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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    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Of Gods and Men
    As the film patiently (perhaps too much so for some) heads toward its foregone conclusion, Beauvois gradually raises his style to a level of baroqueness reminiscent of 1995's "Don't Forget You're Going to Die."
  2. To Die For
    Delivers continuous pinpricks of irreverent humor and subversive cultural commentary.
    • Variety
  3. One Cut of the Dead
    “One Cut” captures all the craziness and exhilaration of movie-making on a minuscule budget. High-energy performances from a cast of little-knowns are perfectly tuned to the material. The outstanding technical package is a great example of how to create a Poverty Row look for what’s actually a very sophisticated filmmaking exercise.
  4. Museo
    Ruizpalacios spins an irresistibly inventive and unusually intelligent tall tale from this kernel of truth. All the mischief, however, is precisely counterbalanced by a deep affection for his funny, flawed (largely fictional) characters and shot through with a surprisingly biting assessment of the compromised nature of the museum trade.
  5. Nobody's Fool
    Nobody's Fool is a gentle, flavorsome story of a loose-knit, dysfunctional family whose members essentially include every glimpsed citizen of a small New York town. Fronted by a splendid performance from Paul Newman as a spirited man who has made nothing of his life, Robert Benton's character-driven film is sprinkled with small pleasures; the dramatic developments here don't take place in the noisy, calamitous manner that is customary these days.
  6. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The wrenching tale has something for anyone who likes their melodrama spiked with palpable tension and genuine suspense.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stranger Than Paradise
    Stranger than Paradise is a bracingly original avant-garde black comedy. Begun as a short which was presented under the same title at some earlier festivals, film has been expanded in outstanding fashion by young New York writer-director Jim Jarmusch.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bonnie and Clyde
    This inconsistency of direction is the most obvious fault of Bonnie and Clyde, which has some good ingredients, although they are not meshed together well.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Beaches of Agnès
    Oddball mix that may strike some as overly whimsical but should delight the filmmaker's many fans.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    West Side Story
    West Side Story is a beautifully-mounted, impressive, emotion-ridden and violent musical which, in its stark approach to a raging social problem and realism of unfoldment, may set a pattern for future musical presentations. Screen takes on a new dimension in this powerful and sometimes fascinating translation of the Broadway musical to the greater scope of motion pictures.
  11. On-Gaku: Our Sound
    True to Ohashi original manga, Iwaisawa’s illustrations are geometric, employing abstract backgrounds and bright, dominant colors. Faces, reduced to a few stark, scrawly lines, heighten the comical effect of the characters’ poker-faced dialogue, without compromising the richness of their expressions.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Raiders of the Lost Ark
    Spielberg has deftly veiled proceedings in a sense of mystical wonder that makes it all the more easy for viewers to suspend disbelief and settle back for the fun.
  13. I Saw the TV Glow
    This character-centered setup is where I Saw the TV Glow is most affecting, grounded by the tense, tacit bond between two highly guarded people — and given an electric jolt by Lundy-Paine’s fragile, volatile performance as someone certain there’s no accepting place for them outside the rectangular confines of the TV set. But
  14. Deliver Us from Evil
    So harsh and damning is the pic toward the current Catholic leadership -- personified by Los Angeles-based Cardinal Roger Mahony, who oversaw O'Grady's stewardship at various central California parishes in the 1970s and '80s, that charges the church operates "like the Mafia" sound spot-on.
  15. May December
    It’s a thorough dive into the psychology of everyone involved, not least of all the woman who’d be drawn to play such a role.
  16. Maidan
    Beyond the film’s immediacy, “Maidan” is an impressive, bold treatment of a complex subject via rigidly formalist means
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Say Anything...
    A half-baked love story, full of good intentions but uneven in the telling.
  18. Drug War
    A nail-biter that’s actually quite light on action but so well-scripted and shot, it’s nonetheless edge-of-your-seat material.
  19. The Great Beauty
    Sorrentino continues to tackle major topics using an extraordinary combination of broad brushstrokes and minute detail. Passion via the intellect has become his trademark, well suited to this dissection of empty diversions, indulged in by latter-day Neros fiddling while Rome burns.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Odd Couple
    The Odd Couple, Neil Simon's smash legit comedy, has been turned into an excellent film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Simon's somewhat expanded screenplay retains the broad, as well as the poignant, laughs inherent in the rooming together of two men whose marriages are on the rocks.
  21. Cover-Up
    As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.
  22. April
    April is loath to explain itself, inviting us instead to watch, listen and feel our way through it — a work marked, like the benevolent but unreachable woman at its center, by immense empathy and isolated, inconsolable despair.
  23. Vitalina Varela
    Costa’s elongation of time (made more acute since there’s rarely enough light coming from the screen to check your watch) combined with his habit of doling out a few narrative details without exploration, results in a film that distances spectators not already in his thrall.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
    Done in the satirical Sturges vein, and directed with that same touch, the story makes much of characterization and somewhat wacky comedy, plus some slapstick, with excellent photography figuring throughout.
  25. Happening
    Happening is filmed and performed in such a delicate, skin-soft register, meanwhile, that the escalating terror of Anne’s situation is all the more pronounced, eventually pivoting into a realm of wholly realism-based body horror.
  26. The Human Surge 3
    The Human Surge 3 doesn’t have defined characters or even very coherent conversations, but its swirling of reality conjures an absorbing dreamscape.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Patton
    War is hell, and Patton is one hell of a war picture, perhaps one of the most remarkable of its type ever made.
  28. The Lost Daughter
    Through it all, Gyllenhaal assumes an unfussy, practically invisible non-style that conveys the essential (like that missing doll, visible in the background of a key scene) while privileging the performances.
  29. Black Mother
    A beguilingly immersive, multifaceted, vividly sensorial portrait of his mother’s homeland, Jamaica.
  30. The Big Sick
    Comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon mine their personal history for laughs, heartache, and hard-earned insight in The Big Sick, a film that’s by turns romantic, rueful, and hilarious.
  31. Argo
    Ultimately, the thrill of Argo is in watching how the illusion-making of movies found such an unlikely application on the world political stage, where the stakes were literally life and death.
  32. Summer Hours
    A family ensembler of utter simplicity, Oliver Assayas' Summer Hours is a salutory (and belated) reminder that, as with his earlier Cold Water and Late August, Early September, some of this writer-director's best work comes in modest packages.
  33. Traffic
    Enormously ambitious and masterfully made, Traffic represents docudrama-style storytelling at a very high level.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (re-released)
    It takes nerve to make a pic in which all dialog is sung. Also, there is no dancing and this is not a filmed operetta or opera. [review of original release]
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Grifters
    A curiously uneven movie.
  36. Talk to Her
    An engaging, well-crafted and imaginative meditation on solitude and communication.
  37. Our Daily Bread
    Looks at the agricultural industry across Europe through sound and images alone. Pic offers a tabula rasa in which some auds will see a horrifying indictment of the industry's cruelties, others a realistic depiction of mechanized farming, and some a soft-spoken tribute to manual labor. Meanwhile, precisely composed lensing and painstaking sound design create moments of sublime beauty.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Strawberry Blonde
    Cagney and de Havilland provide topnotch performances that do much to keep up interest in the proceedings. Rita Hayworth is an eyeful as the title character, while Jack Carson is excellent as the politically ambitious antagonist of the dentist.
  39. The Master
    The writer-director's typically eccentric sixth feature is a sustained immersion in a series of hypnotic moods and longueurs, an imposing picture that thrillingly and sometimes maddeningly refuses to conform to expectations.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Boys Don't Cry
    The poignant and candid Boys Don't Cry can be seen as a "Rebel Without a Cause" for these culturally diverse and complex times, with the two misfit girls enacting a version of the James Dean/Natalie Wood romance with utmost conviction.
  41. The Wild Pear Tree
    Even more than in his previous film, Ceylan and his fellow scriptwriters (wife Ebru Ceylan along with Akın Aksu, also acting) develop astonishingly complex spoken recitatives that weave philosophy, religious tradition, and ethics together into a mesmerizing verbal fugue.
  42. My Imaginary Country
    While in formal terms it’s more of a standard, reportage-based doc than any of his recent essays, it is also the rarest of projects: one in which a venerated member of an older generation of political activists communicates a fervent admiration for his younger counterparts and a deep, grateful optimism for the future they are building.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    The film is full of singing, as the characters break into familiar songs at family gatherings or in the local pub. This isn’t a film based on nostalgia, though; its very special qualities stem from the beautiful simplicity of direction, writing and playing, and the accuracy of the incidents depicted.
  44. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    Story has made a potent political film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that data alone cannot possibly express.
  45. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
    Miyazaki’s first hit fascinates as a glimpse into the master’s then-developing style, even when the final-act storytelling gets woozy.
  46. Aladdin
    Floridly beautiful, shamelessly derivative and infused with an irreverent, sophisticated comic flair thanks to Robin Williams' vocal calisthenics, Aladdin probably won't equal its beastly predecessor but should still enjoy a magic carpet ride through the holiday season.
  47. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Los Angeles may be the most photographed city in the world, but it has never have been captured with such complex layers of meaning and fascination as in Thom Andersen's remarkable Los Angeles Plays Itself.
  48. Sentimental Value
    While not as stylistically radical as Trier’s last film, “The Worst Person in the World,” this layered family-centric drama (which was also written by Eskil Vogt) shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you’d think that cinema would have exhausted by now.
  49. This Is England
    With its knockout lead perfs and taut if slightly familiar construction, this '80s-set dramedy about a skinhead gang reps Meadows' most fluently made film so far.
  50. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Each of these episodes is well acted, follows a reasonably conventional three-act structure and emphasizes interesting female characters in a compelling situation — which is more than can be said for many portmanteau films, where one segment is markedly more satisfying than the others. But it also suggests an ongoing resistance on Hamaguchi’s part to engage with the feature form itself.
  51. City of Ghosts
    What City of Ghosts does best is to humanize those who’ve suffered most from the conflict in Syria, educating us through both outrage and compassion.
  52. Springtime in a Small Town
    Exquisitely made love story.
    • 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
  54. Sweet Sixteen
    Rendered deeply moving by the director's peerless capacity to combine humor and compassion with honesty and despair.
  55. Ponyo
    Though targeted at tots, Ponyo may appeal most to jaded adults thirsty for wondrous beauty and unpackaged innocence
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is a salty, bawdy, hilarious and very touching story about two career sailors escorting to a naval prison a dumb boot sentenced for petty thievery. Jack Nicholson is outstanding at the head of a superb cast.
  57. Strong Island
    It’s a moving film, but it leaves a hole in one’s outrage.
  58. The Interrupters
    James captures candid counseling sessions and heated tussles with equal dynamism, but never quite earns his 164-minute running time.
  59. Ernest & Célestine
    A charming animated feature.
  60. American Factory
    American Factory is anything but a dry documentary, and will likely be a prime contender in awards season.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Only Angels Have Wings
    In Only Angels Have Wings, Howard Hawks had a story to tell and he has done it inspiringly well.
  62. First Reformed
    In First Reformed, Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still one hell of a filmmaker.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Z
    Z is a punchy political pic [from the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos] that mixes action, violence, and conspiracy on a robust, lavish scale.
  64. Baby Driver
    Like all Edgar Wright movies, Baby Driver is a blast, featuring wall-to-wall music and a surfeit of inspired ideas. But it’s also something of a mess, blaring pop tunes of every sort as it lurches between rip-roaring car chases, colorful pre-caper banter, and a twee young-love subplot.
  65. A Little Prayer
    MacLachlan’s writing style is at once honest and slightly elevated, the kind we’re used to hearing onstage, where the structure of the entire script matters, and subtext is every bit as important as what’s spoken.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bad and the Beautiful
    The screenplay of the George Bradshaw story is exceptionally well-written.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Silence of the Lambs
    A mesmerizing thriller that will grip audiences from first scene to last.
  68. Sabaya
    Sabaya is remarkable not least for how cleanly Hirori excises himself from it, careful to not get in between the viewer and these devastating stories with their 10 different flavors of heroism.
  69. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    A stunning debut that finds its dandelion-haired heroine fighting rising tides and fantastic creatures in a mythic battle against modernity.
  70. Let the Fire Burn
    The brilliantly edited tapestry of actions and reactions exposes a pattern of prejudice and fear capable of infinitely repeating itself.
  71. Last Train Home
    The picture laudably adopts an intimate, personal approach to a subject -- hardworking Chinese garment workers -- that's been covered in more hectoring fashion elsewhere.
  72. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    The movie succeeds in enlightening without ever coming across as an “eat your spinach” civics lesson.
  73. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
    Art aficionados the world over will want to catch the pic, which PBS airs later this month; given the impact Warhol had on the world, it's a must for culture vultures.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Persona
    Bergman has come up with probably one of his most masterful films technically and in conception, but also one of his most difficult ones.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Desire
    The direction is subtle and inspired, with many smart little Lubitschian touches adding to the general appeal of the yarn [by Hans Szekely and R.A. Stemmle] and its plot.
  76. One Fine Morning
    It knows the fragility of quiet, which is sometimes the sound of inner peace, and sometimes, per that Prévert poem, the echoing unrest of an empty space.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Double Life of Veronique
    Despite pic’s many-splendored outbursts of filmic creativity and intense emotion, final result, about the opposite destinies of a Polish girl and a French girl who look alike and have the same name and tics, remains a head-scratching cipher with blurred edges.
  78. Flight of the Red Balloon
    This eloquent study of loneliness and postmodern drift likely will be received with more admiration than rapture by the helmer's followers. But Juliette Binoche's turn as a harried single mom and pic's enlivening portrait of domestic rupture make this a highly accessible Hou.
  79. No Other Choice
    The more chaos descends, the more meticulous Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture.
  80. Blue Film
    Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.
  81. The Last Seduction
    Pacing is on the button, and the film moves inexorably, without any flat moments, toward the suspenseful, if morally indefensible, finale.
  82. My Father's Shadow
    As the audience is taken in by this intimate and well-observed drama, the rug gets pulled from beneath them by revealing the violence and strife that was simmering underneath. It’s a trick so devastating that it completely upends the movie, elevating it into a deeply humanist narrative.
  83. A Real Pain
    A Real Pain is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sabotage
    Competent and experienced hand of the director is apparent throughout this production, which is a smart one and executed in a business-like manner from start to finish.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Walkabout
    Roeg's bag is photography, but pretty pictures alone cannot sustain - and, in fact, inhibit - this fragile and forced screen adaptation of a James Vance Marshall novel.
  86. Before Night Falls
    A dense, emotionally satisfying portrait of a man, a time and a place.
  87. Atlantics
    The result offers mixed levels of satisfaction, most successful in capturing the protagonist’s leap into adulthood and her increasing reliance on the forthright, independent-minded women around her.
  88. Waking Life
    Audiences looking for something fresh and different, not to mention a head trip, will find it in Waking Life.
  89. The Green Knight
    As a movie, The Green Knight feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry.
  90. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
    Destined to rank as one of the major achievements in American documentary, the "Paradise Lost" project comes to a presumed end with Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    The film’s nervewracking quality is consistent with its content. Nicholson’s performance is a remarkably varied and daring exploration of a complex character, equally convincing in its manic and sober aspects.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    From Here to Eternity
    An outstanding motion picture...It’s still raw, tough dramatic stuff of great entertainment pull for adult ticket buyers. Only a few will find it too strong for their effete tastes. Importantly, the distaffers will like it.
  93. The Bourne Ultimatum
    A pounding, pulsating thriller that provides an almost constant adrenaline surge for nearly two hours.
  94. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    With its accelerated rhythm, relentless flow of incident and wizard-war endgame, "Part 2" will strike many viewers as a much more exciting, involving picture than the slower, more atmospheric "Part 1."
  95. Tea with the Dames
    A wholly delightful talkathon.
  96. Athlete A
    Athlete A is a testament to their perseverance, and to the courage of all those who stood up in court to face the man who had violated their humanity. But it’s also a testament to the obsession that gave cover to their abuse — to a culture that wanted winners at any cost.
  97. Take Shelter
    This deliberately paced psychological drama builds an ever-tightening knot of tension around an excellent Michael Shannon, here playing a family man slowly driven mad by apocalyptic visions that could be paranoid, prophetic or both.
  98. The Salesman
    For a healthy stretch, The Salesman is even more low-key, minimal, and contained than the earlier Farhadi films. Yet the writer-director’s technique is just as assured as before. Every shot is in place, every line leading to an outcome that feels quietly up for grabs.
  99. 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.
  100. You Can Count on Me
    A sensitive, intimate, enormously touching drama.
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