Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a visionary tour de force, morphing from a childlike gambol into a sophisticated allegory on the folly of materialism and the evanescence of beauty.
  2. Uncertain
    In another director’s hands, the residents might be labeled “eccentric” and condescendingly depicted for laughs, but Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands approach this touch-and-go community with curiosity and humanism, capturing what feels like a deciding moment in a series of struggles so far off the grid, they would otherwise escape our notice entirely.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Captain Blood
    Captain Blood, from the Rafael Sabatini novel, is a big picture. It's a spectacle which will establish both Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Director Michael Curtiz hasn't spared the horses. It's a lavish, swashbuckling saga of the Spanish main.
    • 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.
  5. Great Freedom
    Meise’s film is an exquisite marriage of personal, political and sensual storytelling, its narrative and temporal drift tightened by another performance of quietly piercing vulnerability from Franz Rogowski.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Star Is Born
    A Star Is Born was a great 1937 moneymaker and it’s an even greater picture in its filmusical transmutation.
  7. No End in Sight
    With an accountant's eye for precision and a political scientist's grasp of the machinations that move national policy, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight itemizes the errors, misjudgments and follies that have defined the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It's a Wonderful Life
    Frank Capra and James Stewart, in returning to films after long years in uniform, endow the pic with its most telling contributions. Herewith, Stewart touches the thespic peak of his career. He hasn’t lost a whit of his erstwhile boyish personality (when called to turn it on) and further shows a maturity and depth he seems recently to have acquired.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Madness of King George
    The effective strategy of Bennett, who adapted his 1991 play for the screen, is to demythologize the members of the royal family without trivializing their lives. Hawthorne brings to his complex part a strong screen presence, light self-mockery and pathos that set divergent moods throughout the film.
  10. Phoenix
    Because Petzold is such a gifted storyteller, with the lean, driving narrative sense of the film noir masters, he also keeps those twists and turns chugging smoothly along, building to a climax so expertly orchestrated that one imagines he started with it in mind and worked the rest of the movie backward from there.
  11. Magellan
    The spirit of slow cinema is alive and languid in this stunningly mounted, politically rigorous work, which confronts any viewers hoping for a sweeping biographical romp with a frank post-colonial perspective, thoroughly and violently dismantling any romanticized legacy trailing the eponymous Portuguese navigator.
  12. Goodbye Solo
    Utterly engrossing dual-character study, unfolding with a serene disregard for indie quirkiness, Goodbye Solo radiates authenticity.
  13. Gunda
    Its radiantly beautiful imagery and gently immersive storytelling aren’t in service of a single browbeating message, but a broader, holistic view of where we and the animals we rear, use and consume fit into a single circle of life.
  14. Western
    A low-key but sharply observed work that benefits from real local flavor and a gift for lyric image making.
  15. The Power of the Dog
    All of this should build, slowly and inexorably, in force and emotion. But for a film that’s actually, at heart, rather tidy and old-fashioned in its triangular gamesmanship, “The Power of the Dog” needed to get to a more bruising catharsis. In its crucial last act, the film becomes too oblique.
  16. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    [A] lengthy but absorbing and illuminating documentary.
  17. The Winding Stream
    The Winding Stream is cogent and compelling as a pop-culture history lesson, and genuinely uplifting while it shows how contemporary artists — along with descendants like Rosanne and John Carter Cash — keep the legacy of A.P., Mother Maybelle, June and Johnny alive and thriving.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sullivan's Travels
    Sullivan’s Travels is a curious but effective mixture of grim tragedy, slapstick of the Key- stone brand and smart, trigger-fast comedy.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Downhill Racer
    Redford contributes a sensitive, interesting portrayal. His interpretation is many-faceted and probing. Hackman’s characterization is virile and thoroughly human.
  20. Columbus
    The hypnotically paced drama carried by the serendipitous odd-couple pairing of John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson is lovely and tender, marking Kogonada as an auteur to watch.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night of the Living Dead
    Although pic’s basic premise is repellent – recently dead bodies are resurrected and begin killing human beings in order to eat their flesh – it is in execution that the film distastefully excels.
  22. The Artist
    A love letter to silent cinema sealed with a smirk, The Artist reteams director Michel Hazanavicius with dapper "OSS 117" star Jean Dujardin for another high-concept homage, delivering a heartfelt, old-school romance without the aid of spoken dialogue or sound.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Yankee Doodle Dandy
    Yankee Doodle Dandy is something to cheer about from any perspective.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Foreign Correspondent
    Story is essentially the old cops-and-robbers. But it has been set in a background of international political intrigue of the largest order.
  25. Zama
    The frustrating nine-year wait for new material from Martel has done nothing to blunt her exquisite, inventive command of sound and image, nor her knack for subtly violent exposure of social and racial prejudice on the upper rungs of the class ladder.
  26. The Piano
    The Piano confirms Campion as a major talent, an uncompromising filmmaker with a very personal and specific vision.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Of Mice and Men
    Under skillful directorial guidance of Lewis Milestone, the picture retains all of the forceful and poignant drama of John Steinbeck's original play and novel, in presenting the strange palship and eventual tragedy of the two California ranch itinerants.
  28. Dead Souls
    Wang Bing’s Dead Souls is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.
  29. Cameraperson
    Without narration or a conventional storyline, it’s a uniquely insightful memoir-cum-critical-treatise.
  30. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    At once a celebration and a lament, simultaneously jubilant and ineffably sad, it’s a film worth sticking around to see.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Quai des Orfèvres [re-release]
    In every respect it is outstanding.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    High Noon
    Cooper does an unusually able job of portraying the marshal. (Review of Original Release)
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebel Without a Cause
    Here is a fairly exciting, suspenseful and provocative, if also occasionally far-fetched, melodrama of unhappy youth on another delinquency kick.
  34. The Quiet Girl
    On occasion the deep investment in the long silences and sorrowful gazes that mostly make up Cáit’s life can teeter close to preciousness. When it does, though, there’s always Clinch’s superbly modulated performance, and the way the compassionate camera lavishes on Cáit all the attention that quiet, nice kids like her rarely receive, to bring us back onside.
  35. Letters from Iwo Jima
    Taken together, "Flags" and "Letters" represent a genuinely imposing achievement, one that looks at war unflinchingly -- that does not deny its necessity but above all laments the human loss it entails.
    • 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.
  37. Anomalisa
    Anomalisa’s existence is a minor miracle on multiple levels, from the Kickstarter campaign that funded it (the credits give “special thanks” to 1,070 names) to the oh-so-delicate way the film creeps up on you, transitioning from a low-key dark night of the soul into something warm, human and surprisingly tender.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Funny Girl
    Barbra Streisand in her Hollywood debut makes a marked impact.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    The picture is infinitely better art – indeed, in many passages it is an astonishing fine bit of interpreting a classic, but as popular fare it loses in vital reaction.
  40. I'm Going Home
    Elusive and elliptical as it is, this is one of the most accessible films in Oliveira's recent repetoire.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Conversation
    A major artistic asset to the film - besides script, direction and the top performances - is supervising editor Walter Murch's sound collage and re-recording.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Diva
    Diva is an extraordinary thriller and first film from Jean-Jacques Beineix, complex, stylish and fast-moving.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Show Boat
    Show Boat, Universal’s second talkerized version, is a smash filmusical. Basic tender romance [from Edna Ferber’s novel] between Magnolia (Irene Dunne) and Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones), romantic wastrel of the Mississippi river banks, has been most effectively projected by this reproduction of the classic [1927] Edna Ferber-Oscar Hammerstein II-Jerome Kern operetta.
  44. The Arbor
    Dramatically spellbinding and intellectually stimulating, picture abstractly manipulates multiple layers of representation to shattering effect.
  45. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Plunging viewers into an extended dream sequence in the name of abstract motifs such as memory, time, and space, the film is a lush plotless mood-piece swimming in artsy references and ostentatious technical exercises, with a star (Tang Wei, “Lust, Caution”) as decoration.
  46. Three Minutes: A Lengthening
    Stigter’s method is simultaneously creative and forensic, but never sentimental. Working with a digitized copy that bears the blemishes left by the deterioration of the original celluloid, she conjures up exactly what she declares in the subtitle: a lengthening.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Richard III
    At all times Shakespeare’s poetry, impeccably spoken by this outstanding cast, heightens the dramatic atmosphere. The production, and notably Roger Furse’s decor, is consistently spectacular. The climactic battle sequences rival the pageantry of Henry V.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lion King
    A dazzling -- and unexpectedly daring -- addition to the Disney canon.
  49. 4 Little Girls
    Lee takes a conventional, talking-heads-and-archival-clips approach to the material, but rewardingly establishes an intimate connection with his subjects by devoting considerable time to the personalities and families of the four victims.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wild Strawberries
    Pic sometimes talks too much in philosophical asides, but it remains a searching pictorial analysis of a man’s life. Expert directorial touches and notations of director Ingmar Bergman, and the dignified miming of oldtime director Sjostrom, plus other fine thespic additions, make this an offbeater. It’s a personal and profound work.
  51. Ear for Eye
    This abrasive, exhilarating film is out to candidly say its piece, to identify and evoke the world as Tucker Green sees it, and doesn’t much care if viewers agree or not.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    Film has superior technical narrative, impressive lensing and thesping.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    How Green Was My Valley
    Based on a best-selling novel, this saga of Welsh coal-mining life is replete with much human interest, romance, conflict and almost every other human emotion to match up to cinematic standards for all audiences.
  54. Azor
    Like the intelligent performances — both Rongione and Cléau are standouts — and the terrific art direction, the film’s design reinforces an exquisite, levelheaded decorum about to be smashed by a chillingly cruel monster.
  55. Paddington 2
    Paddington 2 is another near-pawfect family entertainment, honoring the cozy, can-do spirit of Bond’s stories while bringing them smoothly into a bustling, diverse 21st-century London — with space for some light anti-Brexit subtext to boot.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Little Mermaid
    Romantic, suspenseful and at times extremely funny.
  57. City Hall
    The result is both sober and inspiring: an urban progress report taking into account a plethora of government services, scutinized by Wiseman’s patient but unblinking eye.
  58. A Serious Man
    One doesn't know how (auto)biographical any or all of this is, but there's a tartness to the telling of what amounts to a well-shaped series of anecdotes that bespeaks distant pain or, at least, wincing memory twisted into mordant comedy by time and sensibility.
  59. Capote
    The mesmerizing performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the celebrated writer dominates every scene, while director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman's penetrating study enthralls in every aspect.
  60. The Death of Stalin
    Though sporadically brilliant, this too-often uneven send-up of Russian politics attempts to maintain the rapid-fire, semi-improvisational style of Iannucci’s earlier work...while situating such madness within an elaborately costumed and production-designed period milieu.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Miracle on 34th Street
    So you don't believe in Santa Claus? If you want to stay a non-believer don't see Miracle.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Strangers on a Train
    Given a good basis for a thriller in the Patricia Highsmith novel [script adaption by Whitfield Cook] and a first-rate script, Hitchcock embroiders the plot into a gripping, palm-sweating piece of suspense.
  63. From What Is Before
    The fragile interplay of nature and civilization is best expressed in the way Diaz frequently sets the stage for each scene, allowing us to absorb the contours and details of every location before ever so gradually introducing human characters, looking small and ant-like, into the frame.
  64. About Dry Grasses
    This is Ceylan at his most limber and mischievous, the filmmaking exhibiting a generosity and curiosity that belies the script’s defense of individualist, even isolationist, living, at whatever cost to one’s own happiness.
  65. Hard Truths
    Leigh’s films can feel shaggy and unstructured on first viewing, and Hard Truths is no different. But there’s profound poetry in every scene.
  66. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    A brave, challenging picture that makes the viewer complicit in the action, it is also perhaps the first film since the declaration of the Islamic Republic to confront so directly the brutality of the feared security apparatus.
  67. In Transit
    Sampling snippets and snatches of lives and conversations, Maysles and his fellow filmmakers undertake a folk odyssey through northern landscapes that proves a fitting farewell to an American ethnographer.
  68. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    It’s far from a masterpiece, yet it holds you, it adds up, and it’s something to see.
  69. Quest
    [A] living, breathing, stunning documentary.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Overlord [re-release]
    US director Stuart Cooper gives it the right understated, unheroic feel. (Review of Original Release)
  71. A Film Unfinished
    It stands as a unique film-within-a-film, of significance for the historical value of the raw images, the memories they spur and internal evidence of how the Nazis staged scenes long assumed to be real.
  72. Things to Come
    Huppert is such a persistently and prolifically rigorous performer that she risks being taken for granted in some of her vehicles, but this is major, many-shaded work even by her lofty standards.
  73. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    A captivating 1930s-set caper whose innumerable surface pleasures might just seduce you into overlooking its sly intelligence and depth of feeling.
  74. Train Dreams
    Just because Malick’s influence can be felt does not mean that Bentley hasn’t found his own vocabulary to tell Grainier’s story. At times, Train Dreams feels almost quilt-like in the way its pieces fit together, with certain sounds and images flickering briefly, almost subliminally, across our consciousness, often to echo further on.
  75. Winter Sleep
    Nuri Bilge Ceylan is at the peak of his powers with Winter Sleep, a richly engrossing and ravishingly beautiful magnum opus that surely qualifies as the least boring 196-minute movie ever made.
  76. To Kill a Tiger
    To Kill a Tiger depicts a shining, poignant example of the difference individuals can make in altering the social fabric.
  77. A Star Is Born
    Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet.
  78. Citizenfour
    Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways.
  79. Time Out
    Theater veteran Recoing is utterly compelling. Both the script and the resourceful, subtle actor provide enormous insight into the troubled character.
  80. Away from Her
    What Away From Her achieves is quite admirable-- a low-key, intelligent setting for performances marked by those same qualities.
  81. Hamilton
    The film aims to be more intimate, but it frequently deprives audiences of the show’s ingenious spatial design. Still, this original cast is so charismatic — and Miranda’s ultra-dense, dizzyingly clever book and lyrics are so effective — that they maintain our attention even when the edit feels like one of those live sporting events, as a producer sits in the control booth choosing between cameras in the moment, rather than planning out the shoot in advance.
  82. The Father
    The Father is a chamber piece, but it has the artistic verve to keep twisting the reality it shows us without becoming a stunt.
  83. Foxtrot
    Brilliantly constructed with a visual audacity that serves the subject rather than the other way around, this is award-winning filmmaking on a fearless level.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Howards End
    Perhaps the best film made during the 30-year partnership of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Innocents
    Catches an eerie, spine-chilling mood right at the start and never lets up on its grim, evil theme. Director Jack Clayton makes full use of camera angles, sharp cutting, shadows, ghost effects and a sinister soundtrack.
  86. Inside Job
    Charles Ferguson's sophomore film Inside Job is the definitive screen investigation of the global economic crisis, providing hard evidence of flagrant amorality -- and of a new nonfiction master at work.
  87. Sweet Country
    The spare, classical chase drama that ensues is seeded with barbed observations on colonialism, cultural erasure and rough justice, kept poetically succinct by Thornton’s lithe, soaring visual storytelling.
  88. Leave No Trace
    There’s a listless, almost meandering nature to the story. The film’s conflict is clear — this is no way to raise a child, and allowed to continue in this fashion, Will risks both his life and Tom’s — and yet there’s no sense of where the script it headed, and no urgency to its resolution.
  89. Chicken Run
    Technically superb and witty in an old-fashioned, veddy British way that will delight many adults but will sail over the heads of young audiences.
  90. The King's Speech
    While far from easy, both roles provide a delightful opportunity for Firth and Rush to poke a bit of fun at their profession.
  91. Fargo
    In the darkly humorous Fargo, iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen manage the precarious balancing act of respecting genre conventions and simultaneously pushing them to an almost surrealistic extreme. Very funny stuff.
  92. Parallel Mothers
    It’s a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama. Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama. But Parallel Mothers, while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party.c
  93. Hell or High Water
    Hell or High Water is a thrillingly good movie — a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.
  94. Up
    A captivating odd-couple adventure that becomes funnier and more exciting as it flies along.
  95. Shirkers
    Shirkers isn’t about Cardona, but about Tan reclaiming the film and the story that he had taken away from her. Her energized, rough-hewn documentary style doesn’t seem that far removed from her lost debut, but she and her friends have enough perspective to look back at that period in their lives with touching fondness and good humor.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mildred Pierce
    At first reading James M. Cain's novel of the same title might not suggest screenable material, but the cleanup job has resulted in a class feature, showmanly produced by Jerry Wald and tellingly directed by Michael Curtiz.
  97. Poor Things
    Oddly moving in its fervor and abundance, Poor Things may appear a far cry from the harsh, stripped ascetism of an early work like “Dogtooth.” But they’re actually similar animals, fixated on taking people apart to find what makes them tick, what makes them swoon, what makes them interesting.
  98. 45365
    A seductive, fascinating tapestry of small-town life.
  99. Tootsie
    Remarkably funny and entirely convincing, film pulls off the rare accomplishment of being an in-drag comedy which also emerges with three-dimensional characters.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Kill a Mockingbird
    To Kill a Mockingbird is a major film achievement, a significant, captivating and memorable picture that ranks with the best of recent years.
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