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. Funny Games
    The film is shocking and upsetting, but never truly gets under the skin the way this kind of material often can. Whatever reservations are prompted by Haneke's approach, his direction is controlled and edgy. [20 May 1997, p.52]
    • Variety
  2. Peepli Live
    Debuting writer-director Anusha Rizvi manages to wrest a lively feature out of a gravely serious issue, capturing the desperation of India's village farmers, as well as the nation's shift from agriculture to industrialization, without losing sight of the entertainment principle.
  3. Digging for Fire
    A lovely slice of everything and nothing.
  4. Black Gold
    The Francises are aces behind the camera, displaying an elegant sense of composition that makes their subject visually ravishing. Andreas Kapsalis' gorgeous score lends doc a grand quality.
  5. Cold Souls
    An amusing slice of existential whimsy with an Eastern European bent, Cold Souls posits a world in which humans can have their souls extracted and implanted in each others’ bodies.
  6. How to Build a Girl
    The final product feels like if the greatest musician in the world tried to write a classic in 15 minutes. Yet, “How to a Build a Girl” dares to argue that reinventing yourself doesn’t make you a poseur ... It’s a young person’s jam that will hit the right teen like a thunderbolt.
  7. Four Quartets
    Fiennes, in his beautifully grave way, slows the poem down for us, speaking the words with rapt deliberation, so that we live in their moment.
  8. Tuesday
    There’s something undeniably exciting about Pusić’s vision, which confronts serious subjects with disarming irreverence. But her creative choices are peculiar, to say the least.
  9. The Sun Rises on Us All
    With the actors so convincing in their roles and with Xin especially able to command the screen despite the often miserable un-glamor of her surroundings, the film becomes a rich portrait of a connection that was once so tender and now just revolves in a slowly decaying orbit around the broken axis of his resentment and her guilt.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Look Back in Anger
    Richardson's is a technical triumph, but somewhere along the line he has lost the heart and the throb that made the play an adventure. The film simultaneously impresses and depresses.
  11. Charli XCX: Alone Together
    In the end, Alone Together is a love story — about the love between Charli and her fans.
  12. White Building
    Even just the rooftop of this vast, scabbed Phnom Penh apartment complex seems to have a thousand stories to tell — it’s perhaps little wonder that Neang’s melancholic, perplexed, slightly ponderous feature debut gets a little lost navigating them.
  13. Just Another Love Story
    Contrived excess is rarely as entertaining as it is in the ironically titled Just Another Love Story, a furiously overheated romantic thriller from Danish writer-helmer Ole Bornedal.
  14. The Vigil
    Like many such movies, The Vigil leans heavily on jump scares, and is arguably more effective during its tense buildup than in the climactic events.
  15. My Psychedelic Love Story
    When you watch a documentary, some talking heads are more arresting than others, and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, seated before Morris’ camera, seems like a supporting player who’s been elevated to the lead.
  16. Life During Wartime
    In revisiting his darkly comic 1998 ensembler "Happiness," Todd Solondz may have made his best film with Life During Wartime.
  17. General Magic
    As a literal origin story about how we live today, it’s a captivating history lesson with global appeal.
  18. Q Ball
    Within its bounds, Q Ball offers proof that rehabilitative programs like this one offer more than just a chance for prisoners to show athletic excellence; they also provide an opportunity for individual growth.
  19. Papicha
    The screenplay’s seams show so glaringly, and the finish is so tonally mismatched, that notwithstanding audience identification and the inevitable “loosely inspired by real events” tagline, Papicha feels conspicuously manipulative.
  20. The Unknown Known
    Ranging over familiar material, but made vivid by Morris’ fecund associations and invigorating stylistic flourishes.
  21. I Am Greta
    As a summation of her remarkable achievements to date in public life, Nathan Grossman’s film is reasonably thorough, and sometimes rousing, amply showcasing Thunberg’s candid gifts as a truth-to-power speaker. Yet as a portrait of the girl behind the cause, it’s cautious and rarely illuminating, speckled with moments of domestic intimacy that nonetheless feel carefully vetted.
  22. The Ignorant Fairies
    The well-structured film goes beyond issues of sexuality, giving nuanced consideration to broader questions of love and loss, family and friendship, trust, lies and deception.
  23. Small Time Crooks
    Breezy, enjoyable romp gratifyingly zigzags in directions that aren't apparent at the outset and features some intriguingly personal subtext for longtime Woody watchers.
  24. Ride with the Devil
    Lee has made a brutal but sensitively observed film about the fringes of the Civil War.
  25. Monster's Ball
    Burning with a quiet intensity, Monster's Ball is bolstered by a poetic, intelligent sensibility not seen in an American film since Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Pawnbroker
    There is little plot in the regular sense, but a series of episodes spanning just a few days of the present, which recall many harrowing experiences of the past. Some are absorbing, but others seem to lack the dramatic punch for which the director must have strived.
  27. Becoming Mike Nichols
    If the material feels inadequate for a freestanding doc, that’s no fault of Nichols, who’s on playful, perspicacious form.
  28. Kill Me Please
    Anita Rocha da Silveira’s arresting debut feature captures the queasy mix of desire and fear among kids who are sexually inexperienced, yet can think of little else. Pop kitsch, social satire, dreamy narrative unreliability and retro giallo-thriller vibes further flavor a movie at once bold and cryptic.
  29. Penguins
    With irreverence, charm, sparkling cinematography, and a catchy pop soundtrack, this marks the series’ youngest-skewing, most comedic Earth Day documentary yet. That’s not a bad thing, however.
  30. Operation Avalanche
    Operation Avalanche demonstrates that there’s still plenty of room left within the found-footage format to craft fresh, high-concept projects, regardless of the fact that no one’s falling for their alleged authenticity any longer.
  31. Fire in Babylon
    This triumph-of-the-underdogs tale is enjoyable in the retelling, despite its repetitious hammering of the message.
  32. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    When discussing tastemakers of the 20th century, few names conjure "style" with the zest of Diana Vreeland, and documentary The Eye Has to Travel gets the zing just right.
  33. Julia
    Julia offers us glimpses of a complex, brittle personality beneath the robust persona, but is either too cautious or too genuinely besotted with the latter to pry it out.
  34. Bill W.
    Showing deep appreciation for Wilson's influence, as well as for the obscurity in which he spent his career in the spiritual-rescue business, the helmers employ a motherlode of photographs, diary entries, correspondence and recorded speeches to tell a sensational story that many will think they know, but don't.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Plains Drifter
    High Plains Drifter is a nervously-humorous, self-conscious near satire on the prototype Clint Eastwood formula of the avenging mysterious stranger. Script has some raw violence for the kinks and some dumb humor for audience relief. Eastwood’s second directorial effort is mechanically stylish.
  36. This Is Not Berlin
    Hari Sama’s fourth feature as writer-director is something special, and one of the best of its particular subgenre.
  37. The Dry
    Expertly directed and co-written by respected filmmaker Robert Connolly (“Balibo,” “Paper Planes”), The Dry has all the character intrigue, clever plot twists and red herrings to keep viewers guessing.
  38. Kill It and Leave This Town
    An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s abrasive animation Kill It and Leave This Town exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be.
  39. Blockers
    Blockers isn’t really about these girls losing their virginity. It’s about how they seize control of their destinies, one triumphantly lewd zinger at a time.
  40. Serendipity
    Nourry isn’t the most self-effacing of artists, and Serendipity could stand to reveal more of her artistic process, rather than gazing upon the often formidable finished product. Still, on the occasions it stops self-curating and gives us a glimpse into Nourry’s frightened, still-restless soul, this is a stirring, imposing self-portrait.
  41. La Grazia
    The movie will not exactly set your pulse racing. It’s staid. But there’s a hum of inspiration to its meditation.
  42. Green Book
    Featuring a pair of terrific performances by Viggo Mortensen as a goombah with a heart of gold and Mahershala Ali as multilingual composer-musician Don Shirley, the story may be unique, yet it goes pretty much exactly the way you might expect.
  43. The Animal Kingdom
    “The Animal Kingdom” isn’t a traditional genre movie so much as a coming-of-age story with a creature-feature twist — picture a moody French “Teen Wolf,” minus the laughs. ... Stumble even for a moment, and the whole movie could feel silly, which is what makes the fact that it works all the more remarkable.
  44. White Reindeer
    This complex, compassionate film finds both wicked humor and, less expectedly, transcendent hope in America’s gaudy fixation with Christmas spirit.
  45. The Mole Agent
    Alberdi’s comic-caper approach soon fizzles. Like Sergio, the film is hunting for drama, something to merit the 007 guitar and upright bass riffs of Vincent van Warmerdam’s score.
  46. Of an Age
    Equal parts wistful and sensual, vivid and gentle, Stolevski has gifted us with a swoon-worthy romantic drama that looks at that first blushing crush not as an ephemera in need of being remembered but as a living memory that can pulsate and ache precisely because it’s never left you.
  47. Rez Ball
    An almost comically brisk but genuinely rousing underdog story.
  48. Late Shift
    In its cool, propulsive procedural tracking of ward activity, Late Shift quite sufficiently makes its point regarding the monumental challenge and value of Floria’s work, and that of thousands like her.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Out of Africa
    At two-and-a-half hours, Out of Africa certainly makes a leisurely start into its story. Just short of boredom, however, the picture picks up pace and becomes a sensitive, enveloping romantic tragedy. Nonetheless it’s a long way to go for a downbeat ending, which may hurt broad appeal.
  50. Alps
    The cumulative force of the screenplay and Yorgos Mavropsaridis' editing is not as hypnotic as in "Dogtooth," perhaps in part because those familiar with Lanthimos' m.o. will know what to expect.
  51. Boy Erased
    Edgerton shows an admirable sense of restraint, even when hitting all the usual beats. He includes moments of quiet introspection for the characters and the audience alike.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stakeout
    StakeOut is a slick, sure-footed entertainment, one part buddy comedy and one part police actioner stitched together with a dash of romance.
  53. The Only Real Game
    Banks allows the exhilaration of the game and the exigencies of realpolitik to determine the ups and downs of her film’s sentimental journey.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Viva Las Vegas
    The sizzling combination of Elvis Presley and Ann-Margaret is enough to carry Viva Las Vegas over the top.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    King Solomon's Mines
    King Solomon's Mines has been filmed against an authentic African background, lending an extremely realistic air to the H. Rider Haggard classic novel of a dangerous safari and discovery of a legendary mine full of King Solomon's treasure.
  56. The Avengers
    Like a superior, state-of-the-art model built from reconstituted parts, Joss Whedon's buoyant, witty and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order.
  57. 5B
    It’s conventional, occasionally maudlin docmaking that nonetheless grips the heart exactly when it needs to.
  58. The Matchmaker
    This look back at late-'60s Haifa makes for strong, accessible, character-driven drama.
  59. Venus in Fur
    A delightfully intricate battle of wits and wills in which the question of who’s directing/seducing/torturing whom remains constantly shifting open to interpretation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Barton Fink
    Scene after scene is filled with a ferocious strength and humor. Michael Lerner's performance as a Mayer-like studio overlord is sensational.
  61. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    His vision is big, but the execution clunky and crowded with detail, such that it all plays like a regional-theater production of “The Wiz” staged within the walls of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.” Talbert is positively unabashed about Jingle Jangle’s too-muchness, as if trying to make up for a century of underrepresentation by stuffing everything he can into two hours’ worth of Christmas pageantry.
  62. Beirut
    Hamm’s bleary but still debonair presence, Gilroy’s cynically witty dialogue, and the not-quite-confusingly-large array of colorful characters underline how Beirut aims to be less a statement about Middle Eastern strife than a good yarn propelled by the unpredictable currents of international politics.
  63. Nurse Betty
    Few actresses can convey the kind of honesty and humanity that Zellweger does here -- it's hard to imagine the film without her dominant, thoroughly credible performance.
  64. Imelda
    A balanced, evenhanded film about a subject who has always managed to provoke intemperate reactions.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beau Geste
    Beau Geste has been produced with vigorous realism and spectacular sweep. Director William Wellman has focused attention on the melodramatic and vividly gruesome aspects of the story, and skimmed lightly over the episodes and motivation which highlighted Percival Christopher Wren's original novel.
  66. American Hardcore
    Excellent documentary American Hardcore chronicles the short-lived but influential musical moment when a defiantly anti-commercial underground put a distinctive U.S. stamp on the hitherto Brit-driven punk movement.
  67. This Divided State
    As boisterous as it is sobering.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The In-Laws
    Under Arthur Hiller’s fast-paced and engaging direction, everything keeps moving quickly enough to stymie audience qualms about plotting, character developments and a rapidly-compressed time frame.
  69. Oh Lucy!
    Most of Oh Lucy! passes by breezily, and in different hands this could easily be a crowdpleasing comedy...but when Hirayanagi opts to plunge deeper, you realize the darkness has been there waiting all along.
  70. There's Something About Mary
    Crudely made, somewhat overlong and larded with plenty of things that don't work, pic stands as proof positive that a comedy can be far from perfect and still hit the bull's-eye if it delivers when it counts in its big scenes.
  71. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Assisted by the superb performances of his two young, refreshingly unaffected leads, Carbone has a profound understanding of the close but conflicted bond that exists between brothers on either side of the puberty divide.
  72. Dark River
    Dark River isn’t quite as bracing or as unexpected as the director’s previous work.... Still, there’s scarcely room here for improvement at the level of craft or performance; in particular, it’s gratifying to see leading lady Ruth Wilson headlining a big-screen vehicle worthy of her flinty brilliance.
  73. The Times of Bill Cunningham
    The Times of Bill Cunningham is only 74 minutes long, yet it’s a snapshot of a life that leaves you grateful for having encountered it.
  74. Private Violence
    The obstacles against effectively protecting battered women and prosecuting their abusers are vividly illustrated in Private Violence.
  75. Moka
    Watching these two fine actresses circle each other in a kind of watchful alligator’s tango, each waiting for the other to blink first, is the chief pleasure on offer in Moka.
  76. Bad 25
    A blockbuster melange of Motown, metal, hip-hop, world and gospel influences, bound by trailblazing production, "Bad" has stood in its predecessor's shadow too long, and Spike Lee convincingly makes the case for reassessment with this exhaustive and entertaining if less-than-penetrating documentary on its creation.
  77. Zero Motivation
    Beneath the strings of gags and wisecracks run parallel threads of ruthlessness and hysteria which bring “Motivation” a little closer to “Full Metal Jacket” than “Private Benjamin” as off-screen conflicts invade the closed-in encampment.
  78. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    Bodies Bodies Bodies, with its restless camera movement and improv-style acting and general overdramatic rambunctiousness, is like “And Then There Were None” staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.
  79. Joshua
    A creepy-little-kid suspenser decked out with sufficient class to lend it a certain distinction.
  80. The Piano Lesson
    While most of the cast is the same that appeared on Broadway, the movie is undeniably Deadwyler’s show.
  81. Haunt
    It offers nothing particularly new, yet it fulfills the only requirement that really matters for this kind of movie — it’s scary.
  82. Take Me Somewhere Nice
    Take Me Somewhere Nice has fun with the ride yet feels too derivative to leave much of an impression beyond a few vibrantly colored images.
  83. The Show
    Fun if perhaps a little too tongue-in-cheek for its own good, the results will no doubt appeal most to Moore fans who’ll revel in his Byzantine plotting, noirish tropes and other signature elements.
  84. Gook
    Chon’s sophomore feature wavers uncertainly in tone, getting a little too cute for comfort in spots, but is otherwise a lively, auspicious breakthrough.
  85. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    Though Resnais’ gamble seems to have failed, it’s encouraging to see a director on the brink of 90 still willing to experiment in a way most helmers half his age wouldn’t dare.
  86. Blue Story
    Blue Story is very much a blast of something present tense. Rapman’s scenes boil over with life, as he crafts an opera of innocence infected by gangsta pathology.
  87. Yalda, a Night for Forgivness
    Bakhshi’s sure-handed assessment of Iran’s class struggle, a thoughtfully-parsed topic with universal implications, is the film’s most fascinating dimension.
  88. Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    An impressively polished documentary by Bob Hercules and Cheri Hughes. Perhaps even more thought-provoking than its co-helmers intended, pic is bound to spark conversations and debate.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jason and the Argonauts
    The $3 million film has a workable scenario and has been directed resourcefully and spiritedly by Don Chaffey, under whose leadership a colorful cast performs with zeal.
  90. Rumours
    The massed foibles and outright idiocies of the seven principals — all sharp individual comic creations, but collectively a devastating hot-air hydra of enfeebled contemporary democracy — add up to a frustrated protest against our elected elite fiddling while Rome (or the planet, rather) burns, offering mealy-mouthed sentiments that gesture toward coordinated action without ever getting there.
  91. The Last September
    Like hard-edged "Masterpiece Theater."
  92. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    The film's chief shortcoming is perhaps its failure to convey a stronger, more atmospheric sense of the repressive 1970s Catholic school environment that breeds the titular boys' rebellion and wild flights of fancy.
  93. What Will People Say
    "People” represents a big step up from Haq’s more modestly scaled debut, but it’s a move she handles with assurance and aplomb. She develops the father-daughter relationship visually as well as verbally, showing the action from both their perspectives.
  94. The Trip to Greece
    The Trip to Greece marks a spirited and convivial return to form, even if it’s lofty enough to present Coogan and Brydon’s six-day journey through Greece as a retracing of the path of Odysseus.
  95. Gabriel and the Mountain
    On one level, the film can be classified as a journey of discovery, but what deepens interest is the way Barbosa constantly asks the viewer to question what it means to travel.
  96. Chronicle
    Unlike other mock documentaries, which unconvincingly pass themselves off as real, Chronicle cleverly embraces the format as shorthand for a new kind of naturalism, inviting audiences to suspend disbelief and join in the fantasy of being able to do anything with their minds.
  97. Arthur Christmas
    Arthur Christmas embraces this unconditional faith and rewards it with creative explanations and a brisk computer-animated adventure clever enough to become essential yuletide viewing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
    A fitting final installment in Terry Gilliam's trilogy begun with Time Bandits and continued with Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen shares many of those films strengths and weaknesses, but doesn't possess the visionary qualities of the latter.
  99. The Other Dream Team
    Smartly engineered to engage sports fans and non-fans, the picture's account of Lithuania's 1992 Olympics bronze medal-winning team, presented as a symbol of post-Cold War freedom.
  100. Into the Woods
    Marshall hasn’t made one of the great movie musicals here, but he hasn’t bungled it either — far from it.
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