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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    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Guitar Mongoloid
    One of the quirkiest Swedish films of recent memory, “The Guitar Mongoloid” has all the makings of a cult classic.... A dark, but also humorous, depiction of a society with lonely people and sudden outbursts of violence.
  2. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    This adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s heavily autobiographical novel is ideally cast and skillfully handled.
  3. James White
    Familiar in its general trajectory, but unusually raw and ragged in its emotional architecture, Mond’s fraught portrait of a mother and son in crisis sports a pair of knockout performances by Cynthia Nixon and “Girls” alumnus Christopher Abbott.
  4. Dope
    The fun momentum of Dope’s breakneck plotting and snappy dialogue easily overcome any momentary attack of earnestness.
  5. Mississippi Grind
    For all the impressive authenticity of the various settings, it’s Gerry and Curtis’ continually evolving push-pull dynamic that deservedly takes centerstage here, in a picture driven far less by narrative incident than by its gently pulsing comic undercurrents and vivid contemplation of character.
  6. Results
    Once he’s worked through the basic set-up, Bujalski puts the plot on the back burner and lets his characters collide and ricochet off one another with a laconic comic grace.
  7. Entertainment
    Take it or leave it, Alverson’s fourth feature is singular stuff, and it reconfirms the director as one of the truly bold voices in the all-too-homogenous U.S. indie film scene.
  8. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    It’s all absorbing stuff, amply conveying the magnetism of a conflicted leader who drew fanatical adoration, yet who one suspects wasn’t easy company (especially in tandem with Love).
  9. Last Days in the Desert
    Deliberately paced, sparely imagined and suffused with mystery, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia’s seventh feature is nonetheless quite lucid and accessible in its themes of empathy, compassion and sacrifice, and grounded by a Christ/Satan dual performance by Ewan McGregor that plays vastly better onscreen than it sounds on paper.
  10. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    A generous and briskly entertaining doc.
  11. Slow West
    John Maclean’s impeccably crafted writing-directing debut at times has a distinctly Coen-esque flavor in its mix of sly intelligence, bleak humor and unsettling violence, exuding fierce confidence even when these qualities don’t always cohere in the smoothest or most emotionally impactful fashion.
  12. The Summer of Sangaile
    At its best, The Summer of Sangaile captures the special intensity of those relationships in which everything seems to fade away save for the other person.
  13. Unexpected
    Swanberg and co-writer Megan Mercier have crafted an incredibly generous film that wears its heart on its sleeve but never feels sappy or even sentimental.
  14. 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.
  15. 1971
    The film offers surprisingly cogent, lived-in evocations of a period too often glossed over in impersonal, by-the-book montages.
  16. Creed
    With his “Rocky” spinoff, Creed, writer-director Ryan Coogler confirms every bit of promise he displayed in his 2013 debut, “Fruitvale Station,” offering a smart, kinetic, exhilaratingly well-crafted piece of mainstream filmmaking, and providing actor Michael B. Jordan with yet another substantial stepping stone on his climb to stardom.
  17. Mr. Holmes
    The more vital subject of Mr. Holmes turns out to be our need for stories themselves and, in particular, the role of fiction as an escape from the pain and loss of everyday life.
  18. Seymour: An Introduction
    This first documentary directed by Ethan Hawke happily sidesteps any vanity-project pitfalls, granting full expression to Bernstein’s wise and witty commentary on a craft that he’s spent decades honing — as well as the proper application of that craft when the demands of art are often outweighed by the pressures of commerce.
  19. Life
    [An] engaging, elegiac portrait of a legend in the making.
  20. 45 Years
    Above all, 45 Years is a drama of quiet restraint.
  21. Welcome to Me
    A strange and often startlingly inspired media/mental-illness comedy.
  22. Victoria
    Audiences may come down from the high a little sooner than the film does, with the characters’ increasingly ill-considered actions testing our faith and engagements to the breaking point, but the sheer centripetal force of the film’s vigorous technique never loses its hold.
  23. Futuro Beach
    Its visual and sonic verve more than compensate for some overworked symbolism.
  24. The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
    It’s a bizarre story not entirely clear in the telling — partly because we can’t be entirely sure when the subject is telling the truth — but absorbing nonetheless.
  25. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    There are moments when audiences will wonder if laughing about gangland whackings isn’t in bad taste, yet it becomes increasingly clear that the helmer-scripter is using humor to cut Mafia bosses down to size, thereby turning an accusatory glare at an Italy that granted these people power.
  26. The Lesson
    The naturalistic style of the storytelling is stealthily enthralling, as is the lead performance by Margita Gosheva as a provincial Bulgarian schoolteacher who is slowly, inexorably driven to the edge by crushing debt.
  27. Iris
    A joyous celebration of creativity and razor-sharp wit sustained into old age, as evinced by outspoken nonagenarian fashion icon Iris Apfel, Iris also offers proof of Albert Maysles’ continued vitality as a documentarian.
  28. Tangerines
    With nearly five-decade screen veteran Ulfsak setting the wry, soulful tenor, Tangerines balances humor and seriousness in deft fashion, its delicacy abetted by all thesps and design contributions.
  29. Sunshine Superman
    First-rate assembly has a real dramatic grip as well as considerable lightheartedness, the obvious standout element being the large chunks of startling freefall and helicopter camera footage, both new and archival.
  30. The Founder
    Keaton plays Kroc as a man both pathetic and singularly possessed, cannily resisting lovability at every turn, while delivering the internalized self-help speak of his sales pitches with chillingly glib precision.
  31. Dior and I
    As carefully crafted as the clothes is Tcheng’s well-considered direction, privileging the creative process over stereotyped glamour or backstabbing.
  32. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    Often poignant, occasionally pathetic, but never short of entertaining, Raiders! captures the obsessive hold movies have on young people’s imaginations.
  33. The Harvest
    Nothing about the circumstances revealed in The Harvest could be called normal, and yet it’s a credit to a fertile imagination that the film proves so terrifyingly relatable.
  34. 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.
  35. Song from the Forest
    A mesmerizing glimpse into Sarno’s search for a sub-Saharan Walden and the implications of that choice.
  36. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Think of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet as a gift: a work of essential spiritual enlightenment, elegantly interpreted by nine of the world’s leading independent animators, all tied up and wrapped in a family-friendly bow by “The Lion King” director Roger Allers.
  37. All Things Must Pass
    It is much to the credit of Hanks and his collaborators that All Things Must Pass makes this particular iteration of the oft-told tale come across as freshly compelling, even poignant.
  38. The Secret Life of Pets
    The formula may be familiar, but the personalities are completely fresh, yielding a menagerie of loveable — if downright ugly — cartoon critters banding together to help these two incompatible roommates from ending up on the streets.
  39. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    There’s a grand paradox at work in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The film isn’t simply a technological experiment; it’s also a highly original, heartfelt, and engrossing story. And part of the power of it lies in the way that those two things are connected.
  40. 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.
  41. Animals
    Throughout the first half of Animals, there is a welcome amount of humor and some flashes of romantic warmth to alleviate the ever-present undercurrent of dread. As director Collin Schiffli gradually tightens the screws and builds suspense, however, the mood darkens.
  42. Forbidden Films
    Contemporary issues pale before the fascination exerted by the generously sampled films themselves, executed throughout with masterful classical film vocabulary.
  43. Tu Dors Nicole
    The actors, some of whom have worked with Lafleur before, are entirely in tune with his intentions and display a beguiling chemistry.
  44. Irrational Man
    Allen’s visual direction and editing rhythms are particularly sharp and precise this time around, as is his work with the actors.
  45. The Fate of the Furious
    The Fate of the Furious is nothing more than pulp done smart, but scene for scene it’s elegant rather than bombastic, and it packs a heady escapist wallop.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    Gibson impressively fleshes out Max, Tina Turner is striking in her role as Aunty (as well as contributing two topnotch songs, which open and close the picture) and the juves are uniformly good.
  47. Amy
    Hardly innovative in form, but boasting the same depth of feeling and breadth of archival material that made Kapadia’s “Senna” so rewarding, this lengthy but immersive portrait will hit hard with viewers who regard Winehouse among the great lost voices not just of a generation, but of an entire musical genre.
  48. Bone Tomahawk
    Bone Tomahawk may seem over-indulgent at 132 minutes, yet it’s the wayward digressions of Zahler’s script — navigated with palpable enjoyment by an expert, Kurt Russell-led ensemble — that are most treasurable in a film that commits wholeheartedly to its own curiosity value.
  49. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    While the interview-driven documentary may not adhere to Hitchcock’s cinematic ideal, it welcomes one and all into the medium’s embrace.
  50. The Measure of a Man
    Brize (“Mademoiselle Chambon”) makes compelling drama out of the most ordinary of circumstances, and draws a lead performance from frequent collaborator Vincent Lindon that is a veritable master class in understated humanism.
  51. Mountains May Depart
    If “Mountains” feels a touch schematic at times, and awkward in its third-act English-language scenes, the cumulative impact is still enormously touching, highlighted by Jia’s rapturous image-making and a luminous central performance by the director’s regular muse (and wife), Zhao Tao.
  52. One Floor Below
    Like a pot set to bubble only every few seconds, the drama is tightly measured to ensure a controlled level of tension that remains discreetly constant, nicely melding with Muntean’s skilled construction of three-dimensional bourgeois life.
  53. I Believe in Unicorns
    A sensitively observed and arrestingly impressionistic drama that feels at once deeply personal and easily accessible.
  54. The Little Prince
    A respectful, lovingly reimagined take on Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic 1943 tale, which adds all manner of narrative bells and whistles to the author’s slender, lyrical story of friendship between a pilot and a mysterious extraterrestrial voyager, but stays true to its timeless depiction of childhood wonderment at odds with grown-up disillusionment.
  55. 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.
  56. Doomsdays
    This kind of movie would be nothing without a terrific comic pairing, and Fitzpatrick and Rice make near-musicality of their mutual irritation.
  57. Alléluia
    Alleluia may be a remake, but its somber look couldn’t be more original — all the better for the film to spring its nasty surprises on auds, none more unexpected than the way certain shots remain seared into one’s subconscious in the days and weeks that follow.
  58. Dragon Blade
    The writer-director has overcome his tendency to weave florid plots that quickly run out of steam, here forging a coherent narrative that’s strong on physical and emotional drive.
  59. Stray Dog
    Though Stray Dog is slowly paced and at times a bit repetitive, Granik and her crew rarely risk losing their audience’s attention, and they uncover a wealth of images that are alternately striking, symbolic and singular.
  60. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Even the less immediately engaging material here helps build an uncannily cohesive snapshot of a very specific time and place, and the past decades have only given it a bittersweet edge.
  61. Twinsters
    The overriding effect of Twinsters is a sense of pleasure at having borne witness to emotional epiphanies of the most affecting and intimate sort.
  62. Chi-Raq
    Lee’s vision of a scarred, gutted city may not please the tourism board, but his movie is better for it: Its seething dramatic texture captures a deeper, more elusive beauty that — like reconciliation, reform or any other human ideal — can only be achieved when the illusion of safety is left behind.
  63. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    The insights the movie has aren’t exceptional; this stranger-than-fiction series of events is enough.
  64. Two Step
    This character-driven picture takes its time marinating in quiet conversations and Austin atmosphere, making the sudden jolts of violence all the more shocking when they land.
  65. Room
    It’s a testament to the story’s underlying integrity that, even when deprived of some of the elements that made Emma Donoghue’s 2010 book so gripping, director Lenny Abrahamson’s inevitably telescoped but beautifully handled adaptation retains considerable emotional impact.
  66. Truth
    The keenly focused intelligence and low-boil intensity that James Vanderbilt demonstrated in his screenplay for “Zodiac” are on impressive display in Truth.
  67. Assassination
    A sensationally entertaining mash-up of historical drama, “Dirty Dozen” style shoot-‘em-up, spaghetti Western-flavored flamboyance, and extended action setpieces that suggest a dream-team collaboration of Sergio Leone, John Woo and Steven Spielberg.
  68. Barbie
    By showing a sense of humor about the brand’s past stumbles, it gives us permission to challenge what Barbie represents — not at all what you’d expect from a feature-length toy commercial.
  69. Welcome to Leith
    The conflict between different notions of freedom, law-enforcement problems, and an atmosphere of escalating violent threat make Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker’s documentary as engrossing as a fictional thriller.
  70. Heart of a Dog
    While this alternately goofy, serious, lyrical and beguiling cine-essay serves primarily as a loving tribute to the memory of Anderson’s rat terrier, Lolabelle, its roving, free-associative structure brings together all manner of richly eccentric musings on the evasions of memory, the limitations of language and storytelling, the strangeness of life in a post-9/11 surveillance state, and the difficulty and necessity of coming to terms with death.
  71. Butterfly Girl
    Although limited in scope, the feature documentary debut of TV news veteran Cary Bell benefits greatly from the infectious personality of its subject, Abigail Evans.
  72. Creep
    A slow-burning found-footage suspenser with some mildly clever twists and a knockout payoff.
  73. A Bigger Splash
    For Guadagnino, it’s not the characters’ fates that matter so much as their dynamics, which Kajganich and the director manipulate with the sort of take-no-prisoners attitude typically reserved for theater, pushing the entire ensemble to their full potential.
  74. Where to Invade Next
    There’s something undeniably sharp and buoyant about Moore’s globe-trotting, grass-is-greener approach that compels indulgence and attention.
  75. De Palma
    Acolytes of Brian De Palma’s flavorful, flamboyant filmography hardly need reminding of his acrobatic ability as a visual storyteller; what they’ll learn from De Palma is that in front of the camera, he’s a pretty marvelous raconteur, too.
  76. 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.
  77. The Fool
    The helmer shows exquisite control of the world he has created.
  78. Born to be Blue
    Upending the conventions of the musical rise-and-fall formula while still offering a relatively straightforward three-act narrative, the film is anchored by an Ethan Hawke performance that ranks among the best of his career.
  79. The Family Fang
    It’s a measure of Bateman’s skill in front of and behind the camera that his performance here betrays nary a shred of actorly indulgence, operating instead in a subdued register that achieves quietly aching moments in the final stretch.
  80. Maggie's Plan
    Miller is greatly helped by all her major collaborators here.
  81. Veteran
    With a screenplay less bloated than Ryoo’s previous works, and drawing characters who know what they stand for, the film steadily builds up to its sensational catharsis and undeniably satisfying payoff.
  82. The Clan
    Argentine powerhouse Pablo Trapero (“Carancho,” “White Elephant”) takes a case so upsetting many refused to believe it was possible and retells it in ghastly detail from the p.o.v. of the perpetrators in The Clan, a muscular, Hollywood-style account of the Puccio fiasco.
  83. Evolution
    With its linear narrative and clear sense of a protagonist, Evolution is both more beautiful (thanks to gorgeous widescreen cinematography, including stunning underwater and nighttime footage, from “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears” d.p. Manu Dacosse) and accessible than “Innocence,” though the two films clearly function best as the twisted diptych that they are.
  84. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    Berg’s film is no stylistic innovator itself, but it’s the satisfying feature-length overview that Joplin’s brief, fiercely brilliant career has long merited.
  85. Neon Bull
    Neon Bull keeps a cinematic distance at nearly all times, seldom moving in for closeups and allowing most scenes to play out in a single shot. Whether his subjects are shoveling manure or showering down afterward, Mascaro prefers to celebrate these figures in their physical entirety.
  86. Junun
    Favoring long, unbroken takes that allow the rhythmic, full-bodied songs to breathe as they ebb and flow from beginning to end, Anderson’s aesthetics unobtrusively capture the magic of Greenwood and company’s global partnership
  87. The Boy and the Beast
    Though it piles all sorts of emotional baggage onto a series of already-tired believe-in-yourself cliches, Hosoda’s over-complicated script has the virtue of expressing itself less via words than it does through truly spectacular set pieces.
  88. The Idol
    The movie largely benefits from Abu-Assad’s natural talent for building suspense and rhythm; if the story’s elisions and fabrications occasionally feel too tidy, it more than earns its emotional impact on the strength of its excellent young cast.
  89. Guilty (Talvar)
    Khan conveys equal measures of cynical wit and authoritative gravitas as Kumar.
  90. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    Ant-Man and the Wasp has a pleasingly breakneck, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t surreal glee. It’s a cunningly swift and delightful comedy of scale.
  91. The Russian Woodpecker
    Deftly cramming a terrific amount of history, breaking news, personal drama, culture and context into a trim runtime, The Russian Woodpecker is surprisingly inventive, even buoyant in its presentation of several issues that could scarcely be more sobering.
  92. The Daughter
    Deeply involving and emotionally searing, The Daughter reps a confident and profoundly moving bigscreen debut for established theater director Simon Stone.
  93. The Price We Pay
    This well-crafted documentary from director Harold Crooks (“Surviving Progress”) offers a concise, engrossing and occasionally infuriating overview of the ways multinationals avoid taxes by stashing profits in offshore havens.
  94. Of Men and War
    The film’s rigorous approach will appeal to documentary purists while challenging more general audiences who might care to know more about Pathway, Gusman and his philosophy.
  95. Sand Dollars
    Chaplin’s performance is characterized by a lack of vanity and an almost magical combination of empathy and pathos.
  96. Song of Lahore
    The filmmakers eavesdrop on intimate musical interludes at home and in the workplace, where it becomes immediately apparent that these forgotten maestros consider themselves representatives of families who have practiced their art for centuries, passing on their musical knowledge from generation to generation.
  97. Boy and the World
    Beyond its sheer, intense variety and ingenuity, Abreu’s animation remains so appealing throughout because it always feels handmade.
  98. The Creation of Meaning
    Throughout the film, the beauty of the landscapes and the totally natural insertion of human, animal and insect movement within the frame lend The Creation of Meaning a particular grace.
  99. Lamb
    Partridge navigates risky material with assurance, delicacy and a deepening sense of intimacy that can turn, without warning, into complicity: The more at ease we feel in the characters’ company, the more disturbingly questionable the situation becomes.
  100. TransFatty Lives
    TransFatty Lives is an unusually playful and emotionally involving first-person chronicle of serious illness.
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