Variety's Scores

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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
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  1. 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    The film works on both a human-interest level -- focusing on the travails of the band members now finally receiving their well-earned due -- and as a slice of Motown's early history.
  3. Iris
    A triumph on the casting side but less so dramatically, Richard Eyre's Iris fails to do full justice to its subject.
  4. Tim's Vermeer
    The result is just about the most fun you can have while learning, partly because it strips away any tangents beyond the task at hand, offering a lean, 80-minute account of how this crazy guy erected his own Everest and then proceeded to climb it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Charley Varrick
    Charley Varrick is a sometimes-fuzzy melodrama but so well put together that it emerges a hardhitting actioner with a sock finale.
  6. Chevalier
    That Tsangari resists escalating the conflict, counting on subtle political insinuations to emerge as these perplexing social Olympics wear on, will leave as many viewers enervated as amused, but it’s an expertly executed tease.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Witness
    Witness is at times a gentle, affecting story of star-crossed lovers limited within the fascinating Amish community. Too often, however, this fragile romance is crushed by a thoroughly absurd shoot-em-up, like ketchup poured over a delicate Pennsylvania Dutch dinner.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cape Fear
    As a forthright exercise in cumulative terror Cape Fear is a competent and visually polished entry.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Place in the Sun
    Stevens has mounted his production lavishly. Undoubtedly cognizant of the shortcomings of the story itself as popular entertainment, studio toppers have wisely permitted the film every possible compensating advantage. The result is a big picture in both concept and execution.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
    A Woman of Paris is a serious, sincere effort, with a bang story subtlety of idea-expression.
  11. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    The pull of Garry Winogrand’s photographs is that they dissolve the line between art and life.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Secret of NIMH
    The Secret of NIMH is a richly animated and skillfully structured film created by former Disney animators Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy. As craft, their first feature film is certainly an homage to the best of an age ago.
  13. King Richard
    The beauty of Zach Baylin’s script is that while the arc is familiar, hardly a single detail could be described as clichéd, seeing as how the specifics are virtually unprecedented.
  14. Shirley
    Rather than presenting another puzzle with important pieces missing, with this project, Decker provides more material than we know what to do with, and the resulting prism feels intellectually rewarding, no matter the angle from which we choose to approach it.
  15. Nanking
    The horrific 1937-38 massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during the early days of the Japanese occupation gets a polished presentation in Nanking.
  16. mother!
    Its dread has no resonance; it’s a hermetically sealed creep-out that turns into a fake-trippy experience. By all means, go to mother! and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you’re hoping to see a movie that’s as honestly disquieting as it is showy.
  17. Black Souls
    Munzi focuses on incongruous leftovers from a benighted past, where kinship and blood feuds in a marginalized corner of rural Italy fester until entire communities are drawn into a whirlpool of intimidation and violence. This is the film’s strong suit.
  18. Jeune Femme (Montparnasse Bienvenüe)
    Serraille studied literature before switching to cinema, and her sharp attention to the detail distinguishes Jeune femme from so many first-time indie features.
  19. Trees Lounge
    The film’s virtues are modest, but Buscemi has come out on top by taking on people and a place he clearly knows inside out.
  20. Howard
    At 94 minutes, Howard is not and does not try to be a plumbing search through the generation of talent lost to HIV and AIDS; what it is trying to do, appealingly narrowly, is illuminate one life and the work done therein.
  21. What We Do in the Shadows
    Some genre fans who prefer the silly to the satiric may bite, but the anemic pic isn’t remotely weird or witty enough for cult immortality.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Usual Suspects
    The Usual Suspects is an ironic, bang-up thriller about the wages of crime. A terrific cast of exciting actors socks over this absorbingly complicated yarn that's been spun in a seductively slick fashion by director Bryan Singer.
  23. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    The tension is rooted in psychology rather than gimmickry, and evinces a command of craft that feels old-fashioned in the most refreshing possible sense.
  24. Kirikou and the Wild Beasts
    Animation, like dialogue and narration, is simple and direct. Messages of the value of teamwork, pride in shared labor, self-reliance and resourcefulness are nicely embedded into compact, suspenseful adventures.
  25. Sharp Corner
    Led by an against-type performance from Ben Foster, writer-director Jason Buxton’s languidly paced psychological thriller about domesticity and masculinity may be handsomely mounted but ultimately strikes an all too hollow tone to land its kicker of a final shot.
  26. The Currents
    This is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction
  27. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Assembly is brisk and high-grade, allowing for the variable quality of archival materials.
  28. A Dangerous Method
    This complex story from the early days of psychoanalysis engrosses and even amuses as it unfolds through a series of conversations, treatment sessions and exchanged letters.
  29. 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.
  30. The Last Days of Disco
    Whit Stillman's stiff directorial approach ill suits the sensual ambiance of the club scene so intently depicted, and the mostly self-conscious, uptight characters seem to have made a left turn out of "Metropolitan" and walked through the wrong door to turn up in this flamboyant druggie scene.
  31. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Though at first glance this ironically-sweet-and-very-sour mix might seem unappetizing, even repellent, it soon becomes fascinating in its oddball complexity.
  32. La Civil
    This is a gripping and heartbreaking film that goes out with a whimper that hits harder than any kind of bang it could’ve mustered.
  33. The Last of the Mohicans
    [The Last of the Mohicans] blends pure adventure with a compelling central romance.
  34. Holler
    The film’s texture is in the details. There’s nothing glamorous about this kind of subsistence, and nothing invented.
  35. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    For a film bursting with so many ideas, only a fraction of them seem to work. And yet, as an artistic statement, “Tigers” proves as fearless as its kid characters, and an indicator of incredible things to come from its creator.
  36. El Planeta
    There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.
  37. American Gangster
    Absorbing, exciting at times and undeniably entertaining, and is poised to be a major commercial hit. But great it's not.
  38. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
    A collection of five femme-oriented vignettes that are not intricately linked dramatically but overlap characters, this observant, emotionally acute drama is distinguished by a pronounced poetic sensibility.
  39. Music
    Whatever its frustrations, they are outweighed by the pleasures on offer in this scintillating example of film’s uncanny ability to transcend itself, to operate on planes above, below and in between the images and soundscapes of which it is composed.
  40. The Royal Tenenbaums
    Underachieves in its own way by trapping an expansive, probing story in a brittle, highly artificial style that constricts character and emotional development.
  41. Mud
    Mud poses as a mere adolescent adventure tale but explores a rich vein of grown-up concerns, exploring codes of honor, love and family too solid to be shaken by modernizing forces.
  42. Sharkwater Extinction
    A testament to its maker’s staunch belief in the cause of shark preservation, it’s a plea for transparency and conservation whose gorgeous 4K cinematography should make it an enticing proposition for nonfiction cinephiles and activists alike.
  43. Nightcrawler
    Touches of apocalyptic comedy run throughout Nightcrawler, but the movie’s overriding tone is one of strident, finger-wagging self-seriousness.
  44. The Woman King
    It’s stirring but slightly stodgy, designed to stand the test of time.
  45. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
    Donji’s screenplay finds an ideal balance of gentle humor and life-affirming drama.
  46. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    Cold Case Hammarskjöld doesn’t offer the last word about the issues it raises. But it’s a movie that should be seen, grappled with, argued with, and experienced, because the questions it plants in us are dark enough to reverberate as powerfully as answers.
  47. American Symphony
    For this warm and lovely film’s most natural audience, which will most likely be families struggling with illness, the documentary’s final inconclusiveness may feel like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony.
  48. Asteroid City
    Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.
  49. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    [Francis] Lawrence and his team have calibrated the entire experience for maximum engagement. And while its pleasures can’t touch the thrill of seeing the Death Star destroyed — not yet, at least — the film runs circles around George Lucas’ ability to weave complex political ideas into the very fabric of B-movie excitement.
  50. Submarine
    Rises above the genre's tired, cookie-cutter competition, presenting familiar elements, such as preternaturally articulate teens preoccupied with virginity, through fresh eyes.
  51. Marguerite
    This splendid satire benefits...from “The Singer” director Giannoli’s gift for striking just the right tone with such tricky material.
  52. Nouvelle Vague
    The film reminds you that the real salvation of cinema will always come from those who understand that making a movie should be a magic trick good enough to fool the magician himself into believing it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Stranger
    The Stranger is socko melodrama, spinning an intriguing web of thrills and chills. Director Orson Welles gives the production a fast, suspenseful development, drawing every advantage from the hard-hitting script from the Victor Trivas story.
  54. Cyclo
    Made with the same jewel-like meticulousness and very Gallic sense of style that set Tran’s debut so far apart from other Asian offerings, the new feature again boasts boldly creative craftsmanship in every frame. The film is disappointingly compromised, however, by needlessly convoluted, often pretentiously enigmatic plotting, placing a considerable blight on its commercial potential.
  55. Superbad
    The bawdy jokes score big points, but it's the rueful acknowledgement of adolescent embarrassment and humiliation that most distinguishes Superbad, another ultra-raunchy and commercial sex comedy from the Judd Apatow laugh factory.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Tales of Hoffmann
    Film is a brilliant integration of dance, story and music.
  57. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    An ace performance by 26-year-old Julia Jentsch ("The Edukators," "Snowland"), as the quietly determined Munich student who was beheaded for distributing counter-propaganda leaflets in 1943, gives pic a focused dramatic power.
  58. Into the Inferno
    Into the Inferno proves most fascinating when documenting the ways in which primitive peoples invest these angry craters with spirits and gods.
  59. The Truth
    From first shot to last, it’s a film of high wit and confidence and verve, an astonishingly fluid and accomplished act of boundary-leaping.
  60. Pearl
    Its distinctive look and oddly appealing antihero (picture Norman Bates as Shelley Duvall might have played him) could actually make this the more popular of the two films.
  61. Paris, 13th District
    A silky, soulful black-and-white tapestry of single millennials seeking connection.
  62. Down to the Bone
    First-time feature director's disciplined objectivity is coupled with humanism in this collaboration with a gifted cast and cinematographer. The artistic success, though, may be a bit too cool.
  63. Suzhou River
    A compelling story of love and obsession whose progress mirrors the sinuous flow of the Shanghai waterway that supplies its title.
  64. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    Performances are aces top to bottom
  65. The Manchurian Candidate
    Structurally and thematically similar to John Frankenheimer's original but entirely different in style, feel and nuance, this political thriller about a brainwashed soldier being positioned for the White House provides a delectable network of dramatic tripwires that teases the mind and quickens the pulse. This is brainy popcorn fare.
  66. Dead Man's Burden
    The unknown cast is aces, and Moshe inscribes his loquacious film in the Western tradition without overdoing the references to the classics.
  67. 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.”
  68. Happy Valley
    For a film that is very much about the need to continually question our heroes and hold them to a higher standard, Happy Valley offers an unapologetic tribute to one man’s painful honesty and a tacit rebuke to those who couldn’t muster anywhere near the same courage.
  69. A Hard Day
    It’s the nerve-racking situation that faces our hard-luck protag, with its heady black humor, social satire and a touch of surrealism, that keeps audiences on the edge of their seats.
  70. Women He's Undressed
    The film overstays its welcome by punctuating his story with ill-advised dramatic fantasy sequences that are meant to illustrate the anguish of a gay man in mid-century America, but come across as heavy-handed and mean-spirited.
  71. The Lovers
    The Lovers is a comedy of Middle American doldrums that leaves you rooting for its characters instead of smirking at them.
  72. The Panama Papers
    The Panama Papers captures and celebrates a different concentration of power: that of the journalists who’ve begun to band together by thinking globally, following the money as it travels — and does its best to hide — around the world.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Front Page
    A very entertaining picture for anyone anywhere. [25 Mar 1931, p.17]
    • Variety
  74. Nothing Compares
    [An] incisive and poignant documentary ... Sinéad O’Connor was a fire that went out too fast. "Nothing Compares" makes you see it’s still burning.
  75. Mars Express
    A gripping, heady and refreshing 2D animated take on the perils of man and machine coexisting, Périn’s first feature as a director inserts the necessary exposition in a mostly natural manner so we incrementally become aware of how this reality functions.
  76. Hokum
    Buoyed by Scott’s level-headed turn — he doesn’t transform into a scream king — Hokum is a proficient horror exploit, which hinges on atmosphere instead of gore, even if its many frightening threads feel disjointed, like rooms in distinctly different hotels.
  77. Soul Patrol
    [A] haunting, revelatory documentary.
  78. Final Account
    Clocking in at a swift 90 minutes, Final Account is like a teenager-friendly approach to “Shoah,” designed as an introduction to issues of responsibility, guilt and the banality of man’s inhumanity to man.
  79. The Love That Remains
    Wise and lyrical and strange, The Love That Remains thrives on its profound understanding of each family’s individual oddness, and the incremental confusion with which growing children regard their parents, as their elders grow smaller and more flawed by the day.
  80. Greenberg
    As a study of stasis and of people conscious of not living the lives they had imagined for themselves, the picture offers a bracing undertow of seriousness beneath the deceptively casual, dramatically offhand surface.
  81. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    More of an action-light whodunit than a real thriller, and more of a CliffsNotes version than a deeply disturbing portrait of what's wrong with contempo Sweden.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Tarnished Angels
    The Tarnished Angels is a stumbling entry. Characters are mostly colorless, given static reading in drawn-out situations, and story line is lacking in punch.
  83. Five Star
    A low-key but powerfully affecting urban drama that tells a familiar story — of drugs, power and respect on the inner-city streets — with such unusual authenticity and dramatic force that it’s as if we’re seeing it for the first time.
  84. The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside gives us that catharsis; it’s a real rouser. Yet the film is rooted in a sobering grasp of the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph. The arc of the drama is built around an enormous curveball it throws at the audience. And that’s when the movie really gets good.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Killing Fields
    A story of perseverance and survival in hell on earth, The Killing Fields represents an admirable, if not entirely successful, attempt to bring alive to the world film audience the horror story that is the recent history of Cambodia.
  86. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    Excerpted interviews with WWII and Vietnam veterans suggest that every war is hell, yet it is the specificity of the Iraq War combatants' reminiscences that makes their writing resonate so profoundly.
  87. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    An array of supporting craftspeople pull the viewer into a credible alternative world, even if the film itself is more prosaic than inspiring.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Time in America
    Once Upon a Time in America arrives as a disappointment of considerable proportions. Sprawling $32 million saga of Jewish gangsters over the decades is surprisingly deficient in clarity and purpose, as well as excitement and narrative involvement.
  89. Loveless
    Loveless exerts a low-energy, dread-tinged fascination that intrigues rather than wows.
  90. 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.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Straw Dogs
    Director Sam Peckinpah indulges himself in an orgy of unparalleled violence and nastiness with undertones of sexual repression in this production.
  92. Encanto
    Encanto is a lively, lovely, lushly enveloping digitally animated musical fairy tale.
  93. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    It’s a unique, associative blend of sounds and images that aims to convey details as well as underlying truths about Frank’s life. Unfortunately, it also often leaves one feeling aesthetically pummeled to the point of exhaustion.
  94. Yourself and Yours
    Buoyed by Hong’s romantic optimism, the immensely satisfying conclusion hints at the possibility of love as a renewable resource, so long as both partners are flexible to different terms. Yourself and Yours asks the audience to take the same leap — best to keep an open mind and go with the flow.
  95. The Bad Kids
    Taking the macro view, [Fulton and Pepe] seem to miss out on the types of thorny micro details — about McGee’s relationship with his mother, or about Viland’s own history preceding her tenure at Black Rock — that would have provided additional complexity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hit
    Frears and writer Peter Prince have taken a potentially familiar tale of a gangland betrayal and revenge and made something richly inventive and most entertaining.
  97. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    Eschewing character arcs and talking heads in favor of a more poetic approach, this lyrical exercise in avant-garde entomology is the work of an intuitive filmmaker with an often hypnotic sense of composition.
  98. Farewell Amor
    The simple humanism here makes the case for nurturing and celebrating America’s immigrant population in a more eloquent and persuasive way than a more polemical film ever could.
  99. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    It can take a TV series an entire season to establish a political intrigue as elaborate as the one Cedar devises here — and even longer to flesh out such a fascinating protagonist, when all Cedar had to do was give this archetype a name.
  100. A Family Affair
    This deceptively artless, journal-style film has no need for any carefully sculpted twists; rather, it’s the sheer unpredictable perversity of human nature that takes the breath away at key points in Fassaert’s unsettling, perhaps unsolvable, inquiry.
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