Variety's Scores

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For 17,758 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 2.3 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: 9,121 out of 17758
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17758
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17758
17758 movie reviews
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    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dekalog (1988)
    Being a pessimist at heart, Kieslowski, who cowrote all 10 scripts, unfolds a variety of human weaknesses, shows how difficult it is to conform to one commandment, let alone 10, and considers human frailty with sympathy but little hope.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Godfather
    Overlong at about 175 minutes (played without intermission), and occasionally confusing. While never so placid as to be boring, it is never so gripping as be superior screen drama.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Citizen Kane
    It happens to be a first-class film of potent importance to the art of motion pictures...a triumph for Orson Welles.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rear Window
    Hitchcock confines all of the action to this single setting and draws the nerves to the snapping point in developing the thriller phases of the plot. He is just as skilled in making use of lighter touches in either dialog or situation to relieve the tension when it nears the unbearable. Interest never wavers during the 112 minutes of footage.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Leopard (re-release)
    Italy's top bestseller of recent literary history, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's The Leopard comes to the screen in a magnificent film, munificently outfitted and splendidly acted by a large cast dominated by Burt Lancaster. (Review of Original Release)
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Casablanca
    Despite the fact that the fortunate turn or military events has removed the city of Casablanca, in French Morocco, from the Vichyfrance sphere and has thus in one respect dated the film, the combination of fine performances, engrossing story and neat direction make that easily forgotten. Film should be a solid moneymaker everywhere.
  7. Three Colors: Red
    Red, the beautifully spun and splendidly acted tale of a young model’s decisive encounter with a retired judge, is another deft, deeply affecting variation on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s recurring theme that people are interconnected in ways they can barely fathom. If it’s true — as the helmer has announced — that this opus will be his last foray into film directing, Kieslowski retires at a formal and philosophical peak.
  8. Boyhood
    With Boyhood, Linklater has created an uncanny time capsule, inviting auds to relive their own upbringing through a series of artificial memories pressed like flowers between the pages of a family photo album.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Notorious
    Production and directorial skill of Alfred Hitchcock combine with a suspenseful story and excellent performances to make Notorious force entertainment.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vertigo
    Unfortunately, even that mastery is not enough to overcome one major fault, for the plain fact is that the film’s first half is too slow and too long.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sweet Smell of Success (re-release)
    It's a no-holds-barred account of the sadistic fourth estater played cunningly by Burt Lancaster.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fanny and Alexander (re-release)
    Emerges as a sumptuously produced period piece that is also a rich tapestry of childhood memoirs and moods, fear and fancy, employing all the manners and means of the best of cinematic theatrical from high and low comedy to darkest tragedy with detours into the gothic, the ghostly and the gruesome. (Review of Original Release)
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Singin' in the Rain
    Concocted by Arthur Freed with showmanship know-how, it glitters with color, talent and tunes, and an infectious air that will click with ticket buyers in all types of situations.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Playtime
    Tati is not an active satirist nor does he use slapstick. He has assimilated the greats but is an individual comic talent who builds meticulous gags founded on a gentle, anarchic individualism that is always sympathetic, personal and, above all, funny and constantly inventive.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Touch of Evil
    Touch of Evil smacks of brilliance but ultimately flounders in it.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    City Lights
    It’s not Chaplin’s best picture, because the comedian has sacrificed speed to pathos, and plenty of it. This is principally the reason for the picture running some 1,500 or more feet beyond any previous film released by him. But the British comic is still the consummate pantomimist, unquestionably one of the greatest the stage or screen has ever known. Certain sequences in “City Lights” are hilarious.
  17. Moonlight
    A socially conscious work of art as essential as it is insightful.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Intolerance
    Intolerance reflects much credit to the wizard director, for it required no small amount of genuine art to consistently blend actors, horses, monkeys, geese, doves, acrobats and ballets into a composite presentation of a film classic.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Rules of the Game
    As an experiment it’s interesting, but Jean Renoir, who directs, wrote the scenario and dialog, and takes a leading role, has made a common error: he attempts to crowd too many ideas into 80 minutes of film fare, resulting in confusion.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pinocchio
    Pinocchio is a substantial piece of entertainment for young and old. Both animation and photography are vastly improved over Walt Disney's first cartoon feature, Snow White. Animation is so smooth that cartoon figures carry impression of real persons and settings rather than drawings.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wild Bunch
    Film at 145 minutes is far over-length, and should be tightened extensively, particularly in first half. After a bang-up and exciting opening, it appears that scripters lost sight of their narrative to drag in Mexican songs, dancing and way of life, plus an overage of dialog, to the detriment of action.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    The story [from The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White] is sometimes eerie and eventually melodramatic, but it’s all so well done as to make for intense interest.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    Interesting movement holds through the entirety. Life in the native quarter, with its squalor and intrigues, is particularly well presented and photographed.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    A distinguished work that will take its place in the repertory of Hollywood's great and enduring achievements.
  25. Pan's Labyrinth
    There's plenty of blood -- both literal and figurative -- coursing through the veins of Pan's Labyrinth, a richly imagined and exquisitely violent fantasy from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Some Like It Hot
    Some Like It Hot, directed in masterly style by Billy Wilder, is probably the funniest picture of recent memory. It's a whacky, clever, farcical comedy that starts off like a firecracker and keeps on throwing off lively sparks till the very end.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    North by Northwest
    North by Northwest is the Alfred Hitchcock mixture - suspense, intrigue, comedy, humor. Seldom has the concoction been served up so delectably.
  28. Hoop Dreams
    A prodigious achievement that conveys the fabric of modern American life, aspirations and incidentally, sports, in close-up and at length, Hoop Dreams is a documentary slam dunk.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rashomon
    Unveiled at the Venice film fest [in August 1951], this caused a flurry in critical circles for its brilliance of conception, technique, acting and its theme of passion.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Passion of Joan of Arc
    Here is a deadly tiresome picture that merely makes an attempt to narrate without sound or dialog an allegedly written recorded trial in the 15th or 16th century of Joan of Arc for witchery, leading to her condemnation and burning at the stake. [10 Apr 1929, p.25]
    • Variety
    • 98 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All About Eve
    All About Eve has substance in virtually every dramatic and romantic mood, which have been given proper shading and projection by producer Darryl F. Zanuck and Mankiewicz.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    A tender tale [from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche] that avoids mawkishness and impropriety in treating the lives of two friends who are mixed up with a woman they share.
  33. King in the Wilderness
    King in the Wilderness is a searing film because it takes Martin Luther King Jr. down from the mountaintop. You glimpse the real glory of who he was: not a walking monument but a human being with fear, humor, guts, and (amazing) grace under pressure.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Left Foot
    That it features a brilliant performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and a fine supporting cast lifts it from mildly sentimental to excellent.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Night of the Hunter
    This start for Gregory as producer and Laughton as director is rich in promise but the completed product, bewitching at times, loses sustained drive via too many offbeat touches that have a misty effect.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ran
    It’s a dazzlingly successful addition to [Kurosawa's] distinguished career.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Gone with the Wind
    One of the truly great films, destined for record-breaking box office business everywhere. The lavishness of its production, the consummate care and skill which went into its making, the assemblage of its fine cast and expert technical staff combine in presenting a theatrical attraction completely justifying the princely investment of $3,900,000.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Third Man
    Supporting characters turn in excellent portrayals. Camera work on an exceptionally high plane, and in his painstaking direction Carol Reed lives up to his high reputation.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    George C. Scott as the fiery Pentagon general who seizes on the crisis as a means to argue for total annihilation of Russia offers a top performance, one of the best in the film. Odd as it may seem in this backdrop, he displays a fine comedy touch.
  40. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    This is not historical revisionism, if anything, Quo Vadis, Aida? works to un-revise history, re-centering the victims’ plight as the eye of a storm of evils — not only the massacre itself, but the broader evils of institutional failure and international indifference.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Psycho
    Perkins gives a remarkably effective in-a-dream kind of performance as the possessed young man. Others play it straight, with equal competence.
  42. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Pitch perfect and brilliantly acted, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a stunning achievement, helmed with a purity and honesty that captures not just the illegal abortion story at its core but the constant, unremarked negotiations necessary for survival in the final days of the Soviet bloc.
  43. Parasite
    Bong is back and on brilliant form, but he is unmistakably, roaringly furious, and it registers because the target is so deserving, so enormous, so 2019: Parasite is a tick fat with the bitter blood of class rage.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Robin Hood (re-release)
    Film is done in the grand manner of silent-day spectacles with sweep and breadth of action, swordplay and hand-to-hand battles between Norman and Saxon barons.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Streetcar Named Desire
    Tennessee Williams' exciting Broadway stage play - winner of the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics award during the 1947-48 season - has been screenplayed into an even more absorbing drama of frustration and stark tragedy.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Maltese Falcon
    This is one of the best examples of actionful and suspenseful melodramatic story telling in cinematic form. Unfolding a most intriguing and entertaining murder mystery, picture displays outstanding excellence in writing, direction, acting and editing--combining in overall as a prize package of entertainment for widest audience appeal.
  47. American Graffiti
    Of all the youth-themed nostalgia films in the past couple of years, George Lucas’ American Graffiti is among the very best to date. Set in 1962 but reflecting the culmination of the 1950s, the film is a most vivid recall of teenage attitudes and mores, told with outstanding empathy and compassion through an exceptionally talented cast of relatively new players.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    12 Angry Men
    Perhaps the motivations of each juror are introduced too quickly and are repeated too often before each changes his vote. However, the film leaves a tremendous impact.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dumbo
    There’s a pleasant little story, plenty of pathos mixed with the large doses of humor, a number of appealing new animal characters, lots of good music, and the usual Disney skillfulness in technique.
  50. 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.
  51. Spirited Away
    An out-and-out charmer. It's almost impossible to do justice in words either to the visual richness of the movie, which melanges traditional Japanese clothes and architecture with both Victorian and modern-day artifacts, or to the character-filled storyline, with human figures, harpies and grotesque creatures.
  52. Toy Story
    The very good news is that, in addition to stylistic innovation, the film sports a provocative and appealing story that's every bit the equal of this technical achievement.
  53. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    It’s a music documentary like no other, because while it’s a joyful, cataclysmic, and soulfully seductive concert movie, what it’s really about is a key turning point in Black life in America.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Shop Around the Corner
    Although picture carries the indelible stamp of Ernst Lubitsch at his best in generating humor and human interest from what might appear to be unimportant situations, it carries further to impress via the outstanding characterizations by Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart in the starring spots.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breathless
    There are too many epigrams and a bit too much palaver in all this. However, it is picaresque and has enough insight to keep it from being an out-and-out melodramatic quickie.
  56. 12 Years a Slave
    Though the film brims with memorable characters, the show ultimately belongs to Ejiofor, who upholds the character’s dignity throughout.
  57. Manchester by the Sea
    The persistence of grief and the hope of redemption are themes as timeless as dramaturgy itself, but rarely do they summon forth the kind of extraordinary swirl of love, anger, tenderness and brittle humor that is Manchester by the Sea.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Battle of Algiers
    It's a dedicated effort with importance as a 'document.' (Review of original release)
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Hard Day's Night
    A wacky, offbeat piece of filming, charged with vitality, and inventiveness by director Dick Lester.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nashville
    Nashville is one of Altman’s best films, free of the rambling insider fooling around that sometimes mars entire chunks of every second or third picture. When he navigates rigorously to defined goals, however, the results are superb.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Red River
    Howard Hawks' production and direction give a masterful interpretation to a story of the early west and the opening of the Chisholm Trail, over which Texas cattle were moved to Abilene to meet the railroad on its march across the country.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rosemary's Baby
    Several exhilarating milestones are achieved in Rosemary's Baby, an excellent film version of Ira Levin's diabolical chiller novel. Writer-director Roman Polanski has triumphed in his first US-made pic. The film holds attention without explicit violence or gore.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Philadelphia Story
    A picture every suburban mamma and poppa must see–after Junior and little Elsie Dinsmore are tucked away.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    Legend, adventure and poetry fuse to make this engrossing, if overlong, film material.
  65. Ratatouille
    Ratatouille is delicious. In this satisfying, souffle-light tale of a plucky French rodent with a passion for cooking, the master chefs at Pixar have blended all the right ingredients -- abundant verbal and visual wit, genius slapstick timing, a soupcon of Gallic sophistication -- to produce a warm and irresistible concoction that's sure to appeal to everyone's inner Julia Child.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Grapes of Wrath
    It is an absorbing, tense melodrama, starkly realistic, and loaded with social and political fireworks.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    There has never been anything in the theatre quite like Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, seven reels of animated cartoon in Technicolor, unfolding an absorbingly interesting and, at times, thrilling entertainment. So perfect is the illusion, so tender the romance and fantasy, so emotional are certain portions when the acting of the characters strikes a depth comparable to the sincerity of human players, that the film approaches real greatness.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Children of Paradise (1945)
    This ambitious French film turns out to be a strange mixture of the beautiful, the esoteric and the downright dull. Some startling flashes of inspired mimicry and fresh Gallic humor are wedded to the not un-Hollywoodian concept of the femme fatale who, willy-nilly in this instance, leads men to their ruin in an uneven performance of writing and direction.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mean Streets
    Scorsese is exceptionally good at guiding his largely unknown cast to near-flawless recreations of types. Outstanding in this regard is De Niro.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lady Eve
    Laugh entertainment of top proportions with its combo of slick situations, spontaneous dialog and a few slapstick falls tossed in for good measure.
  71. Gravity
    The director’s long-overdue follow-up to “Children of Men” is at once a nervy experiment in blockbuster minimalism and a film of robust movie-movie thrills, restoring a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fantasia
    Fantasia best can be described as a successful experiment to life the relationship from the plane of popular, mass entertainment to the higher strata of appeal to lovers of classical music.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Beauty and the Beast
    A lovely film that ranks with the best of Disney’s animated classics, Beauty and the Beast is a tale freshly retold.
  74. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    Lovers Rock is nothing more (or less) than a snapshot of an era, a moment, a series of lives. Yet it lingers like a song you don’t want to get out of your head.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bride of Frankenstein
    Karloff manages to invest the character with some subtleties of emotion that are surprisingly real and touching.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Don't Look Now
    Superior stuff...The performances are right on the button; Donald Sutherland is (unusually) at his most subdued, top effectiveness as the materialist who ironically becomes the victim of his refusal to believe in the intangible; Julie Christie does her best work in ages as his wife; while a superbly-chosen cast of British and Italian supporting players etch a number of indelibly vivid portraits.
  77. One Battle After Another
    The surprise of One Battle After Another is that while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it’s also a drama that’s totally grounded and relatable. There’s a thematic heft to it, and the movie is often quite funny in a sidelong way, but it’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing. “One Battle After Another” is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.
  78. The Social Network
    Continues Fincher's fascinating transition from genre filmmaker extraordinaire to indelible chronicler of our times.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Fair Lady
    It has riches of story, humor, acting and production values far beyond the average big picture. It is Hollywood at its best.
  80. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    Though this gorgeous, slow-burn lesbian romance works strongly enough on a surface level, one can hardly ignore the fact, as true then as it is now, that the world looks different when seen through a woman’s eyes.
  81. I Am Not Your Negro
    Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro is the rare movie that might be called a spiritual documentary.
  82. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    Funny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when it’s work — as in, the pitiless daily grind — that will be the death of us all.
  83. Aftersun
    Aftersun thus works elegantly as a kind of dual coming-of-age study, perfectly served by Mescal’s signature brand of softboi gentleness — here shown maturing and creasing into more hardened, troubled masculinity — and the vitality of Corio, whose deft, lovely performance braids both authentic exuberance and a girlishness that feels more performed, as if for the benefit of her dad.
  84. Rocks
    The film wants to prove that hope isn’t fools gold. And when it does, Rocks glows.
  85. Amour
    Considering Haneke's confrontational past, this poignantly acted, uncommonly tender two-hander makes a doubly powerful statement about man's capacity for dignity and sensitivity when confronted with the inevitable cruelty of nature.
  86. The Hurt Locker
    Boal's script stirs a little of everything into the pot, which boils down into seven setpieces divided by brief intervals of camaraderie/conflict among the three protags.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Anatomy of a Murder
    Preminger purposely creates situations that flicker with uncertainty, that may be evaluated in different ways. Motives are mixed and dubious, and, therefore, sustain interest.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pulp Fiction
    A spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture, Pulp Fiction is the "American Graffiti" of violent crime pictures.
    • Variety
  89. Zero Dark Thirty
    Far more ambitious than "The Hurt Locker," yet nowhere near so tripwire-tense, this procedure-driven, decade-spanning docudrama nevertheless rivets for most of its running time.
  90. Collective
    This is truly a documentary for our times, deserving of widespread exposure.
  91. A Separation
    Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    Indemnity is rapidly moving and consistently well developed. It is a story replete with suspense, for which credit must go in a large measure to Billy Wilder’s direction.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunrise
    Sunrise is a distinguished contribution to the screen, made in this country, but produced after the best manner of the German school. In its artistry, dramatic power and graphic suggestion it goes a long way toward realizing the promise of this foreign director in his former works, notably Faust.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    La Dolce Vita
    The performances are uniformly excellent. Mastroianni is perfect in the key role of the basically good and honest boy who succumbs to the sweet life. Ekberg is a revelation as the visiting star, while Furneaux almost runs off with the picture as the reporter's instinctive, possessive mistress. (Review of original release)
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Schindler's List
    Evinces an artistic rigor and unsentimental intelligence unlike anything the world's most successful filmmaker has demonstrated before.
  96. WALL-E
    Walks a fine line between the rarefied and the immediately accessible as it explores new territory for animation, yet remains sufficiently crowd-pleasing.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    His Girl Friday
    Casting is excellent, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the top roles.
  98. Carol
    Even high expectations don’t quite prepare you for the startling impact of Carol, an exquisitely drawn, deeply felt love story that teases out every shadow and nuance of its characters’ inner lives with supreme intelligence, breathtaking poise and filmmaking craft of the most sophisticated yet accessible order.
  99. Before Midnight
    Honoring all that was memorable about its forebears while taking the story to new depths of catharsis, Before Midnight stands as a unique and uniquely satisfying entry in what has shaped up to be an outstanding screen trilogy
  100. Amazing Grace
    The effect is ecstatic; she sounds like the holiest of trumpets, with every note piercingly bright yet as soft as velvet. Listening to Franklin, you feel like you could ride that voice into the heavens. She’s not just a singer, she’s a human chariot.
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