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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  1. Hal
    Hal has a once-over-lightly quality, but at times it offers a telling window into how the New Hollywood worked.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Face in the Crowd
    Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg, who teamed to bring forth On the Waterfront, have another provocative and hardhitting entry, based on Schulberg's short story The Arkansas Traveler. It's a devastating commentary on hero-worship and success cults in America.
  3. Exotica
    There's demonstrable growth in his visual and narrative skills here but the writer/director isn't likely to expand his audience with the sometimes oblique, unnerving saga of interwoven lives whose paths cross with alternately comic and tragic results.
  4. The Thomas Crown Affair
    The characters in The Thomas Crown Affair are cool -- too cool, in fact, for the film to develop much of a pulse.
  5. City of Gold
    At a moment when public discourse seems so often focused on exacerbating hostile divisions, this docu’s joyful embrace of human (as well as edible) variety as “the spice of life” seems particularly, well, filling.
  6. Rejoice and Shout
    An overview of African-American gospel sounds whose dazzling talent-display should exhilarate viewers regardless of religious leanings.
  7. A Man for All Seasons
    Producer-director Fred Zinnemann has blended all filmmaking elements into an excellent, handsome and stirring film version of A Man For All Seasons.
  8. Berlin
    Less groundbreaking video experimentation than extraordinary concert experience, Lou Reed's Berlin expertly fulfills its function.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    All That Jazz
    All That Jazz is a self-important, egomaniacal, wonderfully choreographed, often compelling film which portrays the energetic life, and preoccupation with death, of a director-choreographer who ultimately suffers a heart attack.
  10. M3GAN
    M3GAN, as you may have gathered, is overly steeped in pop-culture role models, but in its trivial way it’s a diverting genre film, one that possesses a healthy sense of its own absurdity.
  11. Belushi
    In the film, Belushi’s own letters betray his fear that he had reached the point of no return. Yet there can be a shadow hint of intentionality to all that. Belushi was a bighearted person who craved no limits. In some terrible way, he went out like the rock star he was.
  12. God Grew Tired of Us
    Although shot over a longer period of time than "Lost Boys," God Grew Tired is a softer, less complex version of essentially the same story, far less troubling in its explorations and implications than "The Lost Boys," but with far greater commercial potential.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Big Carnival
    Billy Wilder's direction captures the feel of morbid expectancy that always comes out in the curious that flock to scenes of tragedy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kissing Jessica Stein
    Pure pleasure. A fresh take on sex and the single girl, this buoyant, well-crafted romantic comedy blends pitch-perfect performances with deliciously smart writing.
  15. Seabiscuit
    Respectable when it should be thrilling, honorable when it should be rough and ready.
  16. Always Shine
    With her confident second feature, director Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs itself nearly to death.
  17. Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle
    Salmerón’s film, crammed as full of tchotchkes and knick-knacks and bibelots as one of his mother’s closets, refutes that, presenting an endearingly haphazard portrait of an extraordinary woman and the family she made — one that has discovered its own, completely unique way to be happy.
  18. I Love You Forever
    In observing how Mackenzie absorbs feelings of shame for any time she’s disappointed him, they consider all those who hold onto romantic notions too long, finding a fresh take on a toxic relationship.
  19. A Secret
    A fine drama that stands as Gallic vet Claude Miller's best in at least a decade.
  20. King Jack
    Thompson and his appealing young cast enliven the material with authentic, ingenuous feeling; there’s a palpable understanding here of the substantial difficulties involved in growing up under any circumstances, and Thompson’s script never condescends to its teen subjects with dewy-eyed nostalgia for youth.
  21. Mickey 17
    Though it earns points for sheer oddity (and the nearly monochromatic, future-noir look established by DP Darius Khondji and production designer Fiona Crombie), too much of “Mickey 17” turns out to be sloppy, shrill and preachy — ironically, the same things that make Mark Ruffalo’s deliberately Trump-styled villain so grating in this movie.
  22. 3-Iron
    A rarefied love story, conducted with no dialogue between the principals.
  23. Blow the Man Down
    “Blow the Man Down” has a few contrivances ... Yet Morgan Saylor and Sophie Lowe invest the embattled but loyal Connolly sisters with a desperate resonance, and the movie is clever enough to hold you, even when you wish it had taken the extra step and gone full Patricia Highsmith.
  24. Happy End
    It’s as if the director has tied up loose ends from his earlier films, while forcing us to re-examine issues that have only grown more dire since he first brought them to our attention.
  25. His House
    A potent if unbalanced mashup of social-issues polemic and haunted-house horror.
  26. Earth
    A ravishing distillation of the BBC/Discovery series "Planet Earth," docu brings to the large screen memorable images that cried out on TV for the full movie-going experience.
  27. Burden
    A portrait of the artist emerges that’s complex, somewhat mysterious, but ultimately quite winning.
  28. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    A coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur that expands, not altogether convincingly, into a meditation on our collective over-reliance on our favorite handheld gadgets.
  29. Strike
    Continuing the late-career renaissance of historically urgent, politically engaged fiction filmmaking that began with 1999's "The Legend of Rita" and 2004's "The Ninth Day" German vet Volker Schloendorff stumbles slightly, but doesn't fall, with Poland-set Solidarity saga Strike.
  30. Aliyah
    [An] intimate and dexterous debut feature.
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