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. Share
    Share is fragmented and disorienting, though one suspects that confusion is perhaps Bianco’s point.
  2. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    “Dream Is Destiny” is a pleasurably crafted career snapshot that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
  3. A Borrowed Identity
    Riklis’ strongest film in several years, this is another well-intentioned plea for coexistence, though apart from one scene that lays bare, with welcome righteousness, the disturbing orientalism infiltrating even Israeli intellectual circles, the whole thing is rather too scrubbed and clean.
  4. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
    It’s a small, impressionistic, oddly heartfelt movie about beauty, stardom, adoration, exploitation, and loss. Oh, is it ever about loss.
  5. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    A powerful, necessary contribution to a chilling body of reportage that, one senses by film's end, has just begun to take stock of the human costs of a monstrous conspiracy.
  6. Megadoc
    In the end, it’s inspiring to see a director of Coppola’s stature back at work, and better this than some impersonal job for hire.
  7. Battle of the Sexes
    The outcome is widely known, but the backstory proves boisterously entertaining — and incredibly well-suited to the current climate, as King was both fighting for her gender and exploring her sexuality in 1973, when the widely publicized face-off happened.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    River's Edge
    Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge is an unusually downbeat and depressing youth pic. As group leader Layne, Crispin Glover could have used more restraint: he gives a busy, fussy performance. Others in the cast are more effective, with young Joshua Miller particularly Striking as the awful child, Tim.
  9. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    Pixar wizard Brad Bird's live-action debut serves up sights and setpieces of often jaw-dropping ingenuity and visual flair, but it's a movie of dazzling individual parts that don't come together to fully satisfying effect in the final stretch.
  10. Cold in July
    A superior piece of Texas pulp fiction that starts out like a house on fire, sags a bit in the middle, then rallies for an exuberantly bloody finish.
  11. Layer Cake
    There's a proper lived-in believability about Layer Cake's depiction of how the worlds of the rich, the criminal and the criminally rich intersect.
  12. The Company
    Robert Altman takes an elegant, appealingly unemphatic look at the world of ballet.
  13. Ray
    Bursting at the seams with music, Taylor Hackford's ambitious film provides a good sense of the pioneering entertainer's extraordinary journey and brings it to life with plenty of colorful detail.
  14. Bam gua nat
    Very Korean in its emotional content, while also preserving a quizzical distance that is quite French, picture is one of his lightest and most easily digestible metaphysical meals to date.
  15. Palio
    The film boasts characters as rich, and a narrative as entertaining, as might be found in the most crowd-pleasing of scripted sports sagas.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
    There’s tremendous dramatic impact threaded throughout the picture, interwoven with those deft human episodes which have become familiar with Capra’s direction in previous pictures. He keys the motivation of his basic premise without wasting time, and then carries it through vigorously.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Parent Trap
    David Swift, whose writing, direction and appreciation of young Hayley Mills’ natural histrionic resources contributed so much to Pollyanna, repeats the three-ply effort on this excursion, with similar success.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mask
    Based on a true story, Mask is alive with the rhythms and textures of a unique life. Both in the background and foreground, Mask draws a vivid picture of life among a particular type of lower middle class Southern California whites. Much of the credit for keeping the film from tripping over must go to the cast, especially Stoltz, who, with only his eyes visible behind an elaborate makeup job, brings a lively, life-affirming personality to his role without a trace of self-pity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Incredible Shrinking Man
    Director Jack Arnold works up the chills for maximum effect.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room for One More
    A happy combination of good humor and warm drama has been put together with neat results in Room for One More.
  21. Dead Pigs
    If that lack of discipline is the cost of the generous, expansive, energetic wit of Yan’s immensely promising first feature, it’s one we should be happy to pay.
  22. A First Farewell
    Told mostly through the eyes of primary school-aged characters, “Farewell” operates firstly as a film that can be deemed as suitable for children, while also offering plenty for adult audiences to read between the lines.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sea Wolf
    Robinson provides plenty of vigor and two-fisted energy to the actor-proof role of Larsen, and at times is over-directed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waterloo Bridge
    Elaborating on the basic premise of Robert Sherwood's play, and doing a slick job of cleansing to conform to present regulations of the Hays code, this is a persuasive and compelling romantic tragedy.
  25. The Girl with a Bracelet
    The Girl With a Bracelet comments intelligently on our culture’s propensity to sex-shame and emotionally instruct young women in particular — points which stand regardless of whether shedunnit or not.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cavalcade
    Cavalcade is about as well made as that subject could have been made for the screen. At first thought it would seem too foreign a matter for American consumption, but it’s the first big historical epic on England that means something over here. It’s so powerful and embracing that the matter of nationality and background is lost, or forgotten.
  27. High Tide
    A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.
  28. The Inspection
    Pope gives a career-igniting performance.
  29. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    Subject's career being inextricably tied to two extremely entertaining U.S. decades, Gonzo has a wealth of delightful archival footage to draw on, both directly involving Thompson and evoking the cultural landscape around him.
  30. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    Once again making a diverting but insubstantial movie look better than it is, Downey, with haggard charm to burn, is winning all the way. Kilmer is riotous at times as an impeccably groomed, businesslike guy keen to assert his orientation at every opportunity.
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