Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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 2.3 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Legend of Hell House
    Richard Matheson's scripting of his novel Hell House builds into an exceptionally realistic and suspenseful tale of psychic phenomena.
  2. My Rembrandt
    Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Carter
    Mike Hodges' top-notch adaptation of a Ted Lewis novel not only maintains interest but conveys with rare artistry, restraint and clarity the many brutal, sordid and gamy plot turns.
  4. Locked Down
    Locked Down, at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops.
  5. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    If the first mission made roughly $50 million domestically, the sky could be the limit for this much better sequel -- a clever spoof of "Rambo" and a dozen other movies that employs the usual scattershot "Airplane!" approach but boasts a higher shooting percentage than its forebear. Look out, comedy fans: Fox is coming to get you.
  6. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself
    Not all the tricks translate, nor do they need to, since DelGaudio has shrewdly constructed the experience around the theme of identity, revealing deeply personal elements of his own history in such a way as to prime audiences to look inward as well. The result is a kind of epiphany that leaves them with a feeling of discovery rather than deception.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rush
    Head-swiveling directorial debut of Lili Fini Zanuck lays out a tough masculine scenario [based on Kim Wozencraft's book] in a way that is always emotionally riveting.
  8. Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
    Nelson, who has the ace documentarian’s flair for making history far more interesting than the mythologies it’s cutting through, has directed a film that stays true to the epic devastation crack left in its wake and, at the same time, examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it.
  9. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
    The brief, meteoric, tragic life of martial arts star Bruce Lee forms the basis of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The film is an unlikely pastiche of traditional biography, Hollywood saga, chopsocky set pieces and inter-racial romance. Seemingly contrary elements and styles nonetheless mesh into an entertaining whole and the result proves extremely touching and haunting.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man in the Moon
    The performances are all on the money, but two are outstanding. Newcomer Witherspoon manages to strike exactly the right note as the tomboy on the verge of womanhood while Waterston works on several levels at once.
  11. Once Upon a Time in Venezuela
    Over the course of several years, Anabel Rodriguez Rios’ unsentimentally elegiac documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela quietly observes Congo Mirador being brought to its knees, to progressively powerful and enraging effect.
  12. Killing Zoe
    The truly chilling aspect of Killing Zoe is the correlation Avary makes between the gang’s nihilistic attitude and its penchant for violence. He pinpoints the schism in a precise and unnerving manner.
  13. 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.
  14. Much Ado About Nothing
    A film that is continuously enjoyable from its action-filled opening to the dazzling final shot, one that offers a very generous welcome to newcomers to the play, and reminds those familiar with it of its heady pleasures. Only real drawback, and not an insignificant one, is pic’s visual quality, which is unaccountably undistinguished, even ugly, especially considering the sun-drenched Tuscan location.
  15. So I Married an Axe Murderer
    So I Married an Axe Murderer may have to dodge some angry Scotsmen but otherwise should click with those looking for slightly upscale humor that’s not averse to a few well-placed cheap shots. It’s a delightful and unexpected surprise.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    The story [from The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White] is sometimes eerie and eventually melodramatic, but it’s all so well done as to make for intense interest.
  17. The Dry
    Expertly directed and co-written by respected filmmaker Robert Connolly (“Balibo,” “Paper Planes”), The Dry has all the character intrigue, clever plot twists and red herrings to keep viewers guessing.
  18. 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.
  19. Cryptozoo
    In this zoo, the story may be tame, but the images, and the imagination that releases them, run wild.
  20. Flee
    In the end, however we take Amin’s story, the film is an incredibly intimate act of sharing. The question shouldn’t be whether we can trust Amin, but whether he can trust us enough to reveal himself fully. Truth be told, we don’t need to see or know everything to respect the gift of hearing all that he’s been through.
  21. My Favorite War
    The result of a nine-year labor of love from a Norwegian-Latvian team, it combines distinctive cutout animation with family photos and archival footage to forge a look at an authoritarian society through a young girl’s eyes. It also encompasses her eventual realization of the painful history repressed beneath the platitudes and propaganda of her school days.
  22. On the Count of Three
    Carmichael, working from a script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, directs the movie with an aimless sly verve. He roots the combustible melancholia in the everyday.
  23. John and the Hole
    It’s calculated and precise and meticulously constructed in a way that will be of considerable interest to audiences who appreciate stories that unsettle, and those who recognize the precision of Sisto’s approach.
  24. Pleasure
    It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it does to them, and what it’s doing to all of us.
  25. El Planeta
    There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.
  26. The Sparks Brothers
    After the 140 minutes of “The Sparks Brothers” zip by like a tight half-hour, even the previously uninitiated may well feel like they’ve known Sparks all along – or at least that they should have.
  27. Misha and the Wolves
    Much of the lure of Misha and the Wolves is that it’s simply a tricky good yarn spun around the unbelievable things that human beings will do. But the movie also, in its way, taps into the soul of an era when fake reality is threatening to dislodge actual reality.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What's Love Got to Do with It
    This immensely enjoyable biography of songstress Tina Turner [from her and Kurt Loder's book I, Tina] is a passionate personal and professional drama that hits both the high and low notes of an extraordinary career.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    An hilarious sequel featuring equal parts creature slapstick for the small fry and satirical barbs for adults. Addition of Christopher Lee to the cast as a mad genetics engineering scientist is a perfect touch.
  30. Test Pattern
    Test Pattern — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages just outside the door.
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