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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Map of the Human Heart
    An immensely ambitious and audacious love story spanning 30 years and two continents.
  2. Ema
    What’s novel about Ema is that Pablo Larraín has made a movie that, in its form, is every bit as warped and jagged and jarring and difficult to cuddle up to as its heroine.
  3. Divines
    In her aces debut feature Divines, Houda Benyamina has what ought to be a career-making film on her hands.
  4. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
    Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality.
  5. Factotum
    Arguably one of the best adaptations of Bukowski's work, even compared with Bukowski's own script for 1997's "Barfly," deadpan timing and ace perfs bring out the morose humor and surprising warmth in the often miserabilist scribe's voice.
  6. The Good Girl
    This one comes up short in terms of visual flair. But it delivers amusingly observed characters, consistent laughs underscored by the poignancy of unfulfilled existences and winning performances from a terrific cast captained by Jennifer Aniston.
  7. Intolerable Cruelty
    A thoroughly entertaining comedy about love, lawyers and fat divorce settlements. While a slight imbalance in the romantic formula stops it just short of truly soaring, the crackling dialogue and buoyant wordplay make this a delightful throwback to classic screwball comedies.
  8. Intimate Strangers
    Consistently entertaining exploration of how much -- or how little -- is required to overcome obstacles to self-actualization should be welcome wherever auds crave a good story told with nuance and flair.
  9. Tropic Thunder
    Apart from startling, out-there comic turns by Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise, however, the antics here are pretty thin, redundant and one-note.
  10. Disgrace
    Anchored by another marvelously quirky yet deadly serious performance from John Malkovich, and likely to be relished by the fan base of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, this is a strong, perceptive, old-school arthouse picture.
  11. The Tracker
    Think of an Anthony Mann Western made by an experimental film director and you get an indication of the challenging components of The Tracker, the story of a manhunt that is politically sensitive because of its depiction of atrocities perpetrated on aboriginals by a fanatical white cop.
  12. The Birdcage
    Performed with matchless aplomb and made with plush professionalism, pic serves up pure pleasure from beginning to end.
  13. Koch
    Barsky wisely includes just enough dissenting voices and admissions of grievous error by Koch himself to prevent the picture from seeming like a 100% feel-good puff piece.
  14. Good Will Hunting
    This beautifully realized tale is always engaging and often quite touching.
  15. This Is Martin Bonner
    A mood piece, a character study and an exercise in poetic gesture possessed of a sort of evanescent, secular spirituality.
  16. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    Returning director Jon Watts — whose bright, slightly dorky touch lends a kind of continuity to this latest trilogy — wrangles this unwieldy premise into a consistently entertaining superhero entry, tying up two decades’ of loose ends in the process.
  17. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    It’s a poignant buddy movie that’s sincere in all the right places, but knows better than to take itself too seriously.
  18. Battle for Brooklyn
    "It's un-American," Goldstein says about the abuses of power at the heart of the film, before correcting himself: "No -- you know what? It is American." That's precisely the message that Battle for Brooklyn doesn't sufficiently explore.
  19. Mozart's Sister
    Feminist without the arrogance of 20-20 hindsight, vividly precise in its depiction of 18th-century pre-revolutionary France (the filmmakers were allowed to shoot inside Versailles), alive with exuberantly thesped personages and awash in the joy and power of music, the picture is a stunner.
  20. October Sky
    Immensely entertaining and unabashedly inspirational.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ring
    Hitchcock gets more out of Lilian Hall-Davis than any Continental director and at times makes her reminiscent of Lya de Putti.
  22. Red Eye
    Departing less from his horror bailiwick than he did with "Music Of The Heart" in 1999, Wes Craven retains shocks but dispenses with scares in the negligible Red Eye.
  23. Trumbo
    It will serve as a fine entry point for younger auds interested in learning about the price paid by moviemakers and their families swept up in the 1950s anti-Communist net.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eight Men Out
    Perhaps the saddest chapter in the annals of professional American sports is recounted in absorbing fashion in Eight Men Out.
  25. Proxima
    An unostentatious but quietly dazzling meditation on womanhood in the largely patriarchal space race, Alice Winocour’s highly satisfying third feature outdoes many more lavish Hollywood efforts in evoking the otherworldly emotional disconnect that comes with space travel, all without leaving terra firma for the vast bulk of its running time.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nocturama
    Bonello replies to the news with a magnetic and purely cinematic gesture.
  27. Freeland
    Where Freeland is an unadulterated success is in capturing the physical, psychological and spiritual space Devi inhabits.
  28. Men Go to Battle
    Striking in its evocation of a demanding time and place, this intimate drama about individual and national transformation heralds the arrival of an arresting new filmmaking voice.
  29. Travelers and Magicians
    Although writer-director Khientse Norbu breaks no ground in unfolding two parallel stories about young men seeking fresh horizons, he creates believable characters -- and has the great benefit of living in a country that provides seldom-seen locations at the top of the world.
  30. Lorelei
    Writer-director Sabrina Doyle’s fable-like tale of working-class Americans on the fringe navigates its elusive waters with compassion and care, even when it veers into some predictable shallows from time to time.
  31. Crossing the Line
    Film's rarity value and still-hot subject matter make this required viewing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    Gibson impressively fleshes out Max, Tina Turner is striking in her role as Aunty (as well as contributing two topnotch songs, which open and close the picture) and the juves are uniformly good.
  33. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
    Prosaically straightforward but consistently interesting portrait of the maverick research scientist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine.
  34. Utoya: July 22
    U – July 22 is designed to be as immersive as it is exhausting, and largely succeeds.
  35. My Brother Is an Only Child
    Scripted by "The Best of Youth" duo who brought the post-WWII years into stark and moving light, pic offers a warm humor that illuminates the defiant vista of hope even when the proceedings turn tragic.
  36. Dolls
    Despite an excessively meandering final act, the drama's three intertwined stories have a cumulative impact, their affecting sadness matched by meticulously composed visual poetry.
  37. Memory
    Memory invites debate, rather than imposing a specific interpretation. It’s also a film that lingers, shifting and expanding in significance, even as the details start to blur.
  38. When Two Worlds Collide
    The film makes its case powerfully, and the myriad parallel situations in which private commercial interests continue to trump environmental ones worldwide makes that viewpoint easy to accept as valid.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Car Wash
    Car Wash uses gritty humor to polish clean the souls of a lot of likeable street people.
  40. Tangled
    Tangled is snappily paced and easy enough to get wrapped up in, propelled by a set of jaunty, serviceable songs from venerable composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater.
  41. Red Island
    Its autobiographical elements are keenly felt, as Campillo grapples intelligently not just with the blind spots of his personal past, but those of his national heritage.
  42. Edge of Tomorrow
    The pleasure of Edge of Tomorrow is that it’s not an action movie first and foremost, but rather a cheeky little puzzle picture in expensive-looking blockbuster drag.
  43. The Embalmer
    Director Matteo Garrone's measured approach and soulfully humane focus combine to dignify the characters, allowing the tale of solitude, longing and sorrow to inch quietly under the viewer's skin.
  44. Superstar in a Housedress
    Fan, friend and documentarian Craig Highberger delivers the goods with rare clips of the inimitable Jackie in Off-Off Broadway shows written by the star. The shaky, blurry quality of this never-before-seen archival footage shot by the helmer only adds to pic's surreal shoestring mystique.
  45. The Zen of Bennett
    While the result is sure to appeal to the star's fans, they may find this less-than-definitive portrait distractingly arty at times, while viewers attracted by such up-to-the-moment talents as Lady Gaga will wonder why the picture doesn't bother providing a little more explanatory background about that old guy she's singing with.
  46. Wonderstruck
    Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Affair to Remember
    Adding comedy lines, music, color and CinemaScope, Jerry Wald and Leo McCarey turn this remake of the 1939 Love Affair into a winning film that is alternately funny and tenderly sentimental.
  48. Rapt
    The issues come clashing together in an explosive package that, despite some snafus, remains fairly riveting to the end.
  49. Hacksaw Ridge
    Hacksaw Ridge is the work of a director possessed by the reality of violence as an unholy yet unavoidable truth.
  50. That Thing You Do!
    A top-notch production, exuberant period music and Hanks the actor in an important role cunningly disguise a rather slight and inconsequential narrative.
  51. Welcome to New York
    A bluntly powerful provocation that begins as a kind of tabloid melodrama and gradually evolves into a fraught study of addiction, narcissism and the lava flow of capitalist privilege. [Unrated Version]
  52. Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo
    The film benefits greatly from its ability to review events from the viewpoints of the men on the ground in Houston.
  53. Cielo
    Affording viewers a trip to the Chilean desert to gaze up at the crystal-clear sky, Cielo is a rapturous act of cinematic contemplation.
  54. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    In the piercing and perceptive documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, it’s fascinating, in an outrageous and distressing way, to witness the moment when Ailes transformed the nation’s political landscape virtually overnight.
  55. Everybody's Everything
    The only perspective that’s missing here is that of Peep himself, and that hole at the center of the narrative gives the film a haunting impact.
  56. Escape from Mogadishu
    Ryoo ramps things up impressively once all hope of protection from local forces evaporates. Audiences are treated to half an hour of top-class car chases and shootouts as the group attempt to make it safely across town and onto a rescue flight.
  57. Deep Blue
    Jaw-dropping, sumptuous visuals, a lush George Fenton score, state-of-the-art technology and some of the oddest creatures ever seen without recourse to artificial stimulants.
  58. Le petit lieutenant
    Seems so determined to reproduce the drudgery of police work, it's boring for the first hour, and only marginally more exciting for the second.
  59. The Land of Steady Habits
    No matter how much you want to like the film, something is missing: a spark, a shimmer, a thrust of discovery.
  60. Always in Season
    This film offers an engrossing mix of history, investigation and activism.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Without Limits
    Robert Towne's Without Limits reps a distinct improvement over Steve James' Prefontaine in the filmmaking department.
  62. 22 Jump Street
    22 Jump Street hits far more often than it misses, and even when it misses by a mile, the effort is so delightfully zany that it’s hard not to give Lord and Miller an “A” for effort.
  63. Exit 8
    Like the game, which is popular as kind of a one-off without much replayability, Exit 8 is designed to divert for a short time and does so enjoyably, with Kawamura proving a most judicious assessor of just how little backstory, plot explanation and character development he can get away with and still keep us engaged.
  64. Black Death
    While managing to deliver enough suspense and bloodletting to appease gore fans, steadily improving helmer Christopher Smith ("Severance") and screenwriter Dario Poloni smuggle in a merciless critique of religious delusion.
  65. Hopper/Welles
    Given its gnarly small focus, Hopper/Welles is surprisingly entertaining to sit through.
  66. Twilight's Kiss
    Strong performances by veterans Tai Bo and Ben Yuen make the protagonists’ struggle concrete and affecting.
  67. Frybread Face and Me
    It’s 1990 and a summer that initially smacks of exile and punishment becomes one of discovery — self-discovery to be sure, but also cultural and familial.
  68. We Are What We Are
    That We Are What We Are steers just shy of silliness even at its most outrageous is in large part thanks to a committed cast of non-disposable character actors.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Birdy
    Belying the lightheartedness of its title, Birdy is a heavy adult drama about best friends and the after-effects of war, but it takes too long to live up to its ambitious premise.
  70. Young Adult
    Reteaming pop-savvy scribe Diablo Cody with "Juno" director Jason Reitman, Young Adult revels in breaking the rules of safe Hollywood storytelling.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Postcards from the Edge
    Mike Nichols' film of Carrie Fisher's novel Postcards from the edge packs a fair amount of emotional wallop in its dark-hued comic take on a chemically dependent Hollywood mother and daughter (Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep).
  72. Oasis: Supersonic
    Hardly the most probing or edifying of rock docs, this A24-backed, one-night-only theatrical release is nonetheless a riotously enjoyable, appropriately deafening flashback to one of the last moments in music history when a bunch of knuckleheads with guitars could conquer the world on chutzpah alone.
  73. Winnebago Man
    A curious young helmer tracks down the profanity-spewing subject of a two-decade-old viral video with results at once scabrously funny and uncomfortably poignant.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Personal Best
    Personal Best offers audiences a lot to like in solid characterizations, plus some shock that is a Robert Towne trademark. What they probably won't share, however, is his tedious fascination with physical perfection.
  75. Gemini
    For a director who emerged from indie film’s so-called “mumblecore” movement, Gemini feels like a grown-up achievement, and the sign of a director with so much more to give in the future.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Singles
    [A] dynamite romantic comedy.
  77. Brad's Status
    It’s a film with the courage to be unlikable and the confidence to be complex, trusting audiences to navigate Brad’s whirling, restless mental state as it swings from jealousy to pride to what Ananya (correctly) identifies as “white privilege, male privilege, first-class problems” — otherwise known as entitlement.
  78. The Pledge
    Nicholson is outstanding as he gradually but tellingly sketches in aspects of a man driven by a mission that outstrips his instincts as a professional lawman.
  79. Nicholas Nickleby
    A delightful experience.
  80. Real Women Have Curves
    Delightful coming-of-age comedy-drama.
  81. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    It's the interviews with Aileen herself that steal the show as she insists her mind is being controlled by radio waves -- her Mad Hatter personality beyond the scope of Broomfield's disingenuous tone to interpret.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Score
    Meticulously detailed thriller.
  83. The Road Home
    Takes the simplest of stories and weaves a seductive, extremely moving portrait of a young woman’s unshakable love.
  84. Santo Domingo Blues
    Alternating between New York clubs by night and the colorful streets and countryside of Santa Domingo by day, pic captures the spirit of the music and the nation that gave birth to it.
  85. Making the Boys
    Though some of this material is fascinating, it feels like a rambling postscript to the real story, with Robey, with the benefit of hindsight, too eager to make "The Boys in the Band" snugly fit in the grand sweep of gay history, right down to California's Prop. 8.
  86. Nothing Personal
    Largely thanks to Verbeek's performance, full of physical grace notes and small details, she manages to involve the audience, even though her character is more a movie creation than one based in real psychology. Rea, largely giving his usual mumbling Oirish perf, proves a selfless support, and provides an anchor to the movie.
  87. The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    Oddly, the director's personal connection with his subject adds little warmth, filmmaker Carl proving nearly as unemotional as his deadpan dad.
  88. Last Days Here
    A surprise back-from-the-brink redemption proves reliably engaging in rock-doc Last Days Here, tracking three years in the life of cult musician Bobby Liebling, whose band Pentagram never capitalized on its early promise.
  89. Copenhagen
    Copenhagen remains more intriguing than compelling.
  90. 52 Tuesdays
    The non-pro cast received their scenes one week at a time, and the choice lends their performances a compelling blend of discovery and authenticity.
  91. 32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide
    Gripping and discomfiting, this first directorial feature by the veteran editor is the kind of diaristic inquiry that can seem self-indulgent but here sports a fearlessness that transcends vanity — at times it’s downright unflattering.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Batman: The Movie
    The acting is uniformly impressively improbable. The intense innocent enthusiasm of Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin as the three criminals is balanced against the innocent calm of Adam West and Burt Ward, Batman and Robin respectively.
    • Variety
  93. Fistful of Dirt
    A dark Brothers Grimm-like fairy tale anchored by a terrific child-actor performance.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Road Games
    Road Games is an above-average suspenser concerning an offbeat truck driver who winds up stalking a murderer. Stacy Keach's characterization of the amusing, poetry-spouting man is particularly endearing but the film builds all too effectively to a rather disappointing climax.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Race
    The Great Race is a big, expensive, whopping, comedy extravaganza [from a screen story by Blake Edwards and Arthur Ross], long on slapstick and near-inspired tomfoolery whose tongue-in-cheek treatment liberally sprinkled with corn frequently garners belly laughs.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackbeard's Ghost
    Blackbeard's Ghost, a lively and entertaining Walt Disney production, features Peter Ustinov in a tour de farce title role as the restless spirit of the famed pirate. Dean Jones and Suzanne Pleshette share top billing. Robert Stevenson's direction is highlighted by several very amusing chase and special effects sequences.
  98. Waldo on Weed
    More than the film’s activist message, however, it’s writer-director Tommy Avallone’s portrait of whatever-it-takes parental risk and sacrifice that will help it resonate with audiences no matter their views on marijuana.
  99. Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo
    The documentary tells the fascinating, and moving, tale of how Trejo got off the road to ruin and became the unlikeliest of Hollywood character actors.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Period of Adjustment
    Period of Adjustment is lower case Tennessee Williams, but it also illustrates that lower case Williams is superior to the upper case of most modern playwrights.
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