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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    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unfaithfully Yours
    Moore is right at home on the podium or behind the piano, and his comic invention results in a delightful performance.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Legal Eagles
    Loss of intrigue with a scattered plot involving art fraud and murder is made up for by an often witty, albeit lightweight dialog led by the ever-boyish star Robert Redford.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Mercy
    Despite some graphically brutal violence and a fair bit of 'too-cool' police jargon, No Mercy turns out to be a step above most other films in this blooming genre of lone-cop-turned-vigilante stories.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yentl
    In league with ace cinematographer David Watkin, Streisand has created a fine-looking period piece, working on Czech locations and in English studios.
  5. The Ghost of Peter Sellers
    So what is The Ghost of Peter Sellers? It’s a record of what it was like to shoot an empty shambolic piece of junk that drained the coffers of everyone involved. It’s a record of the kind of damage that a debonair misfit like Peter Sellers could cause when he put his mischievous (and maybe, in some ways, unstable) mind to it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Octagon
    A wildly incredible but entertaining tale.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gorky Park
    There's enough menace and romance in Gorky Park to appeal to many, especially those helped by the memory of Martin Cruz Smith's successful novel.
  8. The Trip to Greece
    The Trip to Greece marks a spirited and convivial return to form, even if it’s lofty enough to present Coogan and Brydon’s six-day journey through Greece as a retracing of the path of Odysseus.
  9. Love Wedding Repeat
    It unfolds, more or less, in real time, which gives it an existential comedy-of-suspense element that trumps the usual Styrofoam rom-com plotting. The classical music playing in the background doesn’t make the film stodgy; it creates a sustained operatic flow. And the actors are simply terrific.
  10. Tape
    “Bombshell” aside, Tape is one of the very first dramas of the #MeToo era to confront, head-on, what harassment looks like and how it really works. Yet even as the film feels up-to-the-minute, it’s been made with a certain threadbare, streets-of-New-York punk feminist mythologizing that may remind you, at times, of the films of Beth B.
  11. The Platform
    Once the major ideas are on the table, the momentum wobbles and The Platform trades thrills for the empathetic weight of imprisonment. There’s more blood and less hope, though Aranzazu Calleja’s music box-inspired score can lighten the mood to that of a storybook fable.
  12. Malignant
    It’s hard to say whether a film this bonkers “works” or not, but it’s impossible not to admire both the craft and the extravagant bad taste behind its go-for-broke energy.
  13. Shithouse
    This is a modest film, well-acted but rather clumsily assembled, that almost certainly would have benefited from an in-person SXSW, where it’s possible to bask in the shared laughter of an enthusiastic first screening.
  14. Blue Story
    Blue Story is very much a blast of something present tense. Rapman’s scenes boil over with life, as he crafts an opera of innocence infected by gangsta pathology.
  15. She Dies Tomorrow
    The film feels a bit too experimental at times, suffering from lags in tempo and purpose, but it never succumbs to the ordinary either. There is a rare, unrefined quality to Seimetz’s film — a personal work of art that feels deeply honest throughout.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Obsession
    Robertson’s low-key performance is as crucial to the manifold surprise impact as Bujold’s versatile, sensual and effervescent charisma.
  17. Waldo on Weed
    More than the film’s activist message, however, it’s writer-director Tommy Avallone’s portrait of whatever-it-takes parental risk and sacrifice that will help it resonate with audiences no matter their views on marijuana.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Random Harvest
    The film transcription of James Hilton’s novel Random Harvest, under Sidney Franklin’s production and Mervyn LeRoy’s direction, achieves much more than average importance.
  19. The Half of It
    It’s also made fresh by the myriad literary and cinematic references Wu weaves into Aster’s correspondence with “Paul.” With its slightly nerdy, play-on-wordy title, The Half of It alludes to the ancient Greek belief that two-faced humans were separated by the gods, devoting their lives to finding their lost soulmates (if you like the idea, read Plato’s “Symposium,” or check out “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”).
  20. Who You Think I Am
    Who You Think I Am is a surprise package that plays its trump cards with shrugging insouciance, yielding giggles and gasps in equal measure, sometimes at once.
  21. Abe
    It’s kind of a tradition among cooking-themed movies (from “Like Water for Chocolate” to “Chocolat”) for a bit of magical embellishment to sneak into the kitchen. Abe is stubbornly earthbound by contrast, but that’s OK. It’s more responsible this way, and young audiences will devour it with no less enthusiasm.
  22. Kubrick by Kubrick
    Kubrick by Kubrick is most interesting for the ways that it undercuts the Kubrick mythology.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Other Music
    More than any other visual document, it celebrates and immortalizes the culture of the record store and record nerds.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Hard Men
    The Last Hard Men is a fairly good actioner with handsome production values and some thoughtful overtones. Charlton Heston and James Coburn are both fine as a retired lawman and his half-Indian nemesis matching their wits in 1909 Arizona along the way to one last bloody confrontation.
  25. Butt Boy
    If your sense of humor favors stupid ideas done smartly, however, Butt Boy offers pleasures that aren’t even all that guilt-inducing.
  26. Circus of Books
    Circus of Books is an affectionate look at one of the most unusual mom and pop businesses in America, directed by the person who knew Mom and Pop best.
  27. Villain
    Actor Philip Barantini’s first directorial feature is nothing wildly original in content or style. Still, it punches both elements across with a satisfying low-key confidence, and does not shrink from occasionally letting things get pretty rough.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Concorde... Airport '79
    Unintentional comedy still seems the Airport series' forte, although excellent special effects work, and some decent dramatics help Concorde take off.
  29. Most Wanted
    Along with Pilon’s striking performance, the film’s sturdy, subdued craftsmanship keeps it from movie-of-the-week territory, even as Roby’s script ticks overly familiar boxes.
  30. Cat in the Wall
    Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova’s smart, bristly film makes some room for oblique everyday poetry in its depiction of immigrants asserting their ground in an unstable country, but is angry enough not to bury its rhetoric in artifice and niceties: Shot through with intimate love-hate knowledge of its South London turf, this is a funny, frustrated yell from a demographic tired of being talked over.
  31. A Secret Love
    At once a misty-eyed romance and a harsh depiction of the practical and emotional challenges of giving up independent living, A Secret Love isn’t subtle in its Kleenex-clutching tactics — as you’d expect from a project bearing the imprint of TV titan Ryan Murphy — but it’s certainly effective.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Not Without My Daughter
    Sally Field has the stage to herself to engage the audience’s sympathy, and this she does with an earnest, suitably emotional performance as a rather typically sincere, middle-class American.
  33. PAW Patrol: The Movie
    Any crass consumerism is eclipsed by disarming, demonstrable themes and meaningful sentiments woven throughout the film’s textured fabric.
  34. The Paper
    A rambunctious look at a struggling New York tabloid, "The Paper" is Paddy Chayefsky lite. With every member of the all-star staff battling personal life crises as they race to put the next edition to bed, Ron Howard's pacy meller can't help but generate a fair share of humor, excitement and involvement.
  35. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
    This is a movie that provokes a consistent sense of “Whoa!” By the end, you’ll know with greater clarity than you did before why we’re in the mess we’re in.
  36. Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story
    What begins as seemingly another lurid Netflix true-crime excavation emerges as a considerably more affecting testament to the damage wrought by generation upon generation of sexual abuse.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Invisible Man
    The strangest character yet created by the screen [from the novel by H.G. Wells] roams through The Invisible Man.
  38. You Don't Nomi
    The fascination of You Don’t Nomi is that it doesn’t find some fatal contradiction among the three views. “Showgirls,” it says, is a bad movie that also is a tasty slice of kitsch that also is a flawed but honestly bracing drama.
  39. Becky
    Wilson’s nimble half-brat, half-she-devil performance is key to our buying the basic premise, aided by solid supporting cast contributions. James grows less intimidating the more dialogue he’s given in an otherwise trim script by marital duo Ruckus and Lane Skye.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Little Romance
    Scripter Allan Burns has craftily kept the point of view of the youngsters, Diane Lane and Thelonious Bernard, while the adults, with certain exceptions, are seen as suitably grotesque and ridiculous, giving Romance a crest of humor on which to ride.
  41. Ron's Gone Wrong
    It’s a shame that the mile-a-minute plot of “Ron’s Gone Wrong” isn’t more focused.
  42. Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo
    The documentary tells the fascinating, and moving, tale of how Trejo got off the road to ruin and became the unlikeliest of Hollywood character actors.
  43. Hammer
    The pileup of disasters is such that this tale might easily have been spun as some kind of grotesque comedy. But writer-director Christian Sparkes’ second feature plays it straight, narrowly evading viewer disbelief via strong principal performances and sufficiently urgent execution.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Medusa Touch
    Director Jack Gold controls all the angles of this improbable story. Burton has some very effective moments too as does Remick.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kidnapped
    An intriguing adventure piece set against that period in Scottish history when the English were trying to take over that country's rule.
  46. Dear Diary
    Offering intimate self-exposure, Moretti solders his bond with fortysomethings who have lived through years of political disenchantment.
  47. I'm No Longer Here
    Frías isn’t trying to change policy so much as perceptions.
  48. I Will Make You Mine
    While the female leads reflect Chen’s desire to create richer parts for Asian actresses, the writer-director has said they also reflect facets of herself. That may be, but she’s written her character as the most aggravating of the three, which makes for a risky but also compelling ask of the audience.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brute Force
    A closeup on prison life and prison methods, Brute Force is a showmanly mixture of gangster melodramatics, sociological exposition, and sex [from a story by Robert Patterson].
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweetie
    Sweetie is an original, audacious tragicomedy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Strike Up the Band
    Direction by Busby Berkeley deftly carries through the story side, despite script deficiencies, but he is in his element in the staging of the production and musical sequences.
  52. Volition
    It’s a film more gritty than stylish, but in any case with all key contributions lashed to the service of a tricky narrative with scant gratuitous fat or flamboyance.
  53. 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Great Expectations
    Only rabid Dickensians will find fault with the present adaptation, and paradoxically only lovers of Dickens will derive maximum pleasure from the film.
  55. The Deeper You Dig
    It’s a nicely economical tale of supernatural vengeance that benefits from its small scale and lived-in atmospherics.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pat and Mike
    Tracy is given some choice lines in the script and makes much of them in an easy, throwaway style that lifts the comedy punch.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Power of One
    On the one hand a captivating and inspiring tale of a boy's journey to courage amid searing injustice, pic often gives way to scenes of intense violence that are likely to bludgeon the very sensibilities it seeks to awaken.
  58. You Should Have Left
    The movie won’t disturb your dreams, but it grabs hold of you and keeps tugging.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jungle Fever
    Performances are all pointed and emotionally edgy. Film feels too long, but it ends powerfully, as the audience exits with the view that both the white and black communities are deeply troubled and have a very long way to go to resolve their differences.
  60. Fully Realized Humans
    Fully Realized Humans solidifies its central dynamic through alternately jokey and heartfelt dialogue that rings true, and via its leads’ sure-footed performances as committed partners grappling with a crazed stew of issues involving control, doubt and masculinity.
  61. The One and Only Ivan
    The story takes no outsize turns, no big surprise twists. Perhaps the only surprise is how touching it is: a tale that will caress you, and your children, in a way that speaks to something true. It reminds you of what it’s like to be moved by a kids’ film that’s driven by more than nonstop movement.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Girl Crazy
    The story thread is light, but enough to string together the George and Ira Gershwin songs.
  63. Tainted
    It’s compelling enough in its non-hyperbolic take on familiar genre elements, even if the depth of tragedy aimed for proves as much out of reach as any nerve-wracking suspense.
  64. Nobody Knows I'm Here
    Still best known as Hurley from “Lost,” Garcia quietly electrifies here in a role that feels like a breakout; for all the film’s superior craft and unsettling atmosphere-building, it is his sympathetic soulfulness that delivers the most resonant harmonics.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Naked City
    Throughout, despite its omniscient, stark melodrama, there has been no sight lost of an element of humor. Barry Fitzgerald, as the film’s focal point, in playing the police lieutenant of the homicide squad, strides through the role with tongue in cheek, with Don Taylor as his young detective aide.
  66. Irma Vep
    A slender but appealing divertissement about a has-been auteur attempting to remake the French silent classic "Les Vampires," the film's wry digs at the institution of Gallic art movies and at the anarchic confusion of the filmmaking process should amuse hip fest audiences.
  67. The Rental
    There’s some crafty artistry at work in The Rental, and also some fairly standard pandering, which feels like a violation of the movie’s better instincts. That said, most of it is skillful and engrossing enough to establish Franco as a director to watch.
  68. Retaliation
    Whether you’re skeptical of Bloom’s abilities or have long been a believer, you can’t help but respect what the actor does with Retaliation. And the same might be true whether you’re religious or not, seeing as how the film promises revenge, while leveraging cinema’s most powerful weapon: empathy.
  69. If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise
    It is, frankly, a lot to absorb — and would risk crumbling under the weight of Lee’s ambition were it not for the second gut punch to the region that BP’s horrifying blunder delivered.
  70. Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall
    This bouncily entertaining doc may boast only a notch more formal ambition than a very well-assembled “Behind the Music” special, but is no less essential than Lee’s first MJ opus, the excellent “Bad 25.”
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Green Pastures
    A simple, enchanting, audience-captivating all-[black] cinematic fable.
  72. The Beach House
    In any case, it’s skillful enough to satisfy most viewers, if not quite sufficiently original in concept or striking in execution to leave a lasting imprint.
  73. Suzi Q
    In some sense, Quatro was Jett before Jett was really Jett — laying down the leather law when no female rocker had yet managed the combination of sex appeal and pure machisma.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Postman Always Rings Twice
    Development of the characters makes Tay Garnett’s direction seem slowly paced during first part of the picture, but this establishment was necessary to give the speed and punch to the uncompromising evil that transpires.
  75. Unsettled: Seeking Refuge in America
    It does provide engrossing studies in human interest, as well as an empathetic look at the particular struggles of U.S. immigration in the new millennium.
  76. The Things We Say, the Things We Do
    For French and art-house audiences, there’s no denying the pleasure of a sapiosexual romance such as this, where the turn-on is to be found in the characters’ intelligence.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rhapsody in Blue
    Those who knew George Gershwin and the Gershwin saga may wax slightly vociferous at this or that miscue, but as cinematurgy, designed for escapism and entertainment, no matter the season, Rhapsody in Blue can't miss.
  78. Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
    An engaging and surprisingly playful documentary about the man who was arguably the most transgressive photographer to emerge from the 1960s and ’70s.
    • 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.
  80. Calm with Horses (The Shadow of Violence)
    If the overall narrative arc is less than inspired, however, the milieu and personalities depicted do have real character.
  81. The Tobacconist
    In the end, what makes The Tobacconist effective despite its limitations is the way it focuses on the experience of a “typical” Austrian — that is, a citizen without political convictions.
  82. The Card Counter
    Part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything. It’s just a game. The Card Counter is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Killing
    This story of a $2 million race track holdup and steps leading up to the robbery, occasionally told in a documentary style which at first tends to be somewhat confusing, soon settles into a tense and suspenseful vein which carries through to an unexpected and ironic windup.
  84. Benjamin
    Benjamin wrings a lot of warmly perceptive, occasionally acidic humor. The film might be termed a romantic comedy, though the will-they-won’t-they dynamic that usually powers the genre feels beside the point here.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Animal Crackers
    First give Paramount extreme credit for reproducing Animal Crackers intact from the stage, without too much of the songs and musical numbers.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Chalk Garden
    On paper, this sounds like a ripe old piece of Victoriana, but curiously it works, largely because of confident, smooth performances by all concerned.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Without Limits
    Robert Towne's Without Limits reps a distinct improvement over Steve James' Prefontaine in the filmmaking department.
  88. Days of the Whale
    For all the peril that darkens its fringes, there’s an indomitable youthful exuberance that thrums through Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s debut feature “Days of the Whale.”
  89. Babysplitters
    The path to the inevitable but deeply moving conclusion is lively and thoroughly entertaining. Friedlander gets us there by throwing in unexpected yet true-to-life twists and turns that will likely be all too familiar to new parents, who typically don’t have the help of a second couple to share the responsibility.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flying Leathernecks
    Actual color footage of battle action in the Pacific has been smartly blended with studio shots to strike a note of realism.
  91. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies
    Nudity, as “Skin” captures in its lively and disarming way, is the great leveler: the thing that makes us all gawk, no matter what the context.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    Good Samuel Fuller programmer about a prostie trying the straight route, The Naked Kiss is primarily a vehicle for Constance Towers. Hooker angles and sex perversion plot windup are handled with care, alternating with handicapped children 'good works' theme.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coffy
    Jack Hill, who wrote and directs with an action-atuned hand, inserts plenty of realism in footage in which Pam Grier in title role ably acquits herself.
  94. Spinster
    Andrea Dorfman’s thoughtful little film arrives at a compromise that feels honest and hard-won — helped along by the infectious, defiantly offbeat presence of erstwhile “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star Chelsea Peretti.
  95. The Way I See It
    The Way I See It mostly feels like a love letter to Obama.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death Takes a Holiday
    It is the kind of story and picture that beckons the thinker, and for this reason is likely to have greater appeal among the intelligentsia. [27 Feb 1934, p.17]
    • Variety
  97. Judas and the Black Messiah
    The powerful film puts the current moment into fresh historical context and suggests that ambivalence can be its own form of betrayal.
  98. The Bay of Silence
    The film’s pained, ugly revelations finally carry more weight than any amateur detective work leading up to them: a #MeToo reckoning hidden within a glinting, noir-esque hall of mirrors.
  99. Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
    The grandest irony to emerge is that despite its unquestionable sincerity, soft-spoken iconoclast Martin Margiela’s insistent non-image may yet turn out to be fashion’s canniest bit of image-making of all.
  100. French Exit
    Yes, French Exit blisters amid the rarefied air of Tom Wolfe or Whit Stillman, but it’s nicely cut with the schadenfreude of “Schitt’s Creek.”
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