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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Inherit the Wind
    This is a rousing and fascinating motion picture. Producer-director Stanley Kramer has held the action in tight check.
  2. Kiss the Future
    In a sense, Kiss the Future is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out.
  3. Ghost Trail
    Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis.
  4. Taboo
    Walks the line between conviction and camp with a not entirely steady step.
  5. Pistol Opera
    Too abstract and self-referential for the average action fan's comprehension. But buffs will be delighted by a package that finds the near-80-year-old helmer giddily tipping hat to the genre conventions, themes and over-the-top aesthetics that long since lent him mad-visionary status.
  6. State and Main
    A bona fide populist laugh riot.
  7. OT: Our Town
    The evolving drama of the amateur, crisis-strewn production creates its own tensions, internal structure and time frame. Pic constantly surprises.
  8. Mistress America
    If nothing else, Mistress America confirms Gerwig as one of the great, fearless screen comediennes of her generation — a tall, loose-limbed whirligig who careers through scenes with the beatific ditziness of a Carole Lombard or Judy Holliday.
  9. The Hottest August
    Story’s an original, and the film is a revelation — a movie that’s as deep as we’re willing to read into it, and an invaluable time capsule for summers far in our future, assuming we ever get there.
  10. Cinema Sabaya
    Based on helmer-writer Orit Fouks Rotem’s experience as a teacher and the real women she encountered, the film is full of life, love, humor and authenticity without being didactic. At the same time, it cleverly questions the ethics and responsibility of filmmaking.
  11. OBEX
    More contained than “Strawberry Mansion” but with similarly expansive ideas, “Obex” feels opportune for the modern era.
  12. Young@Heart
    An irresistibly joyous, tearful and, most importantly, musical doc about a band of senior pop singers whose repertoire includes "Golden Years," "Should I Stay or Should I Go" and "Stayin' Alive."
  13. Rango
    Johnny Depp isn't the sort of star to blend in, so it's saying something that his turn as the world's most conspicuous chameleon in Rango is so full-bodied, you forget the actor and focus on the character.
  14. Patience (After Sebald)
    Gee follows Sebald's path with only occasional detours, while intermittently glimpsed talking heads fade in and out of artful black-and-white landscapes.
  15. Border
    An exciting, intelligent mix of romance, Nordic noir, social realism, and supernatural horror that defies and subverts genre conventions.
  16. Suzanne
    Quillevere, co-scribe Mariette Desert and editor Thomas Marchand struggle to keep audiences fully involved in the story... Thankfully, the performances are all first-rate.
  17. Emily the Criminal
    Despite the fact that the camera rarely backs away from studying Plaza’s wary eyes and tense mouth in close-up, this character piece feels as distanced from its taciturn subject as if it was merely monitoring her on security camera.
  18. From Nowhere
    Credible and creditable performances by a fine cast of promising newcomers and familiar veterans enhance the emotional impact of this low-key but compelling indie.
  19. 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.
  20. Easy Money
    Maria Karlsson's multilayered screenplay makes the film much more than just a crime thriller, beautifully incorporating themes of parents and children, misplaced values, and greed and corruption.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers validates the entire concept of remakes. This new version of Don Siegel’s 1956 cult classic not only matches the original in horrific tone and effect, but exceeds it in both conception and execution. Sutherland has his best role since Klute. He gets excellent support from Adams, who projects a touching vulnerability.
  22. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Colangelo (whose underrated 2014 first feature “Little Accidents” was about the aftermath of a fatal mining accident) has created a consistently interesting if slow-moving drama that works very well as a showcase for its lead performer.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tin Men
    The improbable tale of a pair of feuding aluminum siding salesmen, Tin Men winds up as bountiful comedy material in the skillful hands of writer-director Barry Levinson. Film is packed with laughs, thanks to taut scripting and superb character depictions by Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito and a fascinating troupe of sidekicks.
  24. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
    “Ballad” is assembled with such peculiar, calm exactness that it actually resembles a series of experiments in simplicity.
  25. Tokyo Godfathers
    With its masterful grasp of comedy, pathos, social commentary and mystical weirdness, Tokyo Godfathers takes anime to a whole new level.
  26. The Naked Gun
    The Naked Gun has enough honest laughs to get by.
  27. Ennio
    The film devotes itself entirely to a celebration and exhaustive analysis of Morricone’s music — it’s a portrait of the artist as virtuoso soundtrack renegade.
  28. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    Garbus embraces Simone in all her multitudes and contradictions — or at least as many of them as can be comfortably squeezed into a 100-minute running time.
  29. Bodied
    Pummeling, overlong, and at times a bit too proud of its own provocations, Bodied is nonetheless a feverishly entertaining spectacle, and Kahn’s willingness to put every liberal piety on the Summer Jam screen proves intoxicating.
  30. Sleepless Night
    There's no mistaking Jardin's playful mastery of the Hollywood-style action aesthetic; his movie starts in high gear and accelerates steadily from there.
  31. The Load
    It requires a degree of commitment on the part of the viewer to join the sparsely placed dots of Glavonić’s harshly intelligent and uncompromisingly spare story, especially when the picture they form is so harrowing. But the elements that frustrate can also devastate.
  32. Fear and Trembling
    Classy, funny cross-cultural adventure is Alain Corneau's most accomplished and entertaining film since 1991's "Tous les matins du monde."
  33. Ruben Brandt, Collector
    While Krstić is especially good at providing noir atmosphere (jazzy, smoke-filled dives, ominous shadows, and references to Mike Hammer films), he positively excels at high-octane action.
  34. Power Trip
    Made with deft evenhandedness, Paul Devlin's accomplished film plays almost like a fictional drama, containing suspense, comedy and some colorful characters.
  35. Man on the Train
    The comedy-drama hinges on the captivating dynamic between the two men, combining gentle humor and charm with a melancholy undercurrent of yearning.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeremiah Johnson
    The film has its own force and beauty and the only carp might lie in its not always clear exegesis of the humanistic spirit and freedom most of its characters are striving for.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nightmare Alley
    Nightmare Alley is a harsh, brutal story [based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham] told with the sharp clarity of an etching.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Possession
    Pic’s mass of symbols and unbridled, brilliant directing meld this disparate tale into a film that could get cult following on its many levels of symbolism and exploitation.
  39. My Little Sister
    A modestly scaled, intimately observed domestic drama that doesn’t reinvent any wheels in its portrayal of family frictions, midlife ennui and the anguish of terminal illness, but handles all this potentially sticky material with clear-eyed (and finally, when required, somewhat moist-eyed) grace.
  40. Blaze
    Blaze, which leaps around in time, telling Blaze Foley’s story by zeroing in on a handful of disparate moments, is beautifully made. It’s an organic slice of life — raw and untidy, deceptively aimless but always exploratory.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Down by Law
    The Jim Jarmusch penchant for off-the-wall characters and odd situations is very much in evidence. The black-and-white photography is a major plus, and so is John Lurie’s score, with songs by Tom Waits. Both men are fine in their respective roles, but Benigni steals the film.
  42. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    This worthy follow-up to Kosashvili's brilliant "Late Marriage" should delight auds worldwide.
  43. This Is Congo
    As a contemporary study of the violent struggle between the hamstrung Congolese national army and M23 rebel forces in the North Kivu region, the film is often blisteringly effective, venturing to the frontline in pursuit of raw war footage likely to open many an outside viewer’s eyes — or, at its harshest interludes, prompt them to squeeze tightly shut.
  44. Boy A
    Picture inspires respect for its first-rate performances, artful construction and meticulous understatement.
  45. The Order
    What The Order accomplishes that’s most haunting, and perceptive, is that it shows us how white supremacy in America can be two things at once, two sides of the same coin: the legal and “presentable” side, and the underlying violent side.
  46. 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.
  47. Capernaum
    While this is unquestionably an issue film, it tackles its subject with intelligence and heart.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sands of Iwo Jima
    It's loaded with the commercial ingredients of blazing action, scope and spectacle, but it falls short of greatness because of its sentimental core and its superficial commentary on the war.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    An Officer and a Gentleman
    An Officer and a Gentleman deserves a 21-gun salute, maybe 42. Rarely does a film come along with so many finely-drawn characters to care about.
  50. It's Not Yet Dark
    Not a film for cynics, It’s Not Yet Dark at times risks overplaying its heart-on-sleeve emotions, as Fitzmaurice also hazards in his writing. But both subject and execution here summon the skill, as well as sincerity, required to overcome skepticism.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's Always Fair Weather
    As well as spoofing television, It's Always Fair Weather also takes on advertising agencies and TV commercials, and what emerges is a delightful musical satire.
  52. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    Crams a wealth of material into 90 minutes without losing clarity or momentum.
  53. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The largely elliptical script feels a few drafts shy of focus, with the thriller elements undermining the juicier questions of why one joins a cult and how life can go back to normal later.
  54. José
    Cheng delivers a mood that is unquestionably human and, at times, unexpectedly hallowed (as when Jose stares down the worn face in a Mayan ruin). José brings to light the promise of a director as compassionate as he is observant.
  55. The Settlers
    The real achievement here is in going beyond the buzzwords of newscasts and talking points to convey a sense of what’s happening on the ground — and to give it a sense of urgency.
  56. La Belle Époque
    In the end, the story’s custom reenactment gimmick may not even have been necessary, so well-written and executed is the personal journey that underlies it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flying Leathernecks
    Actual color footage of battle action in the Pacific has been smartly blended with studio shots to strike a note of realism.
  58. Dina
    The connection they share isn’t the kind that would pass for conventionally romantic, and yet, theirs is a compelling love story all the same — one the filmmakers follow with open minds, focusing on the lead-up to and days immediately following their wedding.
  59. The Retrieval
    Equal parts suspenseful road movie, persuasively detailed period drama and emotionally resonant coming-of-age story, The Retrieval is an outstanding example of regional indie filmmaking accomplished with limited resources and an abundance of skill.
  60. The Trip to Italy
    Now and then, Winterbottom nudges the movie in the direction of narrative... But even when it’s just ambling about, The Trip to Italy casts a warm, enveloping spell.
  61. Sauvage / Wild
    There are fleeting moments of wit, bliss and even tenderness amid the gritty severity, as Vidal-Naquet perceptively portrays not just the lonely, drug-fueled rigors of the hustler lifestyle, but the simultaneously competitive and supportive fraternal community that sustains it.
  62. Pacifiction
    Pacifiction is a film in many ways about floating, through life and water and power, inviting the viewer to idly drift right along with it.
  63. My Dead Friend Zoe
    Hausmann-Stokes’ message is simple, and his movie is a perfect place to start: Take an interest in our veterans.
  64. The Flower of My Secret
    Far from abandoning his trademark humor, however, the writer-director skillfully enlists it in the service of an emotional story, charting the heroine's journey from loss and torment to rediscovered strength and hope. Propelled by stellar performances and a script that resonates with intelligence, subtlety and surprises, this is by far Almodovar's best film in years.
  65. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
    Matt Wolf directs “Recorder” with a lot of lively skill. He presents the eccentricity of Marion Stokes’ personality with supreme sympathetic understanding, or maybe you could say a bit more romanticism than it deserves.
  66. Lovely & Amazing
    Engaging, intermittently insightful but too glib to wring full value out of its subject matter.
  67. Knafayim Shvurot
    This poignant film about an Israeli family rendered dysfunctional by the sudden death of the husband and father is a strongly emotional experience despite its tendency toward cryptic dramatics.
  68. MC5*: A True Testimonial
    Draws on extensive archival materials to etch an absorbing portrait of a singular counterculture mini-phenom that will be manna to music fans.
  69. Joy Ride
    Hot-wired, white-knuckle thriller.
  70. Lambert & Stamp
    As much as the movie rocks, Lambert & Stamp drops the needle to reveal the deep pain barely hidden in the grooves.
  71. Stan & Ollie
    The film’s confidence falters only when it transposes the hapless slapstick of the duo’s screen act to their everyday reality. If a couple of labored gags around hauling luggage don’t fully land, that rather proves how much more art went into Laurel and Hardy’s craft than they ever chose to let on.
  72. Undine
    There’s a stylistic and narrative elegance to Petzold’s approach, with its clean lensing and repeated use of a single piece of music (the rolling piano Adagio from Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974), that suggests restraint, where a queer filmmaker might have propelled things into camp territory. In a way, it’s a shame that Undine stops short, since the material feels thin, and the statement as murky as the lake to which the camera ultimately returns.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Risky Business
    Risky Business is like a promising first novel, with all the pros and cons that come with that territory.
  74. Charlie's Country
    Charlie is the vessel through which de Heer navigates these turbulent waters, and the script was developed during sessions when the actor would throw out ideas and the director would structure the results. It is to both men’s credit that amid the suffering, there’s a ray of hope for Charlie in the end.
  75. Under the Tree
    It has the escalating, claustrophobic structure of the darkest farce, but humor doesn’t pile up in Under the Tree so much as it bleeds out.
  76. Attack the Block
    Brit comedian-TV presenter Joe Cornish emerges fully formed as an exciting new writer-helmer with his enormously appealing debut feature, Attack the Block.
  77. Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
    Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy.
  78. Get Me Roger Stone
    When you watch Get Me Roger Stone, the lively, fun, sickening, and essential new documentary, you realize that Atwater and Rove may have excelled at what they did, but there was — and is — only one king.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cul-de-sac
    As a study in kinky insanity, Cul-de-Sac creates a tingling atmosphere. This sags riskily at times when the director unturns the screws and does not keep control of his frequently introduced comedy.
  80. The Wolf of Wall Street
    A big, unruly bacchanal of a movie that huffs and puffs and nearly blows its own house down, but holds together by sheer virtue of its furious filmmaking energy and a Leonardo DiCaprio star turn so electric it could wake the dead.
  81. Zombi Child
    The film can feel worked-over and schematic, as if Bonello was too preoccupied with serving the thesis to trust his peerless intuition.
  82. Terror's Advocate
    Sure to inspire debate in France and Germany and of obvious interest to anyone who follows the roots of modern international terrorism, doc probes gray areas in the colorful life of its controversial, limelight-courting subject.
  83. Nothing Lasts Forever
    Kohn has created the rare documentary that transforms the way we understand the world, questioning so many of our core beliefs, including the very notion of what is “real.” Through it all, diamonds won’t lose one iota of their sparkle, but you’ll never look at them the same way again.
  84. I don't feel at home in this world anymore.
    It’s the perfect role for Lynskey, who’s wise enough to underplay her character, which allows audiences to pour their own fears and frustrations into everything Ruth represents. And what emerges is a stalwart actress’s best work yet, delivered by an exciting new director to watch.
  85. Sweet Land
    Intelligently written, brilliantly cast and thesped story of a German mail order bride in a Norwegian-American community in Minnesota just after WWI never hits a wrong note.
  86. One Cut, One Life
    Unlike more generally philosophical, life-affirming autobiographical docus about dying, “One Cut, One Life” rehashes old problems and tries to resolve multiple unresolved issues already exposed in previous films, proving as exasperating as it is weirdly compelling.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    House of Usher
    In patronizingly romanticizing Poe's venerable prose, scenarist Richard Matheson has managed to preserve enough of the original's haunting flavor and spirit. The elaborations change the personalities of the three central characters, but not recklessly so.
  88. The Two Popes
    While its subject may be religious, The Two Popes doesn’t want to convert the viewer. Rather, as an extraordinary piece of writing — and an even more impressive showcase for its actors — it eloquently communicates the importance of giving people something to believe in.
  89. Mala Mala
    Beginning as a colorful documentary about the Puerto Rican transgender community, candidly showcasing nine very different subjects, Mala Mala slowly morphs into a celebration of solidarity and collective activism without ever losing sight of its likable protagonists.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    Beau Bridges heads the uniformly excellent cast as a bored rich youth who buys a black ghetto apartment building and learns something about life.
  91. Notturno
    It is problematic that many of the film’s most powerful segments are its most prurient, and even more, that they are juxtaposed with the poetic and the prosaic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Misery
    Casting of Caan is effective, as his snide remarks and grumpy attittude are backed up by a physical dimension that makes believable his inevitable fighting back. Bates had a field day with her role, creating a quirky, memorable object of hate.
    • Variety
  93. In Between Days
    Revealing without being especially compelling, In Between Days offers a bleak, rigorously naturalistic portrait of an Asian-American teenager's physical and emotional dislocation.
  94. Win Win
    A disappointing domestic comedy in which all but the audience get what they want.
  95. Clean
    Dramatically pallid and unconvincing. Despite being written for her, the director's "Irma Vep" muse Maggie Cheung seems oddly miscast here and is ill-served by an emotionally underpowered screenplay that rarely gets beneath the surface of the character's problems.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Cry in the Dark
    One of the oddest and most illogical murder cases of modern times is recounted in intimate, incredible detail in the classy, disturbing drama A Cry in the Dark [from John Bryson's Book Evil Angels].
  97. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Nominally focused on the celebrated filmmaker’s lesser-known dabblings in fine art, The Art Life emerges as a more expansive study of Lynch’s creative impulses and preoccupations, as he relates first-hand the formative experiences that spurred and shaped a most unusual imagination.
  98. Clouds of May
    Though it moves more slowly than the tortoise prominently featured in one sequence, Clouds of May is the kind of film that creeps up on the patient viewer.
  99. Stamped from the Beginning
    It lulls the audience into thinking it’s only providing historical context. Yet by the end, it reveals the myths, the distortions and the made-up fallacies that have been presented as truth for centuries. And that is the most radical thing it could have done.
  100. Heaven Knows What
    Holmes may not have the polished technique of a formally trained actress, but she has an innate capacity for drama, and whether or not she can go on to play roles further removed from her own experience, she’s electrifying in this one.
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