Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Paris Calligrammes
    Ottinger takes us through this formative time of her life in a way that deftly balances past and present to paint a picture of a threshold era of both positives and negatives.
  2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    If films about coping with memory loss and/or reverse-order storytelling now constitute a mini-genre, then Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is arguably the best of the lot.
  3. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
    Painstakingly conceived and teeming with raw, unbridled energy, Eyimofe offers a sumptuous, keen-eyed look at modern Lagosian life.
  4. The Best of Youth
    At nearly six hours, pic's extreme length lets Giordana and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli build up a novelistic rhythm, pulling the audience so deeply and forcefully into their story that it becomes like a enveloping dream; when it's over, parting with the characters is truly sweet and sorrowful.
  5. The Overnighters
    Lensed with a complete absence of frills that perfectly suits its honest, unvarnished tone, The Overnighters presents an indelible snapshot of a despairing moment in American history, as men abandon homes, families and dreams to stake their claim in an ever-shrinking land of opportunity.
  6. Whiplash
    Chazelle proves an exceptional builder of scenes, crafting loaded, need-to-succeed moments that grab our attention and hold it tight.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fat City
    Huston catches the feel of the community with a lean, no-nonsense economy, a hard-boiled but humanly alert feeling which raises the tale from a purely naturalistic lowlife depiction of the characters to make a statement on the life style of the drifters and those who accept a moderate place in the smalltown hierarchy.
  8. The Lives of Others
    Superbly cast drama… that looks to be a solid upscale attraction wherever the special chemistry of good writing and performances is appreciated.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    An excellent combination of in-depth contemporary story-telling and personality casting.
  10. House of Flying Daggers
    The tangled tale of love and disguise is awesome in its action sequences but doesn't touch the heart to the same degree.
  11. 63 Up
    If this is the final chapter, as Apted suggests it could be, it’s a worthy cap to one of the boldest experiments in world cinema.
  12. Minding the Gap
    It exists because it’s the movie Liu was born to make, the one he had to get off his chest before he could move on in his filmmaking career.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    Balkan probably gives her best performance to date to create a woman tormented by instability, sexual drive and psycho demons -- disjointedly portrayed in the script.
  14. Scheme Birds
    Superb ... An alternately lyrical and gut-punching coming-of-age study.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Treasure Island
    Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, has been handsomely mounted by Walt Disney. Settings are sumptuous and a British cast headed by American moppet Bobby Driscoll faithfully recaptures the bloodthirsty 18th-century era when pirates vied for the supremacy of the seas.
  16. La Mami
    Amid its textured, occasionally conflict-scarred portrait of female community, La Mami is rife with sharp, tacit socioeconomic criticism of an unequal, patriarchal society in which making joyless business out of pleasure is the best hope many women have.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love and Death
    Love and Death is another mile-a-minute visual-verbal whirl by the two comedy talents, this time through Czarist Russia in the days of the Napoleonic Wars.
    • Variety
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Searching for Bobby Fischer
    Unfortunately, as scripter, debuting director Steven Zaillian (who wrote Awakenings) also feels compelled to throw in Karate Kid-type flourishes, a rather stale genre that doesn’t lend itself all that well to chess. The narrative is ruthlessly edited, jumping around in a manner that skips needed exposition and abandons characters.
  19. Two Days, One Night
    The Dardennes once again find a richness of human experience that dwarfs most movies made on an epic canvas.
  20. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Stylistically, this feels like a young man’s movie. It’s engrossing from the get-go, the palpable tension methodically echoed by Robbie Robertson’s steady-heartbeat score. But it keeps going and going until everyone we care about is dead, dying or behind bars, with nearly an hour still in store.
  21. National Gallery
    The effect of National Gallery is to reinforce the notion that paintings are objects to know and understand.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Assault on Precinct 13
    Novelty of a gang swearing a blood oath to destroy a precinct station and all inside is sufficiently compelling for the gory-minded to assure acceptance. John Carpenter’s direction of his screenplay, after a pokey opening half, is responsible for realistic movement.
  23. Man on Wire
    One of the most wildly entertaining docs of recent years.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Y Tu Mamá También
    The film's biggest limitation is its oversexed, underdeveloped male duo. Playing like a south-of-the-border version of Beavis and Butt-head, the teenagers have but one thought in their heads.
  25. For Sama
    Simple in concept and shattering in execution, blending hard-headed reportage with unguarded personal testimony, it’s you-are-there cinema of the most literal order.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Force of Evil
    Force of Evil fails to develop the excitement hinted at in the title. Makers apparently couldn't decide on the best way to present an expose of the numbers racket, winding up with neither fish nor fowl as far as hard-hitting racketeer meller is concerned. A poetic, almost allegorical, interpretation keeps intruding on the tougher elements of the plot. This factor adds no distinction and only makes the going tougher.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Heat
    The tight-lipped scowl, the hunched shoulders that rear themselves for the kill, the gargoyle speech, the belching gunfire of a trigger-happy paranoiac - one with a mother complex, no less - these are the standard and still-popular ingredients that constitute the James Cagney of White Heat.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    the picture is really director Akira Kurosawa’s, who takes what could have been a terribly unwieldy subject and makes it believable and highly entertaining. Ichio Yamazaki’s camerawork is first-rate.
  29. Elle
    Knowingly incendiary but remarkably cool-headed, and built around yet another of Isabelle Huppert’s staggering psychological dissections, Paul Verhoeven’s long-awaited return to notional genre filmmaking pulls off a breathtaking bait-and-switch: Audiences arriving for a lurid slab of arthouse exploitation will be taken off-guard by the complex, compassionate, often corrosively funny examination of unconventional desires that awaits them.
  30. Still Walking
    Its modest surface belies the depths of a lovely seriocomedy that concisely lays bare all kinds of uncomfortable dynamics in seemingly casual, low-key fashion.
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