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. Transformers One
    Transformers One approaches the well-known characters with a degree of nuance and complexity (as well as violent finality, in a few cases) that marks the most sophisticated onscreen portrait of them to date.
  2. Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
    Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy.
  3. Rule of Two Walls
    With the concise, but still singularly haunting Rule of Two Walls, Ukrainian American director David Gutnik has assembled a collection of portraits highlighting the experiences of artists from across the country who’ve found shelter in the city of Lviv, including some of the people behind the making of this very documentary.
  4. Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds
    A truly spectacular psychedelic excursion in the vein of head-trip classics “The Fantastic Planet” and “The Yellow Submarine.”
  5. Blue Sun Palace
    More akin to European art films than to American indies, “Palace” prioritizes mood over plot. Tsang allows her experienced actors plenty of breathing space to convey the melancholy of their existence in situations where dreams are more likely to be deferred than to come true, but are necessary nevertheless.
  6. Youth (Hard Times)
    At nearly four hours in length, it surpasses even its gargantuan predecessor “Youth (Spring),” but it also uses that film as a platform for deeper exploration.
  7. Unstoppable
    It has plenty of familiar tropes, but in its no-frills way it touches a nerve of authenticity. The true story it tells is nothing short of extraordinary, and that may be why the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to overhype it.
  8. Drowning Dry
    Audiences open to a different sort of world cinema that repays careful attention should find it a stimulating and imaginative work.
  9. Pavements
    It’s impossible not to be won over by the director’s efforts, which come to include at least four separate modes of production.
  10. Elton John: Never Too Late
    The portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving.
  11. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    At the end, Bruce, speaking to us in voiceover, says that he plans to just keep going, to play in concert “until the wheels come off.” Watching Road Diary, you hope they never do.
  12. 40 Acres
    Though R.T. Thorne’s dynamic siege thriller has some familiar moves, it is full of fresh ideas.
  13. Hard Truths
    Leigh’s films can feel shaggy and unstructured on first viewing, and Hard Truths is no different. But there’s profound poetry in every scene.
  14. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    It’s a delight to find these two, plus their penguin nemesis, back on the big screen.
  15. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
    Precisely the sort of intelligent, human-scale adult drama audiences insist no one makes anymore.
  16. Eight Postcards from Utopia
    Eight Postcards From Utopia lingers in the mind as a sharp sociopolitical tangram that could be assembled any number of ways to differing academic and emotional effect: a vision of rebuilding or destruction, hope or nihilistic collapse, depending on what you’re willing to buy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Uncle
    Somewhat long for a comedy, Jacques Tati's film has inventiveness, gags, warmth and a 'poetic' approach to satire.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    Though not as funny as Fete, due to a lesser story peg, this one generates a load of yocks, with fine observation of types at a vacation resort.
  19. Harvest
    Tsangari’s vigorous, yeasty period piece occasionally loses the thread of its sprawling ensemble narrative, but transfixes as a whole-sackcloth immersion into another time and place.
  20. Wicked: For Good
    The emotions are real; everything else is movie magic, representing where we now stand — at the apex of artificiality — for better or worse.
  21. Stranger Eyes
    Solving one mystery unexpectedly quickly before diving into deeper, more searching uncertainties of human behavior and relationships, the third feature from Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua gradually reveals a broken heart beneath its sleek, chilly veneer.
  22. The Bibi Files
    The Bibi Files is an important documentary, because it takes in the big picture of how Benjamin Netanyahu became so entrenched that he remade Israel in his own image, in much the same way that Trump has done in the U.S. and will now try to do even more.
  23. Happyend
    As befits the son of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (and director of acclaimed documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus) Sora displays a subtly fervent faith in music as perhaps the ultimate expression of nascent individuality, and therefore, ever and eternally, a threat to regimes that rely on conformity and obedience.
  24. Afternoons of Solitude
    The film’s gaze is arguably as mocking as it is dazzled — with the macho posturing and hero-worship of Roca Rey a tacit source of comedy — while Serra, living up to his reputation for challenging arthouse fare, doesn’t flinch in his presentation of animal abuse and suffering.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Major Barbara
    Adapted from an old Shaw play, circa 1905, it still carries the lightning thrusts of Shavian caustic satire at any and all levels of society.
  26. Juror #2
    As always, Eastwood respects our intelligence. And yet, Juror No. 2 registers as something of an anomaly in his oeuvre: It ranks among his quietest films, forgoing spectacle in favor of self-reflection.
  27. Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid!
    A revealing and fascinating documentary portrait of James Carville.
  28. When Fall Is Coming
    Nobody is exactly who they appear to be in “When Fall is Coming,” but Ozon’s nimble, perceptive little film takes that as a given: When winter and mortality are beckoning, the past only counts for so much.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Revenge of Frankenstein
    The production is a rich one. The screenplay is well-plotted, peopled with interesting characters, aided by good performances from Francis Matthews as Cushing’s chief assistant and others.
  30. Song Sung Blue
    Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.
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