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. Eno
    The appeal of “Eno” — like the appeal of Brian Eno himself — is that the film conjures a wholehearted and accessible experience within an experimental veneer.
  2. Assassins
    Assassins is a terrific true-crime story, but it’s also a documentary thriller about the new world disorder.
  3. Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind
    Zenovich, the director of “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” offers just what you want from a documentary like this one: She brings us closer to events that have been covered many times, deepening — or overturning — what we think we know about them.
  4. Plan C
    Urgent and unvarnished, Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary Plan C is an early entry in what might be considered post-Roe cinema, focusing less on pro-choice ideology than on the practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heart Like a Wheel
    Heart Like A Wheel is a surprisingly fine biopic of Shirley Muldowney, the first professional female race car driver. What could have been a routine good ol' gal success story has been heightened into an emotionally involving, superbly made drama.
  6. Sand Storm
    The director juggles different points of view with aplomb, and her strong script addresses with impressive subtlety the gap between what people say and what they do under extreme pressure.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    The Panic in Needle Park is a total triumph. Gritty, gutsy, compelling, and vivid to the point of revulsion, it is an overpowering tragedy about urban drug addiction.
  8. The Line
    While The Line doesn’t offer an especially unique take on this milieu, it plays well and acts as a solid showcase for its young cast.
  9. A Woman in Berlin
    A stately, intermittently gripping, ultimately overlong drama.
  10. Gods and Monsters
    Doesn’t always convince, particularly in the last lap. But it’s an engrossing, unusual, imaginatively executed bit of psychological gamesmanship nonetheless.
  11. A Couple
    The final film is elegant and empathetic, but never quite emotionally involving: For all its rich, heightened articulation of a woman’s distress and unrest, the sense of a life being academically magnified under glass never quite leaves the endeavor.
  12. Higher Ground
    A satirical yet sensitive portrait of life in an evangelical Christian community, Higher Ground marks a startlingly bold directing debut for actress Vera Farmiga.
  13. Golden Door
    An imaginative, intelligent and attractive Italo pic precisely when the country needs it most, Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door reps a solid piece of cinema that neither panders nor preaches.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Suspicion
    Alfred Hitchcock’s trademarked cinematic development of suspenseful drama, through mental emotions of the story principals, is vividly displayed in Suspicion, a class production [from the novel Before the Fact by Francis Iles] provided with excellence in direction, acting and mounting.
  15. Stonewall Uprising
    In astounding detail, Stonewall Uprising recalls the now-famous three-day riots in June 1969 after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, as homosexuals finally, openly fought back.
  16. I Used to Be Funny
    That convoluted storytelling tack at times threatens to muffle “Funny’s” potent narrative agenda. Yet in the end, this ambitious, imperfect drama does pull off a complex thematic mix.
  17. The Town
    The behind-the-camera talent Ben Affleck displayed so bracingly in "Gone Baby Gone" is confirmed, if not significantly advanced, in The Town. Again proving a fine director of actors (this time with himself in a starring role), Affleck delivers another potent, serious-minded slice of pulp set on Boston's meanest streets, where loyalty among thieves runs thicker than blood.
  18. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    An entertaining profile of the self-avowed participatory journalist and his tumultuous life and times.
  19. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Slow as molasses but every bit as rich.
  20. The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    It’s an inspiring picture, particularly given the difficulty of imagining one of today’s sports superstars going so far out on a limb for unpopular beliefs.
  21. 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.
  22. In Darkness
    For the film to work, Holland needs audiences to connect as deeply with the trapped Jews as Socha eventually does. With the exception of the group's leader, movie-star handsome Mundek Margulies (German-born, internationally recognized Benno Furmann), the characters are flat as shadows.
  23. Cyrus
    Think of Cyrus as the Duplasses for the masses, as the keenly observant sibs upgrade their scrappy, relationship-based formula to work with movie stars and a Fox Searchlight-size budget without sacrificing the raw, naturalistic feel of their first two features, "The Puffy Chair" and "Baghead."
  24. Liam
    This depiction of the trials and tribulations of a working-class Catholic family during the Depression is a far more intimate viewing experience than the similarly themed "Angela's Ashes."
  25. Little Otik
    An unsettling piece of filmmaking whose grimly vivid images are guaranteed to give impressionable viewers nightmares.
  26. In the Realms of the Unreal
    Documentarian Jessica Yu employs everything from animation and voiceover thesping to archival documents and eyewitness accounts while examining Henry Darger, a self-taught artist who has been posthumously lionized as a visionary genius.
  27. Radio Dreams
    Radio Dreams is a witty, low-key exercise in deferred gratification.
  28. The Witches of the Orient
    For all the film’s playful artistry, the effect is more scattershot.
  29. Daughter of Mine
    Even when it trips up in its later stages, Daughter of Mine is a noble rarity, passionately involved in the exploration of oppositional ideas of motherhood not just as an abstract concept, but as a real and vivid, painfully sacrificial thing.
  30. Hollywoodgate
    The power of documentary filmmaking often lies in discovering seams of humanity running though even the bleakest environments. But the sledgehammer impact of Hollywoodgate comes from director Nash’at peering into the Taliban leadership’s inner circle for a year and finding not even a glimmer of goodness. Finding, in fact, nothing — a terrible emptiness.
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