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. Dark Money
    In contrast to the very personal “Prodigal Sons,” Reed’s sophomore feature is straightforward reportage, telling a complex, multi-issue story with a large number of players, in admirably cogent terms.
  2. Tell Them Who You Are
    A compelling look at the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler by his photojournalist son Mark.
  3. Hellboy
    Has more than enough across-the-board appeal to attract mainstream auds unfamiliar with source material.
  4. Goldie
    With vibrantly expressive aesthetics that match the energy of its defiant and distressed heroine, this impressive coming-of-age indie . . . heralds the arrival of both a distinctive new filmmaking voice and a leading lady with charisma to burn.
  5. Sleepless in Seattle
    Yet for all the enjoyable flourishes, and there are many, Ephron keeps pausing to remind us, through various contrivances, that this is a movie, making it hard for anyone to really get lost in the story.
  6. Days of the Whale
    For all the peril that darkens its fringes, there’s an indomitable youthful exuberance that thrums through Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s debut feature “Days of the Whale.”
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    America America
    Elia Kazan gives a penetrating, thorough and profoundly affecting account of the hardships endured and surmounted at the turn of the century by a young Greek lad in attempting to fulfill his cherished dream - getting to America from the old country.
  8. Hail, Caesar!
    This gorgeously crafted romp through the backlots and Malibu enclaves of Hollywood’s Golden Age tosses off plenty of eccentric comedy and musical razzle-dazzle before taking on richer, more ruminative dimensions, ultimately landing on the funny-sad question of whether life is but a dream factory.
  9. The Painted Bird
    The film’s sheer unblinking stamina is as impressive as its pristine formal composure, though it has to be said that at nearly three hours — somewhat surprising, considering the novel’s brevity — its blunt-instrument force doesn’t yield much fresh perspective on oft-dramatized atrocities.
  10. 4
    Its bawdy comedy, bravura sound design and uncanny atmosphere will turn on auds with a taste for deeply oddball fare and baffle others.
  11. Four Hours at the Capitol
    The imagery of destruction and assault is powerful on its own terms; it’s in building the story of the participants’ motives and actions that Four Hours at the Capitol falters, making what could have been a definitive document into a deeply flawed one.
  12. The Color Purple
    Barrino’s soul-felt R&B sensibility lends itself to the role, and the patience it took to reach this point mirrors Celie’s long path to finding herself. Barrino may have embodied the character on Broadway 15 years earlier, but the moment is now right, and everyone else in the terrific ensemble seems to have fallen into place around that choice.
  13. The Lure
    This kooky-monster escapade is never less than arresting, and sometimes even a riot.
  14. Mistaken for Strangers
    Mistaken for Strangers, a documentary about indie group the National, comes off like an exercise in self-deprecation. As much a diary film as a rockumentary, it almost compulsively veers away from its ostensible subject.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Planes, Trains & Automobiles
    John Hughes has come up with an effective nightmare-as-comedy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Disaster-prone duo of Steve Martin and John Candy repeatedly recall a contemporary Laurel & Hardy as they agonizingly try to make their way from New York to Chicago by various modes of transport.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Igby Goes Down
    Young Kieran Culkin holds his own against a stellar ensemble in Igby Goes Down, a family comedy so dark it turns "The Royal Tennebaums" into latter-day Bradys.
  17. Babes
    With Adlon there to spot them, Glazer and Buteau trust-fall into their respective parts, potentially unlikable qualities and all. At times, the pair get so filthy, you may not believe your ears. But strength, as the saying goes, comes from the mouth of babes.
  18. Safety Not Guaranteed
    Develops into an endearingly scrappy and romantic romp that serves up some nice soul-searching moments alongside a steady stream of laughs.
  19. Christine
    Far from the austere death march it might threaten to be on paper, this is a thrumming, heartsore, sometimes viciously funny character study, sensitive both to the singularities of Chubbuck’s psychological collapse and the indignities weathered by any woman in a 1970s newsroom.
  20. Clear and Present Danger
    Narrative complexity and momentum make this a true cinematic equivalent of an absorbing page-turner.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Die Hard
    As high tech, rock hard and souped up as an action film can be.
  22. Suburban Birds
    Viewers, too, may feel at once cast adrift in the film’s amorphous quests, and languidly seduced by its disorder.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bubot Niyar
    Distilled from a six-episode Israeli TV series, pic mostly fails to transcend its ramshackle structure or penetrate the inner-lives of its subjects.
  24. Saturday Church
    The movie’s not only appropriate for teen audiences, but also constructive in the way it invites viewers to consider and discuss issues of intolerance and hypocrisy, even as it encourages those who don’t fit the straight, marriage-oriented paradigm to embrace their own identities.
  25. Star Trek Into Darkness
    Markedly grander in scale, although never at the expense of its richly human (and half-human) characters, “Into Darkness” may not boldly go where no “Trek” adventure has gone before, but getting there is such a well-crafted, immensely pleasurable ride that it would be positively Vulcan to nitpick.
  26. Dope
    The fun momentum of Dope’s breakneck plotting and snappy dialogue easily overcome any momentary attack of earnestness.
  27. Queer
    The last third of “Queer” may prove to be a challenge for audiences — much more so than the film’s explicit eroticism. Yet Luca Guadagino is telling a version of the same compelling story that he told in “Call Me by Your Name”: that of a queer love that, instead of delivering the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world.
  28. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
    Helmers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin... don’t quite get to the issues behind the trio’s infamous performance at the historic Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow last year, but the young women’s vulnerability and defiance make for stirring viewing.
  29. The Great Invisible
    A uniquely thought-provoking chronicle of an event that, in the absence of any real preventive action taken by oil companies or the U.S. government, calls out for further cinematic and journalistic attention.
  30. Under the Gun
    It’s not necessarily artful, but it’s also never less than compelling. If anything, Soechtig has only refined her skills at packaging a slick, audience-friendly documentary with a subject that feels even more urgent.
  31. Monkey Kingdom
    The eighth entry in Disney’s eco-minded Disneynature series, Monkey Kingdom may well be its cheekiest, funniest and most purely entertaining.
  32. Bugonia
    As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance.
  33. Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
    Top-class fighting and fabulous production design overcome the stale plot.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brewster McCloud
    Brewster McCloud spares practically nothing in contemporary society. Literate original screenplay is a sardonic fairy tale for the times, extremely well cast and directed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    A pleasant film about an old man who rejuvenates himself on a cross-country trek. Script is a series of good human comedy vignettes, with the large supporting cast of many familiar names in virtual cameo roles.
  36. Lovers of Hate
    The movie is witty only on occasion. But it lingers in the mind, thanks largely to its trio of actors -- especially Alex Karpovsky.
  37. Pieta
    The final reel packs a genuine emotional wallop, even as it makes auds laugh with the vicious precision of its dramatic irony.
  38. Slow
    Slow reveals itself to be quite a tender portrait of love and companionship, of what our bodies yearn and want in others, and how we could do well to upend the stories we tell each other about living and loving another.
  39. Orion and the Dark
    Kaufman’s innovations all make Orion and the Dark less predictable, potentially engaging young viewers in the storytelling process. But they also make for a more stressful experience overall, as if Orion wasn’t high-strung enough already.
  40. Sweet Thing
    A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Under Fire
    Thesping is on the plus side, particularly Nolte in a role cut to his proportions. Director Roger Spottiswode, after a couple of earlier actioners, has great potential.
  42. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    Whatever literary talent Leroy was praised for shouldn’t have been so quickly forgotten and dismissed by those who’d once championed it. However, that praise was won under false pretenses — and while you can criticize Leroy fans for claiming to love the writing when they really fell in love with the myth it came packaged in, you can’t blame them for feeling ripped off.
  43. Possessor Uncut
    On a technical level, the film is just astonishing, especially as regards the two lead actors’ performances.
  44. The Buffalo Boy
    Sports a stronger narrative spine than is usual in Vietnamese rural dramas and a less fragile tone in its deployment of landscape and character.
  45. 9 Star Hotel
    In dangerous and downright cruddy conditions, the personable Palestinians share stories, lodgings and camaraderie with the young Israeli filmmaker, whose handheld camera follows them everywhere.
  46. Adela
    Artfully observed, it's content to let Linda be the sole, compelling focal point.
  47. Bellflower
    A likely cult hit among horror fans and a gleeful affront to more delicate sensibilities, Bellflower takes the young-adult romantic-comedy blueprint and subjects it to a kind of devilish origami, creating a disturbed and disturbing parable about young male fantasies, fears and avoidance of adulthood.
  48. Wuss
    An impressively crafted drama laced with darkly comic humor.
  49. Every Last Child
    Impressive though the results of the WHO’s campaign to eradicate polio may be, it is Zaidi’s lensing of the streets, waterways and people of Pakistan that lingers in the mind.
  50. India's Daughter
    Leslee Udwin’s hour-long activist documentary India’s Daughter makes for grim, infuriating and sadly necessary viewing, its despair tinged with the faintest hope that the protestors’ call for gender equality may yet be reignited.
  51. The Rolling Stones Olé Olé Olé!: A Trip Across Latin America
    The band still sounds phenomenal onstage, and the concert scenes are expertly shot, with plenty of roaming on-the-ground footage to take in the audience ambiance.
  52. Finding Oscar
    A standard-issue piece of heart-tugging reportage better suited to small screens than art houses.
  53. Blade of the Immortal
    The story’s supernatural elements enable Miike to take huge liberties with chanbara, the oldest genre in Japanese cinema, and break free from rigid traditions of choreographing swordplay sequences.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
    The acting is superb. Cannon proves an expert comedienne. She and Gould practically steal the film, although admittedly they have the best lines. Wood and Culp give equally fine performances....The film is almost flawless, presenting the issues in a pleasing, entertaining and thought-provoking manner.
  55. Summer in the Forest
    Wright satisfies in providing a glimpse of an alternative community and lifestyle that appears near-idyllic without being painted in terms that are too sentimental or cute.
  56. Alice
    It’s one of the most daring films ever made, not so much because of anything it overtly depicts as what this controversial classic reveals about the infinitely complicated psychology of human sexuality.
  57. No. 7 Cherry Lane
    Many will be left bewildered by the sheer, deranged obsessiveness of Yonfan’s nostalgia head-trip — indeed, there were whistles and walkouts at its first Venice press screening — but accustomed Yon-fans and patient adventurers will fall madly for its madness.
  58. A German Youth
    Utilizing news footage, TV programs, crude activist films and the like, Périot (always his own editor) builds his arguments almost invisibly, guiding the viewer while trusting his audience to use their heads. How refreshing to have a director refuse black-and-white conclusions, knowing that formulating questions is the best way to probe the past and its ramifications.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Road to Utopia
    Technically picture leaves nothing to be desired. Paul Jones, producer, and Hal Walker, who directed, make a fine combination in steering and in the production value provided.
  60. My Rembrandt
    Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.
  61. The Beta Test
    The movie, at its best, holds you in its grip.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Evil Dead II
    More an absurdist comedy than a horror film, Evil Dead II is a flashy good-natured display of special effects and scare tactics so extreme they can only be taken for laughs.
  63. 50/50
    Will Reiser's semiautobiographical script initially prescribes too artificial a story treatment for its characters but is rescued by a genial, low-key vibe that builds in sensitivity and emotion up through the final reels.
  64. Full Battle Rattle
    A so-so pic on an incendiary subject, Full Battle Rattle follows the training regimen of one battalion during engagement and occupation in one of 13 fake "villages" comprising a massive Iraq simulation somewhere in the Mojave Desert.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waiting for Guffman
    The enterprise comes across like a bunch of talented friends making an elaborate home movie for their own amusement.
  66. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Sara Driver, the director of “Boom for Real” (who was there at the time, as Jim Jarmusch’s early producer and romantic partner), creates an alluring and detailed portrait of how the downtown scene came together, springing up like weeds between the cracks of a broken New York, its poverty-row aesthetic infused with the energy of punk and the vivacity of hip-hop (before it was called that).
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Super 8
    A relatively standard monster movie.
  68. War Horse
    This beautifully composed picture brings a robust physicality to tried-and-true source material, but falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heaven Can Wait
    Heaven Can Wait is an outstanding film. Harry Segall's fantasy comedy-drama play, made in 1941 by Columbia as Here Comes Mr Jordan, returns in an updated, slightly more macabre treatment.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    East of Eden
    Powerfully somber dramatics have been captured from the pages of John Steinbeck's East of ed en and put on film by Elia Kazan. It is a tour de force for the director's penchant for hard-hitting forays with life.
  71. The Untamed
    While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.
  72. The Aristocrats
    A raucous insider documentary that invites the viewer to share a secret held exclusively by comics for untold generations.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lake Tahoe
    A lazy exercise in cute minimalist humor, low-budget but visually glossy Mexican film Lake Tahoe is so dry and slight that it threatens to drift right off the screen.
  74. Easy A
    What this high school morality fable really recalls is "Clueless" -- a comedy of very contemporary ill manners drawn from classic literature, an immersion in the young-adult lexicon and a potentially career-making showcase for its lead actress, Emma Stone.
  75. The Eagle Huntress
    Like Disney’s “True-Life Adventures” of yore, it educates while deploying some likely sleight-of-hand, and doesn’t really invite the kind of methodological scrutiny a more verite-style documentary would.
  76. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    There’s a momentum to his story — it has a heist-movie-style checklist, carried out by a team composed of only one — that has its own satisfactions, and set-pieces with real tension, even if they lead to a less-than-novel place.
  77. The Mother
    A portrait of a contempo British family drifting apart because of generational differences, The Mother ends up an uneasy brew of too many competing tastes and themes.
  78. Army of One
    Riveting and timely.
  79. Censored Voices
    Loushy skillfully and briskly excerpts the material, although the film falls somewhere on the line between formal documentary and assemblage.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Guns of Navarone
    It faced the problem of a director-switch in mid-stream. But with a bunch of weighty stars, terrific special effects and several socko situations, producer Carl Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson sired a winner.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flying Down to Rio
    This picture makes its bid via numbers staged by Dave Gould to Vincent Youman melodies. But Rio’s story [from a play by Anne Caldwell, based on an original story by Louis Brock] lets it down. It’s slow and lacks laughs to the point where average business seems its groove.
  82. Memory House
    Memory House is, above all, a fable about identities lost and cultural artifacts in need of recovery that doubles as a thrilling and foreboding ride designed to rattle audiences at home and abroad with equal verve.
  83. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
    It’s not another unhinged Bridget bash — more like a hearts-and-flowers finale.
  84. Priceless
    Co-scripter/helmer Pierre Salvadori serves up an enjoyable riff on genuine romance versus the pay-as-you-go variety, in crowd-pleasing, exportable picture.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killers
    Coon’s screenplay is burdened with affected dialog and contrived plotwork. Virtually nothing of the original Hemingway remains.
  86. Transsiberian
    An engagingly up-to-date melodrama steeped in local color and steered by a treacherous sense of morality.
  87. Armadillo
    If nothing else, Armadillo proves just how well "The Hurt Locker" captured the mixture of boredom, fear, brutality and locker-room machismo that makes up the day-to-day routine of a frontline soldier.
  88. Charlotte Sometimes
    The deft shading he (Byler) elicits from his thesps is of a piece with his dramatics and his understated, artful approach to compositions and movement.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Down and Out in Beverly Hills
    It’s a loving caricature of the nouveau riche (Beverly Hills variety) and although it is more of a comedy of manners than a well-developed story, there are enough yocks and bright moments to make it a thoroughly enjoyable outing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heathers
    Daniel Waters' enormously clever screenplay blazes a trail of originality through the dead wood of the teen-comedy genre.
  91. Brothers Hypnotic
    Lively, funny and at times philosophical, Brothers Hypnotic tackles the challenges of maintaining an independent music career, as well as some knotted generational conflicts, and handles it all with great sensitivity.
  92. Old Stone
    Channeling the style of gritty mainland independent films but without the usual longueurs, the film deftly morphs into a suspense thriller with Dostoevskyan undertones.
  93. Candyman
    The new Candyman references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.
  94. If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise
    It is, frankly, a lot to absorb — and would risk crumbling under the weight of Lee’s ambition were it not for the second gut punch to the region that BP’s horrifying blunder delivered.
  95. Redux Redux
    Boasting a brawny aesthetic and the kind of loopy logic where it’s fun to fill in the gaps, the high-concept thriller gives a different take on the arc of history bending towards justice.
  96. Golden Exits
    Many will accuse Perry of navel-gazing here, but that’s partly the point: Golden Exits means to frustrate, even to abrade, in its coolly articulate portrait of cosseted people who want for nothing and vaguely desire everything.
  97. First Position
    The picture combines the built-in drama, tension and suspense of documentaries such as "Spellbound" with exciting, beautifully lensed variations performed by the virtuosos of the future.
  98. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    It’s at once cheesy and charming, synthetic and spectacular, cozily derivative and rambunctiously inventive, a processed piece of junk-culture joy that, by the end, may bring a tear to your eye.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pusher
    The subject has been done before, but Refn avoids the cliches, both in the story itself and its telling.
  100. The Final Master
    It’s a passionate comic book in which the combat has meaning.
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