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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dances with Wolves
    Costner's directing style is fresh and assured. A sense of surprise and humor accompany Dunbar's adventures at every turn, twisting the narrative gently this way and that and making the journey a real pleasure.
  2. Tony Manero
    Balancing black humor against allegorical indictment of the Pinochet regime's oppression on narrow stack heels, striking, very offbeat period pic Tony Manero follows a psychotic petty criminal into the depths of his crazed obsession with John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Presumed Innocent
    Honed to a riveting intensity by director Alan Pakula and featuring the tightest script imaginable, Presumed Innocent is a demanding, disturbing javelin of a courtroom murder mystery.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These Are the Damned
    Although the cast is excellent, no one character dominates the action or overshadows the others. Joseph Losey's hand is so apparent that the film's considerable effectiveness must be accredited to him as must its few faults and the fearsome message it conveys.
  5. The Outrun
    On its own unvarnished, metaphoric, diary-of-destruction-and-renewal terms, The Outrun is competent and even stylishly made, yet I have to confess: I found the movie overwhelmingly drab.
  6. Wreck-It Ralph
    With plenty to appeal to boys and girls, old and young, Walt Disney Animation Studios has a high-scoring hit on its hands in this brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed toon, earning bonus points for backing nostalgia with genuine emotion.
  7. First They Killed My Father
    The film is so understated with regard to Loung’s basic predicament that we don’t recognize her driving desire...until the movie is over.
  8. Power
    Anyone watching the film is likely to learn something, though whether its lessons will stick, or claw their way beneath one’s skin, is less likely.
  9. ParaNorman
    Few movies so taken with death have felt so rudely alive as ParaNorman, the latest handcrafted marvel from the stop-motion artists at Laika ("Coraline").
  10. Let It Rain
    Despite an initial forecast of smart laughs and witty tete-a-tetes, the French dramedy Let It Rain winds up being a partly cloudy affair that lacks the cohesiveness of Agnes Jaoui’s two previous features, "The Taste of Others" and "Look at Me."
  11. Screwball
    It works surprisingly and consistently well as a storytelling flourish for a documentary that does not traffic in subtleties or moral indignation while repeatedly and boisterously posing the question: “Can you believe these people actually did this?”
  12. Luce
    The film is sleek and shadowy, benefiting from the fact Onah chose to shoot on celluloid and driven by stellar performances across the board.
  13. The Rocket
    Mordaunt previously directed a docu in Laos that featured kids who sold unexploded bombs for scrap metal, and that earlier experience invests this feature’s characters and milieu with an absolute integrity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sign 'o' the Times
    Posing, pouting and pirouetting with androgynous abandon, pushing his guitar into ethereal, upper-register soundstorms and giving supple voice to songs of sensual and emotional free-fall in an anomic contemporary world, Prince provides music video addicts with a pure fix of visual and aural synchronicity.
  15. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    Tyler Taormina‘s delightful stocking-stuffer Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is as alive to the domesticated magic of the season as a classic carol.
  16. A People Uncounted
    This globe-trotting debut effort by helmer Aaron Yeger and his producing team offers a vivid mix of visual evidence, historical commentary and survivor testimonies. It’s less successful trying to integrate the struggles of today’s Roma, which merits a docu of its own.
  17. Welcome to Sarajevo
    The film's persistent skimming from one vantage point to another, with no dominant dramatic line until midway through, will unsettle audiences expecting a more regular construction and something on which to hook their emotions over the long term.
  18. Being Evel
    An exercise in hero worship that doesn’t shy away from its subject’s least admirable traits, “Being Evel” attempts to deliver a complex portrait of a man who preferred to be seen as a self-styled myth
  19. Paul Williams Still Alive
    An engrossing and satisfying picture, one that can be enjoyed even by people who have never before heard of its subject.
  20. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    The Internet’s Own Boy is a beautifully crafted film that opens a window on a world not everyone has entered yet, and exposes ways in which both the legal system and the U.S. government is lagging hopelessly behind technology.
  21. Extra Ordinary
    Extra Ordinary is a kind of tea-cosy “Ghostbusters” that’s consistently funny in a pleasingly off-kilter way.
  22. Only the Brave
    It’s a gripping and powerfully emotional portrait of yee-haw heroism, pitting a squad of cocky, calendar-purty white dudes against an adversary with no creed or color, just an unquenchable appetite for destruction.
  23. The Tunnel
    A cracking slice of old-fashioned, widescreen entertainment.
  24. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    The grounding material here is with the elderly Vidal himself... Unfailingly witty and devastatingly insightful, he personifies that near-extinct species — the public intellectual.
  25. The Search for General Tso
    Eventually, the quixotic “search” of the movie’s title seems secondary to that more arduous quest of so many Chinese-Americans to find their place in a country that did not always welcome them with open arms, and how food forged the path of least resistance.
  26. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    “Fireball” is a documentary about meteorites, but what makes it a Herzog film is that it’s in love with meteorites.
  27. Breaking a Monster
    What makes Luke Meyer’s documentary interesting isn’t so much the music or even the incipient stardom, but rather the push-pull between high-stakes biz pressure and subjects who — being 13 years old or so — hardly have the attention spans for the drudgery and minutiae a “career” requires.
  28. Dark Money
    In contrast to the very personal “Prodigal Sons,” Reed’s sophomore feature is straightforward reportage, telling a complex, multi-issue story with a large number of players, in admirably cogent terms.
  29. Tell Them Who You Are
    A compelling look at the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler by his photojournalist son Mark.
  30. Hellboy
    Has more than enough across-the-board appeal to attract mainstream auds unfamiliar with source material.
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