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. Freaky Friday
    Genuinely clever switched-identities romp.
  2. Thirteen
    Deliberately unvarnished shock piece designed to give pause to anyone with a daughter approaching teenhood.
  3. Sin Alas
    A sensual, brainy, immersive experience that could invite plenty of festival love and attention for its first-time writer-director.
  4. The Brand New Testament
    While the ultra-clever first act stockpiles sufficient admiration from audiences to sustain the film, the bulk of The Brand New Testament concerns itself with Van Dormael’s most persistent preoccupation: the tug-of-war between fate and free will.
  5. Merry Christmas
    A period drama marbled with humor, bold gestures and bittersweet consequences.
  6. The Silence Before Bach
    Arguably stronger conceptually than visually, surreal mix of the unexpected and the banal is definitely not to everybody's taste. But the music is inarguably sublime.
  7. Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
    Reitz maintains his visionary sweep through history, favoring plot over development of characters, except as embodiments of large themes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Changeling
    A superior haunted house thriller.
  9. Of Fathers and Sons
    The result is as despairing as any portrait of close-knit family and dedicated parenthood can be, adeptly blending sensationalism with domestic intimacy, and sincerely eye-opening in its portrayal of inherited Islamist fervor.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tortilla Flat
    A sincere, tender, beguiling and at times exalting picture. It is sympathetically and adroitly adapted, handsomely produced, expertly directed and eloquently acted.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Operation Crossbow
    Ambitiously filmed in Europe and boasting production values which may seem to catch the spirit of the monumental effort, what the Carlo Ponti production lacks primarily is a cohesive story line.
  12. Decorado
    An argument can be had about what will end up being the “best” animated feature released in 2026 — it’s early — but there’s little chance another film can dethrone Decorado as the most mind-bending.
  13. The King
    Promised Land is a searching, flawed, let’s-try-this-on-and-see-how-it-looks movie. At times, it veers too close to being a standard Elvis chronicle, and at others its insight into our national neurosis may strike you as a tad ethereal. It’s an essay in the form of an investigation. Yet it’s the definition of tasty food for thought.
  14. Together Together
    Beckwith puts forth something rare and full of feeling. This is a genuine love story between two straight individuals of the opposite sex that doesn’t involve sex (let’s call it friendship for kicks), an insightful redefinition of masculinity as well as a gentle, intimate celebration of a unique, 21st-century family in the making.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai plays more like an experimental film than a Hollywood production aimed at a mass audience. It violates every rule of storytelling and narrative structure in creating a self-contained world of its own.
  16. Heartbeats
    Splashy colors, oddball framing, super-cool threads and cranked-up retro music supply the picture's bizarre love triangle with a dance-club atmosphere that'll seduce young audiences of most any orientation.
  17. eXistenZ
    This is unquestionably Cronenberg Lite, but there is plenty of fun to be had from the absurdities and convoluted plotting, and a solid cast lends stature to the far-fetched fantasies.
  18. Sun Don't Shine
    Seimetz takes advantage of the eccentric cultural/natural landscape of central Florida to vivid effect, gets impressive if seldom endearing work from her actors, and seems very much in charge of an assertive if not always explicable presentation.
  19. Far from the Tree
    Good intentions aside, Far From the Tree puts all its energy into disproving a thesis that many of us don’t actually believe — that the tree is inherently perfect, and that anything other than a direct copy of one’s parents is a crisis in need of resolving.
  20. Gunner Palace
    Put together by Tucker and his co-director/editor wife Petra Epperlein without a hint of artifice, docu offers up its sounds and images bluntly, and they are very much sounds and images worth having as part of the record.
  21. The Skin I Live In
    Much as he did with Ruth Rendell's "Live Flesh," Almodovar has taken an ice-cold psychological thriller, penned by a novelist of far less humanistic temperament, and performed some stylistic surgery of his own, adding broad comic relief, overripe melodrama, outrageous asides and zesty girl-power uplift.
  22. Curse of the Golden Flower
    Zhang Yimou's strangest and most troubled film, abounds in hysterical, mannered Tang Dynasty-era palace intrigue and dehumanized CGI battle sequences.
  23. Shall We Kiss?
    This is upscale French entertainment at its best.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Unicorn
    The Last Unicorn represents a rare example of an animated kids' pic in which the script and vocal performances outshine the visuals.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Italian Job
    The cast does its stuff to good effect. Coward, as the highly patriotic, business-like master crook, brings all his imperturbable sense of irony and comedy to his role.
  26. Who You Think I Am
    Who You Think I Am is a surprise package that plays its trump cards with shrugging insouciance, yielding giggles and gasps in equal measure, sometimes at once.
  27. Rock the Bells
    At several points, Chang is the only thing standing between his event and total chaos, as frustrated ticket-holders rush the gates.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Barefoot Contessa
    Sharpness of the characters, the high-voltage dialog, the cynicism and wit and wisdom of the story, the spectacular combination of the immorally rich and the immorally sycophantic - these add up to a click feature from writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
  29. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    An intelligent, restrained but warmly intimate cinematic conversation with the Sixth Generation Chinese trailblazer.
  30. Scrambled
    Scrambled is a lot of fun when it’s not trying to also deliver uplift, but it ultimately proves that white, middle-class American women in their 30s can can defeat any obstacle that stands between them and the unfettered life they want, except screenwriting convention.
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