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. The Deeper You Dig
    It’s a nicely economical tale of supernatural vengeance that benefits from its small scale and lived-in atmospherics.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ivanhoe
    Ivanhoe is a great romantic adventure, mounted extravagantly, crammed with action, and emerges as a spectacular feast.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    Billy Wilder's enterprise is a strange one because of its shift in directions from quite good satire to straight spy stuff. It is in large part old-fashioned, in that it's mile-wide and ancient-history Sherlock Holmes, but it's also handsomely produced and directed with incisiveness by Wilder.
  4. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    At once questioning and reaffirming the pleasures of cinematic espionage, this is the rare sequel that leaves its franchise feeling not exhausted but surprisingly resurgent at 19 years and counting.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Purple Rose of Cairo
    Tale is a light, almost frivolous treatment of a serious theme, as Woody Allen here confronts the unalterable fact that life just doesn't turn out the way it does (or did) in Hollywood films. For all its situational goofiness, pic is a tragedy, and it's too bad Allen didn't build up the characters and drama sufficiently to give some weight to his concerns.
  6. In the Last Days of the City
    The real achievement is how the film captures and holds a mood that develops and expands, with a yearning for what was and what might have been.
  7. The Sower
    The resulting film is so delicately wrought and exquisitely visualized that the harsher, eerier details of Ailhaud’s account stand out all the more strikingly, like a shot of vinegar in a pristine crème caramel.
  8. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    Solid, stately and — like the collapsing Papal States of the Italian Peninsula in the late 1800s — just a little too tradition-bound for its own good.
  9. Frozen
    This always enjoyable tale of mysterious magic, imperiled princesses and square-jawed men of action proves longer on striking visuals than on truly engaging or memorable characters.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They Died with Their Boots On
    The liberties which the screen writers have taken with well established and authenticated facts are likely to be a bit trying in spots. But the test of the yarn is not its accuracy, but its speed and excitement. Of these it has plenty.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    Once the inept, draggy start is passed, the film’s pace builds with ever-growing force.
  12. Hatching
    Amid the mischievous mayhem that ensues, Bergholm and Rautsi deserve credit for not abandoning Tinja’s mother.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shot in the Heart
    The piece is ultimately admirable for its lack of easy answers, for its continued sense of emotional confusion.
  14. On the Run
    Fluid camerawork, a resonant music score and tightly wound editing combine to produce a superior suspense film with a conclusion that is somewhat reminiscent of the final acts of Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and of Joseph Losey's "The Criminal."
  15. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    There's no shortage of existing docus on the subject, and Panh's doesn't bring either a fresh enough angle or enough new material to the table to justify its length.
  16. Hala
    Writer-director Baig has made a coming-of-age charmer that’s adamantly ordinary. Her script has the melody of John Hughes and early Amy Heckerling played with a few minor chords.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Longest Day
    A solid and stunning war epic.
  18. Diamantino
    Part loopily queer sci-fi thriller, part faux-naive political rallying cry, glued together with candyfloss clouds of romantic reverie, it’s a film best seen with as little forewarning as possible: To go in blind is to be carried along by its irrational tumble of events as blissfully and buoyantly as its empty-headed soccer-star protagonist.
  19. True History of the Kelly Gang
    Lithe and volatile and recklessly stylized to the hilt, True History of the Kelly Gang has moves like Jagger, but a head still teeming with language and history.
  20. Life, Animated
    This latest film from Roger Ross Williams (“God Loves Uganda”) teems with insights into how children’s fantasy can and can’t bridge a developmental gap, but works on an even more basic, emotional level as a warm testament to a family’s love and resilience.
  21. Waitress
    While aspects verge on sitcom terrain, this tale of a pregnant small-town woman caught between a bad marriage and a risky affair is mostly as funny and charming as intended.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    The naked power and oblique tenderness of Edward Albee's incisive, inhuman drama have been transformed from legit into a brilliant motion picture. Keen adaptation and handsome production by Ernest Lehman, outstanding direction by Mike Nichols in his feature debut, and four topflight performances score an artistic bullseye.
  23. Prodigal Sons
    Sad, compelling documentary leaves a few key questions frustratingly unanswered, but the raw materials here are sufficiently bracing.
    • 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.
  25. Mandibles
    Mandibles is as brazenly and riotously stupid as it sounds, but with a chill, dopey sweetness that makes it stick.
  26. Oklahoma City
    What makes Oklahoma City a haunting experience is that the movie, in laying out the road that led to his humanity withering and dying, demonstrates a disquieting continuity between the anti-government wrath of Timothy McVeigh and the fervor of anti-government wreckage that has just been given a new credibility in America.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rachel, Rachel
    Rachel, Rachel is a low-key melodrama starring Joanne Woodward as a spinster awakening to life. Produced austerely by Paul Newman, who also directs with an uncertain hand, it marks Newman's feature debut in these non-acting capacities. Offbeat film moves too slowly to an upbeat, ironic climax.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terribly Happy
    Entertaining and full of surprising twists, this highly cinematic tale of a Copenhagen policeman working punishment duty in the provinces plays with genre in a manner that can be compared with the Coen brothers or David Lynch.
  29. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    An intelligent overview that makes a radical artist's work comprehensible to audiences with no previous awareness of her or her chosen path.
  30. The Bridesmaid
    At 74, Chabrol is in full possession of his talent for elegant, understated filmmaking, though he's far from his disturbing films of the '50s and '60s.
  31. She Rides Shotgun
    Rowland ratchets up the suspense with cunning and confidence, advancing the narrative and introducing secondary characters with suitable swiftness and meticulous precision that never call undue attention to themselves.
  32. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    Blending wit and modesty, Mann fits the bill, coming across as an overgrown kid with a good heart, but virtually no practice in relating to others — which is perhaps the thing that makes his experience so profoundly relatable.
  33. The Rabbi's Cat
    This feature-length 3D adaptation of Sfar's comicbook series shares many of the same virtues and problems of his solo, live-action helming debut, the biopic "Gainsbourg," in that it is often colorful, witty and inspired, but also too episodic, and lacks a strong ending.
  34. Porcelain War
    Porcelain War thrives on contrast, much of it poignant.
  35. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    A generous and briskly entertaining doc.
  36. Found Memories
    Though the focus is on one older woman (effectively played by Sonia Guedes) the film's spirit is embodied by the whole town, which lingers in the memory.
  37. Dancing in Jaffa
    A surprising, well-crafted documentary.
  38. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    For a long time now, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” has been two movies, and the hypnotic film-geek documentary 78/52 is an ingenious and irreverent master class in both of them.
  39. Adam
    Taking the stories of two women, both frozen in existential stasis, and bringing them together in a predictable yet deeply satisfying manner, the writer-director ensures this scrupulously even two-hander about grief, shame, and the redemption of motherhood doles out emotional comfort food that’s neither too sweet nor too heavy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Green Pastures
    A simple, enchanting, audience-captivating all-[black] cinematic fable.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big House
    As Butch, Morgan and Kent, Wallace Beery, Chester Morris and Robert Montgomery are a great trio in ‘the big house’, where each is serving a stretch for homicide, forgery and manslaughter, respectively. Prison life on the half-shell is plainly exposed.
  42. Slut in a Good Way
    I don’t want to oversell Slut in a Good Way here. It’s a tiny movie, and the bleary black-and-white cinematography looks only a notch better than “Clerks,” and yet, like Antoine Desrosières’ “Sextape” (easily the funniest film I’ve ever seen in Cannes, but still without U.S. distribution), Lorain’s film challenges traditional gender roles in such a way that’s surface-level entertaining but also deep enough to inspire a college term paper or two.
  43. Sicko
    An affecting and entertaining dissection of the American health care industry, showing how it benefits the few at the expense of the many.
  44. Monster
    Gritty and compelling as Monster is, the script's not entirely satisfying elaboration of the central relationship and Ricci's somewhat ungiving performance limit the material to that of a superior telemovie rather than something emotionally richer, like "Boys Don't Cry."
  45. The Lady and the Duke
    History comes alive with verve and cold-sweat suspense in The Lady and the Duke.
  46. 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.
  47. My Sunshine
    Some films prioritize a strident political cause, others set out to terrify or thrill. This touching and simple story from Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Okuyama, premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, is a gentler affair, with modest ambitions that it realizes effectively.
  48. Tabloid
    Errol Morris' Tabloid is bonkers in all the best possible ways -- a welcome return to perverse portraiture after a lengthy sojourn in the realm of more serious-minded subjects.
  49. The Kid Detective
    Both entertainingly old-fashioned and defiantly fresh.
  50. Very Semi-Serious
    A delightful if never particularly deep survey of an American comic institution.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Monkey Business
    The usual Marx madhouse and plenty of laughs sprouting from a plot structure resembling one of those California bungalows which spring up over night.
  52. What Maisie Knew
    Anchored by five strong performances, including a piercing turn by Onata Aprile in the 6-year-old title role, this beautifully observed drama essentially strikes the same sad note for 98 minutes, though with enough sensitivity and emotional variation to make the experience cumulatively heartrending rather than merely aggravating.
  53. Children of the Sea
    This wide-eyed loner may be “just” an anime character, but she’s as relatable as any live-action teenager you might meet on screen this year, thanks to the splendid attention to detail and seemingly boundless imagination that characterizes Children of the Sea, director Ayumu Watanabe’s stunning adaptation of the prize-winning manga by Daisuke Igarashi.
  54. The Women's Balcony
    Offering solid, middle-brow entertainment that borrows from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” the film shows the relationships and tensions between different groups within Orthodox Judaism in Jerusalem, and provides a cautionary (and universally understandable) tale about religious fundamentalism.
  55. Augustine
    Anchored by two intense, intertwined perfs by veteran Vincent Lindon and relative newcomer Soko, a musician who also composed the pic’s growling, atmospheric score, this period drama offers a coolly febrile study of madness, Victorian sexual politics and power.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Key Largo
    A tense film thriller has been developed from Maxwell Anderson's play, Key Largo. Emphasis is on tension in the telling, and effective use of melodramatic mood has been used to point up the suspense.
  57. 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.
  58. Frankenweenie
    This beautifully designed canine-resurrection saga feels, somewhat fittingly, stitched together from stray narrative parts, but nonetheless evinces a level of discipline and artistic coherence missing from the director's recent live-action efforts.
  59. Divine Intervention
    Always imaginative, often arresting, but sometimes just too clever by half.
  60. Black Hawk Down
    Goes down like stiff medicine, leaving one feeling exhausted relief when it's finally over.
  61. The Wise Kids
    An unusual example of what can be termed a "gay Christian" film, Cone's feature is among the best of a recent spate of dramas observing American Christian life.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For a Few Dollars More
    A hard-hitting western with upper-case values out of the busy Italo stable, this is a topnotch action entry.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Radio Days
    Although lacking the bite and depth of his best work, Radio Days is one of Woody Allen's most purely entertaining pictures. It's a visual monolog of bits and pieces from the glory days of radio and the people who were tuned in.
  64. Beans
    Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.
  65. Strawberry Mansion
    Even as their film stretches its flights of fancy past breaking point, there are pleasures to be taken from the blithe, handmade execution of its vision, throwing everything in the pot from creaky animal puppetry to 8-bit effects.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Woman of the Year
    Picture runs 112 minutes and frequently seems every moment of that. Tracy and Hepburn go a long way toward pulling the chestnut out of the fire.
  67. Alam
    This intelligent, sensitive treatment of the rarely seen, everyday lives of young Palestinian citizens of Israel marks tyro feature writer-director Firas Khoury as a talent to watch.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
    The film is a good-enough example of its low-key type, with artwork rather better than usual (less obvious backcloths, etc.), a minimum of artless dialog, good lensing by Arthur Grant and a solid all round cast.
  69. Romería
    Simón’s sweetly sorrowful ode to lost family imagines what might have been, while acknowledging that not all memories can be passed down between generations — some die deliciously with us.
  70. Southside with You
    Richard Tanne’s writing-directing debut deepens into a pointed, flowing conversation about the many challenges (and varieties) of African-American identity, the need for both idealism and compromise, and the importance of making peace with past disappointments in order to effect meaningful change in the future.
  71. Rize
    Eye-popping lensing and an appreciation of social complexities combine for an entirely satisfying experience.
  72. Bottoms
    Bottoms is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect.
  73. Wild
    While Wild will surely be praised in the coming months for having a strong, well-written, flesh-and-blood female at its center, it’s to the film’s credit that it wears this badge of honor with a lightness that in no way undermines its sincerity.
  74. The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile
    There are remarkably few serious hiccups along the way in achieving the career reclamation Carlile envisions for Tucker at the start. But any heightened sense of drama isn’t really necessary when it comes to the pleasures of spending time with two such strong musical personalities in what amounts to a documentary two-hander, fully justifying tagging the younger artist’s name onto the film’s title as an awkward but fitting addendum.
  75. Beastie Boys Story
    Beastie Boys Story is less seamless, but more personal, than a classic documentary. Horovitz and Diamond are infectious company, and the film does a meticulous job of presenting the evolution of Adam Yauch, who was always on the edge of technology (it was his idea to tape-loop “When the Levee Breaks”), as well as postmodern pranksterism.
  76. Daaaaaalí!
    Dupieux injects his own particular brand of daffy humor too, writing, directing, shooting and editing his movie, cutting it along a bias that is familiar to those of us who’ve been paying attention to his recent run of form.
  77. On the Count of Three
    Carmichael, working from a script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, directs the movie with an aimless sly verve. He roots the combustible melancholia in the everyday.
  78. The Ground Truth
    The substance of the movie is potent, and so powerfully presented by those who have fought and are still fighting a controversial war, that the message of Ground Truth cannot be dismissed.
  79. The Sea Beast
    In the end, The Sea Beast is a movie about challenging conventional wisdom and figuring things out for yourself, and that’s a philosophy that worked on both sides of the camera.
  80. Bombay Beach
    In an inspired twist, Har'el brings surreal levity to the potentially downer subject by interrupting her elegiac regional portraiture with a series of amateur dance numbers. Still, without dramatic momentum, this fringe-appeal snapshot feels less like a film than a coffee-table photo project come to life.
  81. The Decay of Fiction
    The attention given to constructing each shot makes for a hypnotic visual experience, while lack of a progressive narrative telescopes film's running time into infinity.
  82. Raya and the Last Dragon
    A lot of the storytelling is clumsy, rushed or inelegant, but the movie’s timely message of unity and trust still resonates because the filmmakers figured out such a satisfying ending — albeit one that ties things up a little too neatly: so much world-building in service of a one-off. Is this overloaded origin story really the last we’ll see of “The Last Dragon”?
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Salt of the Earth
    Salt of the Earth is a good, highly dramatic and emotion-charged piece of work that tells its story straight. It is, however, a propaganda picture which belongs in union halls rather than theatres.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Favorite Blonde
    A progressively funny film.
  85. Humpday
    A visually mangy but frequently hilarious low-budgeter.
  86. Shakespeare Behind Bars
    There's no denying the pic's overall impact as a compelling study of art as a source of transcendence. And it will come as no surprise if this well-crafted doc eventually serves as source material for a dramatic feature.
  87. A Crooked Somebody
    Working from a smartly constructed script by Andrew Zilch, director Trevor White (“Jamesy Boy”) does an impressive job of propelling the narrative along parallel tracks of arrestingly suspenseful thriller and knowing media satire.
  88. Burning Cane
    It’s a movie of minor fascinations and seductions; it exerts the pull of a natural-born filmmaker’s eye.
  89. The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
    Oreck spins a mesmerizing web that appropriates a wealth of disparate Eastern European images — of mushrooms, farmers, falling trees and war-destroyed buildings — to illustrate its lyrical discourse.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Heartbreak Kid
    Elaine May’s deft direction catches all the possibilities of young romance and its tribulations in light strokes and cleverly accents characterization of the various principals.
  91. Scarlet
    Smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work.
  92. The Burial
    Director Maggie Betts has a rousing old-school crowd-pleaser on her hands with this truth-based (albeit strategically embellished) drama featuring the most entertaining performance yet from Jamie Foxx, who makes a day in court feel like going to church.
  93. My Mother's Smile
    In the central role, Castellitto's powerfully focused performance manages to keep the complex drama grounded.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oliver!
    It’s a bright, shiny, heartwarming musical, packed with songs and lively production highspots and, though the leading performances are not all up to the Lean mark, if memory serves it’s a fine enough thesping ensemble to keep exhibitors and audience enthusiastic.
  95. Backspot
    It is Jacobs’ performance that makes “Backspot” such an exciting watch, even as it hits well-known beats and otherwise expected character arcs.
  96. Porfirio
    Porfirio's view of physical disability often mesmerizes despite its glacial progress and stingy way with narrative information.
  97. When the Light Breaks
    Rúnarsson’s film eschews easy melodrama for a more tacit, sensory exploration of the sudden connections that death forges among the living. The future waits in limbo; simply getting through the day is drama enough.
  98. Jawline
    “I’m going to fake it till I make it!” vows Austyn. At first, “Jawline” also feels committed to his rise. Mandelup changes her intention so gradually that the third act of the film feels a little aimless. Still, she’s smart to momentarily give the mic to the female fans to explain their devotion, though the uniformity of their answers is depressing.
  99. Polisse
    Though rough edges are very much part of picture's fabric and charm, the current two-hour-plus edit is too choppy, with many sequences feeling rushed or underdeveloped.
  100. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
    Precisely the sort of intelligent, human-scale adult drama audiences insist no one makes anymore.
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