Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Lady Buds
    While the personalities spotlit here are easy to root for, what emerges is less an upbeat look at female enterprise than yet another case of corporate money and political mechanizations killing off community-based small businesses to further enrich their deep-pocketed, invasive new rivals. It’s an ultimately depressing trajectory, though the film itself remains engaging and well crafted.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Bodyguard
    In his directorial debut, Tony Bill assembles a truly remarkable cast of youngsters with little or no previous acting experience. Chris Makepeace is superb as the slightly built kid coming anew to a Chicago high school dominated by extortionist gang leader Matt Dillon, also terrific in his part.
    • Variety
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
    An okay family musical fantasy featuring Gene Wilder as an eccentric candymaker who makes a boy's dreams come true.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reflections in a Golden Eye
    A pretentious melodrama.
  5. Slash/Back
    Innuksuk approaches everything with such a generous, supportive spirit, it seems churlish to focus on shortcomings in a film with so much personality. ... "Slash/Back" seems bound to find a cult following, but it will mean the most to Inuit audiences, for whom standing up to invaders is more than just another genre-movie cliché.
  6. Juliet, Naked
    It’s a winsome screwball love story that grows on you and takes you somewhere charming.
  7. Man Bites Dog
    An offbeat, darkly hilarious portrait.
  8. Last Days
    Result is dead-on depiction of the hedonistic rock lifestyle, punctuated by sequences of haunting beauty but also quasi-religious imagery that borders on tacky.
  9. A Decade Under the Influence
    An entertaining, deeply respectful assessment of the directors and actors who rode the countercultural wave of the 1970s.
  10. 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.
  11. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Lin's nicely turned out picture is sometimes both predictable and a bit far-fetched narratively, but still provides a generally absorbing look at a slice of society normally taken for granted, both in life and onscreen.
  12. The Business of Strangers
    While it could have used a punchier final act that distilled its themes more cogently and conclusively, this intelligently scripted drama about power and its many channels nonetheless delivers thanks to Stettner's stylish visual sense and, most of all, to the smart, commanding performances of leads Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles.
  13. Young Adam
    All of the promise that was evident in Scottish helmer David Mackenzie's flawed freshman feature, "The Last Great Wilderness" (2002), is richly achieved in his second pic, Young Adam, a resonant, beautifully modulated relationships drama.
  14. Finding Neverland
    An impeccably made and genuinely moving account of how Scottish author J.M. Barrie came to write "Peter Pan."
  15. Jay Kelly
    Jay Kelly is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy.
  16. PG: Psycho Goreman
    As satire, Psycho Goreman is no “Planet Terror,” but it’s a droll enough schlock-in-quote-marks diversion, and part of its appeal is just how damn cheap it is. In the omni-tech era, it’s fun to see a filmmaker build an FX fantasy out of scraps, from the ground up.
  17. Rabbit à la Berlin
    Cunningly fashioning found footage into a rabbit's-eye view of events, Polish helmer Bartek Konopka creates a chillingly apt political allegory in Rabbit a la Berlin.
  18. 16 Acres
    An uncommonly engrossing and articulate documentary.
  19. Fame High
    Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy (“The Garden”) favors formulaic uplift over investigation, failing to offer a p.o.v. on whether young creative people should be driven as mercilessly as these. Lackluster videography further dulls the pic, which culminates in frustratingly fleeting glimpses of the students’ year-end performances.
  20. Dislecksia: The Movie
    The film conveys key information and makes important distinctions not generally known, and its effectiveness probably depends on the viewer’s tolerance for poorly executed kitsch and manic physical intrusions by the filmmaker.
  21. Björk: Biophilia Live
    Bjork’s charm has always hinged on her ability to be guileless and unknowable at once; “Biophilia Live” is no exception.
  22. Les Cowboys
    Bidegain, who for years has served as the muscle behind Jacques Audiard’s scripts, advances his ongoing deconstruction of genre-movie masculinity in his uncompromising, anti-romantic directorial debut.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    To Each His Own
    Charles Brackett, who wrote and produced, injected a human quality in the script, and Mitchell Leisen makes full use of it in his direction.
  24. Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road
    Even if you think you know it all, “Long Promised Road” is an affectionate and satisfying movie, sentimental at times but often stirringly insightful, a collection of pinpoint testimonials to Wilson’s artistry by such authoritative fans as Springsteen and Elton John, and a movie that lets the enchanting qualities of Wilson’s music cascade over you.
  25. Kill Boksoon
    Kill Boksoon, like its heroine, could do with learning that there’s more to life than being highly efficient in execution.
  26. Haywire
    Paring down narrative and character concerns in favor of a breathtaking application of pure thriller technique, Soderbergh's latest picture is a lean, efficient exercise tossed off with his customary sangfroid and wickedly dry sense of humor.
  27. After Everything
    Its refractory tone, both deadpan and swoony, announces that the first-time feature directors have a phenomenal eye for character (which is something those who’ve been watching Marks’ work as an actress may already have realized).
  28. The Little Sister
    Sensitive and empathetic but a little timid in storytelling and style, The Little Sister rests considerably on its lead performance by first-time actor Nadia Melliti.
  29. A Woman's Life
    At 99 minutes, A Woman’s Life is brisk and concentrated, but it never feels glibly selective with regard to its protagonist, permitting us access to Gabrielle at her most impressive, her most unbearable and her most disarmingly ordinary.
  30. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    The result is a well-meaning but somewhat granola, partly engaging yet disorganized documentary, one that searches for an imprecise story and struggles to keep its chief ambitions afloat.
  31. XXY
    Picture has more in common with standard child-parent conflict dramas than it would probably care to admit, but its sensitive treatment of an equally sensitive theme elevates it into something memorable.
  32. Fresh
    Fresh comes across as a carefree bit of bloody fun. But there’s considerably more going on beneath the surface, and the allegory is open-ended enough to hit a range of viewers on different levels.
  33. Kink
    The consistently celebratory stance of “Kink” is commendable, but also feels somewhat limiting.
  34. As You Are
    A promising and impressively self-assured debut for 23-year-old filmmaker Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, As You Are is crafted with the confidence and skill of a veteran, but also the youthful eye of someone not far removed from his protagonists.
  35. The New Radical
    The great strength of The New Radical is that it’s not on its subjects’ side (or totally against them either). It’s the rare documentary that lets you decide.
  36. Zi
    If the film weren’t so arresting to look at, it could often be absorbed with eyes closed: If its larger message is elusive, Zi advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace.
  37. Perfect Blue
    Forsaking the usual anime fantasy terrain for a straight suspense plot that might easily have been executed in live-action form, director Satoshi Kon's debut pic, "Perfect Blue," is a psychological thriller that intrigues without quite hitting the bull's-eye.
  38. Marvin's Room
    The whole film is laced with shards of humor and irony, which proves helpful, considering the basically downbeat nature of the material.
  39. Spoor
    The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Silent Running
    Silent Running depends on the excellent special effects of debuting director Douglas Trumbull and his team and on the appreciation of a literate but broadly entertaining script. Those being the highlights, they are virtually wiped out by the crucial miscasting of Bruce Dern. Production lacks dramatic credibility and teeters on the edge of the ludicrous.
  41. Meduzot
    Tightly constructed, cleverly stylized, serio-comic ensemble piece. Highly cinematic, with a mood of existential loneliness leavened by magical whimsy, its different story strands share themes including the need for affection and the struggle to communicate.
  42. Annette
    In this particular cocktail, Carax is boiling lead to Sparks’ soda-pop fizz, sucking all the fun from the root-beer float. What does go well with the French auteur’s honesty-insisting earnestness is Adam Driver’s over-committed lead turn.
  43. Chappaquiddick
    The movie is avidly told and often suspenseful, but it’s really a fascinating study of how corruption in America works. It sears you with its relevance.
  44. A Late Quartet
    Centered around four outstanding performances, Yaron Zilberman's fiction-feature debut feels like the work of a filmmaker who knows and appreciates the art form under scrutiny, laying a credible foundation for a story that lays bare the often melodramatic passions of the artistic soul.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Morning, Vietnam
    From the start, the film bowls you over with excitement and for those who can latch on, it’s a nonstop ride.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    A low-key drama with comedic undertones that will appeal to older auds, arthouse patrons, and Joan Plowright fans.
  47. Korengal
    Junger has emerged with a worthy companion piece in Korengal, a less harrowing, more reflective dispatch from the front lines, and an equally vital examination of the strange crucible of selflessness, courage, bloodlust, rage, confusion and fear endured by the brave men interviewed here.
  48. A Faithful Man
    If “Two Lovers” was a lively New Wave lark, exploding with color and energy, then A Faithful Man is its sober, cerebral opposite, gray and stylistically restrained, an efficient short story of a film that feels more like an intellectual exercise than an emotional experience.
  49. Sanctuary
    This is a terrifically nasty thriller about seizing control, over others and over oneself. Wigon proves to have a great grasp on it, as well; his assuredness is half of the film’s success.
  50. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    Possesses charm, as well as visual and musical appeal, on the bigscreen. But as with many short-form TV entities when sextupled in length, "SpongeBob" proves more palatable as scrumptious fast food than full-scale repast.
  51. The Ninth Day
    A thoughtfully written drama of ideas with vivid performances by August Diehl and Ulrich Matthes.
  52. The Flower of Evil
    A terrific multigenerational cast brings a subtle, mordant, frequently funny tale of family secrets vividly to life.
  53. Open Range
    An intensely scenic, refreshingly humanistic oater that dares to be sincere and open-hearted.
  54. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Toby Perl Freilich's thought-provoking documentary Inventing Our Life sketches the history of the radically socialist, more-than-100-year-old kibbutz movement.
  55. The Last Christeros
    The final days of a band of 1930s Christian rebels in the central Mexican wilderness are depicted with majestic stoicism in Matias Meyer’s elegant ode to independence.
  56. Imperial Dreams
    Even in moments that don’t ring entirely true, Boyega’s grounded performance keeps the film headed in the right direction.
  57. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    This dual focus on the need to end the ineffective, destructive “war on drugs” and broader questions of political compromise gives director Riley Morton’s film particular resonance.
  58. Mr. X
    Alluring if not especially illuminating.
  59. The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young
    Annika Iltis and Timothy Kane’s debut feature documentary finds plenty of rooting interest and colorful characters in a competition whose willful perversity brings an inevitable, generous side helping of gallows humor.
  60. Better Watch Out
    What starts out looking like a prank run amuck gradually grows more sinister, with director Chris Peckover (“Undocumented”) nicely handling the swerves toward dramatic peril and fatal consequences while still maintaining a confectionary “family entertainment” veneer of antic doings in a glossy suburban setting.
  61. The King of Staten Island
    If there were any lingering doubts that Pete Davidson has what it takes to be a terrific actor, this movie should dispel them. In “The King of Staten Island,” he holds the screen with his blinkered, scurrilous, and oddly innocent I did-what? personality, and for the first time he makes the sociopathic goofball he’s playing a fully dimensional presence.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackboard Jungle
    Glenn Ford, Morrow and Poitier are so real in their performances under the probing direction by Brooks that the picture alternatingly has the viewer pleading, indignant and frightened before the conclusion.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horror of Dracula
    Both director Terence Fisher as well as the cast have taken a serious approach to the macabre theme that adds up to lotsa tension and suspense.
  64. Drop Dead City
    Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.
  65. Sovereign
    The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.
  66. The Ides of March
    Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.
  67. Shortcomings
    For all the film’s chatty insights into modern dating mores and its casually pointed discussions of racial identity, the formula to which Shortcomings mostly adheres is a familiar one, as though someone has given one of the Apatow-esque man-child comedies of the aughts an Asian makeover.
  68. Guinevere
    Wonderfully acted and slickly mad. Acutely written with an eye to the motivations and ambiguities involved on both sides in such a relationship.
  69. Tesla
    Almereyda lays tracks to take Tesla in a dozen wild directions. . . . Yet, having ordered the audience onboard, Almereyda doesn’t go anywhere with the gambit.
  70. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    Writer-director Montiel creates a movie of many parts that don't always congeal. Mix this with the many meaty scenes and a roster of often exceptional actors and the effect is one of a fabulous acting showcase more than a wholly finished work.
  71. Enemy of the State
    Sporadically entertaining, though it lacks the kind of political urgency and emotional resonance so crucial to many similarly themed '70s movies.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poison
    Haynes has composed three distinctive stories that constitute case studies of antisocial aberrations, shot them in three strikingly different styles and intercut them in surprisingly successful ways.
  73. The Great Hack
    Privacy issues aside (and I’m second to none in my concern about them), the movie, in its ham-fisted fashion, is trying to come up with some way to regulate what it despises.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    FernGully: The Last Rainforest
    Drawn in brilliantly verdant colors immediately inviting the viewer into a special world, FernGully is certainly simple enough for any youngster to understand, yet is sufficiently hip around the edges to contain the sap.
  75. Watermarks
    Snappy, affecting documentary.
  76. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    Though Ritchie’s screenplay scores a 10 for sheer complexity and cleverness, it rates much lower down the scale for comprehensibility and audience involvement.
    • Variety
  77. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    First-time writer-director Stephen Chbosky adapts his young-adult bestseller with far more passion than skill, which suits familiar scenes of adolescent awkwardness aptly enough.
  78. In the Aisles
    In the Aisles is unusual in its compassion and respect for its blue-collared characters.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Cincinnati Kid
    Adapted from Richard Jessup's realistically-written novel, it emerges a tenseful examination of the gambling fraternity.
  80. The History of Future Folk
    Close encounters of the charming kind infuse The History of Future Folk, which will likely be remembered as the first neo-hipster Brooklyn sci-fi movie.
  81. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    In the end, the couple’s chemistry is off the charts, and that’s all that matters — though there’s still a too-tasteful David Hamilton-like quality to it all.
  82. Tom at the Farm
    It’s an improbably exciting match of knife-edge storytelling and a florid vintage aesthetic best represented by Gabriel Yared’s glorious orchestral score.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Last Starfighter
    With The Last Starfighter, director Nick Castle and writer Jonathan Betuel have done something so simple it's almost awe-inspiring: they've taken a very human story and accented it with sci-fi special effects, rather than the other way around.
  84. Jesus, You Know
    Visually glorious and sometimes moving, but comes coated with a thick hoarfrost of irony.
  85. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    "Southwest of Salem” proves a portrait of individual tragedy, and an indictment of a system willing to let prejudice cloud its judgment — and, also, to avoid admitting its own wrongdoing.
  86. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    Even at its most purplish and highfalutin (mostly in the “Her” section), “Eleanor Rigby” always aims for something sincere, and when Benson pulls back a bit — and stops trying to show us how much Freud he’s read and how many Bergman films he’s seen — the movie becomes vastly more engaging.
  87. A Master Builder
    The adaptation lacks a strong enough sense of modulated construction, making for a tedious sit. One of the biggest problems, though, is the performances.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Music from the Inside Out
    Words sometimes fail, but energy and enthusiasm triumph in Music From the Inside Out, a docu that quizzes members of the Philadelphia Orchestra about their relationship to music.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Minnie and Moskowitz
    Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel play the title roles in Minnie And Moskowitz, an oppressive and irritating film in which a shrill and numbing hysteria of acting and direction soon kills any empathy for the loneliness of the main characters. John Cassavetes wrote and directed in his now-familiar home-movie improvisational and indulgent style.
  90. The Sapphires
    Soul music’s alleged redemptive powers are fully at work in this jumbled, sketchily written but vastly appealing true-life musical comedy.
  91. Ivansxtc
    Achieves a certain poignancy through its sensitivity to mortality in a context where illness and death are often thought of primarily in terms of gossip, blown deals and lost money.
  92. Quo Vadis?
    Bright, glossy, grandly scaled and dramatically stolid, 79-year-old writer-director Jerzy Kawalerowicz's longtime dream project mixes earnest religiosity with the depraved cruelty of Nero's Rome in the classic De Mille tradition.
  93. Veer-Zaara
    Though it doesn't quite match recent classics like "Kabhi khushi kabhie gham" in sheer technique and production sheen, in-depth star casting and thorough entertainment values make this a must-see for Bollywatchers.
  94. Garden State
    Feels too piecemeal and ultimately inconsequential.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bite the Bullet
    Bite the Bullet is an excellent, literate action drama probing the diverse motivations of participants in an endurance horse race.
  96. The Green Prince
    An extraordinarily engrossing tale becomes an extremely uncinematic experience in the hands of Israeli documentarian Nadav Schirman.
  97. Saint of 9/11
    An unabashed tribute to Judge's life, struggles and Christian mission, does a good job of communicating what made Judge an inspiring figure to many, while making his life's work accessible and understandable.
  98. Proteus
    A stimulating scientific inquiry that may cause audiences to look at (and think about) the world around them in dramatically different terms.
  99. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    A movie that tries and fails to channel the indelibly dreamy mood of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides." Well-intentioned but derivative and only intermittently engaging, the suburban Michigan-set indie hits at least as many false notes as true ones.
  100. More Than the Rainbow
    [A] loosely structured, always informative, sometimes illuminating portrait docu.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »