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. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.
  2. Fort Tilden
    Its potent sense of place and underlying ideas never compensate for the tiresome millennial musings that constitute most of its runtime.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Double Dare
    Viewers are left feeling that it's still a male-dominated profession, but that determined women like these might just effect some small change.
  4. The Motel
    The Motel offers a fresh take on characters and conventions, and compels interest with shrewd, sympathy-inspiring storytelling.
  5. Yossi & Jagger
    It's a very small pic but engagingly played by a fine cast.
  6. Prisoners
    A spellbinding, sensationally effective thriller with a complex moral center.
  7. Year of the Dog
    A satisfying and funny, if ironic, comedy intended for lovers of both the beast and/or sophisticated laughs.
  8. Batman Begins
    Ambitious, well made but not exactly rousing.
  9. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
    An unusually low-key Filipino drama whose neo-realist air generally triumphs over the script's violent, tearful contrivances.
  10. Earth Days
    A moving, elegiac, deeply contemplative work that leaves the viewer not with a save-the-world checklist, but rather a spirit of hopeful reflection.
  11. Hamlet
    This slacker prince (Hawke) comprises a sinkhole at the center of adaptor-helmer Michael Almereyda's otherwise compelling contempo update.
  12. Quills
    Lacks an edge of danger or excitement that might have brought the subject alive in more than a cerebral way.
  13. Amélie
    Fresh, funny, exquisitely bittersweet tour de force.
  14. Empathy
    Helmer-poet Amie Siegel delivers a provocative, confident film.
  15. The Last Circus
    Loud, tedious and unattractive in every sense, this barrage of blood set during the Franco regime combines the helmer's customary cartoonishness with horror and ups it a thousand notches.
  16. The Yellow Sea
    Gushing more blood and possessing more stamina than any number of Hollywood hack-'em-ups, writer-director Na Hong-jin's pulse-pounding, mordantly funny genre piece is at times messily convoluted, yet serious and full-bodied enough to achieve a genuinely tragic dimension.
  17. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    Detailing the birth, life and death of America's first major urban housing project in St. Louis, Chad Freidrichs' The Pruitt-Igoe Myth combines concise but thoroughgoing sociological-historical analysis and elegant cinematic resources in service of an uncommonly artful example of film journalism.
  18. Herblock: The Black & the White
    Stevens offers a couple of revelations that bring the documentary to a dramatically and emotionally satisfying conclusion — and, not incidentally, leave a viewer with the pleasing sensation of discovering a worthy individual.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fatal Assistance
    Fatal Assistance is a powerful indictment of the aid process, though Peck lets Haitian politicos off too lightly, and the voiceovers would be better on paper.
  20. Bird People
    Where the film goes is both unexpected and necessary, since however grounded and relatable these thinly detailed characters might be, the movie doesn’t actually seem to be going anywhere.
  21. Song from the Forest
    A mesmerizing glimpse into Sarno’s search for a sub-Saharan Walden and the implications of that choice.
  22. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    As the hours roll slowly past, it’s hard not to feel that this epic achievement in monotonous misery might have retained its impact at a fraction of the length, and that even our grimmest truth-tellers might well find themselves capable of saying more with less.
  23. Chapter & Verse
    Despite its familiarity, Chapter & Verse manages to make its material both fresh and authentic.
  24. Never Steady, Never Still
    Hepburn’s film eschews the expected emotional progression of a grief drama by focusing as much on continuing pain as sudden mourning.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Winning
    Overly-long, it nevertheless carries sock appeal in suspenseful racing sequences and its principals in a realistically-developed marital romance score strongly.
  26. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    If terror is not particularly sought after, there is still sufficient tension, and downplaying the story’s fantastical aspect in favor of psychological conflicts lends the whole a persuasive pathos.
  27. The Thief Collector
    The Thief Collector is a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime. It’s also a portrait of art and obsession. But by the time it makes you say “Oh. My. God.,” it’s a movie that has used art to touch something essential about how strangers — or maybe I should just say the downright strange — walk among us.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Niagara
    Niagara is a morbid, cliched expedition into lust and murder.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
    Perhaps the film is a triumph of controlled and deliberate mediocrity, but it still closer resembles a clumsy carbon of a bad satire on the original.
  30. Man Finds Tape
    Hall and Gandersman compel enough interest to pull viewers through, even if they may find the fadeout less than satisfying.
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