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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    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    Lana Turner is outstanding in the pivotal role played in Universal’s 1934 version by Claudette Colbert.
  3. Pain and Glory
    A mature work of meticulously tuned meta-fiction.
  4. Russian Ark
    Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.
  5. The Farthest
    Reynolds’ film conveys a legitimate, stirring sense of awe about mankind’s innate desire for adventure, discovery and communion with all that surrounds it.
  6. Genèse (Genesis)
    Lesage’s filmmaking, with its unhurried editing and eerily echoing music cues, is in expert sympathy with his hovering, out-of-time protagonists.
  7. Gomorrah
    Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano's muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families' insidious control.
  8. Familiar Touch
    Friedland’s film, as sharp as it is soft, conveys both the terror of losing the life you recognize, and the intermittent, fragmented joy of finding it again.
  9. To Be and to Have
    Any negative stereotypes viewers might harbor about education in rural communities are sent packing by this magnificently lensed and cumulatively touching account from documaker Nicolas Philibert.
  10. A Night of Knowing Nothing
    Only a few seconds into Payal Kapadia’s shimmery, poetic essay doc A Night of Knowing Nothing, it feels like we are a few hours deep into the excavation of someone else’s memories.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eraserhead
    Eraserhead is a sickening bad-taste exercise made by David Lynch under the auspices of the American Film Institute. Like a lot of AFI efforts, the pic has good tech values (particularly the inventive sound mixing), but little substance or subtlety.
    • Variety
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Withnail and I
    Withnail & I is about the end of an era. Set in 1969 England, it portrays the last throes of a friendship mirroring the seedy demise of the hippie period, delivering some comic gems along the way.
  13. Return to Seoul
    While Chou’s elliptical screenplay gently explodes many preconceived assumptions about the effects of adoption on adoptees, it is too clear-sighted to ignore the fact that whether biology affects identity or not, the mere possibility that such a link exists could exert a powerful attraction on a searching spirit not quite sure what it is searching for.
  14. The Velvet Underground
    As a collage of the period, The Velvet Underground is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Federico Fellini, long a scripter, in his second feature film satirizes the 'wastrels', the do-nothing sons of middle-class Italian provincials whose life ranges from schoolroom to poolroom.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Medium Cool
    Photographed in Chicago against the clamor and violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where cast principals were on their own as they made their way through the crowds and police lines. Buildup to these later sequences frequently is confusing and motives difficult to fathom.
  17. Three Colors: Blue
    Bold final sequence is a visual and aural crescendo calibrated to show that while each person is fundamentally alone, every life inevitably touches other lives.
  18. Mami Wata
    Even if narratively Mami Wata never fully reaches a satisfactory apex, its images remain utterly enthralling.
  19. Mulholland Dr.
    A genuinely ominous and suspenseful thriller.
  20. Fire at Sea
    Rosi has long been drawn to quiet lives, but has never been quite so successful in conveying the soulful qualities he sees in them to his audience — until now, using the oblique approach of Lampedusa’s residents to spotlight this growing international crisis, while using his young protagonist’s obliviousness to reflect and indict our own.
  21. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    McQuarrie clearly believes in creating coherent set pieces: His combat scenes are tense, muscular, and clean, shot and edited in such a way that the spatial geography makes sense. He places audiences just over Cruise’s shoulder, or staring into the actor’s face as he grimaces with exertion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    Orson Welles has reworked the docu material of Francois Reichenbach on noted art forger Elmyr De Houry, made for TV about 1968, into an intriguing, enjoyable look at illusion in general and his own, Clifford Irving’s and De Houry’s dealing with it in particular.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cléo from 5 to 7
    Sometimes invention falters, as in the scene with the songwriters. But Varda then easily picks up the threads and keeps alive interest in the girl and her plight.
  24. Grizzly Man
    A brilliant portrait of adventure, activism, obsession and potential madness that ranks among helmer Werner Herzog's strongest work.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Goldfinger
    There's not the least sign of staleness in this third sample of the Bond 007 formula. Some liberties have been taken with Ian Fleming's original novel but without diluting its flavor.
  26. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    How fortunate that Boseman’s legacy should include this film, an homage to Black art that’s tough enough to confront the costs of making it.
  27. Robot Dreams
    Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One False Move
    Working for the most part in straightforward style, director Carl Franklin achieves considerable suspense by pitting the frailties of each party against the other.
  29. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    Each elegantly framed shot, every deftly observed moment expresses something organic and moving.
  30. Jane
    Jane provides as much insight as we might hope for (in visual media at least) into a personality whose life might seem well-documented to the point of redundancy.
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