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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Them!
    This science-fiction shocker has a well-plotted story [by George Worthington Yates, adapted by Russell Hughes], expertly directed and acted in a matter-of-fact style.
  2. Every Body
    Cohen fosters an environment where the trio can share and compare their experiences, addressing topics rarely spoken of in public.
  3. 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.
  4. Art for Everybody
    Much like Penny Lane’s endlessly amusing “Listening to Kenny G,” Yousef’s illuminating doc appeals to all sides, from Kinkade’s haters to his most ardent defenders, revealing dimensions altogether absent from his enormously popular oeuvre.
  5. 20,000 Species of Bees
    Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Going My Way
    Bing Crosby gets a tailor-made role in Going My Way, and with major assistance from Barry Fitzgerald and Rise Stevens, clicks solidly to provide topnotch entertainment for wide audience appeal.
  7. Monster
    By sharing only select pieces of each character’s private life, he all but obliges us to leap to incorrect conclusions, distracting with topics such as bullying, aggression and suicide when the real subject — how children are socialized, and the unfair pressures this puts on anyone who doesn’t fit the norm — is so much simpler than any of the intriguing dimensions teased along the way.
  8. In Our Day
    Neither switch-your-brain-off-escapist, nor the kind of arthouse filmmaking that makes heavy demands on your time or willpower, Hong’s cinema remains one of the most reliable sources of this particular pleasure.
  9. May December
    It’s a thorough dive into the psychology of everyone involved, not least of all the woman who’d be drawn to play such a role.
  10. Four Daughters
    With so many moving parts, it’s hard to isolate just one reason why Ben Hania’s film — a vast improvement on her terminally uneven, unexpectedly Oscar-nominated “The Man Who Sold His Skin” — should prove so gripping.
  11. The Goldman Case
    Kahn’s crafty, compelling portrait gives Goldman the floor, but his walls remain fixed around him.
  12. How to Have Sex
    How to Have Sex resists much of the obvious confrontation and catharsis you’d expect in movies of this type, instead trading in the thwarted impulses and micro-reactions of real life, and it’s all the more devastating for it.
  13. Tiger Stripes
    From the exuberant credits and opening sequence through to the end, Tiger Stripes is the work of a confident new talent whose next work will be eagerly awaited.
  14. The Sweet East
    The film is intriguingly anthropological in its take on America as a subject, viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience — there’s a sense of disintegration and incipient violence seeping through everything, which occasionally explodes to entertaining effect, but there’s clearly deep affection there too.
  15. Club Zero
    What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.
  16. Perfect Days
    This beguiling film may trade in the tranquil security of routine, but makes an occasional, heart-quickening case for the unexpected.
  17. Last Summer
    It proves most daring in the ways the film departs from its more conventionally moralistic source, and especially in Breillat’s refusal to call either party a parasite.
  18. Terrestrial Verses
    This is punchy first-person filmmaking, from the point of view of the last person you want to be.
  19. The Scent of Green Papaya
    Precision lensing by Benoit Delhomme, and charming, contained playing by the amateur cast, add up to a tasty package.
  20. Concerned Citizen
    With its piercing, probing final moments, which turn self-flagellating into thorny cathartic territory, Haguel has crafted an intimate portrait of privilege that’s as damning as it is discomfiting.
  21. Against All Enemies
    A grim diagnosis of a fast-spreading cancer, Against All Enemies may provide much less reassurance than cause for alarm, but its wakeup call is certainly worth heeding.
  22. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    Practically all that’s missing is an appearance by Anderson himself, the way Alfred Hitchcock used to present episodes of his television series. Then again, one could say he’s present in every frame.
  23. Klondike
    Without undue contrivance or melodrama, Er Gorbach overlaps escalating marital tension with the larger war closing in on the couple to claustrophobic life-or-death effect, building to a finale of staggering savagery.
  24. The League
    If one measure of a documentary’s quality is whether it inspires you to learn more about its subject after the credits roll, The League is an unqualified success.
  25. Surrounded
    An exceptionally well-crafted Western that spins a gripping, racially charged tale of suspicion, deception and survival in post-Civil War New Mexico.
  26. American Pain
    It’s hard to think of a prior chronicle quite so luridly indicting as American Pain.
  27. Dumb Money
    [A] smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Public Enemy
    There's no lace on this picture. It's raw and brutal. It's low-brow material given such workmanship as to make it high-brow.
  29. The Eternal Memory
    This insistent parallel between individual and national consciousness never culminates in quite the rhetorical kicker Alberdi seems to be seeking, but there’s power in it just the same: a reminder of how our best efforts to keep and curate memories — for ourselves and others — can be thwarted by time.
  30. Red Rooms
    In contrast to most movies about serial killers, this one offers nary a glimpse of violence, let alone any wallowing in sadism. Yet somehow that makes it all the more icky — at times the squirm factor is such that you may think no shower could wash a viewer’s taint-by-association away.
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