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. Honey Boy
    Ask yourself: Just how curious are you to understand the source of Shia LaBeouf’s insecurities and rage? If this is a subject of high importance to you, then you’re in luck, because Honey Boy offers a sincere window into the actor’s soul: a vulnerable, honest (or at least honest-seeming) act of therapy through screenwriting
  2. The Killer
    In The Killer, David Fincher is hooked on his own obsession with technique, his mystique of filmmaking-as-virtuoso-procedure. It’s not that he’s anything less than great at it, but he may think there’s more shading, more revelation in how he has staged The Killer than there actually is.
  3. Boiling Point
    There’s a barreling momentum to the filmmaking that feels true to the cut and thrust of restaurant life, regardless of the script’s digressions.
  4. My Name Is Pauli Murray
    Although she died in 1985 at the age of 74, the human rights activist, lawyer, poet, professor and first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest owns this journey.
  5. Audrie & Daisy
    [A] powerful, well-crafted documentary.
  6. The Ivory Game
    There are moments when the movie tugs at your heart, but the subject matter, because it’s so epic, deserves an even more probing and definitive treatment.
  7. Mr. Roosevelt
    This riotously endearing comedy is substantially funnier, sharper, and more peculiar than that premise is bound to make it sound.
  8. Little Feet
    Here, as in his 1992 breakthrough feature, “In the Soup,” Rockwell conveys his characters’ peculiar suppositions and perceptions using a variety of cinematic approaches, many recalling the untrammeled exuberance of early cinema.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Major and the Minor
    A sparkling and effervescing piece of farce-comedy.
  10. Splitsville
    The push-pull kinetics keeping these increasingly raddled lovers together and apart eventually turn from manic to strenuous, not least because viewers are likely to be less invested than the film is in their final formation.
  11. Folktales
    With the epic, primal beauty of its remote location, Folktales scores high on visual aesthetics, but rates lower on actual content, as the youth characters aren’t as fully-fledged as one could wish and the school experience is not enough of a trial to provide real drama.
  12. Results
    Once he’s worked through the basic set-up, Bujalski puts the plot on the back burner and lets his characters collide and ricochet off one another with a laconic comic grace.
  13. Cars
    Periodic bursts of cleverness brighten the festivities, but they're too few and far between, and the trademark humor that appeals to adults and kids often misfires.
  14. Appropriate Behavior
    This tart, sexually frank portrait of a disintegrating relationship — and its long, bitter aftermath — packs plenty of punch in its best scenes, but it also frequently tests audience patience with its relentless deadpan affectlessness and insistence on leaving no Brooklyn cliche unmined.
  15. Fairyland
    There’s an unforced authenticity to its portrait of ruptured early childhood that isn’t matched by its later, more melodramatic depiction of father-daughter warfare — even if its tear-jerking tactics are undeniably effective. That it’s affecting in both registers comes down to a performance of quiet, good-humored grace by Scoot McNairy.
  16. Slay the Dragon
    Slay the Dragon is an incisively made and morally suspenseful film, at once chilling and stirring.
  17. Erin Brockovich
    Snappy and unusually funny under fundamentally serious circumstances, without being contrived or sitcomy.
  18. Zombieland
    Benefiting from the very different but very appealing comedy styles of Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg even when the script's wit runs thin, this should be catnip to jaded genre fans.
  19. Julieta
    While Julieta represents a welcome return to the female-centric storytelling that has earned Almodovar his greatest acclaim, it is far from this reformed renegade’s strongest or most entertaining work.
  20. Ferrari
    The specter of death haunts the racing scenes in “Ferrari.” That’s part of their intoxicating charge. But it isn’t just the action that’s fraught with thrilling danger. Every moment of the drama moves with a sense of high-stakes dread, of underlying emotional turbulence.
  21. Antz
    A dazzling delight.
  22. The Lookout
    A stealthy neo-noir drama that isn't afraid to take its time developing characters on the way to the payoff of a neatly designed caper scenario.
  23. News of the World
    Suspense is not the film’s strong suit, and while the trek in between needn’t be dull, Greengrass has made it curiously unengaging.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big
    A 13-year-old junior high kid Josh (David Moscow) is transformed into a 35-year-old's body (Tom Hanks) by a carnival wishing machine in this pic which unspools with enjoyable genuineness and ingenuity.
  25. Summer Pasture
    A remarkably intimate documentary woven out of tradition and change, and the endearing subjects who contend with both.
  26. Good Boy
    Good Boy reflects the powerful connection between people and their pets as few films have, ultimately devastating us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.
  27. Girl
    For Lara, dancing matters more than dating, more than anything, and as such, Dhont’s relatively modest film manages to encompass the themes of both “Billy Elliot” and “Tomboy,” and deserves the recognition of both.
  28. The Hangover
    At once raucously free-wheeling and meticulously contrived, picture satisfies as a boys-gone-wild laff riot that also clicks as a seriocomic beat-the-clock detective story.
  29. The Square
    Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    They Drive by Night
    Fast moving and actionful melodrama of long-haul trucking biz, They Drive clicks with plenty of entertainment content.
  31. The Club
    Those willing to enter The Club will discover an original and brilliantly acted chamber drama in which Larrain’s fiercely political voice comes through as loud and clear as ever.
  32. The Girl Cut in Two
    While not a classic, this is a pleasantly disturbing, nominally voyeuristic romp in the territory Chabrol knows best.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dirty Dozen
    Lee Marvin heads a very strong, nearly all-male cast in an excellent performance.
  34. Slam
    The fervent performances by the central duo, real-life poets Williams and Sohn (who wrote their own material), are impeccable, clearly stemming from their deep moral commitment to their work.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love in the Afternoon
    Under Billy Wilder's alternately sensitive, mirthful and loving-care direction, and with Maurice Chevalier turning in a captivating performance as a private detective specializing in cases of amour, the production holds enchantment and delight in substantial quantity.
  36. Journey's End
    Journey’s End never feels over-talkative, dull or even particularly claustrophobic. Much of the credit goes to the astute writing and punchy yet understated staging. But primarily, the film keeps audiences engrossed in the personalities involved, their fatigue, disillusionment and residual humanity, as well as the tenderness they extend towards one another where needed.
  37. Both Sides of the Blade
    Denis’ latest sees her applying her usual rigorous form and psychological curiosity to material that tends to inspire more generic directorial treatment, teasing out a rich, nuanced exploration of female desire from the fault lines of an ostensibly simple narrative.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rope
    Hitchcock could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed in Rope. Theme is of a thrill murder, done for no reason but to satisfy a sadistical urge and intellectual vanity.
  39. Share
    Share is fragmented and disorienting, though one suspects that confusion is perhaps Bianco’s point.
  40. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    “Dream Is Destiny” is a pleasurably crafted career snapshot that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
  41. A Borrowed Identity
    Riklis’ strongest film in several years, this is another well-intentioned plea for coexistence, though apart from one scene that lays bare, with welcome righteousness, the disturbing orientalism infiltrating even Israeli intellectual circles, the whole thing is rather too scrubbed and clean.
  42. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
    It’s a small, impressionistic, oddly heartfelt movie about beauty, stardom, adoration, exploitation, and loss. Oh, is it ever about loss.
  43. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    A powerful, necessary contribution to a chilling body of reportage that, one senses by film's end, has just begun to take stock of the human costs of a monstrous conspiracy.
  44. Megadoc
    In the end, it’s inspiring to see a director of Coppola’s stature back at work, and better this than some impersonal job for hire.
  45. Battle of the Sexes
    The outcome is widely known, but the backstory proves boisterously entertaining — and incredibly well-suited to the current climate, as King was both fighting for her gender and exploring her sexuality in 1973, when the widely publicized face-off happened.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    River's Edge
    Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge is an unusually downbeat and depressing youth pic. As group leader Layne, Crispin Glover could have used more restraint: he gives a busy, fussy performance. Others in the cast are more effective, with young Joshua Miller particularly Striking as the awful child, Tim.
  47. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    Pixar wizard Brad Bird's live-action debut serves up sights and setpieces of often jaw-dropping ingenuity and visual flair, but it's a movie of dazzling individual parts that don't come together to fully satisfying effect in the final stretch.
  48. Cold in July
    A superior piece of Texas pulp fiction that starts out like a house on fire, sags a bit in the middle, then rallies for an exuberantly bloody finish.
  49. Layer Cake
    There's a proper lived-in believability about Layer Cake's depiction of how the worlds of the rich, the criminal and the criminally rich intersect.
  50. The Company
    Robert Altman takes an elegant, appealingly unemphatic look at the world of ballet.
  51. Ray
    Bursting at the seams with music, Taylor Hackford's ambitious film provides a good sense of the pioneering entertainer's extraordinary journey and brings it to life with plenty of colorful detail.
  52. Bam gua nat
    Very Korean in its emotional content, while also preserving a quizzical distance that is quite French, picture is one of his lightest and most easily digestible metaphysical meals to date.
  53. Palio
    The film boasts characters as rich, and a narrative as entertaining, as might be found in the most crowd-pleasing of scripted sports sagas.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
    There’s tremendous dramatic impact threaded throughout the picture, interwoven with those deft human episodes which have become familiar with Capra’s direction in previous pictures. He keys the motivation of his basic premise without wasting time, and then carries it through vigorously.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Parent Trap
    David Swift, whose writing, direction and appreciation of young Hayley Mills’ natural histrionic resources contributed so much to Pollyanna, repeats the three-ply effort on this excursion, with similar success.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mask
    Based on a true story, Mask is alive with the rhythms and textures of a unique life. Both in the background and foreground, Mask draws a vivid picture of life among a particular type of lower middle class Southern California whites. Much of the credit for keeping the film from tripping over must go to the cast, especially Stoltz, who, with only his eyes visible behind an elaborate makeup job, brings a lively, life-affirming personality to his role without a trace of self-pity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Incredible Shrinking Man
    Director Jack Arnold works up the chills for maximum effect.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room for One More
    A happy combination of good humor and warm drama has been put together with neat results in Room for One More.
  59. Dead Pigs
    If that lack of discipline is the cost of the generous, expansive, energetic wit of Yan’s immensely promising first feature, it’s one we should be happy to pay.
  60. A First Farewell
    Told mostly through the eyes of primary school-aged characters, “Farewell” operates firstly as a film that can be deemed as suitable for children, while also offering plenty for adult audiences to read between the lines.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sea Wolf
    Robinson provides plenty of vigor and two-fisted energy to the actor-proof role of Larsen, and at times is over-directed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waterloo Bridge
    Elaborating on the basic premise of Robert Sherwood's play, and doing a slick job of cleansing to conform to present regulations of the Hays code, this is a persuasive and compelling romantic tragedy.
  63. The Girl with a Bracelet
    The Girl With a Bracelet comments intelligently on our culture’s propensity to sex-shame and emotionally instruct young women in particular — points which stand regardless of whether shedunnit or not.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cavalcade
    Cavalcade is about as well made as that subject could have been made for the screen. At first thought it would seem too foreign a matter for American consumption, but it’s the first big historical epic on England that means something over here. It’s so powerful and embracing that the matter of nationality and background is lost, or forgotten.
  65. High Tide
    A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.
  66. Renoir
    None of this would work at all if it weren’t pinned to the unselfconscious gaze of Fuki (delightful newcomer Yui Suzuki), 11 years old and already an original.
  67. The Inspection
    Pope gives a career-igniting performance.
  68. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    Subject's career being inextricably tied to two extremely entertaining U.S. decades, Gonzo has a wealth of delightful archival footage to draw on, both directly involving Thompson and evoking the cultural landscape around him.
  69. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    Once again making a diverting but insubstantial movie look better than it is, Downey, with haggard charm to burn, is winning all the way. Kilmer is riotous at times as an impeccably groomed, businesslike guy keen to assert his orientation at every opportunity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is an affecting study of an uppercrust Midwestern family in the late 1930s.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crossing Delancey
    In an unexpectedly enjoyable way, Crossing Delancey addresses one of the great societal issues of our day - the dilemma of how the 30-ish, attractive, successful, intelligent and unmarried female finds a mate she can be happy with.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What's Up, Doc?
    The script and cast are excellent; the direction and comedy staging are outstanding; and there are literally reels of pure, unadulterated and sustained laughs.
  73. Three Monkeys
    But gripping as the film often is, its unrelenting doom and gloom offers fewer lasting rewards.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Long Walk Home
    An effectively mounted drama about the human impact of changing times on two families, with sturdy performances by Sissy Spacek as an uppercrust white housewife and Whoopi Goldberg as her maid.
  75. Zootopia 2
    These movies are comedies first and crime-film homages second, but it’s their tertiary value as social commentary that makes the franchise so indispensable: Behind the laughs are teachable moments.
  76. Bowfinger
    So lunatic that it creates as much puzzled disbelief as it does carefree delight.
  77. One Of Them Days
    Palmer, though she has the “straight” role, is so witty in her attack that she commands the screen. And SZA, in her film debut, simply sizzles. She’s a volcano of camp fury. The director, Lawrence Lamont, is a helmer of hip-hop videos making his feature-film directing debut, and while it might seem his main task is to keep the comedy crackling, the film’s secret weapon is the visual and rhythmic flow he imparts to it.
  78. The Adults
    The Adults is most moving in its understanding of the trivial quips, asides and slight, splintered anecdotes that are sometimes all that remains between adult relatives who once shared richer connective tissue.
  79. The New World
    Malick's exalted visuals and isolated metaphysical epiphanies are ill-supported by a muddled, lurching narrative, resulting in a sprawling, unfocused account of an epochal historical moment.
  80. Fire Will Come
    You know exactly what climax is coming in Oliver Laxe’s rustically beautiful rural parable, but its dreamy, mesmeric power lies in the waiting.
  81. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    Crude, sophomorically homophobic but frequently funny, pic also overstays its welcome a bit and indulges in some juvenile excesses. All told, though, The 40 Year Old Virgin delivers enough belly laughs.
  82. In This Corner of the World
    Adapting Fumiyo Kono’s 2007 manga of the same title, director Sunao Katabuchi captures the manifold experiences of a housewife during WWII with beguiling intimacy and appealing hand-drawn illustration.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bull Durham
    A fanciful and funny bush league sports story where the only foul ball is its overuse of locker-room dialog.
  84. Herman's House
    A portrait of an invisible man, Herman's House is a raised voice in the constitutional debate over solitary confinement.
  85. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    The movie plays like a career summation in which the 68-year-old writer-director has simply run out new ideas.
  86. The Cats of Mirikitani
    Always surprising documentary makes excellent use of its many serendipidities.
  87. Dark Waters
    What gives Dark Waters its singular texture is that Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”), who has never made a drama remotely like this, colors in the scenario with an underlying dimension of personalized obsession.
  88. Attenberg
    A captivating and vaguely disturbing experience.
  89. Hello, Bookstore
    Hello, Bookstore is a salute to the sacramental qualities of art that are threaded through everyday life.
  90. The Original Kings of Comedy
    Consistently hilarious.
  91. Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    Superbly crafted documentary is strong enough to make believers out of non-metalheads, and inside enough to get the devil's-horns salute from the most diehard followers.
  92. Shattered Glass
    Credibly and absorbingly relates the tale of journalistic fraud perpetrated by young writer Stephen Glass at the New Republic five years back.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    A simple, low-budget, contempo dramedy -- with plenty of clever plot reversals.
  94. War of the Worlds
    A gritty, intense and supremely accomplished sci-fier.
  95. In My Mother's Skin
    “In My Mother’s Skin” finds a rare sweet spot between story-book nightmare and historical allegory.
  96. I Believe in Unicorns
    A sensitively observed and arrestingly impressionistic drama that feels at once deeply personal and easily accessible.
  97. Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang
    “Sky Ladder” may not fully penetrate the mystery of Cai’s artistic identity, but it ends with the poignant suggestion that the most significant accomplishments often stem from the simplest, most personal impulse.
  98. Love & Basketball
    The pic is so well directed and lead performance by Sanaa Lathan so charismatic that audiences will overlook the script's flaws and root for the central duo.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Breaker Morant
    As a sheer exercise in manipulation, it approaches the masterful and is extremely effective.
  100. Thirst
    An overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration.
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