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. South Mountain
    As highlighted by its pitch-perfect finale, South Mountain demonstrates a realistically complex conception of stock ideas like “vengeance,” “moving on” and “healing,” and Ethan Mass’s cinematography echoes the material’s dualities in its delicate interplay of light and dark. Guiding the material from start to finish, however, is Balsam.
  2. Sword of Trust
    The considerable pleasure of Lynn Shelton’s latest “Sword of Trust” is that everyone onscreen is so good at this kind of [improv] work that one wishes more tightly scripted comedy screenplays had such savory dialogue, or inspired character conceptions.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sweet Charity
    Sweet Charity is, in short, a terrific musical film. Based on the 1966 legituner [by Neil Simon, Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, based on Federico Fellini's film, Nights of Cabiria], extremely handsome and plush production accomplishes everything it sets out to do.
  4. Roll Red Roll
    The phenomenon of rape culture has emerged, more than anywhere, from the frat house (and from spring break, that ritualized bacchanal for kids who aren’t necessarily in frats), and it has been growing there — metastasizing — for decades. Roll Red Roll captures, with potent power, how the “If it feels good, wreck it” ethos of the beer-pong drink-till-you-submit forced “hookup” is finding more and more of a home among high schoolers.
  5. Working Woman
    This second narrative feature by Israeli documentarian Michal Aviad is a strong drama that eschews melodramatic contrivance, making its points via cool (yet sometimes squirm-inducing) observation.
  6. Screwball
    It works surprisingly and consistently well as a storytelling flourish for a documentary that does not traffic in subtleties or moral indignation while repeatedly and boisterously posing the question: “Can you believe these people actually did this?”
  7. The Chambermaid
    Director Lila Avilés has designed her debut feature, The Chambermaid, to give audiences the opposite opportunity, inviting us to step into the shoes of an invisible woman for two hours, and as such, her film is a rare and special thing.
  8. Hagazussa
    This is a frequently ravishing film, as attuned to the mysticism of landscapes as prime Herzog, while capable of jolting us with the occasional brutal image.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Town
    The pep, enthusiasm and apparent fun the makers of On the Town had in putting it together comes through to the audience and gives the picture its best asset.
  10. Nureyev
    Nureyev delivers Nureyev’s life in all its ecstasy and tragedy. As a documentary, it’s not definitive, but it’s good enough to leave you thrilled and haunted by this man who, at the height of his artistry, seemed to leap off the earth and leave it behind.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Scrooge
    Albert Finney's remarkable performance in the title role; executive producer Leslie Bricusse's fluid adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol, plus his unobtrusive complementary music and lyrics; and Ronald Neame's delicately controlled direction which conveys, but does not force, all the inherent warmth, humor and sentimentality.
  12. Always Be My Maybe
    Perhaps the best sequences are multi-purpose. They’re both funny and genuine, add a bubbly buoyancy through deft wit and charm, and tweak genre conventions.
  13. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    Laced with colorful stories. ... The movie is mostly content to be a portrait of Ronstadt the artist, and it’s more than satisfying on that front.
  14. Framing John DeLorean
    An adventurous hybrid. ... It shouldn’t work, but it does.
  15. Plus One
    [A] winning film ... Genre fans won’t want to miss it.
  16. The Silence of Others
    Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s straightforward but emotionally acute documentary works as both a thorough history lesson and a work of contemporary activism.
  17. General Magic
    As a literal origin story about how we live today, it’s a captivating history lesson with global appeal.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Days in May
    The performances are excellent down the line, under the taut and penetrating directorial guidance of John Frankenheimer.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prizzi's Honor
    Picture is a stretch for Nicholson, who speaks in a street-tough, accented gangster-ese that initially takes some getting used to, but shortly becomes totally convincing. Turner manages to use her loveliness to jolting results.
  20. Ready or Not
    The violence here is so over-the-top that it can lapse into comedy, prompting shocked laughter when certain characters are unexpectedly killed, and again when it comes time to dispose of their bodies, none of which can adequately prepare you for the film’s explosively funny finale.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These Are the Damned
    Although the cast is excellent, no one character dominates the action or overshadows the others. Joseph Losey's hand is so apparent that the film's considerable effectiveness must be accredited to him as must its few faults and the fearsome message it conveys.
  22. Firecrackers
    Mozaffari has an incredible eye for the details that bring a situation or place to life, working with inexperienced actors to create electrifying characters and a sense of edgy unpredictability.
  23. Echo In the Canyon
    Echo in the Canyon offers a richly evocative and star-studded overview of the 1960s Laurel Canyon music scene.
  24. Judy
    Director Rupert Goold and resurgent star Renée Zellweger have pulled off something unusual and affecting in Judy: a biographical portrait in which performer and subject meet halfway, illuminating something of each other in the process.
  25. It Must Be Heaven
    Whimsical and wistful yet infused with a yearning for the stability of place.
  26. Little Joe
    An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant.
  27. The Wild Goose Lake
    It may refer inescapably to genre classics from elsewhere, but The Wild Goose Lake is like an organic feature of the Chinese cinematic landscape, as though it pooled onto the screen in all its oily, murky glory, having welled up from deep inside the ground. Suddenly, China feels like the noirest place on Earth.
  28. Invisible Life
    Anyone already familiar with Aïnouz’s work will know to expect a florid sensory experience, but even by the Brazilian’s standards, this heartbroken tale of two sisters separated for decades by familial shame and deceit is a waking dream, saturated in sound, music and color to match its depth of feeling.
  29. 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.
  30. The Swallows of Kabul
    An involving adaptation of Yasmina Khadra’s elegant literary fiction.
  31. Nina Wu
    Nina Wu is a thrillingly complicated sort of corrective, living out the progressive ideal of giving the victim back her story, even when that story, told with lacerating self-criticism and a deep undercurrent of dismay, includes a great deal that falls far short of progressive ideals.
  32. The Climb
    Beautifully written and performed by the director and real-life BFF Kyle Marvin, Covino’s film gets precisely the balance of dependency and denial that keeps a bad bromance afloat.
  33. Deerskin
    A loopy entertaining WTF lark. ... The fact that it holds you, for 77 minutes, is a testament to the debauched rigor of Dupieux’s filmmaking.
  34. First Love
    First Love may be a fluffier, more eager-to-please bauble than Miike’s more challengingly outré titles, but like the cutesy mechanical toy puppy that turns up yapping in the middle of the film, it is wired to explode, and it is a blast.
  35. The Cordillera of Dreams
    Taken as a completed project, Guzmán’s late-career trinity is a stunning achievement in the cinema of the hidden pattern and the startling, unexpected connection.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harakiri
    This stunning film is a sombre tragedy [from Yasuhiko Takiguchi's novel] giving off deep rage against militarism, political systems and beliefs that do not allow for a rational human outlook or future change.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Longest Day
    A solid and stunning war epic.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Miracle Worker
    Where the picture really excels, outside of its inherent story values, is in the realm of photographic technique. It is here that director Penn and cameraman Ernest Caparros have teamed to create artful, indelible strokes of visual storytelling and mood-molding.
  39. Stuber
    It’s both funny and familiar to see these two incredibly different personalities thrust together for what’s meant to be a short ride. [SXSW work-in-progress review]
  40. The Invisible Man
    This gratifyingly clever and, at times, powerfully staged thriller is too rooted in our era to be called old-fashioned — its release, in fact, feels almost karmically synched to the week of the Harvey Weinstein verdict. Yet there’s one way that the movie is old-fashioned: It does an admirable job of taking us back to a time when a horror film could actually mean something.
  41. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frankenstein
    Looks like a Dracula plus, touching a new peak in horror plays and handled in production with supreme craftsmanship.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Place in the Sun
    Stevens has mounted his production lavishly. Undoubtedly cognizant of the shortcomings of the story itself as popular entertainment, studio toppers have wisely permitted the film every possible compensating advantage. The result is a big picture in both concept and execution.
  44. Joy
    If all the performances here feel lived-in, it’s because they’re literally just that — but even within that context, Alphonsus is an electric find, silently signaling Joy’s clashing moral impulses with a complexity that would defeat many a professional.
  45. An Easy Girl
    Ultimately, An Easy Girl challenges what society thinks of those who leverage their desirability as Sofia does, leaving intriguing questions about one’s values — and value — in her wake.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stagecoach
    Sweeping and powerful drama of the American frontier, Stagecoach displays potentialities that can easily drive it through as one of the surprise big grossers of the year. Without strong marquee names, picture nevertheless presents wide range of exploitation to attract, and will carry far through word-of-mouth after it gets rolling.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bringing Up Baby
    Bringing Up Baby is constructed for maximum of laughs, with Ruggles and Catlett adding to the starring team’s zany antics. There is little rhyme or reason to most of the action, but it’s all highly palatable.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Woman Under the Influence
    This is a disturbing portrait of a slightly-mad housewife. Its serious treament of a downbeat subject is hypoed by a fine performance from Peter Falk and a bravura one from Gena Rowlands.
  49. Sea of Shadows
    Told with straightforward investigative nous and a judicious teardrop of anguished sentimentality, the film makes a virtue of its many clashing participants: journalists, scientists, activists, navy officials and fishermen, each with a slightly different stance on the matter.
  50. The Survivor
    The Survivor is a Holocaust movie that’s fresh enough to make you laugh between the tears, the gasps of terror, the long road out of the inferno.
  51. The Lavender Scare
    Essential and absorbing documentary.
  52. Three Peaks
    Superbly crafted, utterly gripping.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Atlantic City
    Film is blessed with a spare, intriguing script by Yank John Guare, which always skirts impending cliches and predictability by finding unusual facets in his characters and their actions.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Yearling
    Heart-warming story of good earth, family ties and the love of the 11-year-old Jody Baxter for the faun which he is compelled to put out of his life as it becomes a yearling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The War of the Worlds
    A socko science-fiction feature, as fearsome as a film as was the Orson Welles 1938 radio interpretation of the H.G. Wells novel.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Caine Mutiny
    The Caine Mutiny is highly recommendable motion picture drama, told on the screen as forcefully as it was in the Herman Wouk best-selling novel. The intelligently adapted screenplay retains all the essence of the novel.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carmen Jones
    Preminger directs with a deft touch, blending the comedy and tragedy easily and building his scenes to some suspenseful heights. He gets fine performances from the cast toppers, notably Dorothy Dandridge, a sultry Carmen whose performance maintains the right hedonistic note throughout.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absolute Beginners
    Absolute Beginners is a terrifically inventive original musical for the screen. Daring attempt to portray the birth of teenagedom in London, 1958, almost exclusively through song is based upon Colin MacInnes' cult novel about teen life and pop fashion in the percolating moments just before the youth cultural explosion in the early 1960s.
  59. The Feeling of Being Watched
    Equal parts angry and anxious, Boundaoui’s smart, unsettling documentary functions both as a real-world conspiracy thriller and a personal reflection on the psychological strain of being made to feel an outsider in one’s own home.
  60. Swinging Safari
    A cheerfully vulgar, consistently amusing and sometimes hilarious parody of life in a suburban Aussie cul-de-sac in the mid-1970s.
  61. The Other Story
    The screenplay, co-written by Nesher and psychology professor Noam Shpancer, feels well-researched, poignantly highlighting the little things parents do that unintentionally traumatize their children. It also brims with the snappy dialogue that Nesher’s films are known for.
  62. Straight Up
    A little of this can go a long way (the film is sometimes a bit airless), but James Sweeney is a filmmaker with the rare ability to toss antically inspired dialogue right off the edge of his brain. Straight Up is the work of a startling talent.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Buddy Holly Story
    The Buddy Holly Story smacks of realism in almost every respect, from the dramaturgy involving Holly and his back-up band, The Crickets, to the verisimilitude of the musical numbers.
  64. The Ground Beneath My Feet
    Without proselytizing, and without distracting from the main thrust of her gripping, intelligent psychodrama, Kreutzer and her predominately female team have created a story both knottily specific and usefully general in its understanding that for many women, an ultimately untenable level of watchful self-control is the price of ambition.
  65. Rojo
    Rojo is a witheringly provocative examination of temporary moral eclipse becoming permanent moral apocalypse.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beaches
    [An] engaging tearjerker.
  67. Promare
    Every bit as loud and ambitious as one might expect from a visual artist with such a hyperactive imagination, sci-fi action-adventure Promare checks all the conventional anime boxes — post-apocalyptic setting, mecha suits and plenty of fan service — but it’s still an exciting watch.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Demon Seed
    Excellent performances and direction (Donald Cammell), from a most credible and literate screenplay [from a novel by Dean R. Koontz], make production an intriguing achievement in story-telling.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Murder by Death
    A very good silly-funny Neil Simon satirical comedy, with a super all-star cast.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    Norman Jewison's sensational futuristic drama about a world of Corporate States stars James Caan in an excellent performance as a famed athlete who fights for his identity and free will.
  71. Rosie
    This small, tough film provides no easy solutions.
  72. Luz
    Comparisons do not come easy with Luz, an arresting first feature for German writer-director Tilman Singer that is equal measures demonic-possession thriller, experiment in formalist rigor, and flummoxing narrative puzzle-box.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bang the Drum Slowly
    The baseball version of Brian’s Song has reduced more than a few tough guys to tears.
  74. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield comes across as a bright and jaunty corrective to the dour and stuffy Dickens adaptations that have come before.
  75. Hustlers
    Flashy, fleshy and all-around impossible to ignore, Hustlers amounts to nothing less than a cultural moment, inspired by an outrageous New York Magazine profile (which serves as the sturdy six-inch stilettos on which the movie stands) adapted by writer-director Lorene Scafaria at her most Scorsese, and starring Jennifer Lopez like you’re never seen her before.
  76. Love, Antosha
    A touching and surprising portrait of an actor who had much more going on in his life – from a serious illness to some seriously left-field artistic inclinations – than was mentioned in his obituaries.
  77. Black Widow
    Black Widow is very much about the origin of Natasha — her skills and her identity. The movie features just enough kinetic combat to give a mainstream audience that getting-your-money’s-worth feeling, but right from the opening credits (built around a dreamy slow-mo cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), most of it has a gritty, deliberate, zap-free tone that is strikingly — and intentionally — earthbound for a superhero fantasy.
  78. Dolemite Is My Name
    A total motherf—kin’ blast. ... You might have to go all the way back to the ’80s to find a Murphy performance driven by this much pleasurable funky verve.
  79. The Laundromat
    The Laundromat is Soderbergh at his most playful, and also Soderbergh at his most wonkish, and damned, in this case, if the two don’t chime together.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ladyhawke
    LadyHawke is a very likeable, very well-made fairytale that insists on a wish for its lovers to live happily ever after.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She-Devil
    The casting is a real coup, with Barr going her everywoman TV persona one better by breaking the big screen heroine mold, and Streep blowing away any notion that she can’t be funny.
  82. Los Reyes
    You don’t have to be a “dog person” to find these two irresistible, although those with a soft spot for animals may be surprised by how deeply attached they get over the course of the film.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marooned
    The film is superbly crafted, taut and a technological cliff-hanger.
  84. Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins
    The late journalist’s career and witticisms are smoothly encapsulated by veteran documentarian Janice Engel’s slick feature.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hamburger Hill
    Well-produced and directdd with an eye to documentary-like realism and authenticity, pic centers upon a military undertaking of familiar futility during the Vietnam War.
  86. 1917
    Astonishing as his filmmaking can be at times, it’s Mendes’ attention to character, more than the technique, that makes 1917 one of 2019’s most impressive cinematic achievements.
  87. A Man for All Seasons
    Producer-director Fred Zinnemann has blended all filmmaking elements into an excellent, handsome and stirring film version of A Man For All Seasons.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hill
    It is a harsh, sadistic and brutal entertainment, superbly acted and made without any concessions to officialdom.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Where Eagles Dare
    Highly entertaining, thrilling and rarely lets down for a moment.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Barefoot in the Park
    A thoroughly entertaining comedy delight about young marriage.
    • 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.
  93. Cruella
    The director, who brought a wicked edge to pop-culture redux “I, Tonya” a few years back, has rescued Cruella from the predictability of the earlier “101 Dalmatians” remakes and created a stylish new franchise of its own in which a one-time villain has been reborn as the unlikeliest of role models.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Career Opportunities
    Writer-producer John Hughes' followup to Home Alone lacks the spit-polish and magic of the blockbuster but still has plenty of absorbing characters, smart, snappy dialog and delightful stretches of comic foolery.
  95. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    “Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lair of the White Worm
    Donohoe as the vampire seductress projects a beguiling sexuality that should suck the resistance out of all but the most cold-blooded critics. She is also hilarious, a virtue shared by everyone and everything in The Lair of the White Worm.
  97. 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King of New York
    Complementing Walken’s bravura turn are equally flamboyant performances by David Caruso as the young Irish cop out to destroy Walken, and Larry Fishburne as Walken’s slightly crazy aide-de-camp.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revenge
    This far-from-perfect rendering of Jim Harrison's shimmering novella has a romantic sweep and elemental power that ultimately transcend its flaws.
  100. Bait
    The engaging and defiantly hand-crafted, offbeat experiment Bait may be black and white, but its insights, thankfully, come in subtly graded shades of gray.
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