Variety's Scores

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For 17,805 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: 9,148 out of 17805
  2. Mixed: 7,020 out of 17805
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17805
17805 movie reviews
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sid and Nancy
    The film’s dialog is extremely rough, the settings sordid, the theme of wasted lives (and talent?) depressing. But Sid and Nancy is a dynamic piece of work, which brings audiences as close as possible to understanding its wayward heroes.
  2. Ferdinand
    In what’s been an underwhelming year for big-studio animation, it’s the best of the bunch: sincere, likable, surprisingly funny, and overall true to its source material.
  3. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    This finely crafted docu may well long stand as the most balanced among such treatments, as it respectfully examines Sands’ folk-heroic legacy rather than simply amplifying it.
  4. Cameraperson
    Without narration or a conventional storyline, it’s a uniquely insightful memoir-cum-critical-treatise.
  5. Miss Hokusai
    Animation proves the ideal medium for Miss Hokusai’s relatively tame story, allowing audiences to admire the family’s artwork within a world that they were partially responsible for creating.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blazing Saddles
    Although Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder head a uniformly competent cast, pic is handily stolen by Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn. Kahn is simply terrific doing a Marlene Dietrich lampoon...Rest of cast is fine, although Little’s black sheriff doesn’t blend too well with Brooks’ Jewish-flavored comic style. Wilder is amusingly low-key in a relatively small role.
    • Variety
  7. Three Colors: Blue
    Bold final sequence is a visual and aural crescendo calibrated to show that while each person is fundamentally alone, every life inevitably touches other lives.
  8. Peter and the Farm
    With this rueful, cantankerous yet hugely charismatic figure at its center, Tony Stone’s beautiful documentary reveals the twin burdens of working the farm alone while beating back an encroaching inner darkness.
  9. Free Fire
    The fact that they could all lay down their weapons and finish the deal heightens Wheatley’s generally irreverent approach, all of which serves to remind that guns don’t kill people; insecure, overcompensating idiots do.
  10. Amanda Knox
    A gripping and incisive documentary.
  11. Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids
    Demme proves he’s still a wily master of the craft, and the director’s work here makes this more than just a fans-only proposition.
  12. Barry
    You could almost watch Barry even if you’d never heard of Barack Obama: The movie is simply interested in what it looks like when a guy who’s got this much going for him has a piece missing.
  13. The Woman Who Left
    This occasionally transcendent opus finds Diaz’s formal powers — not least his own incisive monochrome lensing — at full strength.
  14. My Name Is Albert Ayler
    My Name is Albert Ayler brings a sense of logic and humanity to a man whose music was as unsettling as it was untethered to the tenets of jazz.
  15. Chicken People
    An illuminating and amusingly entertaining look at the thriving subculture of competitive poultry breeders.
  16. Kékszakállú
    It takes an uncommon talent to keep the mundane from seeming inert, and through Solnicki’s lens, the absence of outer conflict doesn’t mute the turmoil within.
  17. Slash
    An effortlessly engaging dramedy that somehow manages to sustain an air of buoyant sweetness even while repeatedly referencing erotic fantasies and sexual anxieties.
  18. The Son of Joseph
    No one behaves quite like a human being in Eugene Green’s Le Fils de Joseph, yet a soulful sense of humanity emerges from their heightened declamations anyway.
  19. Yourself and Yours
    Buoyed by Hong’s romantic optimism, the immensely satisfying conclusion hints at the possibility of love as a renewable resource, so long as both partners are flexible to different terms. Yourself and Yours asks the audience to take the same leap — best to keep an open mind and go with the flow.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    Hard-driving, riveting film will be tough for many to take, but Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer marks the arrival of a major film talent in the person of director, coproducer and cowriter John McNaughton.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tampopo
    A thoroughly offbeat but most enjoyable comedy on the subject of food.
  22. By Sidney Lumet
    The movie is simply Lumet and his films, which turns out to be an astonishingly satisfying experience, because he’s an incredible talker, with the same earthy electric push that powers his work.
  23. Uncle Howard
    This is no starry-eyed, heart-on-sleeve flashback but a low-key, respectful one, no less appealing for its relative reserve.
  24. Your Name.
    This vividly realized and emotionally satisfying feature ought to make Shinkai a household name — certainly in Japan, and with any luck, in other countries as well.
  25. 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.
  26. Lazy Eye
    Lazy Eye makes you realize how rare it is to see a movie, even an indie movie, that gives you the privilege of listening to authentically smart conversation. The understated flow of talk makes us feel like we’re eavesdropping.
  27. Hunter Gatherer
    Deliberately steering clear of the usual gangland drugs-and-violence cliches, Josh Locy’s writing-directing debut features a welcome starring role for Andre Royo (“The Wire”), whose performance as a wily hustler trying to stay one step ahead of possible ruin sets the tone for this odd, occasionally mystifying but undeniably singular and imaginative work.
  28. Old Stone
    Channeling the style of gritty mainland independent films but without the usual longueurs, the film deftly morphs into a suspense thriller with Dostoevskyan undertones.
  29. The Belko Experiment
    As a self-aware guilty pleasure, The Belko Experiment may not quite seize greatness, but it does give it a playful squeeze.
  30. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    Gore has been talking up this issue for 25 years now, and as the film makes clear, he isn’t tired of talking. You feel he’s got enough wind to power another sequel. What’s extraordinary is that this one, after a decade of global-warming fatigue, feels as vital as it does.
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