Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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  1. Hala
    Writer-director Baig has made a coming-of-age charmer that’s adamantly ordinary. Her script has the melody of John Hughes and early Amy Heckerling played with a few minor chords.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Longest Day
    A solid and stunning war epic.
  3. Diamantino
    Part loopily queer sci-fi thriller, part faux-naive political rallying cry, glued together with candyfloss clouds of romantic reverie, it’s a film best seen with as little forewarning as possible: To go in blind is to be carried along by its irrational tumble of events as blissfully and buoyantly as its empty-headed soccer-star protagonist.
  4. True History of the Kelly Gang
    Lithe and volatile and recklessly stylized to the hilt, True History of the Kelly Gang has moves like Jagger, but a head still teeming with language and history.
  5. Life, Animated
    This latest film from Roger Ross Williams (“God Loves Uganda”) teems with insights into how children’s fantasy can and can’t bridge a developmental gap, but works on an even more basic, emotional level as a warm testament to a family’s love and resilience.
  6. Waitress
    While aspects verge on sitcom terrain, this tale of a pregnant small-town woman caught between a bad marriage and a risky affair is mostly as funny and charming as intended.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    The naked power and oblique tenderness of Edward Albee's incisive, inhuman drama have been transformed from legit into a brilliant motion picture. Keen adaptation and handsome production by Ernest Lehman, outstanding direction by Mike Nichols in his feature debut, and four topflight performances score an artistic bullseye.
  8. Prodigal Sons
    Sad, compelling documentary leaves a few key questions frustratingly unanswered, but the raw materials here are sufficiently bracing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Skeleton Twins
    Sibling bonds are fertile territory for indie dramedies, but The Skeleton Twins distinguishes itself from the pack with a pair of knockout performances from “Saturday Night Live” veterans Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig.
  10. Mandibles
    Mandibles is as brazenly and riotously stupid as it sounds, but with a chill, dopey sweetness that makes it stick.
  11. Oklahoma City
    What makes Oklahoma City a haunting experience is that the movie, in laying out the road that led to his humanity withering and dying, demonstrates a disquieting continuity between the anti-government wrath of Timothy McVeigh and the fervor of anti-government wreckage that has just been given a new credibility in America.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rachel, Rachel
    Rachel, Rachel is a low-key melodrama starring Joanne Woodward as a spinster awakening to life. Produced austerely by Paul Newman, who also directs with an uncertain hand, it marks Newman's feature debut in these non-acting capacities. Offbeat film moves too slowly to an upbeat, ironic climax.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terribly Happy
    Entertaining and full of surprising twists, this highly cinematic tale of a Copenhagen policeman working punishment duty in the provinces plays with genre in a manner that can be compared with the Coen brothers or David Lynch.
  14. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    An intelligent overview that makes a radical artist's work comprehensible to audiences with no previous awareness of her or her chosen path.
  15. The Bridesmaid
    At 74, Chabrol is in full possession of his talent for elegant, understated filmmaking, though he's far from his disturbing films of the '50s and '60s.
  16. She Rides Shotgun
    Rowland ratchets up the suspense with cunning and confidence, advancing the narrative and introducing secondary characters with suitable swiftness and meticulous precision that never call undue attention to themselves.
  17. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    Blending wit and modesty, Mann fits the bill, coming across as an overgrown kid with a good heart, but virtually no practice in relating to others — which is perhaps the thing that makes his experience so profoundly relatable.
  18. The Rabbi's Cat
    This feature-length 3D adaptation of Sfar's comicbook series shares many of the same virtues and problems of his solo, live-action helming debut, the biopic "Gainsbourg," in that it is often colorful, witty and inspired, but also too episodic, and lacks a strong ending.
  19. Porcelain War
    Porcelain War thrives on contrast, much of it poignant.
  20. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    A generous and briskly entertaining doc.
  21. Found Memories
    Though the focus is on one older woman (effectively played by Sonia Guedes) the film's spirit is embodied by the whole town, which lingers in the memory.
  22. Dancing in Jaffa
    A surprising, well-crafted documentary.
  23. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    For a long time now, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” has been two movies, and the hypnotic film-geek documentary 78/52 is an ingenious and irreverent master class in both of them.
  24. Adam
    Taking the stories of two women, both frozen in existential stasis, and bringing them together in a predictable yet deeply satisfying manner, the writer-director ensures this scrupulously even two-hander about grief, shame, and the redemption of motherhood doles out emotional comfort food that’s neither too sweet nor too heavy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Green Pastures
    A simple, enchanting, audience-captivating all-[black] cinematic fable.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big House
    As Butch, Morgan and Kent, Wallace Beery, Chester Morris and Robert Montgomery are a great trio in ‘the big house’, where each is serving a stretch for homicide, forgery and manslaughter, respectively. Prison life on the half-shell is plainly exposed.
  27. Slut in a Good Way
    I don’t want to oversell Slut in a Good Way here. It’s a tiny movie, and the bleary black-and-white cinematography looks only a notch better than “Clerks,” and yet, like Antoine Desrosières’ “Sextape” (easily the funniest film I’ve ever seen in Cannes, but still without U.S. distribution), Lorain’s film challenges traditional gender roles in such a way that’s surface-level entertaining but also deep enough to inspire a college term paper or two.
  28. Sicko
    An affecting and entertaining dissection of the American health care industry, showing how it benefits the few at the expense of the many.
  29. Monster
    Gritty and compelling as Monster is, the script's not entirely satisfying elaboration of the central relationship and Ricci's somewhat ungiving performance limit the material to that of a superior telemovie rather than something emotionally richer, like "Boys Don't Cry."
  30. The Lady and the Duke
    History comes alive with verve and cold-sweat suspense in The Lady and the Duke.
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