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. Invictus
    Inspirational on the face of it, Clint Eastwood's film has a predictable trajectory, but every scene brims with surprising details that accumulate into a rich fabric of history, cultural impressions and emotion.
  2. Big Hero 6
    After establishing its fresh and relatable origin story, the movie gets bogged down with a relatively generic villain’s power-hungry schemes. Still, there’s enough that’s new and different about Big Hero 6 to get excited about, especially for those still too young for Marvel’s more intense live-action fare.
  3. As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial
    Not unlike its subject, the documentary’s power, beauty and complexity lie in Harper’s use of rhetoric and lyricism.
  4. Bad Hair
    While Rondon’s focus is the struggle of wills between a boy awakening to homosexual feelings and his embittered mother, the helmer invests their collision with a powerful specificity.
  5. Will & Harper
    It can sound like a cliché to say that any given movie is what the world needs now, but “Will & Harper” earns that distinction.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Edward Scissorhands
    A delightful and delicate comic fable.
  7. The Pirogue
    Toure crafts a handsome work that makes up in skill and honesty what it lacks in originality.
  8. Mommy
    It’s uncanny how much Dolan’s style and overall solipsism have evolved in five years’ time, resulting in a funny, heartbreaking and, above all, original work — right down to its unusual 1:1 aspect ratio — that feels derivative of no one, not even himself.
  9. Highest 2 Lowest
    In the end, Lee has taken “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Duchess of Langeais
    Rivette uses intertitles (including some direct quotes from Balzac) to move the plot along and underline the dry wit. Helming is both leisurely and exact, offering auds ample opportunities to intimately observe the selfishness and folly of two people who would rather fight than switch.
  11. The Golden Dream
    Though it takes some work to engage with the characters at first, the journey makes a powerful impact.
  12. Sweat
    With her eerily flawless image and pathological narcissism, it would be all too easy to make Sylwia a monstrous figure of fun — yet the more circumstances turn against her, the more nuance and moral curiosity von Horn and Koleśnik find beneath her hyper-contoured surface.
  13. Starlet
    Though named after a party girl's pet Chihuahua, Starlet could just as easily describe the two exceptional first-timers making their debuts in this brittle, beautifully understated San Fernando Valley character study.
  14. Eastern Boys
    Campillo’s original screenplay demands any number of trusting leaps from its audience and characters alike, yet maintains credibility thanks to the studied assurance of its most elaborate setpieces, and the wealth of socioeconomic detail in its portrayal of both Daniel’s aging-yuppie lifestyle and the nervous group dynamic of the immigrants.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Silent Partner
    The Silent Partner is one of the films that run the gamut from intrigue to violence.
  16. My Kid Could Paint That
    The popular human-interest story of a child prodigy becomes an engrossing meditation on truth, media exploitation and the value of art in My Kid Could Paint That.
  17. Two Lovers
    This very New York tale is old-fashioned in good ways that have to do with solid storytelling, craftsmanship and emotional acuity.
  18. As I Open My Eyes
    Sharply yet subtly capturing the atmosphere of fear fostered by the dictatorship of President Ben Ali, this skillfully made drama is especially attuned to the myriad forms of surveillance, from the prurient to the political.
  19. Power Ballad
    What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wag the Dog
    Glib cynicism isn't a tremendously appealing quality, but in Wag the Dog it at least has the benefit of comic precision and polished handling.
  21. Cosmos
    Zulawski maintains such expert control of the film’s look and tone that there can be no question that each choice has been deliberate, whatever the significance.
  22. Kill
    The movie hardly ever turns its gaze out the windows, but the scenery never gets old, since Bhat has a head for creative close-quarters combat.
  23. Sin City
    For geeks, action freaks and sensation-seeking teenage boys of all ages, the price of admission will provide a one-way ticket to hard-boiled heaven.
  24. Old Dog
    A spare but stealthily powerful tale.
  25. Land and Shade
    While mirthless in the extreme, Cesar Acevedo’s deliberately paced and distant-feeling debut works its way under audiences’ skin, weaving a haunting allegory through painterly compositions.
  26. tick, tick...Boom!
    What’s refreshing about the debuting director’s approach is that it feels relatively egoless. His style is playful and energetic, often intercutting between multiple threads within a given song or scene, but it doesn’t feel as if Miranda is calling attention to himself so much as trying to open up the show.
  27. My Country, My Country
    Gotham-based documaker Laura Poitras ("Flag Wars") comes up with a still-timely, quietly hard-hitting look at the Iraqi situation with My Country, My Country, focusing on the lead-up to and outcome of the Jan. 30, 2005, Iraq election.
  28. She Said
    Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.
  29. Creep
    A slow-burning found-footage suspenser with some mildly clever twists and a knockout payoff.
  30. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    Pic itself is a long haul, at nearly 2½ hours; yet one needn't be a fan of Metallica or heavy metal to be engrossed throughout.
  31. Source Code
    Solid execution and some provocative ideas can't save Source Code from a fatal hubris, as it thinks itself far more clever than it actually is and assumes it's earned emotions at which it's only hinted.
  32. Sweet Dreams
    It takes place on a sugar plantation, but Ena Sendijarević‘s magnificently composed, eerily satirical Sweet Dreams has something more like acid flowing through its veins.
  33. Beast
    Upgrading a sleeping-with-the-enemy premise familiar from countless B-thrillers with a faintly mythic aura and cool psychosexual shading, Beast also sustains a fresh, frank feminine perspective through Jessie Buckley’s remarkable lead performance.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Oklahoma!
    The tunes ring out with undiminished delight. The characters pulsate with spirit. The Agnes De Mille choreography makes the play literally leap.
  35. Little Woods
    There’s at least one more key aspect of Little Woods that sets it apart: Whereas DaCosta’s dialogue strains to find poetry amid such scrappy conditions, she intuitively reveals a deeper dimension to both of her heroines by taking an extra beat at the beginning or end of scenes to observe their faces when no one else is watching.
  36. Joe
    A patiently observed, often unsettlingly violent drama that can’t help but feel overly familiar in some of its particulars, rich in rural texture but low on narrative momentum or surprise.
  37. Jay Myself
    After watching Jay Myself, you yourself may begin to see the world in a whole new way, as if you’d woken up to all the images that might have been invisible before, but only because you passed them by.
  38. Utama
    [A] sublime, quietly elegiac feature debut.
  39. Under Fire: Journalists in Combat
    Viewers unconvinced by the "war is a drug" doctrine set forth by Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" will find it amply corroborated by the self-admitted adrenaline junkies here, whose collective war-reporting experience spans an astounding number of overseas conflicts from Sarajevo and Chechnya to El Salvador and Libya.
  40. After Parkland
    After Parkland has its gun politics, and its aching heart, in the right place, but we need more from a movie about this subject. We need to ask how where the contemporary American heart of darkness is coming from.
  41. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
    A simple premise can serve as a portal to profound social critique, for those willing to take the plunge.
  42. The Song of Sparrows
    Beautifully crafted, often sentimental, sometimes humorous.
  43. Linda Linda Linda
    This aimless, lifeless time-killer about four teenage girls prepping for their rock-band gig in a school talent show proves entirely the wrong choice.
  44. State of Fear
    So strong are the perceived parallels between the Peruvian situation described in State of Fear and the sociopolitical dynamics of the current U.S. war on terror that filmmakers have trouble, in post-screening Q&As, returning the discussion to the historical subject at hand.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Naked City
    Throughout, despite its omniscient, stark melodrama, there has been no sight lost of an element of humor. Barry Fitzgerald, as the film’s focal point, in playing the police lieutenant of the homicide squad, strides through the role with tongue in cheek, with Don Taylor as his young detective aide.
  46. The Crime Is Mine
    It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine.
  47. La faute à Fidel!
    Wonderfully engaging look at 1970-71 from a child's p.o.v.
  48. Thor: Ragnarok
    While it’s not saying much, Thor: Ragnarok is easily the best of the three Thor movies — or maybe I just think so because its screenwriters and I finally seem to agree on one thing: The Thor movies are preposterous.
  49. Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
    "Going to Mars” responds creatively to the call of its ingenious subject thanks to the directors’ soulful grasp of her work, and Terra Long and Lawrence Jackman’s skillful editing.
  50. Narco Cultura
    Narco Cultura is as overwhelming as it is absorbing.
  51. Teacher's Pet
    A doggone hilarious cartoon extravaganza...virtually bursts at the seams with a supersized abundance of witty wordplay, silly songs and inspired sight gags.
  52. Bird
    The film is Arnold trying to have the integrity of her severity and eat it too. Bird is a feel-bad movie that turns into a feel-good movie. What it never feels like is a totally authentic movie.
  53. Beats
    Beats proceeds to give a dying scene its euphoric due, in a dazzling digression from stage-based form.
  54. The Restless
    It’s not one of those filmmaking-as-therapy grudge sessions, but a wrenchingly fair-minded look at complicated family dynamics.
  55. La Sapienza
    The unresolvable tension between logic and feeling animates Eugene Green’s La Sapienza, an exquisite rumination on life, love and art that tickles the heart and mind in equal measure.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Haunting
    The artful cinematic strokes of director Robert Wise and staff are not quite enough to override the major shortcomings of Nelson Gidding’s screenplay from the Shirley Jackson novel (The Haunting of Hill House).
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Splendor in the Grass
    Elia Kazan's production of William Inge's original screenplay covers a forbidding chunk of ground with great care, compassion and cinematic flair. Yet there is something awkward about the picture's mechanical rhythm. There are missing links and blind alleys within the story. Too much time is spent focusing on characters of minor significance.
  58. Wild Indian
    Wild Indian doesn’t quite add up, but it heralds an important new voice — not just because of his Native American heritage (although that plays a central role in this project’s concerns), but even more on account of the complexity he’s willing to acknowledge in his characters.
  59. Lemon Tree
    The rare ability to make intelligent, entertaining cinema from hot-button current issues is beautifully illustrated by Lemon Tree.
  60. Queen & Slim
    When a movie taps a nerve with the public, it doesn’t need to be a masterpiece to become a phenomenon, which might explain why Matsoukas puts greater attention on the look, feel and musical signature of the project than she does the plot, which feels thin and familiar.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    This version of Georges Bizet's frequently reinterpreted "Carmen" is spoken and sung in the click-punctuated African lingo of Xhosa and adapted to fit yarn's shift south, with a semi-cinema verite style cleverly disguising the artifice of the work's legit origins.
  62. Breach
    Just as somber as "The Good Shepherd," the most recent domestic spy drama, but more tightly focused, Breach absorbingly zeroes in on how the FBI nailed the most damaging turncoat in American history.
  63. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    Sixty years after World War II, descendants of a prominent Nazi responsible for implementing Hitler's policies in Slovakia reignite debate over their heritage in emotional docu 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him.
  64. Among the Believers
    The filmmakers quietly expose conflicts and contradictions without the intrusion of voiceover, and with only occasional intertitles furnishing factual information.
  65. Japanese Story
    Develops into a powerfully emotional experience thanks to a career-best performance by Toni Collette.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cape Fear
    A smart and stylish remake of the 1962 suspenser.
  67. 28 Days Later...
    Shows a rather arrogant disdain for its audience in between occasional flashes of flair.
  68. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    Bigger, Longer & Uncut will make it harder still to dismiss, or kill, this cultural mini-phenom — not least because the feature is a more clever diversion than anyone had any right to expect.
  69. Arna's Children
    Must-see docu penetrates a Jenin refugee camp to follow several Palestinian children from laughing little kids in a theater group to grim actors on a grislier world stage.
  70. Novitiate
    A piercing, immersive, and superbly played convent drama in which the suppression of speech is witnessed at both an individual and institutional level.
  71. (T)error
    A vital expose of American law enforcement carried out with almost reckless zeal.
  72. All This Panic
    All This Panic is more remarkable for the way it looks than the actual, somewhat banal, girl-talk content.
  73. From Afar
    Looking, not touching, is the act of choice for a sexually wary gay man in From Afar, and his hands-off approach is shared by the expert storytelling in Venezuelan helmer Lorenzo Vigas’ pristinely poised but deeply felt debut feature.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Matewan
    Matewan is a heartfelt, straight-ahead tale of labor organizing in the coal mines of West Virginia in 1920 that runs its course like a train coming down the track.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Roxanne
    Aussie director Fred Schepisi, who has elsewhere handled much rougher material, does a professional job of creating a breezy atmosphere, but in the end it’s hopelessly sappy stuff.
  76. 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.
  77. The Surrogate
    That writer-director Jeremy Hersh’s debut feature is a screen original surprises, not because it’s “stagy” (though he has written plays), but because its engagingly argumentative virtues aren’t typical for movies anymore, if they ever were.
  78. Beba
    An insightful, engaging and all-around affirmational auto-portrait from an Afro-Latina New Yorker with an ear for poetry and an eye for the ineffable, Beba never questions its own right to exist.
  79. 1945
    The gripping period drama offers a fresh, intelligent cinematic approach to a difficult topic.
  80. On the Rocks
    On the Rocks turns into a boozy humanistic hang-out caper movie, one that’s light-spirited and compelling, mordantly alive to the ins and outs of marriage, and a winning showcase for Murray’s aging-like-fine-whisky brand of world-weary deviltry.
  81. Red Road
    Sensual, dark in every sense, but a touch derivative, Red Road reps an impressive feature debut for Brit writer-helmer Andrea Arnold, an Oscar-winner for her knockout short "Wasp."
  82. Malcolm X
    The picture comes up short in several departments, notably in pacing and in giving a strong sense of why this man became such a legend.
  83. Karmalink
    This striking feature debut by U.S. filmmaker Jake Wachtel takes viewers on a fascinating and frequently wondrous expedition to a place where science and metaphysics intersect.
  84. Facing Nolan
    Its lack of manufactured drama is one of the most engaging things about it, especially if you are a baseball fan who has ever marveled at the miracle that was, and is, Nolan Ryan.
  85. Scrap
    The well-acted, confidently crafted indie Scrap probes messy family dynamics with low-key but taut acuity, avoiding the usual poles of dysfunctional-clan comedy or high drama driven by yelling matches and shocking revelations.
  86. Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Clever, unpredictable and fun, Final Destination Bloodlines offers the series a transfusion of creativity that virtually guarantees that it will live to kill again.
  87. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    Palm Trees and Power Lines finds a truth, one it wrenches out of an experience.
  88. 4 Days in France
    Unapologetically rambling but never dull at over 140 minutes, this story of two gay lovers both separated and united by mobile distractions of the flesh loiters coolly where the sensibilities of Jacques Rivette and Alain Guiraudie intersect — which is to take nothing away from the droll peculiarity of Reybaud’s own voice.
  89. Into the Wild
    Sean Penn delivers a compelling, ambitious work that will satisfy most admirers of the book.
  90. Dossier 137
    Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, “Case 137” keeps its mind strictly on the job.
  91. Miss Juneteenth
    Miss Juneteenth richly captures the slow pace of ebbing small-town Texas life, even if you might wish there were a bit more narrative momentum to pick up the slack in writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ first feature.
  92. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    Although its reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, Catherine Bainbridge’s Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World earns respect as much for its achievement as its ambition.
  93. Unicorn Wars
    The visually striking, not-at-all-kid-friendly result is all kinds of wrong: Picture pastel-colored anime bears impaled on the horns of sleek black horses, backlit by raging hot-pink infernos. “The Care Bears” this ain’t, though the comparison can hardly be accidental with this ultra-graphic, Saturday morning cartoon-subverting satire for which irreverent Bronies may well be the ideal audience.
  94. The Party
    Slight and self-contained, it won’t go down in cinema history as anything but, perhaps, the most purely fun film ever made by peculiar British experimentalist Sally Potter.
  95. A Scanner Darkly
    Deeply intriguing but almost too-faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's nightmarish 1977 novel.
  96. Cropsey
    Cropsey has all the trappings of a true-crime TV special, but with an undercurrent of cultural exposition that is intelligent, profound and unsettling.
  97. Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
    As a documentary, “Olympic Pride” is a little on the staid side. The film’s writer-producer-director, Deborah Riley Draper, works in a variation on the Ken Burns style.... Yet she does an absorbing job of capturing a historical moment that was even more fraught than it’s generally imagined to be.
  98. The House of the Devil
    Call it the best '80s babysitter-in-peril movie never made. The House of the Devil delivers about as much as one could reasonably hope from the not-quite-alone-in-the-house category, with the bonus of authentically re-creating the low-budget look and feel of that era's classic horror entries.
  99. The Dinner Game
    Abetted by an excellent cast, vet writer Weber weaves a simple premise into comedy gold.
  100. The Iron Claw
    A perfect movie for this moment.
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