Variety's Scores

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For 17,794 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 2.4 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: 9,142 out of 17794
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17794
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17794
17794 movie reviews
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  1. Godard Mon Amour
    A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).
  2. Jupiter's Moon
    This serious-minded, ambitious oddity shoots for the moon of a far-off planet, but it really only finds the grace it’s looking for in its magnificent supple camerawork.
  3. Happy End
    It’s as if the director has tied up loose ends from his earlier films, while forcing us to re-examine issues that have only grown more dire since he first brought them to our attention.
  4. Loveless
    The dramatic aesthetic of a movie like Loveless — rock-solid yet leisurely in its observance, grounded yet metaphorical — makes it a quietly commanding film.
  5. Let the Sunshine In
    Perfectly small rather than slight, and radiantly carried by Juliette Binoche — in a light-touch tour de force to be filed alongside her work in Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” — this turns out to be a subtler departure than it outwardly appears for Denis, most evoking her other Parisienne drifting-hearts study, “Friday Night,” in its bittersweet tone.
  6. The Rider
    Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.
  7. Rodin
    Rodin is a meticulously reverential, handsomely lit and very dull biopic.
  8. In the Fade
    Diane Kruger’s powerhouse performance in her first German-language production goes a long way toward compensating for the narrative’s dip into overly crystalline waters.
  9. Double Lover
    Sure, it’s kinky, but Ozon is having fun with it, to the extent that the entire film rewards that fetish all moviegoers have in common — voyeurism — offering up a kind of equal-opportunity objectification.
  10. A Gentle Creature
    The film beguiles with its bravura but it’s a deliberately punishing journey, made by a male Cassandra impelled to point out his nation’s destruction yet sadly aware that it’s too late to change the tide of history.
  11. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    [A] sprawling, thrilling, finally heart-bursting group portrait of Parisian AIDS activists in the early 1990s.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lover for a Day
    The film benefits from the collective contributions of four screenwriters...whose collective insights result in a beautiful complexity.
  13. Filmworker
    Filmworker is a brisk, compelling movie that’s pure candy for Kubrick buffs, yet there are oddities about it.
  14. The Square
    Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one.
  15. Hermia & Helena
    With its tricksy timeline and waifish subplots, the film feels unduly stretched even to reach its modest length, while our dramaturgy-fixated protagonist is slow to stumble into a compelling arc of her own.
  16. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Piscatella and editor Matthew Sultan have shaped the kind of exciting you-are-there narrative that captures the feeling of underdog “naive” idealism transforming into a game-changing popular movement.
  17. Good Time
    These restlessly independent auteurs have passed the genre-foray test with flying neon colors, at no cost or compromise to their abrasively humane worldview.
  18. Radiance
    The film’s thematic preoccupation with the power of images — as perceived through any of the senses — is a worthy and thoughtful one. Yet the execution lacks the visual and emotional rigor of Kawase’s most imposing films, instead swaddling viewers in buttery lighting and blunt, earnest platitudes.
  19. The Day After
    Even lesser Hong has its lackadaisical pleasures, and The Day After has its share of wry musings and twitchy banter between characters to counter its visual stasis and lulling storytelling.
  20. Claire's Camera
    Characters often most reveal themselves when they’re saying nothing of any particular consequence in Hong’s short, loose script.
  21. Blade of the Immortal
    The story’s supernatural elements enable Miike to take huge liberties with chanbara, the oldest genre in Japanese cinema, and break free from rigid traditions of choreographing swordplay sequences.
  22. The Florida Project
    As a filmmaker, Baker is a graceful neorealist voyeur who thrives on improvisation, and his storytelling, in The Florida Project, is mostly just a series of anecdotes. But that turns out to be enough.
  23. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    Farrell and Kidman are astonishingly gifted at playing the subtext of every scene.
  24. The Beguiled
    Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.
  25. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    With no shtick to fall back on, Sandler is forced to act, and it’s a glorious thing to watch.
  26. Wonderstruck
    Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.
  27. Baywatch
    The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.
  28. Ava
    Mysius’ startlingly assured, exquisitely shot “Ava” is a film that doesn’t simply explore the textural possibilities of 35mm film for the hell of it, it makes thematic use of them, to stunning, evocative effect.
  29. Don't Tell
    With West’s magnetic performance and Garrett’s sensitive direction leading the way, the film achieves its crucial goal of turning uncomfortable subject matter into emotionally rewarding viewing.
  30. War Machine
    Everyone has a different idea of what’s funny, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being amused by War Machine, a colossally miscalculated satire.
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