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. Gimme Danger
    Gimme Danger has an ironic tone for a Stooges portrait: dutiful and engrossing, but not electric or crazy.
  2. El Conde
    As a magnificently unlovable art-house object, El Conde is perhaps best approached as a challenge: Run the gauntlet if you dare, and if, at the other end, you emerge dazed and disturbed rather than straightforwardly entertained, perhaps those are just the splinters you get when you try to stake a vampire.
  3. Arco
    Arco looks at once fantastical and recognizable, removed just enough from what we know in our present, but grounded on familiar, childlike amazement.
  4. The Life of Reilly
    With equal measures of prickly wit, gleeful pride and bemused gratitude, Charles Nelson Reilly looks back at his life, and invites his audience to share the view, in this thoroughly engaging filmization of his one-man stage show.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Wolf Man
    The Wolf Man is a compactly-knit tale of its kind, with good direction and performances by an above par assemblage of players, but dubious entertainment.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fantastic Voyage
    Fantastic Voyage is just that. The lavish production, boasting some brilliant special effects and superior creative efforts, is an entertaining, enlightening excursion through inner space - the body of a man.
  7. LifeHack
    The result is a genuinely funny and ultimately heart-pounding production, with an execution that feels like a heist itself.
  8. I Served the King of England
    A virtual primer on the unique mixture of self-deprecating dark humor and personal tragedy that has been the Czech cinema's stock-in-trade since their celebrated 1960s New Wave.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Meaning of Life
    Gross, silly, caustic, tasteless and obnoxious are all adjectives that alternately apply to Monty Python's The Meaning of Life though probably the most appropriate description would simply be funny.
  10. Gangs of New York
    Bears all the earmarks of a magnum opus for Martin Scorsese: Fascinating and fresh material about his beloved New York City, an epic reach, an equally epic gestation period, a dynamic criminal element, combustible socio-political-religious elements, outstanding actors and sophisticated allusions to cinema history that inform and enrich the experience.
  11. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    An unbeatably colorful life story.
  12. Felicia's Journey
    Mounted as an art film and is likely to divide both critics and the helmer's fans.
  13. The Rookie
    Quaid's effortlessly compelling and engagingly earnest performance keeps pic grounded in down-to-earth reality.
  14. Nowhere in Africa
    Easy on the eye and effortlessly entertaining across almost 2½ hours.
  15. A Beautiful Mind
    Consistently engrossing as an unusual character study and as a trip to the mysterious border-crossing between rarified brilliance and madness, this serious-minded but lively film is distinguished by an exceptional performance by Russell Crowe.
  16. Slow West
    John Maclean’s impeccably crafted writing-directing debut at times has a distinctly Coen-esque flavor in its mix of sly intelligence, bleak humor and unsettling violence, exuding fierce confidence even when these qualities don’t always cohere in the smoothest or most emotionally impactful fashion.
  17. Barry
    You could almost watch Barry even if you’d never heard of Barack Obama: The movie is simply interested in what it looks like when a guy who’s got this much going for him has a piece missing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mister Roberts
    James Cagney is simply great as the captain of the ship. William Powell tackles the role of ship’s doctor with an easy assurance that makes it stand out and Jack Lemmon is a big hit as Ensign Pulver.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    As a 16mm cinema verite of four rock musicians in a studio jamming a bit, trying to get their music together, clowning and rapping a little, and finally doing a brief concert, Let It Be is a relatively innocuous, unimaginative piece of film.
  20. A Compassionate Spy
    The film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling.
  21. Post Mortem
    Pablo Larrain's breathtaking visual command makes for enthralling viewing in Post Mortem, a rigorous, formally controlled yet emotionally gripping drama set during Chile's bloody 1973 military coup.
  22. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    It comes as little surprise that Howard, a nimble and proficient storyteller in non-fiction and fiction like, hasn’t a natural documentarian’s drive for information: This diverting, brightly assembled boomer nostalgia trip won’t open the eyes of any existing Fab Four fans, however much it pleases their ears.
  23. Your Sister's Sister
    After putting male insecurity under a comic microscope in "Humpday," writer-director Lynn Shelton hands the fairer sex a more prominent role in Your Sister's Sister, another winning study of relational boundaries crossed and sexual dares gone awry.
  24. Midsommar
    It’s an admirably strange, thematically muddled curiosity from a talented filmmaker who allows his ambitions to outpace his execution.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    John M. Stahl directs this kind of thing very well. He keeps the Fannie Hurst ‘success story’ brand of snobbishness under control and the film flows with mounting interest, if at moments a trifle slowly.
  26. The Crow
    A seamless, pulsating, dazzlingly visual revenge fantasy that stands as one of the most effective live-actioners ever derived from a comic strip.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Stepfather
    The Stepfather is an engrossing suspense thriller that refreshingly doesn't cheat the audience in terms of valid clues and plot twists.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Groundhog Day
    The film is inconsistent in tone and pace; fortunately the pay-off works, bringing some much needed warmth to the area.
  29. It's All So Quiet
    The character development here is understated but beautifully laid bare by a quartet of top actors.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Grand Prix
    The roar and whine of engines sending men and machines hurtling over the 10 top road and track courses of Europe, the US and Mexico – the Grand Prix circuits – are the prime motivating forces of this actioncrammed adventure that director John Frankenheimer and producer Edward Lewis have interlarded with personal drama that is sometimes introspectively revealing, occasionally mundane, but generally a most serviceable framework.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Koyaanisqatsi
    Koyaanisqatsi is at first awe-inspiring with its sweeping aerial wilderness photography. It becomes depressing when the phone lines, factories, and nuke plants spring up. The pic then runs the risk of boring audiences with shot after glossy shot of man’s commercial hack job on the land and his resulting misery.
  32. The Dark and the Wicked
    Ireland conveys subtle differences between paranoia and white-knuckled fear with an appealing fragility, while Oliver-Touchstone invites sympathy and disquiet with just a few twitches of her wrinkles. However, the glaring absence of any background to the main characters’ lives and relationships gives the cast less to work with than they deserve.
  33. The Woodsman
    A stunningly crafted work from first-time feature director Nicole Kassell.
  34. Society of the Snow
    It’s up to the individual whether to see this story as a miracle or a tragedy, Numa says in voiceover; Bayona’s film, for all its forceful feeling, doesn’t decide for us.
  35. Summertime
    Summertime celebrates the unique couple’s chemistry, allowing their smiles to convey the transformative effect they have on one another.
  36. Die My Love
    By the time Die My Love reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie.
  37. Is This Thing On?
    It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s an inner softness to it, a slightly pandering quality.
  38. Shame
    A mesmerizing companion piece to his 2008 debut, "Hunger," this more approachable but equally uncompromising drama likewise fixes its gaze on the uses and abuses of the human body, as Michael Fassbender again strips himself down, in every way an actor can, for McQueen's rigorous but humane interrogation.
  39. Akeelah and the Bee
    This earnest weepie plays like "The Karate Kid" with a pro-literacy agenda, pushing all the right emotional buttons yet hitting quite a few wrong ones in the process.
  40. Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
    Jaunty and fun for a while, with a cast of colorful locals who make the residents of "Vernon, Florida" seem normal, pic ultimately overstays its welcome and overstates its case.
  41. Crazy Horse
    What's generally missing here though is a sense of the creative process; rather than sweat-and-tears rehearsals breaking the dances into individual movements, the numbers are largely shown nearly complete. Consequently, there's little sense of the discipline involved, or the struggle for perfection that makes dance documentaries so engrossing.
  42. Brick
    The story, while derivative, isn't half bad, and the picture gains in finesse and confidence to the point where Johnson more or less pulls off his peril-fraught exercise.
  43. Doctor Strange
    Yes, this new project shares the same look, feel, and fancy corporate sheen as the rest of Marvel’s rapidly expanding Avengers portfolio, but it also boasts an underlying originality and freshness missing from the increasingly cookie-cutter comic-book realm of late.
  44. Death and the Maiden
    As vivid and suspenseful as Roman Polanski has made this claustrophobic tale of a torture victim turning the tables on her putative tormentor, one is still left with a film in which each character represents a mouthpiece for an ideology.
  45. Watcher
    Watcher, if it has an agenda beyond being a fun, shivery, fish-out-of-water chiller, is not so much a manifesto to Believe All Women as it is a reminder to all women watching to at least believe ourselves.
  46. The Suicide Squad
    The Suicide Squad is cunningly scuzzy, disreputable fun.
  47. Ghost Town
    Smartly supernatural, and featuring sensational performances by Ricky Gervais and Tea Leoni, Ghost Town is a "Topper" for our times.
  48. The Lottery
    Advocacy to the point of propaganda.
  49. The Heart Machine
    Thoroughly modern without being ostentatious about it, and featuring excellent performances from Kate Lyn Sheil and John Gallagher Jr., the film boasts pleasures more formal than narrative.
  50. Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends)
    It’s an engrossing, ultimately poignant chronicle.
  51. The Day After
    Even lesser Hong has its lackadaisical pleasures, and The Day After has its share of wry musings and twitchy banter between characters to counter its visual stasis and lulling storytelling.
  52. Escapes
    A unique, breezy pastiche that’s as nostalgic as a TV Land binge-watch, and as intimate as having one’s ear pleasurably bent by a garrulous “man of the world” at a dinner party.
  53. Tiny Furniture
    What it doesn't have, to its credit, is a neat conclusion. In the end, the film appears to suggest that Aura likely will feel free to keep searching for herself, repeating mistakes and making new ones, because she has all the time in the world.
  54. Bringing Out the Dead
    Achieves a poetic, quasi-religious tone.
  55. Air Guitar Nation
    With equal measures of showmanship, patriotism and irony, hundreds vie at NYC's Pussycat Lounge for the East Coast Division of the first-ever nationwide air guitar championship for the right to eventually represent the U.S. at the world championship.
  56. The Closet
    A clever premise that's good for many laughs.
  57. Mostly Martha
    A charming relationships comedy about food, gourmet cooking and emotionally chilling out. Anchored by a career-best performance from German thesp Martina Gedeck.
  58. Walk the Line
    Walk the Line is a strongly acted, musically vibrant, conventionally satisfying biopic of country/rock/blues legend Johnny Cash and his second wife, June Carter.
  59. Six Degrees of Separation
    Six Degrees is magical when addressing the preposterous. Like any good storyteller, Paul is deft at knitting eyes with wool. Smith proves himself an extremely charismatic presence, convincing in his sincerity and cunning in conveying his ability as a human sponge.
  60. When Marnie Was There
    Yonebayashi’s open-hearted tale, more than any other Ghibli offering, could conceivably have worked just as well in live-action, and yet the tender story gains so much from the studio’s delicate, hand-crafted approach.
  61. I Love Boosters
    It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.
  62. Control
    Crowd-pleasing, darkly comic joyride.
  63. Terri
    Jacobs' slow-building portrait of a late bloomer makes this poetic picture an outsider even among outsider movies.
  64. Dormant Beauty
    "Beauty" has numerous scenes of enormous power, though removing one unnecessary plot strand would allow deeper probing elsewhere.
  65. The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
    The Storms of Jeremy Thomas persuasively makes the case for closer scrutiny of a producer’s career, though it leaves viewers with some homework to do.
  66. Obit
    If, overall, Obit is merely pleasant in a predictable, innocuous way, it’s nonetheless well-crafted and moderately educational.
  67. Daylight
    Some movie buffs will be amused to note slight but perceptible plot similarities between Daylight and, of all things, "The Tall T," Budd Boetticher's classic 1957 Western. To their credit, the filmmakers more or less acknowledge the influence in the closing credits.
  68. Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
    It’s possible that the film’s passing pleasures are so rich that we don’t even notice how deep Okada has driven her storytelling dagger until she pulls it out in the end, and the tears come, adding, to the bitterness and sweetness of this moving and strange little fable, a hefty dose of salt.
  69. Mother and Son
    Inspired by the life and roots of her children’s father, Serraille’s original screenplay embeds tacit, national-scale socioeconomic commentary in its intimate domestic story, though smartly avoids making blunt symbols of its sharp, specific characters.
  70. Mary and Max
    Has its share of deadpan amusements, but its combo of mordant whimsy and tearjerker moments winds up curdling in an unappetizing fashion.
  71. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    This brisk, stylish and extremely heartfelt portrait of Nas’ rise from the housing projects of Queensbridge to the heights of hip-hop royalty ably stands on its own, marked by an admirable focus on the man and his music rather than hype and hagiography.
  72. Match Point
    Well-observed and superbly cast picture is the filmmaker's best in quite a long time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
    A film with Jane Fonda as a hard-as-nails babe. It becomes, in a recreated old ballroom, a sordid spectacle of hard times, a kind of existentialist allegory of life.
  74. Still Alice
    Julianne Moore guides us through the tragic arc of how it must feel to disappear before one’s own eyes, accomplishing one of her most powerful performances by underplaying the scenario.
  75. Late Night with the Devil
    Though not quite a slam-dunk — its sum impact is more pleasingly ingenious than indelible — Late Night With the Devil definitely reps a personal best for the Cairnses.
  76. Sound of Noise
    A delightful comic cocktail of modern city symphony, police procedural and love story.
  77. A Space Program
    It’s a singularly off-kilter vision of repurposed invention, though even at 72 minutes, the film struggles to keep itself afloat, its central conceit too slender to maintain its sense of mirth or wonder.
  78. Ethel & Ernest
    Mainwood’s fidelity to Briggs’ illustrative aesthetic is welcome, as it maintains a homey, appropriately somewhat retro air redolent of pencil sketches and pastels. Hewing to the book’s sparse text is a little less ideal.
  79. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
    A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.
  80. Truly Madly Deeply
    This sharply scripted study of a bereaved woman who literally wishes her partner back from the grave is an impressive directorial bow by British playwright Anthony Minghella. Despite surface similarities with Ghost pic has a different feel and theme.
  81. The Talent Given Us
    Brutally truthful, funny and touching in nearly equal measure.
  82. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea feels like a first draft, the one that needed to be written before the second draft added flesh and blood.
  83. Manifesto
    Audiences needn’t be intimidated: Manifesto may not adhere to any conventional narrative structure, but it’s compulsively watchable all the same
  84. Strictly Ballroom
    Within the confines of this tried-and-true formula, Luhrmann has concocted a feel-good entertainment, which is lively, original (in an old-fashioned sort of way) and charming.
  85. Surfwise
    Somewhat forced happy ending aside, the pic holds together well.
  86. Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    An insightful and incisive portrait of a self-destructive paranoid artist whose importance is partly hidden by his own divisive nature.
  87. The Back of the World
    A gripping, superbly constructed indictment of the way governments contribute to the destruction of their citizens' lives.
  88. Step Into Liquid
    An awe-inspiring survey of global surf culture, with the power to crush the post-"Gidget" decades of Hollywood stereotyping of surfers and surfing.
  89. Mulan
    A rich dramatic tapestry lightly stained by some strained comedy, rigorous political correctness and perhaps more adherence to Disney formula than should have been the case in one of the studio's most adventurous and serious animated features.
  90. Isn't This a Time! A Tribute Concert for Harold Leventhal
    Timely and entertaining concert documentary.
  91. Four Eyed Monsters
    Fascinating if overly self-involved Slamdance entry is among the few U.S. pics that deliberately smudges the line between non-fiction and invention as it tells how Crumley and Buice meet online and develop a relationship.
  92. Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    Looks, sounds and fascinates like an exceptional episode of a true-crime TV series.
  93. Despicable Me
    There's nothing like a little world domination to melt the most dastardly evildoer's heart. Since villains so often steal the show in animation, Despicable Me smartly turns the whole operation over to megalomaniacal rogue Gru.
  94. Master of the Universe
    Less a portrait of an individual than of an unchecked culture where the lure of staggering profits eliminates ethics, Universe subtly exposes the pernicious effects of deregulation and does so in an ingeniously cinematic manner.
  95. Salad Days
    Those not particularly interested in the bands or era portrayed may find Salad Days a bit too much of a good thing. But they’re unlikely to be viewers anyway, and fans will find the documentary’s fast-paced but detail-oriented progress satisfying.
  96. Doomsdays
    This kind of movie would be nothing without a terrific comic pairing, and Fitzpatrick and Rice make near-musicality of their mutual irritation.
  97. Donald Cried
    In virtually every closeup, Donald Cried practically seethes with barely suppressed emotion, though Avedisian cannily couches his characters’ very real, raw feelings amid a ridiculousness born of Donald’s wholesale weirdness.
  98. The Incredible Jessica James
    Writer-director Jim Strouse (“Grace Is Gone,” “The Winning Season”) places Williams at the center of a thoroughly conventional indie narrative — trusting his star’s sensibility to freshen up otherwise stale scenarios. Fortunately, Williams delivers on every count.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Out of Towners
    The Out of Towners is a total delight.
  100. The Year of the Everlasting Storm
    Here we have seven escape routes, each one reconnecting us to a world inevitably transformed by the pandemic — a world where art lives on.
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