Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. Concrete Cowboy
    This is one of those rare, reframe-the-conversation films, like “Paris Is Burning,” “12 O’Clock Boys” and “Rize,” that take a very specific subculture and turn it into something universal and uplifting — only this one isn’t a documentary, despite the many real-world details that bring director Ricky Staub’s exceptional father-son drama to life.
  2. Avatar: The Way of Water
    At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in "The Way of Water," remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.
  3. Snow Angels
    Emotionally harrowing and gentle by turns, this well-acted winter's tale is a more narrative-driven experience than Green's more lyrical Sundance entries, "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls."
  4. Summer of Sam
    Summer of Sam is never less than absorbing but feels just a bit like yesterday's news, both narratively and cinematically.
  5. Harmony and Me
    Bristling with wry wit and peopled with a rogue's gallery of disaffected losers.
  6. The New Rijksmuseum
    Hoogendijk has created an artifact that, while not exactly elegant, 400 years hence may prove as vital a window into Amsterdam culture as any of the Dutch masterpieces hanging in the museum itself.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cactus Flower
    Cactus Flower drags, which is probably the worst thing that can be said of a light comedy. It's due to sloppy direction by Gene Saks and the miscasting of Walter Matthau opposite Ingrid Bergman.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lord of the Flies
    The theme of young boys reverting to savagery when marooned on a deserted island has its moments of truth, but this pic rates as a near-miss on many counts.
  9. Kid 90
    In many ways, Frye’s collage only makes sense to its maker, where someone else might have brought enough distance to put all this material in perspective.
  10. Idiots
    Sure, the case can be made for this contrast between scatological humor and serious insight working as a mirror for how quickly a person’s reality can shift from joy to sorrow, but the overall effect is puzzling.
  11. The Blackening
    The Blackening is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere.
  12. Deadstream
    What keeps the film from being anything more than an enterprising but minor diversion is that, with Shawn being is such a loud comic character from the get-go, scares and laughs alike don’t have much space to build. Winter gives his all, entertainingly so. But the performance is also dialed too high, too soon, its ultimate payoff diminished because we’ve already had so much of this protagonist screaming, bragging and sniveling.
  13. Light of My Life
    Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Naked Lunch
    Stretching himself with each new work, David Cronenberg has come up with a fascinating, demanding, mordantly funny picture.
  15. Dig Two Graves
    It’s all quite nicely handled by Adams’ direction and his script (co-written with Jeremy Phillips), though the latter ultimately somewhat disappoints.
  16. Hush
    Siegel’s likable perf keeps the audience on her side and highlights Maddie’s knack for thinking on her feet. Gallagher is even better as the mysteriously motivated antagonist.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Super Fly
    Best that can be said for this quickie is its unpretentiousness in not seeking any pseudo-sociological meaning or theme, or assuming any airs that one is supposed to be enriched or provoked by it all. It's strictly action-adventure, alternating, like clockwork, drugs-sex-violence for its duration with hardly a plot line to hold it together.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Flamingo Kid
    Dillon does a good job in his fullest, least narcissistic characterization to date.
  19. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Infinity Castle
    The film’s humor doesn’t necessarily translate, and the animation style doesn’t come close to the medium’s most artistic work. Beyond the sheer inventiveness of the movie’s made-up martial arts, that leaves the tragic elements, which can be disarmingly effective in giving audiences reason to feel invested in the battles — battles that have only just begun.
  20. Other People
    While Chris Kelly’s semi-autobiographical writing-directing debut gets off to a painfully broad start, it does intermittently find its footing as it progresses, gathering enough well-observed moments and details to counterbalance its otherwise flailing stabs at humor and pathos.
  21. Thirteen Days
    Reasonably intelligent, well-crafted and dramatically understated.
  22. Ghosts of the Abyss
    Though quite routine on the logistics of deep-sea exploring, pic develops a visual style as it replays the events of the sinking that some viewers may find more visually exciting and satisfying than what Cameron staged in his original mega-blockbuster.
  23. Almost Peaceful
    A gentle, sad and at times funny film in the best French tradition of high-quality cinema.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Interiors
    Watching this picture a question keeps recurring: what would Woody Allen think of all this? Then you remember he wrote and directed it. The film is populated by characters reacting to situation Allen has satirized so brilliantly in other pictures.
    • Variety
  25. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Once again, the DreamWorks team demonstrates that humor is the primary weapon in its arsenal.
  26. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    A creative exploration of the global honeybee crisis replete with remarkable nature cinematography, some eccentric characters and yet another powerful argument for organic, sustainable agriculture in balance with nature.
  27. Robot and Frank
    Debuting helmer Jake Schreier, screenwriter Christopher D. Ford and a wry and wily Frank Langella all shine in a smart, plausible and resonant film.
  28. Slither
    Slither begins briskly, gradually accelerates and eventually achieves a breakneck momentum that makes the wild ride even more exhilarating.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Close Range
    Audiences will respond to the very strong performances of the two leads, especially Walken in one of his best roles.
  30. Manny & Lo
    Despite the imaginative setup and the original sensibility, pic ultimately suffers from a slight, rather contrived narrative and a lack of secondary characters.
  31. Vox Lux
    Powered in its second half by a riveting performance of fiercely mannered bravado by Natalie Portman, as a kamikaze electropop diva running her Faustian fame off and under the rails, Vox Lux paints a sharp, shellacked portrait of a ghost in the celebrity machine.
  32. Children of Invention
    Urgent, artful and even austerely poetic.
  33. Future Weather
    Centered around a quietly spectacular performance by young Perla Haney-Jardine, Future Weather integrates a green message into a striking and emotional drama about intergenerational female conflict.
  34. In Bruges
    Closer to pics like “The Hit” and “Miller’s Crossing” than to McDonagh’s bristling, funny plays, this half-comic, half-serious account of two Irish hitmen who are sent to the titular Belgian burg to cool their heels after a job is moderately fair as a nutty character study, but overly far-fetched once the action kicks in.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment, Part II
    That's Entertainment, Part II is a knockout. The very handsome and polished sequel to That's Entertainment! transforms excerpts from perhaps $100 million worth of classic Metro library footage into a billion dollars worth of fun, excitement, amusement, escapism, fantasy, nostalgia and happiness.
  36. Ned Rifle
    Though lacking the emotional depth and almost epic scope that made “Henry Fool” loom so large after Hartley’s anecdotal, idiosyncratic early features, Ned Rifle is a far more satisfactory extension of its memorable characters than the misbegotten “Fay Grim.”
  37. Brigsby Bear
    Rather than milking the outre premise for broad comedy, everyone involved strives to keep the characters and situations grounded and warm.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Running on Empty
    A complex, turbulent tale told with admirable simplicity. Film successfully operates on several levels – as study of the primacy of the family unit, an anguished teen romance, a coming-of-age story and a look at what happened to some political radicals a generation later.
  39. The Vessel
    Cuban-American writer-director Julio Quintana’s feature debut has an understated formal loveliness that helps offset its more heavy-handed allegorical inclinations.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Phantom of the Paradise
    A very good horror comedy-drama about a disfigured musician haunting a rock palace. Brian De Palma's direction and script makes for one of the very rare backstage rock story pix, catching the garishness of the glitter scene in its own time.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Secret Agent
    Secret Agent dallies much on the way but rates as good spy entertainment, suave story telling, and, in one particular case, brilliant characterization.
  42. Been Rich All My Life
    Providing an inspiration for active retirement, the ex-Harlem Renaissance chorus girls profiled in docu Been Rich All My Life are still shaking booty while most of their contemporaries can only shuffle their walkers.
  43. Nocturnal Animals
    Ford is a true moviemaker — a social observer who’s a junkie for sensation and narrative. He has structured Nocturnal Animals beautifully, so that the past feeds into the present, and fiction into reality.
  44. Russian Dolls
    Viewers who thought the protags were superficial and annoying first time around will find little to change their minds here, but original pictures fans will probably embrace the now-scattered group's marginally more mature dilemmas centered on work and romance.
  45. Night Call
    Blanchart proves himself adept at giving all his ensemble various shading, shifting the audience’s allegiances and making his film much more than the usual brutal actioner.
  46. Framing John DeLorean
    An adventurous hybrid. ... It shouldn’t work, but it does.
  47. Bolt
    Bears some telltale signs of Pixar's trademark smarts, but still looks like a mutt compared to the younger company's customary purebreds.
  48. In Search of Mozart
    A beautifully lensed but ploddingly paced tribute.
  49. The Well Digger's Daughter
    The humanist spirit of Gallic novelist-director Marcel Pagnol is alive and well in the old-fashionedly sincere The Well-Digger's Daughter, a competent remake of Pagnol's eponymous 1940 melodrama about a working-class girl impregnated by a young pilot who's sent off to war.
  50. Elevate
    Hoop dreams die hard, and the stories in Elevate are both sobering and thrilling.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bananas
    Allen and Mickey Rose have written some funny stuff, and Allen, both as director and actor, knows what to do with it.
  52. Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache
    Aesthetically, too, Norbu’s film offers steady, muted levels of intoxication, giving constant pleasure while never quite tipping into flamboyance.
  53. T2 Trainspotting
    Where “Trainspotting’s” dive into the void was targeted, bristling with snarky anger at a Conservative system that provided few lifelines, “T2” — despite landing in a Britain once more under divisive Tory rule — is mostly content to let its characters alternately indulge and excoriate themselves.
  54. This Is the End
    This directing debut for co-writers Rogen and Evan Goldberg offsets its slightly smug premise with a clever sense of self-parody and near-cataclysmic levels of vulgarity.
  55. My Old School
    Like any good con-artist documentary, My Old School keeps its audience guessing, delighted to be deceived — although there’s a degree to which relying on animation cheats us of the question on everybody’s mind: How could so many have fallen for Brandon’s ruse?
  56. The Door in the Floor
    A thoughtful, melancholy story of love, loss, pain, betrayal and the lingering after-effects of tragedy, The Door in the Floor is an intelligent, impeccably acted, unsentimental drama.
  57. Sound of My Voice
    Two documentary filmmakers infiltrate a mysterious cult, only to find themselves drawn into the leader's insidious grip, in the taut, compelling low-budget feature Sound of My Voice.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Blood of a Poet
    On the face of it, this film represents six reels of scraped together footage from off the cutting room floor. A more vague or hopeless mess could not have resulted.
  59. It Came from Kuchar
    Gleefully piles on everything anyone could want in a docu on the fabulous Kuchar brothers, whose deliriously campy zero-budget mellers -- with titles like "Hold Me While I'm Naked" or "Sins of the Fleshapoids" -- enlivened many otherwise somber evenings of '60s underground cinema.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fatal Attraction
    The screws are tightened expertly in this suspenseful meller about a flipped-out femme who makes life hell for the married man who scorns her.
  61. Steel City
    Its honest, unshowy performances and textured depiction of life in a working-class community in a nowhere Southern Illinois town make this modest indie feature an affecting experience.
  62. Mondovino
    Consistently fascinating material provides an uncommonly eloquent, provocative statement against globalization that's sure to stimulate thinking audiences.
  63. Decasia
    Lacking any obvious thematic or emotional arc, compilation pic succeeds as a pure exercise in visual stimulus, its narcotic effect much amplified by Michael Gordon's thunderous, dissonant orchestral score.
  64. Stir of Echoes
    Koepp does a masterful job of grounding his intimations of the supernatural in a totally persuasive down-to-earth context.
    • 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.
  66. An Ideal Husband
    Shines like a freshly minted coin in Oliver Parker's adaptation.
  67. Fahrenheit 9/11
    Pic fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about, so intellectually Moore is largely preaching to the converted in this blatant cinematic 2004 campaign pamphlet.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Die Hard 2
    Die Hard 2 lacks the inventivenes of the original but compensates with relentless action.
  69. Hellaware
    The cinematic equivalent of a modestly amusing shaggy-dog story that meanders toward a clever punchline.
  70. The Wall
    Though complementary, the pic’s images and voiceover never quite fuse into a single whole.
  71. Cuties
    Cuties' job is to coil the contrasting messages and spin them until her lead falls down dizzy, which can make the film feel as subtle as a headache.
  72. The China Hustle
    Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining documentary The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.
  73. Halloween
    By contemporary horror standards, the original “Halloween” was actually quite tame, featuring just five (human) deaths, whereas this one more than triples the body count — and it does so with style, borrowing several of Carpenter’s classic devices...before getting into the more prosthetic-heavy mayhem that follows.
  74. Synecdoche, New York
    A wildly ambitious and gravely serious contemplation of life, love, art, human decay and death, the film bears Kaufman’s scripting fingerprints in its structural trickery and multiplane storytelling.
  75. Edge of Seventeen
    Unpretentious, funny and touching, Edge of Seventeen rates as a quintessential Amerindie sleeper.
  76. Charlie Wilson's War
    Charlie Wilson's War is that rare Hollywood commodity these days: a smart, sophisticated entertainment for grownups.
  77. Canvas
    First-rate performances, an uncompromising point of view and a fresh take on a well-worn movie subject -- madness.
  78. The Take
    An unlikely but entertaining amalgam of "Heat," "Memento" and "Regarding Henry," Brad Furman's streetwise caper drama The Take is elevated by the potent performances of John Leguizamo and Rosie Perez and a momentum that seldom stops.
  79. Garbage Dreams
    Mai Iskander's stunning documentary-helming debut.
  80. Stuck Between Stations
    Real people may not be this glib and witty, but Rosen and Lister-Jones sell us on Casper and Becky nonetheless.
  81. Alive Inside
    Rossato-Bennett’s over-the-top narration often sounds cloying and banal... But the filmmaker succeeds in providing context, medical and historical, in between awakenings.
  82. Parched
    Yadav pinpoints the various ways in which institutional and personal prejudices keep people enslaved, crafting a sharp portrait of gender inequality.
  83. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    This Midsummer Night’s Dream actually works. It’s charming, funny and moderately sexy, with witty use of the disconnect between modern manners and melodious prose. And yes, the actors can speak the language — which, as many a movie has proven before, is never a given.
  84. A Brother's Love
    Beneath the film’s soapier turns, and despite its more strident moments, there is a small dose of bittersweet wisdom here about the dangers inherent in entrusting one person — whomever it might be — with sole custody of your self-worth.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    Film is most engaging in its romantic sparring between Martin and his gorgeous client, Ward.
  86. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The problem is not that this film is upsetting (it should be), but that it ultimately seems more interested, and skilled, at dispensing regular shocks than fresh insights.
  87. The Little Stranger
    Wilson’s extraordinary performance rules the film, weaving a lifetime of accumulating disappointment into a single arched eyebrow.
  88. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Lacking the outrage and wit of Michael Moore's "Sicko," which dealt with the different matter of health insurance, this documentary is stronger on finding viable solutions.
  89. The Armstrong Lie
    Director Alex Gibney delivers not just a detailed, full-access account of his subject, in all his defiance, hubris and tentative self-reckoning, but also a layered inquiry into the culture of competitiveness, celebrity, moral relativism and hypocrisy that helped enable and sustain his deception.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Take the Money and Run
    A few good laughs in an 85-minute film do not a comedy make. Basically a running gag about hero Allen's ineptitude as a professional crook, scatters its fire in so many directions it has to hit at least several targets. But satire on documentary coverage of criminal flop is overextended and eventually tiresome.
    • Variety
  91. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme
    It’s about as sweet to see friendship survive success as it is to see Lin-Manuel Miranda as the world’s most adorkable Beastie Boy.
  92. The Ambassador
    Brugger ensures it's a fairly entertaining excursion, especially when he starts to enjoy getting into character as the nefarious white man in Africa.
  93. The Idea of You
    This is Hathaway’s movie, and she owns it: independent, desirable and never, ever desperate.
  94. Fear Street Part One: 1994
    “Fear Street” may look like countless horror movies that have come before, but it’s desperately trying to be original, and that may pay off in the two installments to come.
  95. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Walloping gut punch The 3 Rooms of Melancholia offers a harrowing docu look at war and militarism's wounds, as seen through the eyes of Russian and Chechen children.
  96. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    The movie does get some zingers in there, and it balances the humor with some nicely atmospheric creepy small town vibes (courtesy of DP Natalie Kingston), but the tone is all over the place and a far cry from the “Fargo”-y Coen brothers feel Cummings seems to be going for.
  97. A Private Life
    While the ultimate destination somewhat underwhelms, it’s a thrill to see Foster navigating a fully bilingual role, while tossing off the kind of personal insights only an expat could feel toward the French — a tiny glimpse into Foster’s private life, perhaps.
  98. The Family Fang
    It’s a measure of Bateman’s skill in front of and behind the camera that his performance here betrays nary a shred of actorly indulgence, operating instead in a subdued register that achieves quietly aching moments in the final stretch.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
    Frears levitates the film’s harsh realism with a fantastical counterpoint in touches like the ghost of a tortured labor leader who haunts Rafi from the outset, and a band of gypsy buskers who serenade the ongoing anarchy.
  100. The Last Duel
    Despite a brief action interlude here or there, The Last Duel turns out to be a lavishly convoluted and, at times, rather interesting medieval soap opera.
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