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. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    If terror is not particularly sought after, there is still sufficient tension, and downplaying the story’s fantastical aspect in favor of psychological conflicts lends the whole a persuasive pathos.
  2. The Thief Collector
    The Thief Collector is a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime. It’s also a portrait of art and obsession. But by the time it makes you say “Oh. My. God.,” it’s a movie that has used art to touch something essential about how strangers — or maybe I should just say the downright strange — walk among us.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Niagara
    Niagara is a morbid, cliched expedition into lust and murder.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
    Perhaps the film is a triumph of controlled and deliberate mediocrity, but it still closer resembles a clumsy carbon of a bad satire on the original.
  5. Man Finds Tape
    Hall and Gandersman compel enough interest to pull viewers through, even if they may find the fadeout less than satisfying.
  6. Inside
    Inside has a suspense hook to drive it forward and a climactic violent set piece, if not quite the one we were expecting. But the question of who’s going to kill or get killed ultimately proves less important than how their pasts have shaped these men — or rather trapped them, like quicksand.
  7. Theater Camp
    Mostly, audiences are stuck watching everybody trying to be funny: testing out one-liners, singing off-key, panhandling for laughs. Running jokes trip over their own shoelaces.
  8. Standard Operating Procedure
    Adds relatively little insight to the public understanding of wayward military behavior more incisively analyzed in "Taxi to the Dark Side."
  9. Star Trek: First Contact
    Having earned his stripes by directing a few TV episodes, Frakes makes an auspicious debut as a feature filmmaker, sustaining excitement and maintaining clarity as he dashes through a two-track storyline.
  10. I Love You, Man
    A Judd Apatow clone that's one of the few recent R-rated raunch fests the ubiquitous auteur of larky crudeness actually had nothing to do with, I Love You, Man cranks out the kind of lowball humor that makes you gag on your own laughs.
  11. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    A biographical portrait that doubles as an origin story for today’s amoral political landscape, its marriage of incisiveness and timeliness should make it an indie hit this fall.
  12. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    “Memory” captures the hypnotic layers of history and meaning that were folded into the shock value of “Alien.”
  13. Ushpizin
    An enjoyable seriocomic tale of a poor couple whose holiday-time miracle becomes a test of faith.
  14. The Walk
    What Zemeckis delivers here is an entirely different brand of spectacle from that which audiences have come to expect from recent studio tentpoles, sharing a true story so incredible it literally must be seen to be believed, as opposed to imaginary feats full of impossible CG creatures.
  15. Veni Vidi Vici
    Capitalism, as depicted here, is inherently sociopathic. As the murders continue to claim ordinary middle-class folks, audiences can’t help but find themselves on edge, bracing for the sniper’s next attack.
  16. The Barbarian Invasions
    A full-bodied, funny and gloriously unpretentious ode to family, friendship and the meaning of life, The Barbarian Invasions is solidly entertaining, sharply written and genuinely touching.
  17. Dior and I
    As carefully crafted as the clothes is Tcheng’s well-considered direction, privileging the creative process over stereotyped glamour or backstabbing.
  18. Sundown
    Yes, Sundown is a mystery, but it’s also a Rorschach test. No two people will see the film the same way.
  19. It Is In Us All
    If as a thriller, the cryptic It Is in Us All, doesn’t thrill quite enough, as an examination of the kind of perverse death-obsession that unloved, unhappy, estranged boys can develop, it is a darkly provocative and promising debut mood-piece from Campbell-Hughes.
  20. Plan 75
    Plan 75 might have been a risible exercise in emotional manipulation if not for the sensitive tone with which Hiyakawa approaches all of her characters.
  21. Companion
    Directing his first feature, Hancock brings an impressive degree of control to a project that’s entirely execution dependent. If the timing and tone weren’t just right, the satirical edge would sour, and the entire project might seem silly or in extremely bad taste.
  22. Fauci
    It’s a documentary that merits a place in classrooms as well as theaters, as a preventative against the virus of cynicism.
  23. A Complete Unknown
    A Complete Unknown is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical.
  24. The Paper
    A rambunctious look at a struggling New York tabloid, "The Paper" is Paddy Chayefsky lite. With every member of the all-star staff battling personal life crises as they race to put the next edition to bed, Ron Howard's pacy meller can't help but generate a fair share of humor, excitement and involvement.
  25. Long Way North
    In both tone and approach, this animated treasure couldn’t be more different from the lavish high-tech toons competing in the American marketplace.
  26. Friday Night Lights
    Friday Night Lights is the "Black Hawk Down" of high school football movies. As exclusively as Ridley Scott's picture was about combat, this film concerns football and nothing but.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Manon of the Spring
    Manon des Sources is the poignant, but more dramatically wobbly, followup to Jean de Florette, producer-director Claude Berri's risky two-film adaptation of a novel by Marcel Pagnol, who, unsatisfied with his own next-to-last feature in 1952, expanded it as a two-part novel.
  28. Ordinary Love
    David Holmes and Brian Irvine’s score is melodic and insistent, and it knows when to fall away into silence to let the audience appreciate Neeson and Manville’s superb chemistry.
  29. The Bikeriders
    It goes a long way to humanize figures who’ve been long misrepresented on film, while giving audiences privileged access to this inner world.
  30. Swimming Pool
    Working predominantly in English for the first time, the French director has crafted an absorbing tale about the merging of fiction with reality, propelled by contrasting performances from Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier.
  31. Sweet and Lowdown
    The almost wall-to-wall music is glorious, with solo guitarist Howard Alden doing a sock job. Penn, incidentally, utterly convinces in the scenes in which he's seen "playing" the guitar.
  32. Narc
    A darkly textured, powerfully suspenseful genre piece.
  33. Galaxy Quest
    One of the holiday movie season's more pleasant surprises. A mischievously clever and slickly commercial sci-fi comedy.
  34. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Sophisticated cutting brings out the story’s complex emotional undercurrents, though “Breakdown’s” less convincingly scripted second half sputters more often than it shines.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    1900
    Bertolucci’s ambitious generational canvas is elaborately constructed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Catch-22
    Low, cheap comedy mingles nervously with slick, high-fashion technical polish in a slow-boiling stew of specious philosophy and superficial characterization.
  37. Portrait of Wally
    Turning over rocks in and around the New York art world, helmer Andrew Shea finds a lot of ugly stuff while chronicling what amounts to a 60-year hostage drama centered around the Egon Schiele oil painting that gives the film its title.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bound for Glory
    Bound for Glory is outstanding biographical cinema, not only of the late Woody Guthrie but also of the 1930s Depression era which served to disillusion, inspire and radicalize him and millions of other Americans.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alfie
    Alfie pulls few punches. With Michael Caine giving a powerfully strong performance as the woman-mad anti-hero, and with dialog and situations that are humorous, tangy, raw and, ultimately, often moving, the film may well shock. But behind its alley-cat philosophy, there's some shrewd sense, some pointed barbs and a sharp moral.
  40. Art Bastard
    It reveals Robert Cenedella to be an artist far too infused with life to ever let a movie like this one live up to its title.
  41. King Corn
    No doubt inspired to some degree by "Super Size Me," this equally engaging, slightly better-crafted documentary deftly balances humor and insight.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hooper
    Individually, the performances in this story of three generations of Hollywood stuntmen are a delight. And Hal Needham’s direction and stunt staging are wonderfully crafted.
  43. All These Sleepless Nights
    Taken as a whole, All These Sleepless Nights presents a restless, some-might-say-dynamic portrait of characters who seem to be going absolutely nowhere.
  44. Molli and Max in the Future
    In crafting two believable characters, giving them witty banter and getting Mamet and Athar to inhabit them, Litwak succeeds. The rest feels hit or miss.
  45. East of Havana
    The temptations of allowing a promotional video to seep inside a genuine non-fiction study nearly overtake East of Havana and its look at a bubbling hip-hop culture in Cuba.
  46. Gabrielle
    Archambault’s handling of Gabrielle and Martin’s sexuality is one of the pic’s strong suits, presenting their desire with a refreshing, straightforward honesty.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Starman
    There is little that is original in Starman, but at least it has chosen good models.
  48. Becoming Who I Was
    The endearing, guileless personalities of the two principals constitute much of the film’s appeal.
  49. Rosewood
    Ultimately, however, the film's ambition, urgency and acute observations prevail over the many stock elements to forge an estimable work that is notably serious and analytical for a Hollywood-produced film in this day and age.
  50. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Offers potent romantic fantasy elements for men and women and a cast that should produce the best commercial returns for a Woody Allen film since "Match Point."
  51. Public Enemies
    Oddly, too, the film is somewhat shortchanged by its great star, Johnny Depp, who disappointingly has chosen to play Dillinger as self-consciously cool rather than earthy and gregarious.
  52. Resurrection
    It winds up several stops north of bonkers, in a finale that shoots for transgressive, psycho-biological role-reversal, but plays like 1994’s Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Junior” given a torture-porn makeover.
  53. Tsotsi
    Powered by a pounding soundtrack of dance hall Kwaito music, the pic has vital, urban energy similar to the Brazilian crossover "City of God" but with a tauter, more conventional storyline.
  54. Lost Embrace
    A general lack of drama, a low-budget documentary feel and an ultraslim storyline are more than compensated for by a sterling script and performances.
  55. Countdown to Zero
    A politically urgent picture, it will also literally scare the breath out of what will certainly be a worldwide audience.
  56. Final Portrait
    Rush and Tucci create a captivating portrait of an artist who’s at once elated, haunted, and utterly possessed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Exodus
    Transposing Leon Uris' hefty novel to the screen was not an easy task. It is to the credit of director Otto Preminger and scenarist Dalton Trumbo that they have done as well as they have. One can, however, wish that they had been blessed with more dramatic incisiveness.
  58. To Live and Die and Live
    For all its tastefully exasperating gaps in character and storytelling specifics, “To Live & Die and Live” still has a persuasive overall vision, one that holds out the possibility of salvation for its hero — and its city — albeit only if history and the toll it still exacts are faced head-on.
  59. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    Often poignant, occasionally pathetic, but never short of entertaining, Raiders! captures the obsessive hold movies have on young people’s imaginations.
  60. The Nice Guys
    The Nice Guys is an ultra-violent burlesque, the sort of cheerfully hostile buddy bash that’s been a staple since the ’80s, only this one is singularly clever about its own triviality, and it offers the scruffy pleasure of seeing two great actors dial down their gravitas with style.
  61. Bob Roberts
    Both a stimulating social satire and, for thinking people, a depressing commentary on the devolution of the American political system.
  62. The Little Prince
    A respectful, lovingly reimagined take on Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic 1943 tale, which adds all manner of narrative bells and whistles to the author’s slender, lyrical story of friendship between a pilot and a mysterious extraterrestrial voyager, but stays true to its timeless depiction of childhood wonderment at odds with grown-up disillusionment.
  63. Guru
    Strongly cast, long-limbed yarn contains some of Ratnam's best stuff in its first half but script weaknesses mar the later going and film's overall impact.
  64. A Ciambra
    Creatively speaking, however, A Ciambra is something of a step sideways for the Italian-American filmmaker, consolidating his considerable formal and observational gifts while fumbling a bit as storytelling.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Shot in the Dark
    Sometimes the narrative is subordinated to individual bits of business and running gags but Sellers’ skill as a comedian again is demonstrated, and Sommer, in role of the chambermaid who moves all men to amorous thoughts and sometimes murder, is pert and expert.
  66. Wilde
    Toplining British comedian/wit Stephen Fry in a once-in-a-lifetime role as the brilliant, acerbic playwright, and mounted with a care and affection in all departments that squeezes the most from its $10 million budget, movie is a tony biopic that manages to combine an upfront portrayal of the scribe's gayness with an often moving examination of his broader emotions and artistic ideals.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Holiday Inn
    Loaded with a wealth of songs, it's meaty, not too kaleidoscopic and yet closely knit for a compact 100 minutes of tiptop filmusical entertainment. The idea is a natural, and Irving Berlin has fashioned some peach songs to fit the highlight holidays.
  68. Hard Miles
    Daniel Hanna (“Miss Virginia”) and a strong cast, making for a satisfying scenic ride that picked up several festival audience awards last year.
  69. Hope
    It’s an endless pleasure to see such exceptional, careful, considered filmmaking applied to such a gleefully generic set-up. Even when some of the tricks become apparent, each new repetition somehow delivers more than the last.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Brother from Another Planet
    Pic is essentially a series of behavioral vignettes, and many of them are genuinely delightful and inventive. Once the Brother discovers the Harlem drug scene, however, tale takes a rather unpleasant and, ultimately, confusing turn.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quo Vadis
    Quo Vadis is a super-spectacle in all its meaning. That there are shortcomings [in this fourth version of the tale] even Metro must have recognized and ignored in consideration of the project’s scope.
  72. A Traveler's Needs
    If Huppert’s endearingly scatty, offhand performance lends proceedings a veil of comfy familiarity, however, A Traveler’s Needs nonetheless finds the indefatigable Korean auteur at his most puckishly cryptic.
  73. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    This odd, epic tale of a man who ages backwards is presented in an impeccable classical manner, every detail tended to with fastidious devotion.
  74. Devils on the Doorstep
    Has all the classic faults of a picture not only directed by an actor but by an actor who is his own producer.
  75. Smoke
    Too often goes off on a tangent with unessential anecdotes and then fails to deliver in more important areas.
  76. Owning Mahowny
    Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Hurt give compelling performances... But the coldly unrewarding drama is as distant and joyless as its protagonist, representing a disappointment for director Richard Kwietniowski.
  77. Girlfight
    Blends in a most satisfying manner the conventions of several genres, resulting in a coherent picture that is at once a poignant inner-city drama, a rousing sports movie, an emotional family yarn and, above all, a sweet romance.
  78. Warrior of Light
    Universally embraceable subject matter, coupled with helmer's sterling rep as benevolent booster of humanistic pioneers.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cutter's Way
    Cutter's Way suffers from a terminal case of creative indecision. With any number of initially intriguing plot lines, director Ivan Passer and scripter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin never come close to shedding light on what, if anything, this picture is really about. Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn all deliver exceptionally fine topline performances, but their efforts seem wasted in such a weak vehicle.
  80. Spring
    Co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (“Resolution,” “V/H/S: Viral”), working from a script credited to Benson, do a clever job of entwining elements of budding romance, mounting dread and indolent vacation in their leisurely paced, handsomely produced indie feature.
  81. Out of the Blue
    Chilling, often moving docudrama focuses not so much on the mayhem or murderer, but on the bewildered, occasionally courageous reactions of ordinary citizens caught in the inexplicable violence.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    More Than Honey
    Most striking in “Honey” are closeups of the bees in their hives, symbiotically working together in creating their new queen: Imhoof rightfully spends time detailing the extraordinary nature of bee social structure.
  83. Hedda
    Not everyone knows Ibsen going in, but that needn’t diminish the satisfaction of watching “Hedda Gabler” so vividly reinvented.
  84. Nakom
    There’s an air of authenticity as well as a pleasingly laid-back yet substantive narrative engagement to this polished effort.
  85. Heartstone
    Sympathetic as Thor’s journey to awareness is, Heartstone’s languid, rollingly repetitive storytelling never quite justifies its weighted focus on his character at the expense of his friend’s more active anguish; a more judicious edit could place both in sharper relief.
  86. Wicker
    The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.
  87. Unstrung Heroes
    A coming-of-age piece that is slight to the point of anemia, Unstrung Heroes sports a willful eccentricity that almost immediately becomes annoying.
  88. Rodeo
    Rodeo is a movie that’s all surface, all present tense, all too-cool-to-be-anything-but-French-vérité gestures.
  89. The Friend
    A by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser with a bit more on its mind than your typical canine-centric tearjerker.
  90. Colossal
    Colossal takes diminishing advantage of an amusing premise, one that seems made for satirical treatment yet is executed with an increasingly awkward semi-seriousness the characters aren’t depthed (or likable) enough to ballast.
  91. Blank City
    The major draw of Blank City lies in its generous glimpses of rare, virtually lost Super-8 and 16mm films.
  92. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
    The movie just about pulses with contemporary resonance.
  93. In & Out
    Aside from Dillon, who brightens every scene he's in, the delightful surprise here is Selleck, who brings wonderfully mischievous, energizing and self-deprecating qualities to the role of the dirt-digging but ultimately on-the-level broadcaster.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bad Lieutenant
    Abel Ferrara's uncompromising Bad Lieutenant is a harrowing journey observing a corrupt NY cop sink into the depths, with an extraordinary and uninhibited performance by Harvey Keitel in the title role.
  95. Late August, Early September
    A kaleidoscopic but engrossing study of the shifting sands of friendship among a group of Parisians, "Late August, Early September" reps a major advance by writer-director Olivier Assayas in warmth and maturity of observation.
  96. Emilia Pérez
    Audiard wonders how much people really change when they transition. In Emilia’s case, less than she’d like, but enough to inspire positive change in society.
  97. Sword of Trust
    The considerable pleasure of Lynn Shelton’s latest “Sword of Trust” is that everyone onscreen is so good at this kind of [improv] work that one wishes more tightly scripted comedy screenplays had such savory dialogue, or inspired character conceptions.
  98. Monkey Man
    The movie has three extended action sequences, and I would have been happier if it had eight of them — that is, if it had less pretensions and, like the “Wick” films, was more willing to wear its pulp on its sleeve.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    About Last Night...
    Film lacks much of Mamet's grittiness, but is likable in its own right.
  100. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
    This is a movie that provokes a consistent sense of “Whoa!” By the end, you’ll know with greater clarity than you did before why we’re in the mess we’re in.
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