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. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    Not to disparage the f/x guys, but what's onscreen in Hellboy II is all about the seismic eruptions in del Toro's head. Comparing his work to most fantasy cinema is like comparing cave drawings to the Cathedral of Cologne.
  2. Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan
    This Central Asia-set historical epic from Russian helmer Sergei Bodrov ("Nomad") boasts breathtaking landscapes, dazzling cinematography, bloody battles and unique traditions.
  3. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    A mesmerizing portrait of the director as acclaimed artist and tortured human being.
  4. Katyn
    This plays almost like an academic master class, meticulously exploring the event's ramifications but only catching full fire at the end.
  5. Everlasting Moments
    Artistically on a plane with or near the vet filmmaker's best work, this period drama about a woman slowly discovering her metier is an artisanal creation par excellence.
  6. Tyson
    By getting Tyson to open up as he has, Toback has succeeded in illuminating one of the most polarizing, complex and -- the film almost forces one to admit -- misunderstood figures of our time.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Big Man Japan
    Decidedly odd, even by Japanese standards, this mockumentary about an electrically charged, skyscraper-high superhero saddled with misfortune, bad press and even worse TV ratings is tears-down-the-face funny and a genuine, jaw-dropping oddity.
  8. Easier with Practice
    Amusingly predicated on the romantic possibilities of phone sex, Easier With Practice pushes past its titillating premise to become a quietly provocative love story about emotionally stunted manhood and the risks some guys will take to connect.
  9. Taxidermia
    Taxidermia sets a benchmark for body horror in the cinema.
  10. The Town Is Quiet
    Guediguian's seemingly sprawling but in fact quite precise picture takes a while to establish itself, but is eventually rewarding viewing.
  11. The School of Flesh
    A skillful blend of fire and ice that subtly conveys the emotional extremes fraught in the relationship.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Open Hearts
    Poignant, thoughtful and utterly absorbing, Susanne Bier's Dogme film Open Hearts is a gem.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mickey Blue Eyes
    An engaging, often very funny fish-out-of-water story that provides Hugh Grant with his best part to date.
  14. Pollock
    Distinguished by its quiet, intelligent, admirably restrained approach and by two finely wrought performances from Harris and Marcia Gay Harden in the leading roles.
  15. Before Night Falls
    A dense, emotionally satisfying portrait of a man, a time and a place.
  16. Paragraph 175
    The definitive screen chronicle to date of homosexual persecution under the Third Reich.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Minus Man
    The kind of muted, anything-but-obvious psychological thriller Hitchcock would have loved.
  18. Under the Sand
    An exquisite reflection on personal bereavement.
  19. The Cockettes
    Joyously re-creates the brief but resplendent reign of the legendary freakadelic drag troupe.
  20. The Brothers McMullen
    Good old-fashioned virtues of three-dimensional characters, fine dialogue, recognizable life situations and meat-and-potatoes content.
  21. The Last September
    Like hard-edged "Masterpiece Theater."
  22. Food of Love
    Pons has aimed for a performance-driven drama whose virtues are of the small-scale, low-key variety, with the director working within narrow dramatic limits as always but here doing so brilliantly.
  23. Eureka
    Builds steadily through a series of masterfully orchestrated modulations to a final act without shattering revelations or lofty dramatic peaks but with a quiet, formidable power.
  24. La Commune (Paris, 1871)
    Taped in stark black-and-white and clocking in 15 minutes shy of six hours, invigorating pic is big, passionate and brimming with compelling human details and broad sociopolitical idealism.
  25. The Back of the World
    A gripping, superbly constructed indictment of the way governments contribute to the destruction of their citizens' lives.
  26. ZigZag
    Evidencing savvy visual flair and compelling storytelling skill, Goyer infuses heart and vigor into material that could have come off as overly familiar at best, sappily improbable at worst.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Place Vendôme
    Taut and nuanced from start to finish, with memorable, lived-in central characters and an appealingly melancholy tone, helmer/co-scripter Nicole Garcia’s third feature has what it takes.
  28. Les Destinées
    A massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.
  29. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    Exhaustively informative and powerfully emotional.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Blue Angel
    A standout picture.
  31. Chaos
    A breathlessly involving tale of urban indifference, rampant hypocrisy and the difference a little human decency can make, superbly played pic is a black comedy that's frequently funny but never frivolous.
  32. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    A treat, a delicious blend of perversity, playfulness and deadly passion concealed beneath the tranquil, moneyed surface of the Swiss bougeoisie.
  33. Billy Elliot
    Strikes a delicate balance of comedy and pathos with an uplifting final act that delivers a resoundingly satisfying emotional payoff.
  34. Wendigo
    A mostly superb bit of modern horror from the writer-director-editor previously responsible for the Frankenstein story "No Telling" and the urban vampire pic "Habit."
  35. The Circle
    Both fascinates and horrifies with its bold assertions about what it means to be a woman under a cruel, institutionalized patriarchy.
  36. Pleasantville
    Ingeniously conceived and impressively executed, Pleasantville is a provocative, complex and surprisingly anti-nostalgic parable.
  37. Tape
    Emphasis on its combustible emotions, suspense and surprising humor should help draw sophisticated audiences who, once lured, will quickly find themselves hooked for the duration.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Four Weddings and a Funeral
    Truly beguiling romantic comedy.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    Producer and screenwriter have added enough fictional flesh to provide director William Friedkin and his overall topnotch cast with plenty of material, and they make the most of it.
  40. Nicholas Nickleby
    A delightful experience.
  41. Last Orders
    Delicately handled and superbly textured, this fine adaptation of Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winning novel deals with all the really big subjects: love, friendship, death, life.
  42. Bulworth
    An uncommonly smart, sharp and irreverent American picture.
  43. Jakob the Liar
    A markedly better picture than Roberto Benigni's far more sentimental Oscar collector.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shine
    An unconventional biopic about a brilliant young pianist.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Repo Man
    Repo Man has the type of unerring energy that leaves audiences breathless and entertained.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Colors
    A solidly crafted depiction of some current big-city horrors and succeeds largely because of the Robert Duvall-Sean Penn teaming as frontline cops.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Moonstruck
    Carried by snappy dialog and a wonderful ensemble full of familiar faces.
    • Variety
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heathers
    Daniel Waters' enormously clever screenplay blazes a trail of originality through the dead wood of the teen-comedy genre.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hunt for Red October
    The Industrial Light & Magic special visual effects unit does yeoman work in staging the action with cliffhanger intensity.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hot Spot
    Seeps with atmosphere, unfolds at a deceptively relaxed pace, steadily accumulates noirish grit, then dizzily plunges into a Lynch-like plumbing of the dark passions and nasty secrets at the heart of Main Street, USA.
  51. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    Vastly entertaining.
  52. Shanghai Noon
    This enjoyable East-meets-Western likely will succeed on its own terms as a sure-fire, long-legged crowd-pleaser.
  53. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    A throughly researched and extremely informative survey of the life and work of one of the great figures of world cinema, Richard Schickel's Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin is a must for lovers of cinema.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mystic Pizza
    Genuine and moving... Script is remarkably mature in its dealings with teens.
  55. Menace II Society
    Fierce, violent and searing in its observation, the film makes previous excursions seem like a stroll through the park.
  56. Northfork
    Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar.
  57. 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.
  58. The Man Without a Past
    Enormously satisfying, superbly crafted.
  59. The Joy Luck Club
    Wang has made a dramatically confident move into the mainstream on his own terms with highly congenial material.
  60. Quiz Show
    Robert Redford's handsome, smartly constructed new film stands likely to capture the imagination of the educated, culturally inclined public.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Player
    Mercilessly satiric yet good-natured, this enormously entertaining slam dunk quite possibly is the most resonant Hollywood saga since the days of "Sunset Blvd." and "The Bad and the Beautiful."
    • Variety
  62. The Spanish Prisoner
    The picture is a devilishly clever series of reversals that keeps you guessing to the very end.
  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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    You've Got Mail
    The most successful version yet of this familiar premise.
  65. The End of the Affair
    A faithful adaptation that captures the haunting spirit and religious nature of the 1951 novel.
  66. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    This intelligent, engaging indie sets out to find a few answers and in the process introduces a clutch of interesting, very human characters.
  67. Cremaster 3
    Matthew Barney delivers his masterpiece in Cremaster 3, unquestionably the 35-year-old sculptor-performance artist-filmmaker's most linear, most narratively inclined work to date.
  68. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    T3 delivers the goods. A hard-hitting, straight-ahead sci-fi actioner with none of the pretentions and ponderousness that have put at least a portion of the public off of "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Hulk."
  69. My Architect
    This fascinating portrait of an eccentric visionary and his chaotic triple family life is an accomplished, enormously satisfying non-fiction work.
  70. Stone Reader
    A debut of enormous craft, surety and resourcefulness -- a superlative, soul-baring non-fiction work that will generate torrential word-of-mouth among auds lucky enough to catch it.
  71. Tadpole
    A smart sex comedy that successfully swims upstream to spawn and score.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Robin Hood (re-release)
    Film is done in the grand manner of silent-day spectacles with sweep and breadth of action, swordplay and hand-to-hand battles between Norman and Saxon barons.
  73. Wonder Boys
    Massively inventive, Wonder Boys is spiked with fresh, perverse humor that flows naturally from the straight-faced playing.
  74. Timecode
    If the satire feels familiar, and the dramatics often contrived, there's rarely a moment here when something funny, intense or cleverly interconnected doesn't keep one's synapses firing on overdrive.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
    Crass, broad, irreverent, wacky fun - and absolutely hilarious from beginning to end.
  76. A Few Good Men
    Expert story construction and compelling thesping and direction make all the narrative elements pay off as if calculated by a precision instrument in which all the parts are working perfectly.
  77. Venus Boyz
    An utterly fascinating, beautifully crafted exploration of the world of drag kings -- women who dress, perform and/or live as men.
  78. Children Underground
    Belzberg's unsparing camera sometimes portrays a level of cruelty that tests viewers' tolerance, but her fearless aesthetic is also a measure of the film's brilliant indictment of any society that can allow its most vulnerable to slip into oblivion.
  79. Frailty
    A resoundingly old-fashioned and well crafted study of evil infecting an American family, Frailty moves from strength to strength on its deceptive narrative course.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Basic Instinct
    Grade-A pulp fiction. This erotically charged thriller about the search for an ice-pick murderer in San Francisco rivets attention through its sleek style, attractive cast doing and thinking kinky things, and story, which is as weirdly implausible as it is intensely visceral.
  81. 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Howards End
    Perhaps the best film made during the 30-year partnership of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
  83. Insomnia
    Gripping, highly dramatic thriller that more than confirms the distinctive talent of young Brit helmer Christopher Nolan.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Fisher King
    The Fisher King has two actors at the top of their form, and a compelling, well-directed and well-produced story.
  85. An Ideal Husband
    Shines like a freshly minted coin in Oliver Parker's adaptation.
  86. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Errol Morris delivers a compelling, thoughtful and entirely involving documentary in The Fog of War.
  87. Office Space
    Imagine a live-action version of the "Dilbert" comic strip with a touch of Hal Hartley's deadpan absurdism, and you're ready for the frequently uproarious "Office Space."
  88. LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
    The balance between feeling and distance is never a contradiction here but, rather, the dynamic that makes this film an especially humanistic entry in the Maysles canon.
  89. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    There are some unsatisfactory elements–slow spots occur during the middle stretch, the mild anti-establishment stance is getting to be a bit cliche and one never knows whether E.T.’s mortal illness is physical or psychological in nature, or both. But, as with “Close Encounters,” the truly lovely and moving ending more than makes up for everything. Chalk up another smash for Spielberg.
  90. Teacher's Pet
    A doggone hilarious cartoon extravaganza...virtually bursts at the seams with a supersized abundance of witty wordplay, silly songs and inspired sight gags.
  91. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    A warm, often invigorating and ultimately moving ode to community values.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Edward Scissorhands
    A delightful and delicate comic fable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Prince of Egypt
    At once rich in historic and character detail and full of eye-popping tableaux, this new spin on the Moses saga sometimes out-DeMilles DeMille's 1956 live-action epic, "The Ten Commandments."
  94. Son of the Bride
    Unflaggingly genial and universally funny.
  95. Winged Migration
    Visually stunning, practically dialogue-free and very family-friendly.
  96. Chopper
    The director has managed the difficult feat of making a nonlinear film that contains a handful of almost unbearably suspenseful sequences, each one undercut by bizarre black humor.
  97. G.I. Jane
    A very entertaining get-tough fantasy with political and feminist underpinnings.
  98. Hard Eight
    Four excellent lead performances, vividly evoked ambience and a masterfully sustained mood of quiet desperation mark Sydney as an impressive piece of work.
  99. About Adam
    Unlike "Four Weddings," which ultimately was moralistic and conservative in its message --—About Adam is a frolic free of any judgments, and marked by Stembridge's sparkling wit.
  100. Human Resources
    A cogent human drama.
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