Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big Picture
    The Big Picture is a surprisingly genial, good-natured satire on contemporary Hollywood mores.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Long Walk Home
    An effectively mounted drama about the human impact of changing times on two families, with sturdy performances by Sissy Spacek as an uppercrust white housewife and Whoopi Goldberg as her maid.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alice
    Performances are strong all around, with a succession of top actors making the most of their brief turns. But the center of the pic is Farrow, who’s funny and touching.
  4. August Winds (Ventos de Agosto)
    Mascaro isn’t interested in psychology and instead simply sketches in thoughts and motivations (Shirley’s boredom, Jeison’s father’s dissatisfaction) without exploring them, much in the manner of an observational documentary. The real connective tissue is the locale.
  5. The Housemaid
    When its many secrets spill out in the finale, “The Housemaid” has to cheat a little to pull off a humdinger of a twist, but it’s enormously satisfying anyway, if only for bringing the core historical conflict back to the fore.
  6. 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.
  7. Ophelia
    The best part of Ridley’s performance is her plodding, heavy-footed walk that reminds us this well-groomed lady is still a stubborn child underneath her fancy dress. She has a blank, open face that absorbs the court’s machinations and reflects little back until she decides to act insane.
  8. Never Goin' Back
    Inspired at least in part by stunts Frizzell pulled when she was her characters’ age, this raucous parade of humiliation and embarrassment packs all the appeal of an outrageous anecdote hilariously retold by someone who can scarcely believe they ever did something so stupid.
  9. Braven
    To put it simply and gratefully: Braven is the sort of unpretentious yet thoroughly professional popcorn entertainment that brings out the best in everybody involved.
  10. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    The movie’s message, if it has one, is that you don’t have to be super to be a superhero. Teen Titans GO! is fun in a defiantly unsuper way, and that’s a recommendation.
  11. Crazy Rich Asians
    Director Jon M. Chu (“Step Up 2: The Streets”) has crafted a broadly appealing charmer in which practically anyone can identify with Wu’s character as she’s whisked into this elite milieu.
  12. Lu Over the Wall
    In terms of craftsmanship, the film has a scrappy, sometimes cheap look to it (characters look flat, like thin-lined Etch-a-Sketch drawings, superimposed over more colorful hand-painted backgrounds), for which it more than compensates via other strengths — namely, a trio of relatable, well-written human protagonists and Lu, who can change form and bend water at will.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Shot in the Dark
    Sometimes the narrative is subordinated to individual bits of business and running gags but Sellers’ skill as a comedian again is demonstrated, and Sommer, in role of the chambermaid who moves all men to amorous thoughts and sometimes murder, is pert and expert.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Inspector Clouseau
    Film is a lively, entertaining and episodic story of bank robbers. Good scripting, better acting and topnotch direction get the most out of the material.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Pink Panther
    Revenge of the Pink Panther isn't the best of the continuing film series, but Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers on a slow day are still well ahead of most other comedic filmmakers.
  16. Pandas
    Pandas is less sentimental than you expect, but you can respect the film’s honesty and still leave it hoping that the next true-life panda adventure delivers more of a feel-good ending — for the audience, and mostly for the pandas.
  17. Allure
    A Worthy Companion is a lacerating snapshot of what abuse really does: how it can tear away someone’s identity.
  18. Bumblebee
    Bumblebee shows that there’s room for a bit more nuance within the formula, but if you break it down, this relatively enjoyable film is made entirely from recycled parts.
  19. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Neville’s fantastic archival footage reveals the man through his work — or at least, it reveals his philosophies, if not the childhood memories that gave Rogers the ability to understand a four-year-old’s brain, almost as if he still carried his in his cardigan pocket.
  20. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The movie quotes Baldwin as saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street,” but this one may as well be located inside a snow globe. In deciding how to translate Baldwin’s prose to the screen, Jenkins may as well have made Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a Douglas Sirk movie (or put Alice Waters’ “The Color Purple” through the Steven Spielberg filter).
  21. Roma
    Roma is no mere movie — it’s a vision, a memory play that unfolds with a gritty and virtuosic time-machine austerity. It’s a Proustian reverie, dreamed and designed down to the last street corner and scuffed piece of furniture. Yet I actually think it’s far from a masterpiece, because as a viewing experience it has a slightly hermetic coffee-table-book purity. Every moment comes at you in the same methodically objective and caressing Zen way.
  22. Suspiria
    Suspiria has been made with enough skill to get inside your head, but enough ominous pretension to leave you scratching it.
  23. Kangaroo
    Kangaroo deserves credit for presenting a wealth of informed opinions and impressing the need for a change of thinking if solutions are ever to be found.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Swimming with Sharks
    Within its very limited range, pic has verve, a fine control of tone and a stylish look given its low budget and three-week sked. Spacey dominates, but Whaley makes a convincing transition from goody-goody to icy insider, and Forbes manages well despite being forced to flip-flop on command between sarcastic bitchiness and softer intimacy.
  25. The Humanity Bureau
    Director Rob W. King and screenwriter Dave Schultz’s engaging effort has enough standard genre elements to satisfy more open-minded sci-fi fans, and its political-allegory angle is ultimately quite potent without becoming too heavy-handed.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fresh
    This portrait of a childhood both incredibly resourceful and tragically deprived is memorable in an era of numerous outstanding preteen performances, and the final image of Fresh cracking, for the first time, from the cumulative pressure of his life is indelible. Performances are terrifically intense from top to bottom. Esposito is particularly riveting as the sinewy drug baron, and Ron Brice also scores as a rival dealer.
  27. Piercing
    The film is expertly crafted with jewel-toned cinematography, terrifically sleazy saxophone music, and performances by Abbott and Wasikowska that take turns seizing command. Still, like Reed’s solo rehearsals, Piercing has the feel of a blueprint, a talented man exercising his technical skills while waiting for a whack at the real deal.
  28. Madeline's Madeline
    Madeline’s Madeline mistakes intimacy for honesty, and it mis-assumes that audiences care nearly as much about the creative process as actors and directors do.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    10 to Midnight
    William Roberts’ screenplay, while it sags in the middle, is damnably clever at dropping in its vicious vigilante theme without being didactic, and J. Lee Thompson’s direction, borrowing from Hitchcock’s editing in Psycho, creates the full horror of blades thrusting into naked bellies without the viewer ever actually seeing it happen.
  30. Inventing Tomorrow
    Inventing Tomorrow won’t win points for originality, but this snapshot of adolescent ingenuity and innovation, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, nonetheless proves equally entertaining and inspiring.
  31. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    It’s a film as compellingly all over the shop as its subject, even if it doesn’t quite have her beat on stylistic verve and risk.
  32. The Tale
    Both a natural extension of Fox’s career to date and a complete about-face, The Tale marks her first narrative feature, but only because traditional documentary wouldn’t do justice to this messy, meandering investigation into her traumatic first sexual experience, for the incidents it depicts are true, “at least as far I know.”
  33. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade shines as, like, a totally spot-on, you know, portrait of Millennial angst and stuff. That may be how Kayla (and all her peers) talk...but Burnham shows a sociolinguist’s ear for the cadence and flow of 21st-century girl-speak, and Fisher...delivers his dialogue so naturally, you’d swear she’s making it up as she goes along.
  34. Juliet, Naked
    It’s a winsome screwball love story that grows on you and takes you somewhere charming.
  35. Bucky and the Squirrels
    The unshakable perkiness of the whole endeavor, its blithe lack of topicality, edge or satirical intent (it’s not even a spoof, just a goof) would be irritating if it didn’t work so hard to remind us that you don’t have to be mean to be funny.
  36. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Colangelo (whose underrated 2014 first feature “Little Accidents” was about the aftermath of a fatal mining accident) has created a consistently interesting if slow-moving drama that works very well as a showcase for its lead performer.
  37. The Long Dumb Road
    Instead of slapstick laughs, The Long Dumb Road pays attention to how these two opposites connect.
  38. Pity
    If Pity doesn’t quite have the shock of the new on its side, then, its sharpest passages nonetheless exert the bracing, mouth-shuddering tang of neat ouzo: You know how it’s going to taste, but it leaves you wincing anyway.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an entertaining and emotionally involving western. Yet, while it is an enjoyable film it falls distinctly shy of its innate story potential.
  40. Adrift
    Woodley gives herself over to the physical and spiritual reality of each scene. She knows how to play an ordinary woman who’s wild at heart, and she keeps you captivated, even when the film itself is watchable in a perfectly competent, touching, and standard way.
  41. The Cured
    Just when you thought nothing new could be done with the undead, “The Cured” pulls off a fresh take on zombie terrain.
  42. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
    Hosking has a vision, and more often that not, it works.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bugsy
    A melancholy and intimate gangster saga about a romantic dreamer with fatal flaws, Bugsy emerges as a smooth, safe portrait of a volatile, dangerous character. An absorbing narrative flow and a parade of colorful underworld characters vie for screen time with an unsatisfactory central romance.
  44. Finding Your Feet
    The modest rewards in Finding Your Feet are ones of sprightly human chemistry rather than great narrative discovery, of all-round good humor rather than outright hilarity.
  45. The Price of Free
    The film’s edge, if not its worthiness, is slightly dulled by an over-slick approach that in the end makes it feel less like reportage than a first-class fundraising video.
  46. Hearts Beat Loud
    Clemons has been a luminous presence who could bloom into a great grown-up actress. Hearts Beat Loud proves she’s the real deal. As for the film around her, Haley’s 21-drum solo salute to the passage of time is, like Frank, merely fine. But he admirably keeps his characters’ victories small and their losses familiar, making his movie a ballad everyone can hum to.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death Race 2000
    Script, from an Ib Melchior story, makes its satirical points economically, and director Paul Bartel keeps the film moving quickly.
  48. Are We Not Cats
    Though this is a slightly unreal world in which no one looks at their iPhones or uses a computer...the sweet earnestness of the two leads makes their characters real.
  49. Becks
    Becks is the kind of modest, non-earthshaking indie enterprise that ends up being so satisfying mostly because it’s about a character type familiar from real life but all too under-represented at the movies.
  50. The Reports on Sarah and Saleem
    If at times it feels like the Alayan brothers have bitten off more than they can chew, the core of the plot, and the weighty issues raised, fortunately remain front and center.
  51. The Peacemaker
    What brings a documentary like this one to life is a central character with something going on that’s thornier than his official idealism. Fortunately, that’s Padraig O’Malley.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Manhattan Project
    A warm, comedy-laced doomsday story. Using clever one-liners and many humorous situations, Brickman manages successfully to sugarcoat the story’s serious message.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Toy Soldiers
    Toy Soldiers is a very entertaining action film that updates 1981's sleeper hit Taps. Seeing Sean Astin (son of John Astin and Patty Duke) and his pranksters turn into commandos who wipe out the nasty invaders makes for purely escapist, crowd-pleasing pleasure.
  54. Ramen Heads
    Ramen Heads may be a tad lacking in visual excitement, but it succeeds in imparting the ineffable appeal of Japan’s national dish.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Toxic Avenger
    This madcap spoof on The Incredible Hulk is an outlandish mix of gory violence and realistic special effects.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Benji
    One of the wonders of the production, told simply and with no pretense of grandiose style, is the manner in which Benji – real name Higgins – performs. In this case, it isn’t a dog performing, but a dog acting, just as humans act. Much of the footage is shot from about 18 inches above the ground, upward from Benji’s point of view, and innovation is fascinating.
  57. Monster Hunt 2
    Monster Hunt 2 is so perfectly good-natured and so utterly nonsensical that it makes not-thinking-about-it basically an act of self-preservation, for which, bless its bouncing, gurgling, flolloping heart.
  58. Hannah
    This is an impressively rigorous exercise, in which the director’s sober formalism finds a kindred spirit in his leading lady’s studied, secretive restraint.
  59. Don't Talk to Irene
    Even when the film’s eccentricities feel too choreographed, it manages to deliver its preordained uplift with good-humored charm.
  60. Rogers Park
    It’s an ideal showcase for the four leads, who are given the latitude to create fully human characters.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Parent Trap
    David Swift, whose writing, direction and appreciation of young Hayley Mills’ natural histrionic resources contributed so much to Pollyanna, repeats the three-ply effort on this excursion, with similar success.
  62. Pyewacket
    It’s the rare horror film that’s actually more effective in psychological terms than in suspense ones.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who's Harry Crumb?
    Foolishness in the right hands can be sublimely funny, and combo of star John Candy and director Paul Flaherty (former SCTV cohorts) puts the perfect spin on Who’s Harry Crumb?, a Naked Gun-style farce about a bumbling private eye who succeeds in spite of himself.
  64. Infinite Football
    [Ginghină's] endlessly evolving ideas for revolutionizing football are not a blueprint for a real-world solution at all. Instead they represent that intensely relatable and human place inside, where any of us, however small our lives and crushed our ambitions, can be limitless, unhobbled by injury, unfettered by ordinariness, unbounded by physics: infinite.
  65. Profile
    Bekmambetov’s cumulatively hysterical film begins as a study of terror before lurching into something closer to horror.
  66. Utoya: July 22
    U – July 22 is designed to be as immersive as it is exhausting, and largely succeeds.
  67. Season of the Devil
    There are some raw, stirring interludes here...but the film’s sheer mass of similar material rather reduces their impact.
  68. Touch Me Not
    Pintilie is the opposite of a misanthrope — she’s genuinely invested in opening the mind to the body’s sensations. Keeping it all balanced is where she gets bogged down.
  69. Dovlatov
    It’s easy to simply be mesmerized by German’s exceptional talent for stage blocking and camera movements, yet while there’s much here to appreciate, the film lacks the power of “Under Electric Clouds” despite being his most emotionally approachable work to date.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sister Act
    It’s a divine concept, and after a weak start director Emile Ardolino milks it for all the laughs it’s worth, while deriving requisite warmth from solid performances by Goldberg and Smith.
  71. Dora and the Lost City of Gold
    The most endearing quality of Nicholas Stoller and Matthew Robinson’s script — not counting the fact they didn’t try to whitewash their Latina heroine — is the way it permits Dora to remain indefatigably upbeat no matter what the situation, whether navigating treacherous Incan temples or facing an auditorium of jeering teenage peers.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wilby Conspiracy
    The Wilby Conspiracy [from Peter Driscoll’s novel] is a good action melodrama about apartheid in South Africa. It was made in Kenya. The stars Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine are relentlessly stalked by Nicol Williamson, superb as a coldly dedicated and brutal policeman out after racial agitators.
  73. Backstabbing for Beginners
    It’s to the film’s credit that it creates a sense of high-stakes peril despite us knowing the rough outcome from the get-go, and largely without simplifying its moral dilemmas into straightforward choices between heroism and villainy.
  74. Take Your Pills
    The kinds of connections that Take Your Pills makes, between the culture of information overload and a radically tightened job market and heightened personal performance and the chemical itch that fuels this whole late-stage capitalist dynamic, may strike some as too speculative for comfort. Yet it’s precisely by making connections like these that a documentary can fire up your perceptions enough to burn through the cumulative effects of advertising.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heavy Metal
    Courtesy of a vastly overlong, relatively unrousing 27-minute end-piece that may be the technical highpoint of the film, but lacks the punch and tightness of the earlier segments, the venture tends to run out of steam. Still, the net effect is an overridingly positive one.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valley Girl
    Valley is very good simply because director Martha Coolidge obviously cares about her two lead characters and is privileged to have a couple of fine young performers, Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman, to make the audience care.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Conan the Destroyer
    Conan the Destroyer is the ideal sword and sorcery picture. As Conan, Arnold Schwarzenegger seems more animated and much funnier under Fleischer’s direction than he did under John Milius’ in the original – he even has an amusing drunk scene. Jones just about runs off with the picture.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heartbreak Ridge
    Heartbreak Ridge offers another vintage Clint Eastwood performance. There are enough mumbled half-liners in this contemporary war pic to satisfy those die-hards eager to see just how he portrays the consummate marine veteran.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Commando
    In Commando, the fetching surprise is the glancing humor between the quixotic and larky Rae Dawn Chong and the straight-faced killing machine of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Chong lights up the film like a firefly, Schwarzenegger delivers a certain light touch of his own, the result is palatable action comics.
  80. First Match
    Emanuelle manages to make us care about this bullying girl without pleading for sympathy.
  81. Red Notice
    A fun, fast-paced and frequently amusing divertissement.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Meatballs
    Scripters have managed to gloss over the stereotypes and come up with a smooth-running narrative that makes the camp hijinks part of an overall human mosaic. No one is unduly belittled or mocked, and Meatballs is without the usual grossness and cynicism of many contempo comedy pix.
  83. Summer in the Forest
    Wright satisfies in providing a glimpse of an alternative community and lifestyle that appears near-idyllic without being painted in terms that are too sentimental or cute.
  84. An Ordinary Man
    An incredibly precise actor who understands exactly how to play to the camera, conveying volumes via even the slightest microexpressions, Kingsley navigates the tricky mix of humor, horror, and deep-seated regret that make this man, if not exactly ordinary, then relatable, at least.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Internal Affairs
    Figgis never lets the pace slow long enough to expose the story’s thinness despite, in retrospect, a moderate amount of action.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miami Blues
    This quirky and sometimes brutally funny film strings together terrific moments but never takes a point of view.
  87. Winter Brothers
    While we may not always know what Pálmason means, there’s the undeniable sense that he does, and mostly, that’s enough to add up to an impressively original, auspiciously idiosyncratic debut, one that scratches away at truths about masculinity, lovelessness and isolation, that are no less true for being all but inexpressible.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Woman in Red
    A wonderful diversion through all of this is Gilda Radner, a relatively plain fellow office worker who initially thinks she’s the object of Wilder’s wanderlust and is bitterly – and vigorously – disappointed when she finds out she isn’t.
  89. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    The film is sufficiently intelligent and entertaining to engage most grown-ups and, no kidding, fascinate history buffs.
  90. The Informer
    For all The Informer lacks in surface style — shot and scored as it is in functional, straight-to-VOD fashion — it remains a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine.
  91. Fighting with My Family
    Fighting With My Family may not be an Oscar contender but it has enough wit, heart, energy and good cheer to make it a fun watch even for non-wrestling fans.
  92. A Simple Favor
    The film feels a lot like the Serge Gainsbourg number that Stephanie dances to in the kitchen: jazzy, a little sleazy, and worth a cult following.
  93. Second Act
    Even though Second Act shouldn’t work, it does (sort of). It’s got flow, a certain knowing ticky-tackiness about its own contrivances. You know you’re watching a connect-the-dots comedy, but the dots sparkle. And Lopez gives her first star performance in a while. Age has enriched her talent; she brings curlicues of experience to every scene.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
    As a phenomenon, the hip-hop, breakdancing, sidewalk graffiti and rap music culture lends itself well to a comic book approach and to his credit director Sam Firstenberg doesn’t try to interject too much reality into the picture.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sudden Impact
    A brutally hard-hitting policier which casts Clint Eastwood as audiences like to see him, as the toughest guy in town.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    When a Stranger Calls
    More than anything else, When a Stranger Calls resembles a good, old-fashioned grade B thriller.
  97. Tombstone
    Tombstone is a tough-talking but soft-hearted tale that is entertaining in a sprawling, old-fashioned manner.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes
    Wes Craven’s blood-and-bone frightener about an all-American family at the mercy of cannibal mutants is a satisfying piece of pulp.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Electric Horseman
    Even though Redford, as an ex-rodeo champ, and Fonda don’t create the romantic sparks that might be expected, it’s their dramatic professionalism that salvages Horseman and makes it a moving and effective film by the time the final credits roll by.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Falcon and the Snowman
    All the way through The Falcon and the Snowman director John Schlesinger and an exemplary cast grapple with a true story so oddly motivated it would be easily dismissed if fictional. Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn are superb.
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