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. The Mountain
    Having dipped a toe into bigger-name casting with his previous feature “Entertainment,” Alverson experiments intriguingly with performance style here, submitting his otherwise rigorously controlled filmmaking to the whims of unpredictably idiosyncratic thesps like Lavant, Goldblum and Udo Kier. It’s a calculated clash that perhaps reflects the film’s own theme of agitated minds at odds with the stoic status quo.
  2. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.
  3. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    It says more about the man behind it than any documentary to date, cut together with such a supreme understanding and care for its subject that director Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) seems half-justified in suggesting that his project may as well be the missing film.
  4. Five Fingers For Marseilles
    Five Fingers for Marseilles turns out to be an impressively effective and engrossing cross-cultural hybrid that has a great deal more than novelty value going for it.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shadow of a Doubt
    Hitchcock deftly etches his small-town characters and homey surroundings. Wright provides a sincere and persuasive portrayal as the girl, while Cotten is excellent as the motivating factor in the proceedings.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    With Alfred Hitchcock pulling the suspense strings, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a good thriller.
  7. Cold Pursuit
    By pumping up the darkly comedic undertones, augmenting the frigid chill of the original, Moland’s terrific, riveting noir-tinged picture distinguishes itself from other rote, reductive remakes.
  8. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    The pull of Garry Winogrand’s photographs is that they dissolve the line between art and life.
  9. Tea with the Dames
    A wholly delightful talkathon.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
    This is a happy, hand-clapping, foot-stomping country type of musical with all the slickness of a Broadway show. Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul provide the slick, showy production with eight songs, all of which jibe perfectly with the folksy, hillbilly air maintained in the picture.
  11. Hotel by the River
    As a forlorn kind of hangout movie, then, Hotel by the Sea proceeds at a pleasing shuffle, spiked with bittersweet humor and even a gentle, surprising hint of sentimentality.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Wolf Man
    The Wolf Man is a compactly-knit tale of its kind, with good direction and performances by an above par assemblage of players, but dubious entertainment.
  13. Too Late to Die Young
    While the film is perhaps longer than necessary, and the adult characters could use some fleshing out, this is a satisfying sensorial work.
  14. Dead Souls
    Wang Bing’s Dead Souls is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.
  15. Walking on Water
    The artist’s forceful character does battle with technology, bureaucracy, corruption and the elements, resulting in an installation of stunning beauty and a documentary that delights in capturing the act of creation.
  16. The Biggest Little Farm
    Both deeply personal and remarkably objective, The Biggest Little Farm offers a firsthand account of the ups and downs of married duo John and Molly Chester’s trial-and-error attempt to start a biodiverse agricultural operation on land that had long since been stripped of nutrients.
  17. The Quietude
    Boasting a trio of actresses at the top of their game and cinematography that constantly impresses with its confident yet unshowy fluidity, the movie deftly enters into the bosom of a family harboring multiple secrets, encompassing the personal and political.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Starting Over
    Starting Over takes on the subject of marital dissolution from a comic point of view, and succeeds admirably, wryly directed by Alan J. Pakula, and featuring an outstanding cast.
  19. Trees Lounge
    The film’s virtues are modest, but Buscemi has come out on top by taking on people and a place he clearly knows inside out.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hooper
    Individually, the performances in this story of three generations of Hollywood stuntmen are a delight. And Hal Needham’s direction and stunt staging are wonderfully crafted.
  21. Black '47
    Daly’s characterful, slow-burn tale is a well-crafted experiment in grafting genre onto disregarded history.
  22. Scaffolding
    [A] gripping, realist drama.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    This tense, offbeat piece of science-fiction is occasionally difficult to follow due to the strangeness of its scientific premise. Action nevertheless is increasingly exciting.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King Kong
    Faithful in substantial degree not only to the letter but also the spirit of the 1933 classic for RKO, this $22 million-plus version neatly balances superb special effects with solid dramatic credibility.
  25. Tito and the Birds
    Employing a darkly iridescent fusion of oil paint and digital embellishment, it renders a growing dystopia in shifting, seasick colors, distorted into about as much exquisite, Expressionist-inspired nightmare fuel as its family-film remit will allow.
  26. Missing Link
    Sooner or later, Laika was bound to branch out, which makes this funnier, more colorful film the link previously missing between the company’s Goth-styled past and whatever comes next.
  27. Antlers
    What makes suggestion-driven Antlers so disturbing isn’t the movie’s tension- and dread-building mechanics so much as the way the filmmaker burrows into the minds of his two main characters.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Commitments
    Director Alan Parker's story of a band of young Dubliners playing American '60s soul is fresh, well-executed and original.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dumbo
    There’s a pleasant little story, plenty of pathos mixed with the large doses of humor, a number of appealing new animal characters, lots of good music, and the usual Disney skillfulness in technique.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Victory Through Air Power
    Disney and his battalion of artists, animators and backgrounders have not permitted the seriousness of the theme to completely dwarf their humor. There are the usual imaginative complement of Disneyisms in his cartoonics, and an excellent musical score to point it up.
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