Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Brooklyn
    A robust romantic drama, rich in history and full of emotion, Brooklyn fills a niche in which the studios once specialized, using a well-read and respected novel as the grounds for a tenderly observed tearjerker.
  2. Nobody Knows
    Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity, delivering the goods after a seemingly directionless first half.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life Is Sweet
    As a precise observation of British types and a virtuoso piece of carefully observed ensemble playing, the film would be hard to beat.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mary Poppins
    Julie Andrews’ first appearance on the screen is a signal triumph and she performs as easily as she sings, displaying a fresh type of beauty nicely adaptable to the color cameras. Van Dyke, as the happy-go-lucky jack-of-all-trades, scores heavily, the part permitting him to showcase his wide range of talents.
  5. Apollo 11
    Apollo 11 is a cool, meticulous, at times enthralling documentary that captures the Apollo 11 flight in its entirety through raw footage drawn from the NASA vaults.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Faces
    Faces is a long, long (at least an hour too long) look at a 36-hour splitup in the 14-year marriage of a middle-class couple. At least John Cassavetes, who also wrote the screenplay, describes them as middle-class.
  7. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Has a sharper narrative focus and a livelier sense of forward movement than did the more episodic "Fellowship."
  8. L'Enfant (The Child)
    Those masters of small-scale realism, Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, have created yet another beautifully acted, exquisitely observed morality tale in The Child.
  9. Jane Fonda in Five Acts
    Lively, confessional, and entertaining.
  10. Poetry
    Calmer and less shattering than his masterly psychodrama "Secret Sunshine" (2007), Poetry is a deceptively gentle tale with a tender ache at its center, as well as a performance from Yun Jung-hee that lingers long in the memory.
  11. Newtown
    Structured more like a requiem than a polemic, the doc ebbs and flows in accordance with the cycles of mourning as it speaks with parents of the murdered children, as well as the teachers, priests, doctors and neighbors afflicted with survivor’s guilt, elegantly and devastatingly capturing the tenor of a small town that will carry these scars for at least a generation.
  12. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The movie quotes Baldwin as saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street,” but this one may as well be located inside a snow globe. In deciding how to translate Baldwin’s prose to the screen, Jenkins may as well have made Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a Douglas Sirk movie (or put Alice Waters’ “The Color Purple” through the Steven Spielberg filter).
  13. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    A triumph on every creative level, from casting to execution.
  14. Little Women
    This handsomely produced period piece is easily the most emotionally effective bigscreen melodrama since "The Joy Luck Club," as well as the most intelligent.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shine
    An unconventional biopic about a brilliant young pianist.
  16. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Its mind-bending storytelling and themes of play and paranoia make it perhaps the quintessential Gallic movie of its era.
  17. Aftershock
    The tried and true way to break viewers’ hearts is to make them care deeply. Aftershock wastes no time in doing just that.
  18. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    It’s the human side of the character that makes this McCarthy’s best performance to date, revealing haunting insights into friendship, loneliness, and creative insecurity.
  19. Wolfwalkers
    In the decade since “Kells,” it’s not just the technological advances that make Moore’s latest so impressive, but the rapidly changing cultural conversations as well. He brings everything together by borrowing from timeless visual influences, leaving audiences with another stunning artwork for the ages.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It Happened One Night
    One of those stories that without a particularly strong plot manages to come through in a big way, due to the acting, dialog, situations and direction. In other words, the story has that intangible quality of charm which arises from a smooth blending of the various ingredients. Difficult to analyze, impossible to designedly reproduce. Just a happy accident.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Neighbor Totoro
    Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki has essentially padded a television half-hour into a sluggish theatrical feature.
  22. I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You
    Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.
  23. The Missing Picture
    The film is a brave act of witness complicated by the documaker’s decision to re-create his experiences using clay figurines, a tricky aesthetic device that raises fascinating and problematic questions of representation.
  24. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
    Stands out in a field of generic, cookie-cutter dramas, not simply in terms of representation — though the female-made, indigenous-focused thriller offers a field day for intersectionality theorists — but also in the unconventional way the story unfolds.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Invisible Man
    The strangest character yet created by the screen [from the novel by H.G. Wells] roams through The Invisible Man.
  26. Our Father, the Devil
    A cutting, at times unwieldy exploration of trauma and forgiveness, the enigmatic drama goes places you almost certainly won’t expect — and, once there, makes you wonder how you ever thought it could have gone anywhere else.
  27. Amadeus
    Loaded with pleasures, the greatest of which derive from the on location filming in Prague, the most 18th century of all European cities.
  28. Of Men and War
    The film’s rigorous approach will appeal to documentary purists while challenging more general audiences who might care to know more about Pathway, Gusman and his philosophy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Long Goodbye
    Robert Altman's film version of Raymond Chandler's novel is an uneven mixture of insider satire on the gumshow film genre, gratuitous brutality, and sledgehammer whimsy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a western meller done in the best John Ford manner.
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