Variety's Scores

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For 17,807 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 17807
  2. Mixed: 7,022 out of 17807
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17807
17807 movie reviews
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  1. 6 Balloons
    You can’t help feeling that something terrible will happen at any moment, unless something worse happens first.
  2. The Guardians
    Inspired by prize-winning French author Ernest Pérochon’s 1924 novel, director Xavier Beauvois’ emotionally devastating adaptation — which some may find as arduous as the wartime chapter it depicts — dispenses with a fair amount of the suffering to be found in the book, forgoing the contemporary tendency toward gritty, handheld realism in favor of a more timeless, almost painterly aesthetic.
  3. Boundaries
    Boundaries, to be sure, delivers you to a place you know you’re going, but there should always be room for a movie that does that this well.
  4. People's Republic of Desire
    People’s Republic of Desire is provocative and unsettling as it brings us on a guided tour through the digital marketplace for something resembling human contact.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Running Scared
    Nonstop banter between the two stars is rowdy, intimate, natural and often very funny. Hyams keeps most of it fresh, including the action ending, staged within one of Chicago’s architectural spectacles, the cavernous, glass-enclosed Illinois State Building.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For a Few Dollars More
    A hard-hitting western with upper-case values out of the busy Italo stable, this is a topnotch action entry.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Map of the Human Heart
    An immensely ambitious and audacious love story spanning 30 years and two continents.
  8. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    What on paper might be a standard sporting bio-doc, largely relevant only to tennis aficionados or fans of John McEnroe at the height of his powers, instead becomes a lovely meditation on time and movement, dedication and obsession, image and perception.
  9. Beautiful Boy
    Beautiful Boy, made by the Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), from a script by Luke Davies, is scrupulous and tenderly wounding — a drama that seizes and holds you.
  10. Big Fish & Begonia
    Big Fish & Begonia commands awe on the strength of its imagery alone...while weaving an epic tale that’s uniquely informed by local myths and motifs. If only it made the slightest bit of sense.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Howling
    Director Joe Dante’s work reflects Alfred Hitchcock’s insistence that terror and suspense work best when counterbalanced by a chuckle or two.
  12. Black Mother
    A beguilingly immersive, multifaceted, vividly sensorial portrait of his mother’s homeland, Jamaica.
  13. That Summer
    Almost exclusively composed of 16mm footage shot in 1972 and lost until now, Göran Hugo Olsson’s fascinating documentary recounts the summer when Lee Radziwill and photographer Peter Beard decided to record Radziwill’s reclusive aunt and first cousin, hiring the Maysles and shooting in and around Grey Gardens while workers fixed the place up.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prick Up Your Ears
    The script is witty, the direction fluid, with one of the homosexual orgy scenes in a public toilet almost balletic, and the depiction of the lovers’ life in their flat suitably claustrophobic. Gary Oldman is excellent as Orton, right down to remarkable resemblance, while Alfred Molina creates both an amusing and tormented Halliwell. Vanessa Redgrave takes top honors, though, as a compassionate and benign agent.
  15. Red Rock West
    A wry thriller with a keen edge, Red Rock West is a sprightly, likable noirish yarn. Centered on a case of mistaken identity, the internecine plot becomes progressively more complex without losing its sense of fun.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sleeping with the Enemy
    In Sleeping with the Enemy, a chilling look at marital abuse gives way to a streamlined thriller [from the novel by Nancy Price] delivering mucho sympathy for imperiled heroine Julia Roberts and screams aplenty as she's stalked by her maniacal husband.
  17. Executive Decision
    Ultimately, it’s the film’s sly irony that sets it a notch above similar actioners. The Thomas brothers’ script repeatedly draws us down dead-end alleys only to reverse expectations and top white-knuckle situations with thrilling conclusions.
  18. The 12th Man
    A stirring adventure by any standard.
  19. The Snapper
    There’s plenty of unvarnished, off-the-wall Irish humor, especially in the ensemble scenes of family life and boozy barroom chat, plus real warmth beneath the rough one-liners.
  20. In the Last Days of the City
    The real achievement is how the film captures and holds a mood that develops and expands, with a yearning for what was and what might have been.
  21. The Rachel Divide
    The portrait it paints is sure to confound and infuriate in equal measure. Far from simply a snapshot of a discussion about race, Brownson’s documentary is a riveting account of self-sabotage, misplaced priorities, and obstinacy run amok.
  22. See How They Fall
    See How They Fall, a deft interlocking tale of two small-time hoods and an unlikely avenger, is morally ambiguous and dosed with irony in the noir tradition. Dark, compelling helming debut by veteran scripter Jacques Audiard should do nicely at Gallic wickets and rack up healthy tube sales.
  23. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Sara Driver, the director of “Boom for Real” (who was there at the time, as Jim Jarmusch’s early producer and romantic partner), creates an alluring and detailed portrait of how the downtown scene came together, springing up like weeds between the cracks of a broken New York, its poverty-row aesthetic infused with the energy of punk and the vivacity of hip-hop (before it was called that).
  24. Penguins
    With irreverence, charm, sparkling cinematography, and a catchy pop soundtrack, this marks the series’ youngest-skewing, most comedic Earth Day documentary yet. That’s not a bad thing, however.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bleak Moments
    A film with downbeat themes of solitude, difficulties of communication, coping with a retarded 29-year-old sister, it has enough human insight sans mawkishness or undue sentimentality to make it wryly funny, with its recognition of human foibles that gives it an edge, charm and warmth, tempered with compassion.
  26. Under the Tree
    It has the escalating, claustrophobic structure of the darkest farce, but humor doesn’t pile up in Under the Tree so much as it bleeds out.
  27. The Cat Returns (2002)
    Animated by Hiroyuki Morita -- a protege of Hayao Miyazaki -- story draws more from fairy tales than the eerie transformative productions by Studio Ghibli. Result is catchy entertainment for kids and adults.
  28. All About Nina
    Nina’s confessional set takes the already-raw portrait to a whole other level. All About Nina is very funny, but with that scene, it breaks our hearts, forcing us to reevaluate Nina’s recklessness while reiterating the lesson of the last year: that we never know what someone has been through until that person chooses to share it, and that going public takes courage, as there’s no going back.
  29. The Bleeding Edge
    The Bleeding Edge needs to be seen, so that it can change hearts and minds.
  30. The Desert Bride
    It’s a loving showcase for its star’s most finely wrought powers of expression, but equally beguiling as a display of its first-time helmers’ gentle observational acuity and surprisingly inventive visual storytelling.
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