Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Aquarius
    Aquarius is a character study as well as a shrewd meditation on the needless transience of place and the way physical space elides with our identity.
  2. So Long, My Son
    Utterly wrenching.
  3. 2000 Meters to Andriivka
    Like its predecessor, this is an angry, viscerally illustrative film — but it’s a weary one too, occasionally narrating its first-hand view of military combat with the jaundiced sense of futility that comes with living through long-term conflict.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Back to the Future
    Performances by the earnest Fox, the lunatic Lloyd, the deceptively passionate Lea Thompson, and, particularly, the bumbling-to-confident Glover, who runs away with the picture, merrily keep the ship sailing.
  5. Everything Is Copy
    Anything but a morose tale of a bright light snuffed out far too soon, Bernstein’s documentary is an inspiring heartstring-tugger.
  6. Toy Story 2
    Toy Story 2 is to "Toy Story" what "The Empire Strikes Back" was to its predecessor, a richer, more satisfying film in every respect.
  7. Black Panther
    Historical significance aside, what superhero fans want to know is how “Black Panther” compares with other Marvel movies. Simply put, it not only holds its own, but improves on the formula in several key respects, from a politically engaged villain to an emotionally grounded final showdown.
  8. Cemetery of Splendor
    While Cemetery of Splendor is unabashedly a work of slow cinema, the oft-hurled pejorative of “difficult” seems a particularly poor fit for a film whose unforced lyricism could scarcely be more graceful or inviting.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bridge on the River Kwai
    A gripping drama, expertly put together and handled with skill in all departments. Its potency stems only partly from the boxoffice draw of William Holden and, to a lesser degree, Alec Guinness. What elevates “Kwai” to the rank of an artistic and financial triumph for producer Sam Spiegel is the engrossing entertainment it purveys, including some scenes which will be listed as among the best of film memorabilia.
  10. The Human Voice
    The Human Voice, in all its delicious absurdity and kitsch extravagance, ties into the concerns of emotional abandonment and disrupted communication that have long run through his [Almodóvar's] more ostensibly serious works.
  11. Brooklyn
    A robust romantic drama, rich in history and full of emotion, Brooklyn fills a niche in which the studios once specialized, using a well-read and respected novel as the grounds for a tenderly observed tearjerker.
  12. Nobody Knows
    Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity, delivering the goods after a seemingly directionless first half.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life Is Sweet
    As a precise observation of British types and a virtuoso piece of carefully observed ensemble playing, the film would be hard to beat.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mary Poppins
    Julie Andrews’ first appearance on the screen is a signal triumph and she performs as easily as she sings, displaying a fresh type of beauty nicely adaptable to the color cameras. Van Dyke, as the happy-go-lucky jack-of-all-trades, scores heavily, the part permitting him to showcase his wide range of talents.
  15. Apollo 11
    Apollo 11 is a cool, meticulous, at times enthralling documentary that captures the Apollo 11 flight in its entirety through raw footage drawn from the NASA vaults.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Faces
    Faces is a long, long (at least an hour too long) look at a 36-hour splitup in the 14-year marriage of a middle-class couple. At least John Cassavetes, who also wrote the screenplay, describes them as middle-class.
  17. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Has a sharper narrative focus and a livelier sense of forward movement than did the more episodic "Fellowship."
  18. L'Enfant (The Child)
    Those masters of small-scale realism, Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, have created yet another beautifully acted, exquisitely observed morality tale in The Child.
  19. Jane Fonda in Five Acts
    Lively, confessional, and entertaining.
  20. Poetry
    Calmer and less shattering than his masterly psychodrama "Secret Sunshine" (2007), Poetry is a deceptively gentle tale with a tender ache at its center, as well as a performance from Yun Jung-hee that lingers long in the memory.
  21. Newtown
    Structured more like a requiem than a polemic, the doc ebbs and flows in accordance with the cycles of mourning as it speaks with parents of the murdered children, as well as the teachers, priests, doctors and neighbors afflicted with survivor’s guilt, elegantly and devastatingly capturing the tenor of a small town that will carry these scars for at least a generation.
  22. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The movie quotes Baldwin as saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street,” but this one may as well be located inside a snow globe. In deciding how to translate Baldwin’s prose to the screen, Jenkins may as well have made Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a Douglas Sirk movie (or put Alice Waters’ “The Color Purple” through the Steven Spielberg filter).
  23. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    A triumph on every creative level, from casting to execution.
  24. Little Women
    This handsomely produced period piece is easily the most emotionally effective bigscreen melodrama since "The Joy Luck Club," as well as the most intelligent.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shine
    An unconventional biopic about a brilliant young pianist.
  26. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Its mind-bending storytelling and themes of play and paranoia make it perhaps the quintessential Gallic movie of its era.
  27. Aftershock
    The tried and true way to break viewers’ hearts is to make them care deeply. Aftershock wastes no time in doing just that.
  28. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    It’s the human side of the character that makes this McCarthy’s best performance to date, revealing haunting insights into friendship, loneliness, and creative insecurity.
  29. Wolfwalkers
    In the decade since “Kells,” it’s not just the technological advances that make Moore’s latest so impressive, but the rapidly changing cultural conversations as well. He brings everything together by borrowing from timeless visual influences, leaving audiences with another stunning artwork for the ages.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It Happened One Night
    One of those stories that without a particularly strong plot manages to come through in a big way, due to the acting, dialog, situations and direction. In other words, the story has that intangible quality of charm which arises from a smooth blending of the various ingredients. Difficult to analyze, impossible to designedly reproduce. Just a happy accident.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Neighbor Totoro
    Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki has essentially padded a television half-hour into a sluggish theatrical feature.
  32. I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You
    Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.
  33. The Missing Picture
    The film is a brave act of witness complicated by the documaker’s decision to re-create his experiences using clay figurines, a tricky aesthetic device that raises fascinating and problematic questions of representation.
  34. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
    Stands out in a field of generic, cookie-cutter dramas, not simply in terms of representation — though the female-made, indigenous-focused thriller offers a field day for intersectionality theorists — but also in the unconventional way the story unfolds.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Invisible Man
    The strangest character yet created by the screen [from the novel by H.G. Wells] roams through The Invisible Man.
  36. Our Father, the Devil
    A cutting, at times unwieldy exploration of trauma and forgiveness, the enigmatic drama goes places you almost certainly won’t expect — and, once there, makes you wonder how you ever thought it could have gone anywhere else.
  37. Amadeus
    Loaded with pleasures, the greatest of which derive from the on location filming in Prague, the most 18th century of all European cities.
  38. Of Men and War
    The film’s rigorous approach will appeal to documentary purists while challenging more general audiences who might care to know more about Pathway, Gusman and his philosophy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Long Goodbye
    Robert Altman's film version of Raymond Chandler's novel is an uneven mixture of insider satire on the gumshow film genre, gratuitous brutality, and sledgehammer whimsy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a western meller done in the best John Ford manner.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    Lana Turner is outstanding in the pivotal role played in Universal’s 1934 version by Claudette Colbert.
  42. Pain and Glory
    A mature work of meticulously tuned meta-fiction.
  43. Russian Ark
    Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.
  44. The Farthest
    Reynolds’ film conveys a legitimate, stirring sense of awe about mankind’s innate desire for adventure, discovery and communion with all that surrounds it.
  45. Genèse (Genesis)
    Lesage’s filmmaking, with its unhurried editing and eerily echoing music cues, is in expert sympathy with his hovering, out-of-time protagonists.
  46. Gomorrah
    Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano's muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families' insidious control.
  47. Familiar Touch
    Friedland’s film, as sharp as it is soft, conveys both the terror of losing the life you recognize, and the intermittent, fragmented joy of finding it again.
  48. To Be and to Have
    Any negative stereotypes viewers might harbor about education in rural communities are sent packing by this magnificently lensed and cumulatively touching account from documaker Nicolas Philibert.
  49. A Night of Knowing Nothing
    Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia’s shimmery, poetic essay doc A Night of Knowing Nothing, it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eraserhead
    Eraserhead is a sickening bad-taste exercise made by David Lynch under the auspices of the American Film Institute. Like a lot of AFI efforts, the pic has good tech values (particularly the inventive sound mixing), but little substance or subtlety.
    • Variety
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Withnail and I
    Withnail & I is about the end of an era. Set in 1969 England, it portrays the last throes of a friendship mirroring the seedy demise of the hippie period, delivering some comic gems along the way.
  52. Return to Seoul
    While Chou’s elliptical screenplay gently explodes many preconceived assumptions about the effects of adoption on adoptees, it is too clear-sighted to ignore the fact that whether biology affects identity or not, the mere possibility that such a link exists could exert a powerful attraction on a searching spirit not quite sure what it is searching for.
  53. The Velvet Underground
    As a collage of the period, The Velvet Underground is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Federico Fellini, long a scripter, in his second feature film satirizes the 'wastrels', the do-nothing sons of middle-class Italian provincials whose life ranges from schoolroom to poolroom.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Medium Cool
    Photographed in Chicago against the clamor and violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where cast principals were on their own as they made their way through the crowds and police lines. Buildup to these later sequences frequently is confusing and motives difficult to fathom.
  56. Three Colors: Blue
    Bold final sequence is a visual and aural crescendo calibrated to show that while each person is fundamentally alone, every life inevitably touches other lives.
  57. Mami Wata
    Even if narratively Mami Wata never fully reaches a satisfactory apex, its images remain utterly enthralling.
  58. Mulholland Dr.
    A genuinely ominous and suspenseful thriller.
  59. Fire at Sea
    Rosi has long been drawn to quiet lives, but has never been quite so successful in conveying the soulful qualities he sees in them to his audience — until now, using the oblique approach of Lampedusa’s residents to spotlight this growing international crisis, while using his young protagonist’s obliviousness to reflect and indict our own.
  60. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    McQuarrie clearly believes in creating coherent set pieces: His combat scenes are tense, muscular, and clean, shot and edited in such a way that the spatial geography makes sense. He places audiences just over Cruise’s shoulder, or staring into the actor’s face as he grimaces with exertion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    Orson Welles has reworked the docu material of Francois Reichenbach on noted art forger Elmyr De Houry, made for TV about 1968, into an intriguing, enjoyable look at illusion in general and his own, Clifford Irving’s and De Houry’s dealing with it in particular.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cléo from 5 to 7
    Sometimes invention falters, as in the scene with the songwriters. But Varda then easily picks up the threads and keeps alive interest in the girl and her plight.
  63. Grizzly Man
    A brilliant portrait of adventure, activism, obsession and potential madness that ranks among helmer Werner Herzog's strongest work.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Goldfinger
    There's not the least sign of staleness in this third sample of the Bond 007 formula. Some liberties have been taken with Ian Fleming's original novel but without diluting its flavor.
  65. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    How fortunate that Boseman’s legacy should include this film, an homage to Black art that’s tough enough to confront the costs of making it.
  66. Robot Dreams
    Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One False Move
    Working for the most part in straightforward style, director Carl Franklin achieves considerable suspense by pitting the frailties of each party against the other.
  68. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    Each elegantly framed shot, every deftly observed moment expresses something organic and moving.
  69. Jane
    Jane provides as much insight as we might hope for (in visual media at least) into a personality whose life might seem well-documented to the point of redundancy.
  70. Walk Up
    Existing sharply in such a naturalistic register that they scarcely seem scripted at all, all the film’s interactions are still so cleverly designed that despite being blurry with alcohol or attraction or self-analysis, they all highlight the funny, sad truism that no one human can ever really know what it’s like to be another.
  71. Jaws
    Robert Shaw [is] absolutely magnificent as a coarse fisherman finally hired to locate the Great White Shark; and Richard Dreyfuss, in another excellent characterization as a likeable young scientist.
  72. We Are the Best!
    It’s the rare film about adolescence that doesn’t seem exclusively targeted either to teens or to adults. Rarer still, it’s one that takes an interest in the nourishing qualities of female friendship.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Spartacus
    There is solid dramatic substance, purposeful and intriguingly contrasted character portrayals and, let's come right out with it, sheer pictorial poetry that is sweeping and savage, intimate and lusty, tender and bitter sweet.
  74. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Rolling Thunder Revue celebrates the let’s-try-it-on, let-it-all-hang-out spirit of the era, and as a time capsule the film is a gift that keeps on giving.
  75. Small Axe: Education
    The brilliance of this particular episode is how it allows us to see ourselves in Kingsley and to consider the many unseen forces at play in our own socialization. For Black audiences, it confirms many of those invisible barriers. For white ones, it may lead them to question whether the myth of their “success” owes in part to keeping others back.
  76. About Endlessness
    If we’ve been here before, the immaculate, somehow tender-hearted execution of About Endlessness ensures this is not a complaint.
  77. Pompei: Below the Clouds
    While among his warmest works, rich in pleasures of place and weather and human motion, it’s no empty travelogue, notwithstanding the sometimes glistening beauty of Rosi’s black-and-white cinematography.
  78. Nomadland
    For those on Zhao’s wavelength, the movie is a marvel of empathy and introspection.
  79. Hope
    Sødahl’s skill at making gesture and its absence count in the most subtle ways is an essential component in our investment with these protagonists, thanks to the superbly understated camerawork of Lars von Trier’s regular DP Manuel Alberto Claro.
  80. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    Park and co-helmer Steve Box stay faithful to the cozy core ingredients that made the clay duo's kudo-reaping shorts and Park's previous pic, "Chicken Run," so well loved. "Curse" delivers a wholesome morsel, happily not too cheesy, that families will nibble on as a treat.
  81. About Elly (2009)
    While not equaling the depth of characterization of Farhadi’s previous films, About Elly takes the complexity of his storytelling to a fascinating level. However, the variable quality of the thesping also prevents the pic from being his best work.
  82. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    This adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s heavily autobiographical novel is ideally cast and skillfully handled.
  83. Lincoln
    The result looks as much like a Natural History Museum diorama as it sounds: a respectful but waxy re-creation that feels somehow awe-inspiring yet chillingly lifeless to behold, the great exception being Jones' alternately blistering and sage turn as Stevens.
  84. Elena
    A wise and impeccably controlled drama that finds Russian helmer Andrei Zvyagintsev in outstanding form.
  85. All Is Lost
    A virtually wordless film that speaks with grave eloquence and simplicity about the human condition. Nothing here feels fancy or extraneous, least of all Redford’s superb performance.
  86. The Banshees of Inisherin
    The result feels closer than any of his previous films to the barbed, intimate lyricism of McDonagh’s work as a playwright, and more deeply, sorrowfully felt to boot.
  87. Love & Friendship
    [Stillman] takes the inherent sophistication of Austen’s worldview and introduces just the right note of sly, self-deflating mockery.
  88. Hereditary
    Ari Aster directs slowly, meditatively, purging the film of any of the usual horror-video razzmatazz. Instead, he creates scary coherent spaces for the audience to sink into.
  89. Listen to Me Marlon
    The pic is a superbly crafted collage whose soundtrack is as complexly textured as the curation and editing of visual elements.
  90. The Fugitive
    A consummate nail-biter that never lags, it leaves you breathless from the chase yet anxious for the next bit of mayhem or clever plot twist.
  91. Gideon's Army
    Like the film itself, Porter’s handful of devoted, charismatic attorneys do a righteous job of reminding people that the accused are innocent until proven guilty, and that the criminal justice system seems otherwise disposed.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Incredible Journey
    Sheila Burnford’s book of the same title has been given a vivid translation in The Incred ible Journey, a live actioner exquisitely photographed in the Canadian outdoors.
  93. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Blending molasses-dark comedy with searing poetic realism to capture contemporary Zambian society at a generational impasse between staunch tradition and social progress, this is palpably new, future-minded filmmaking, at once intrepidly daring and rigorously poised.
  94. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Picture's dour take on the dehumanizing process of medical treatment is leavened by black humor and dialogue that always rings true.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Odd Man Out
    Carol Reed has made his film with deliberation and care, and has achieved splendid teamwork from every member of the cast. Occasionally too intent on pointing his moral and adorning his tale, he has missed little in its telling.
  96. Maria Full of Grace
    Writer-director Joshua Marston's strikingly confident debut maintains an unblinking focus and sustains an almost unbearable level of tension.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shakespeare in Love
    Exquisitely acted, tightly directed and impressively assembled.
  98. Fateless
    Exquisitely modulated and superbly mounted, the directing debut of skilled cinematographer Lajos Koltai went through an extended, unpredictable production history to emerge as a genuinely new way of looking at the Holocaust that is markedly different in tone from other such stories including "Schindler's List" and "The Pianist."
  99. Happy as Lazzaro
    The film, for all its interest in fables, trades less in morals than in equivocal, irony-laced human observation. Rohrwacher deftly skirts sentimentality even as she risks big, expansive poetic gestures.
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