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. Thirst
    An overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration.
  2. Notes on a Scandal
    The riveting interplay between Dench and Cate Blanchett draws blood with every scene, thanks to a precision-honed script and Eyre's equally incisive direction.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Charlotte's Web
    Heartwarming entertainment.
  4. Softie
    Softie clearly sees a beam of long-term hope for Kenya’s future in Mwangi and his political allies — including his no-bull, vinegar-tongued campaign manager Khadija, as delicious a documentary scene-stealer as we’ve seen this year. Yet Soko doesn’t go in for easy, crowd-pleasing uplift.
  5. The Dig
    It’s hard to say whether the period this picture exhumes was any more innocent than what the world now faces, but that’s certainly the way Stone plays it, acting like an urbane orchidologist, cross-breeding contemporary art-house touches with the old-school refinement of a vintage Masterpiece Theatre production. Sometimes the best escape from the craziness of today is to lose oneself in history.
  6. Athena
    The result is nothing short of an urban war movie, as charismatic characters decide to do something about the outrage people have been expressing toward law enforcement in the real world.
  7. Good Manners
    Class, desire, motherhood, responsibility to society — all these themes are worked in, to varying degrees. Yet balancing the film’s two halves is less successful, and certain shifts between humor and dead-seriousness don’t quite work.
  8. The Taiwan Oyster
    Disguised as a drunken cartwheel through expat paradise, Mark Jarrett’s striking feature juggles questions of mortality along its rowdy cross-country path.
  9. The Fall of Fujimori
    Ellen Perry seems keenly aware, there is really no need to embellish the Fujimori story, which has enough unlikely melodrama for six Italian operas.
  10. Blood Tea and Red String
    Often grotesque, though never in the "Sick and Twisted" juvenile gross-out mode, dreamlike feature is as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet, with Mark Growden's avant-garde folk score in perfect synch.
  11. Clueless
    A fresh, disarmingly bright and at times explosively funny comedy well worth a trip to the mall, even if it eventually runs out of gas.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The City of Lost Children
    A vibrant, bubbling cauldron of breathtaking f/x, gross-out humor and in-your-face imagery.
  13. Approved for Adoption
    It’s impossible not to be charmed on some level by Jung Henin and Laurent Boileau’s Approved for Adoption, though it’s best not to ask for too much.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment!
    An outstanding, stunning, sentimental, exciting, colorful, enjoyable, spirit-lifting, tuneful, youthful, invigorating, zesty, respectful, dazzling, and richly satisfying feature documentary commemorating its filmusicals.
  15. Sing Your Song
    Moving and enlightening as it serves up a crash-course in 20th-century history.
  16. Uprising (2013)
    Amid the flood of documentaries about the Arab Spring in general and the Egyptian Revolution in particular, Uprising takes a clear, cohesive approach to the spontaneous events at its center.
  17. A Picture of You
    Competently written and skillfully acted, the film seems to be melodrama-bound, when a shocking discovery and the sudden arrival of friends instead send it careening into comedy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Patch of Blue
    Film has very good scripting plus excellent direction and performances, including an exceptional screen debut by Elizabeth Hartman as the gal.
  19. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Like any mixtape, it offers some truly transcendent moments alongside a smattering of filler, and never quite assembles its pieces into a cohesive whole.
  20. The Blue Room
    While this appropriately brief film unravels its enigma at a tidy clip, it gathers neither enough heat, nor quite enough of a chill, to linger in the bones.
  21. Almost Holy
    Hoover’s style seems equally fit for a bleak documentary, suspenseful thriller, black comedy, dystopian sci-fi nightmare and grisly horror film.
  22. Leonor Will Never Die
    Escobar is after something deeper than parody. She wants audiences to question how fictional strongmen have been idealized as real-world saviors.
  23. Amreeka
    A culture-clash dramedy whose background in Middle-East conflict is leavened with vibrant energy, balanced politics and droll humor by first-time feature director Cherien Dabis.
  24. The Endless Trench
    The Endless Trench plunges us into a living nightmare with enough atmospheric precision of its own: It needn’t literally spell things out for us.
  25. CODA
    Siân Heder, who came up as a writer and story editor on “Orange Is the New Black,” has directed just one previous feature (“Tallulah”), but she’s got the gift — the holy essence of how to shape and craft a drama that spins and burbles and flows.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Polyester
    A fitfully amusing comedy of not so ordinary people.
  27. Fire Island
    Yang may be the MVP in this ensemble, though the cast is terrific across the board.
  28. Will-o'-the-Wisp
    Rampantly horny and unapologetically silly, Will-o’-the-Wisp appeals to more primal desires and thought processes in its audience, even as it repurposes a Greta Thunberg speech or references the racially charged work of 18th-century Portuguese painter José Conrado Roza.
  29. Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    The ensemble commits to the premise with utmost gravity and conviction, enabling our belief in even the most improbable interpretations of its core enigma.
  30. Bros
    Bros is confident enough being about queer characters that it doesn’t have to make them all likable.
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