Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. Herself
    Many filmmakers mistakenly think that exploiting tragedy is the way to jerk tears from their audience, when in fact, gestures of spontaneous kindness shown by near-strangers can be most moving — something Lloyd understands, boosting the positive energy with anthems like “Chandelier” and “Bulletproof.”
  2. Benedetta
    With its haters-be-damned approach to all things carnal, Benedetta is intended to arouse, thereby satisfying the most basic definition of pornography, even if Verhoeven (who claims a certain scholarly interest in the subject as well) does surround the titillating bits with illuminating insights into Renaissance religious life.
  3. Memoria
    In Memoria, the disruptive sounds Jessica hears are a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed.
  4. The Souvenir: Part II
    Though fully distinct in its thematic and aesthetic fixations, The Souvenir Part II abuts its predecessor to form one of the medium’s most intimate, expressive portraits of the artist as a young woman — a mirror tilted just enough away from the filmmaker that the audience, too, can catch itself in the glass.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Life as a Dog
    An exquisite look at childhood, based loosely on Reidar Jonsson's 1983 novel about a rural-provincial 12-year-old equivalent of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Trip to Bountiful
    The Trip to Bountiful is a superbly crafted drama featuring the performance of a lifetime by Geraldine Page.
  7. Last and First Men
    A ravishing 70-minute audiovisual essay on human mortality, extinction and legacy — all the more poignant for being its maker’s final creative statement.
  8. Days
    I confess my incapacity for his particular strain of slow cinema for two reasons: First, to let audiences know that it’s OK to be frustrated by the experience — you’re not alone. And second, so you might appreciate what it means that Days worked on me. Instead of leaning in, as I’m wont to do with challenging movies, I settled back into my chair and let the rhythm wash over me, lull me into its relaxing embrace.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Yankee Doodle Dandy
    Yankee Doodle Dandy is something to cheer about from any perspective.
  10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    They’ve done it. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t just extend the tale of Miles Morales. The film advances that story into newly jacked-up realms of wow-ness that make it a genuine spiritual companion piece to the first film. That one spun our heads and then some; this one spins our heads even more (and would fans, including me, have it any other way?).
  11. Collective
    This is truly a documentary for our times, deserving of widespread exposure.
  12. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    Lee takes time to explain the stories behind the stories, to unearth revealing details under-reported in other accounts, and to identify individuals among the faceless masses of unfortunates.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hamlet
    This is picture-making at its best.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Oliver Twist
    From every angle this is a superb achievement.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cimarron
    An elegant example of super film making and a big money picture. This is a spectacular western away from all others. It holds action, sentiment, sympathy, thrills and comedy - and 100% clean. Radio Pictures has a corker in Cimarron.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Candidate
    The Candidate is an excellent drama starring Robert Redford as a naive liberal political novice who wises up fast...Redford’s superior acting talents, which not-often-enough are tapped by the scripts he decides to do, are nearly all on display herein in a virtuoso peformance.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    Film has superior technical narrative, impressive lensing and thesping.
  18. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    There’s nothing ironic about the title of American Utopia. It’s David Byrne and Spike Lee reveling in the majesty, and hidden magic, of the here and now.
  19. Wolfwalkers
    In the decade since “Kells,” it’s not just the technological advances that make Moore’s latest so impressive, but the rapidly changing cultural conversations as well. He brings everything together by borrowing from timeless visual influences, leaving audiences with another stunning artwork for the ages.
  20. The Best Is Yet to Come
    The Best Is Yet to Come is superbly well-made, making a compelling case for recognizing the humanity of others even in the midst of illness, even when ignorance and politicized paranoia threaten your compassion. It’s not hard to discern the relevance.
  21. Concrete Cowboy
    This is one of those rare, reframe-the-conversation films, like “Paris Is Burning,” “12 O’Clock Boys” and “Rize,” that take a very specific subculture and turn it into something universal and uplifting — only this one isn’t a documentary, despite the many real-world details that bring director Ricky Staub’s exceptional father-son drama to life.
  22. The World to Come
    This is filmmaking as attuned to incremental shifts in light and landscape (Romania’s, in fact, gorgeously filling in for undeveloped upstate New York) as the ebb and flow of a character’s interior joy, written in a face unaccustomed to smiling.
  23. 76 Days
    That it’s so artfully and elegantly observed, and packs such a candid wallop of feeling, atop its frontline urgency is testament to the grace and sensitivity of its directorial team, not just their timely savvy.
  24. Beginning
    Beginning is not a derivative work. Its slow-cinema trappings aren’t merely plucked from the films that have taught its maker along the way, but prove a rhythmically apt, intuitive way into the headspace of its protagonist, a woman who feels her very life has been put on pause.
  25. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    How fortunate that Boseman’s legacy should include this film, an homage to Black art that’s tough enough to confront the costs of making it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Metro achieves in A Tale of Two Cities a screen classic.
  27. A Sun
    There’s a deep well of truth in “Parking” helmer Chung’s fifth narrative feature, and this unforgettable family drama promises both to devastate and to uplift audiences in virtually any country where a Mandarin-language masterpiece stands a chance at being released.
  28. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    This is not historical revisionism, if anything, Quo Vadis, Aida? works to un-revise history, re-centering the victims’ plight as the eye of a storm of evils — not only the massacre itself, but the broader evils of institutional failure and international indifference.
  29. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    It’s a music documentary like no other, because while it’s a joyful, cataclysmic, and soulfully seductive concert movie, what it’s really about is a key turning point in Black life in America.
  30. Jockey
    Jockey could be seen as a fairly conventional estranged-family drama. As sports movies go, it’s far more radical, showing relatively little interest in the outcome of any particular race. But in either genre, the movie stands apart from — and above — its peers. That’s a testament not only to the performances but also to Bentley’s approach, which begs to be seen on the big screen.
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