly melodramatic and dubious finale, The Idolmaker is an unusally compelling film about the music business in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It shows how teen idols were created, promoted, and discarded by entrepreneurs cynically manipulating the adolescent audience. Ray Sharkey is superb in the title role.
  16. Il Futuro
    Even though mood trumps character psychology, the entire cast provides mesmerizing, evocative performances.
  17. Bad Words
    This exuberantly foul-mouthed and mean-spirited comedy goes somewhat soft in the final stretch but remains an often uproarious model of sharp scripting and spirited acting.
  18. Begin Again
    A film that lays emotions on the line and then drives them home with music.
  19. Fading Gigolo
    John Turturro brings sensitivity and intelligence to a subject that could have gone terribly awry in Fading Gigolo.
  20. Moebius
    A gloriously off-the-charts study in perversity.
  21. Abuse of Weakness
    Of all living actresses, only Huppert could capture nuances that alternately elicit sympathy and fierce sexual attraction to a recent stroke victim.
  22. Locke
    This ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise.
  23. The Unknown Known
    Ranging over familiar material, but made vivid by Morris’ fecund associations and invigorating stylistic flourishes.
  24. Shepard & Dark
    The ups and downs of a decades-long friendship are charted with warmth and sensitivity in Shepard and Dark.
  25. Winter Nomads
    Von Stuerler’s debut showcases nature, but its real theme is its subjects’ engagement with their work.
  26. Le Week-End
    Bittersweet, charming yet often very thorny.
  27. The Square
    The Square is journalism, but Noujaim’s agenda is greater than mere reportage.
  28. Sunlight Jr.
    Incandescent performances by Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon and an unerring grasp of strip-mall-dominated Florida distinguish Sunlight Jr.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Camp 14: Total Control Zone
    There are some subjects so horrific, so far beyond our understanding, that the mind goes numb. Such is the case with Marc Wiese’s chilling docu Camp 14: Total Control Zone.
  30. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
    The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet is the perfect 3D vehicle and Jeunet takes full advantage, offering a feast of amusing visual flourishes suited to the book’s playfulness.
  31. The Missing Picture
    The film is a brave act of witness complicated by the documaker’s decision to re-create his experiences using clay figurines, a tricky aesthetic device that raises fascinating and problematic questions of representation.
  32. Capital
    Costa-Gavras develops such a propulsively suspenseful pace — with no small assist from Armand Amar’s mood-enhancing Euro-tech score — that his drama comes across as the cinematic equivalent of an engrossing page-turner you might purchase off the rack at an airport newsstand.
  33. For Those in Peril
    Wright’s strongest achievement here is an evocative depiction of place, where young teens flee from adult supervision and danger lies in wait. And while the story may feel claustrophobic, the visuals are free-flowing.
  34. Camille Claudel 1915
    A measured, moving account of a brief period in the later life of the troubled sculptress, could hardly be the work of anyone else, with its sparseness of technique and persistent spiritual curiosity.
  35. The Taiwan Oyster
    Disguised as a drunken cartwheel through expat paradise, Mark Jarrett’s striking feature juggles questions of mortality along its rowdy cross-country path.
  36. Hours
    An ingeniously simple setup is cunningly exploited for maximum suspense in Hours, a slow-building, consistently engrossing drama.
  37. Chinese Puzzle
    Bringing an appreciative outsider’s perspective to the sights, sounds and polyglot energy of New York, Klapisch and his collaborators ensure that the two hours whiz by decoratively and entertainingly.
  38. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    Gondry and his frisky hieroglyphs successfully convey Chomsky’s concept of language as the fleeting “meanings we impose on fragmentary experience.”
  39. Cousin Jules
    Yet even as the timelessness of the human activity on display seduces with its serenity, it evokes in modern viewers a definite impatience with the impracticality of traditional rites and rhythms, perhaps only enjoyable in 90-minute doses.
  40. The Punk Singer
    Dynamic performance footage and input from a variety of collaborators, colleagues and admirers, as well as Hanna herself, make the tightly edited Punk Singer a vivid watch even for those with no interest in or experience with the music itself.
  41. Lenny Cooke
    A penetrating and ultimately heartbreaking inventory of hard lessons learned on and off the court.
  42. Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case
    With the aid of Johnsen’s doc to overcome the obstacles China has put in his path, Ai’s voice carries louder than ever before.
  43. St. Vincent
    With St. Vincent, the chief pleasure is comedy, which typically arises from waiting to discover what Bill Murray might do next.
  44. Blackhat
    The film is a snarl of contradictions, starting with the discrepancy between Mann’s obsessive demand for realism and the consistently implausible screenplay.
  45. Ernest & Célestine
    A charming animated feature.
  46. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Deftly sidestepping both melodrama and family-values messaging, Poppe imbues the film with enormous emotional resonance, brilliantly grounded by his leading lady.
  47. The Sacrament
    It’s a film that purists might insist isn’t horror in the strictest sense, though this slow-burning investigation of unseemly goings-on at a rural Christian commune is frightening in any genre language.
  48. The Great Passage
    Director Yuya Ishii takes a considerable step forward in terms of budget and ambition with this simple, sometimes sentimental yet wise and full-bodied comedy-drama, which movingly testifies to the ways in which dedication, focus and an extreme attention to detail can achieve something of lasting value.
  49. All the Light in the Sky
    [Swanberg's] latest work, All the Light in the Sky, displays a striking new willingness to meet his audience halfway, buttressing his signature style with clever pacing, solid technique and a deeply soulful lead performance from co-scripter Jane Adams.
  50. Blue Ruin
    A lean and suspenseful genre piece that follows a bloody trail of vengeance to its cruel, absurd and logical conclusion.
  51. The Rocket
    Mordaunt previously directed a docu in Laos that featured kids who sold unexploded bombs for scrap metal, and that earlier experience invests this feature’s characters and milieu with an absolute integrity.
  52. Jodorowsky's Dune
    Pavich does an admirable job tracking down surviving parties (except for the suspicious-sounding cast), opting for a humorous rather than indignant tone to the interviews.
  53. Kill the Messenger
    The film taps into far deeper, richer veins of material than it has the time to properly mine. It’s nonetheless a flinty, brainy, continually engrossing work that straddles the lines between biopic, political thriller and journalistic cautionary tale, driven by Jeremy Renner’s most complete performance since The Hurt Locker.
  54. Magic in the Moonlight
    Whenever Firth and Stone are onscreen together, the movie sings; the rest of the time it’s never less than a breezy divertissement.
  55. Trainwreck
    A somewhat shaggy, frequently hilarious romantic comedy that, like much of Apatow’s best work, delicately balances irreverent raunch with candid insights into the give-and-take of grown-up relationships.
  56. The Homesman
    Unlike other actor-directors, Jones never seems to indulge excess on the part of his cast. Though the characters are strong, the performances are understated.
  57. The Imitation Game
    So innately compelling is Turing’s story — to say nothing of Benedict Cumberbatch’s masterful performance — it’s hard not to get caught up in this well-told tale and its skillful manipulations.
  58. A Most Wanted Man
    Corbijn succeeds here in large part because his attention to nuance and detail so fully complements that of the German operatives at the story’s core.
  59. Rosewater
    Stewart’s confident, superbly acted debut feature works as both a stirring account of human endurance and a topical reminder of the risks faced by journalists in pursuit of the truth.
  60. The Theory of Everything
    What’s onscreen is less a cerebral experience than a stirring and bittersweet love story, inflected with tasteful good humor, that can’t help but recall earlier disability dramas like “My Left Foot” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
  61. Tusk
    An utterly bizarre, weirdly compelling story of manimal love that stakes out its own brazen path somewhere between “The Fly” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
  62. The Two Faces of January
    Best known as the screenwriter of such subtext-rich adaptations as “The Wings of the Dove” and “Drive,” Amini excels at conveying the subtle, unspoken tensions between characters, selecting a tightrope-risky example with which to make his directorial debut and orchestrating it with aplomb.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Skeleton Twins
    Sibling bonds are fertile territory for indie dramedies, but The Skeleton Twins distinguishes itself from the pack with a pair of knockout performances from “Saturday Night Live” veterans Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig.
  64. Omar
    Deliberately ambiguous in how it approaches the inexorable nexus of violence, Omar will trouble those looking for condemnation rather than the messiness of humanity.
  65. Eden
    Hansen-Love, who co-wrote the script along with her former-DJ brother Sven, zeroes in on the signature experiences of ’90s club life with expert precision.
  66. Dinosaur 13
    [An] engrossing documentary.
  67. Frank
    Helmer Lenny Abrahamson (“Garage,” “Adam & Paul”) puts the pic’s eccentricity to good use, luring in skeptics with jokey surrealism and delivering them to a profoundly moving place.
  68. Dedh Ishqiya
    Dedh Ishqiya ends on a note of sadder-but-wiser resignation that recalls its predecessor, but its high romantic cultural allusions convey a deeper sense of what’s at stake.
  69. The Better Angels
    Apart from the heavy debt it owes to Malick’s oeuvre, Edwards’ entrancing debut is radically non-generic, either as history film and coming-of-age piece.
  70. Cold in July
    A superior piece of Texas pulp fiction that starts out like a house on fire, sags a bit in the middle, then rallies for an exuberantly bloody finish.
  71. The Guest
    The Guest is blood-soaked action trash of a high grade.
  72. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Forbes brings a marvelous warmth and specificity to this story of a mixed-race family struggling to survive, aided considerably by one of Mark Ruffalo’s richest, most appealing performances.
  73. Papirosen
    Solnicki demonstrates that a work of art can be made from the humble materials of home-shot video and various 8mm formats, especially when the eye and ear behind the camera are as observant and unabashed as they are here.
  74. The Lunchbox
    Batra adeptly plays on the tension of will they or won’t they meet, making good decisions based on character and situation rather than the need to uplift an audience.
  75. Kids for Cash
    The film represents a scathing critique of America’s juvenile justice system, the privatization of penal institutions, and the whole notion of “zero tolerance.”
  76. Cheap Thrills
    The performances are perfectly attuned to the material, with Koechner dominating his every scene as a kind of demented ringmaster, and Healy adroitly demonstrating the potential for both humor and horror in a character with nothing left to lose.
  77. Finding Vivian Maier
    [An] initially playful, ultimately haunting documentary.
  78. A Coffee In Berlin
    This day-in-the-life indie says something profound about an entire generation simply by watching a feckless young man try to figure it out.
  79. Ilo Ilo
    Anthony Chen is remarkably astute in his depiction of the class and racial tensions within such a household, his accessible style enabling the characters’ underlying decency and warmth to emerge unforced.
  80. 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cat People
    Paul Schrader’s reworking of the 1942 Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur Cat People is a super-chic erotic horror story of mixed impact. Kinski was essential to the film as conceived, and she’s endlessly watchable.
  82. The Babadook
    This meticulously designed and directed debut feature from writer-director Jennifer Kent (expanded from her award-winning short, “Monster”) manages to deliver real, seat-grabbing jolts while also touching on more serious themes of loss, grief and other demons that can not be so easily vanquished.
  83. Rich Hill
    Everything about the three principal teens registers as deserving of “human interest” to Rich Hill’s two helmers, whose generous attitude draws us into this deeply empathetic film.
  84. 12 O'Clock Boys
    Using Baltimore’s dirt-bike groups as its entry point, the film offers a remarkable grassroots look at how the system is broken at the inner-city level.
  85. Imperial Dreams
    Even in moments that don’t ring entirely true, Boyega’s grounded performance keeps the film headed in the right direction.
  86. Obvious Child
    The humor springs either from real-world recognition, as Robespierre and her co-writers go where others fear to tread, or in response to the cast’s lively, eccentrically lived-in characters.
  87. 20,000 Days on Earth
    An aptly intense and innovative study of pioneering rock poet Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth playfully disguises itself as fiction while more than fulfilling the requirements of a biographical documentary.
  88. Pitch Perfect 2
    Kay Cannon’s script is even lighter on narrative than its predecessor, but fills any resulting void with a concentrated supply of riotous gags, and a renewed emphasis on the virtues of female collaboration and independence.
  89. The Rover
    Michod’s sophomore feature isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before, but it has a desolate beauty all its own, and a career-redefining performance by Robert Pattinson that reveals untold depths of sensitivity and feeling in the erstwhile “Twilight” star.
  90. Starred Up
    The pic owes its believability to Asser, who served as a therapist similar to Oliver’s character, drawing from his experience to shape the world. Asser brings more than just realism, however, crafting the central father-son relationship on the foundation of classical Greek tragedy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Postman Always Rings Twice
    In the key roles, Nicholson and Lange are excellent, as is Michael Lerner as their defense attorney.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    A tender tale [from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche] that avoids mawkishness and impropriety in treating the lives of two friends who are mixed up with a woman they share.
  93. Hasee Toh Phasee
    It makes the regeneration of an overweight and complacent commercial format look easy.
  94. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Karasawa deftly orchestrates the sometimes hairpin tonal shifts, never veering towards the saccharine; if she did, Stritch would probably shoot her.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Foreign Correspondent
    Story is essentially the old cops-and-robbers. But it has been set in a background of international political intrigue of the largest order.
  96. Black Coal, Thin Ice
    A bleak but powerful, carefully controlled detective thriller in which — as with all the best noirs — there are no real heroes or villains, only various states of compromise.
  97. The Final Member
    The Final Member finds hilarity in humanity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tess
    Tess is a sensitive, intelligent screen treatment of a literary masterwork. Roman Polanski has practiced no betrayal in filming Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and his adaptation often has that infrequent quality of combining fidelity and beauty.
  99. Particle Fever
    For all their concentration on the human factor, the filmmakers by no means shortchange the aesthetic dimensions of LHC.
  100. The Only Real Game
    Banks allows the exhilaration of the game and the exigencies of realpolitik to determine the ups and downs of her film’s sentimental journey.
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