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. Divines
    In her aces debut feature Divines, Houda Benyamina has what ought to be a career-making film on her hands.
  2. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
    Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality.
  3. Factotum
    Arguably one of the best adaptations of Bukowski's work, even compared with Bukowski's own script for 1997's "Barfly," deadpan timing and ace perfs bring out the morose humor and surprising warmth in the often miserabilist scribe's voice.
  4. The Good Girl
    This one comes up short in terms of visual flair. But it delivers amusingly observed characters, consistent laughs underscored by the poignancy of unfulfilled existences and winning performances from a terrific cast captained by Jennifer Aniston.
  5. Intolerable Cruelty
    A thoroughly entertaining comedy about love, lawyers and fat divorce settlements. While a slight imbalance in the romantic formula stops it just short of truly soaring, the crackling dialogue and buoyant wordplay make this a delightful throwback to classic screwball comedies.
  6. Intimate Strangers
    Consistently entertaining exploration of how much -- or how little -- is required to overcome obstacles to self-actualization should be welcome wherever auds crave a good story told with nuance and flair.
  7. Tropic Thunder
    Apart from startling, out-there comic turns by Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise, however, the antics here are pretty thin, redundant and one-note.
  8. Disgrace
    Anchored by another marvelously quirky yet deadly serious performance from John Malkovich, and likely to be relished by the fan base of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, this is a strong, perceptive, old-school arthouse picture.
  9. The Tracker
    Think of an Anthony Mann Western made by an experimental film director and you get an indication of the challenging components of The Tracker, the story of a manhunt that is politically sensitive because of its depiction of atrocities perpetrated on aboriginals by a fanatical white cop.
  10. The Birdcage
    Performed with matchless aplomb and made with plush professionalism, pic serves up pure pleasure from beginning to end.
  11. Koch
    Barsky wisely includes just enough dissenting voices and admissions of grievous error by Koch himself to prevent the picture from seeming like a 100% feel-good puff piece.
  12. Good Will Hunting
    This beautifully realized tale is always engaging and often quite touching.
  13. This Is Martin Bonner
    A mood piece, a character study and an exercise in poetic gesture possessed of a sort of evanescent, secular spirituality.
  14. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    Returning director Jon Watts — whose bright, slightly dorky touch lends a kind of continuity to this latest trilogy — wrangles this unwieldy premise into a consistently entertaining superhero entry, tying up two decades’ of loose ends in the process.
  15. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    It’s a poignant buddy movie that’s sincere in all the right places, but knows better than to take itself too seriously.
  16. Battle for Brooklyn
    "It's un-American," Goldstein says about the abuses of power at the heart of the film, before correcting himself: "No -- you know what? It is American." That's precisely the message that Battle for Brooklyn doesn't sufficiently explore.
  17. Mozart's Sister
    Feminist without the arrogance of 20-20 hindsight, vividly precise in its depiction of 18th-century pre-revolutionary France (the filmmakers were allowed to shoot inside Versailles), alive with exuberantly thesped personages and awash in the joy and power of music, the picture is a stunner.
  18. October Sky
    Immensely entertaining and unabashedly inspirational.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ring
    Hitchcock gets more out of Lilian Hall-Davis than any Continental director and at times makes her reminiscent of Lya de Putti.
  20. Red Eye
    Departing less from his horror bailiwick than he did with "Music Of The Heart" in 1999, Wes Craven retains shocks but dispenses with scares in the negligible Red Eye.
  21. Trumbo
    It will serve as a fine entry point for younger auds interested in learning about the price paid by moviemakers and their families swept up in the 1950s anti-Communist net.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eight Men Out
    Perhaps the saddest chapter in the annals of professional American sports is recounted in absorbing fashion in Eight Men Out.
  23. Proxima
    An unostentatious but quietly dazzling meditation on womanhood in the largely patriarchal space race, Alice Winocour’s highly satisfying third feature outdoes many more lavish Hollywood efforts in evoking the otherworldly emotional disconnect that comes with space travel, all without leaving terra firma for the vast bulk of its running time.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nocturama
    Bonello replies to the news with a magnetic and purely cinematic gesture.
  25. Freeland
    Where Freeland is an unadulterated success is in capturing the physical, psychological and spiritual space Devi inhabits.
  26. Men Go to Battle
    Striking in its evocation of a demanding time and place, this intimate drama about individual and national transformation heralds the arrival of an arresting new filmmaking voice.
  27. Travelers and Magicians
    Although writer-director Khientse Norbu breaks no ground in unfolding two parallel stories about young men seeking fresh horizons, he creates believable characters -- and has the great benefit of living in a country that provides seldom-seen locations at the top of the world.
  28. Lorelei
    Writer-director Sabrina Doyle’s fable-like tale of working-class Americans on the fringe navigates its elusive waters with compassion and care, even when it veers into some predictable shallows from time to time.
  29. Crossing the Line
    Film's rarity value and still-hot subject matter make this required viewing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    Gibson impressively fleshes out Max, Tina Turner is striking in her role as Aunty (as well as contributing two topnotch songs, which open and close the picture) and the juves are uniformly good.
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