Variety's Scores

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For 17,828 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: 9,160 out of 17828
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17828
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17828
17828 movie reviews
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  1. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    It’s a thin, practically anemic observational movie for audiences who recognize themselves in Fran’s awkwardness.
  2. Chef
    The final destination is entirely predictable — right down to the deus ex machina reappearance of an erstwhile antagonist — but the trip itself is never less than pleasant, and often extremely funny.
  3. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    For all the information here, Gibney is unusual among investigative documentarians in that he never forgets he's making cinema.
  4. Detropia
    Among several recent documentaries about Detroit, the elegiac Detropia is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing, if not the most informative or insightful.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    House of Wax
    Andre de Toth's direction, while uneven, nonetheless gears it to the medium.
  6. Missing Link
    Sooner or later, Laika was bound to branch out, which makes this funnier, more colorful film the link previously missing between the company’s Goth-styled past and whatever comes next.
  7. Why We Fight
    Picture sets the gold standard for political documentaries.
  8. Dream Horse
    This is a well-cast, artfully handled effort that exercises sufficient restraint to really earn its requisite laughter and tears.
  9. Women Without Men
    Has striking moments comparable to the best of Neshat's potent imagery. But the script jettisons most of the book's more powerful sections.
  10. Tales from the Golden Age
    Though Mungiu's presumed two shorts have the most individual feel, the other helmers -- Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hoefer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu, all feature novices -- show a plethora of styles within the so-called "Romanian New Wave."
  11. Anita
    Anita may be a tribute doc, but it’s one with real heft.
  12. The Lesson
    The naturalistic style of the storytelling is stealthily enthralling, as is the lead performance by Margita Gosheva as a provincial Bulgarian schoolteacher who is slowly, inexorably driven to the edge by crushing debt.
  13. Active Measures
    While it’s not as if the film comes up with some smoking gun that Robert Mueller hasn’t yet, it fills in the Trump-Russia connection in a dogged, rigorously reported, eyebrow-raising way.
  14. Down Terrace
    Cleverly channeling gangster tropes through a British kitchen-sink soap opera, TV scribe-helmer Ben Wheatley has concocted a nifty black comedy, with a little help from his friends, in Down Terrace.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On Golden Pond
    The film’s most moving interlude, (spoiler omitted), is saved for the end, and both Fonda (pere) and Hepburn are miraculous together here, conveying heartrending intimations of mortality which are doubly powerful due to the stars’ venerable status.
  16. Journey to the West
    [A] mostly entertaining action-fantasy-comedy.
  17. Twister
    Another theme park ride of a movie without an ounce of emotional credibility to it, Twister succeeds on its own terms by taking the audience somewhere it has never been before: into a tornado's funnel.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sophie's Choice
    Sophie's Choice is a handsome, doggedly faithful and astoundingly tedious adaptation of William Styron's best-seller.
  19. My King
    French actress-turned-helmer Maiwenn is concerned first and foremost with her characters, who rank among the most vividly realized of any to have graced the screen in recent memory.
  20. The Harvest
    Nothing about the circumstances revealed in The Harvest could be called normal, and yet it’s a credit to a fertile imagination that the film proves so terrifyingly relatable.
  21. Stations of the Cross
    The fixed gaze of each “station” is an appropriate choice for illustrating unbending dogma, and helmer Brueggemann always makes interesting use of the frame.
  22. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Thanks to stunning advances in performance capture technology, director Rupert Wyatt successfully ditches the cumbersome makeup appliances of past chapters, building the story around a cast of photoreal CG simians convincing enough to identify with as characters, rather than just special effects.
  23. The Innocent
    This film is a slightly slipperier customer than a topline summary would suggest, with tonal shifts that shouldn’t work, but somehow do.
  24. Won't Anybody Listen
    Richly satisfying both as subversive, music-biz primer and as gritty, true-life underdog story.
  25. Son of the Bride
    Unflaggingly genial and universally funny.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Black Balloon
    Collette acts as an anchor for the ensemble, but the young leads credibly hold their own onscreen.
  27. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Competently mounted yet plodding, it’s manifestly a labor of love that becomes a bit of a labor to watch.
  28. The Party's Just Beginning
    The movie, a wayward portrait with surrealist touches, is trying for something genuine. Yet despite some good scenes, some tart lines...and an atmosphere of saintly desperation that suggests “Trainspotting” redone as a darkened YA fable, the movie is wispy and meandering; it doesn’t gather power as it goes along.
  29. Timecrimes
    Timecrimes welds a B-movie plotline to precision-engineered writing and a down-to-earth style; add an engagingly sloppy, nonplussed hero, who remains unfazed by the time-bending scrape in which he finds himself, and the result is memorably offbeat.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yentl
    In league with ace cinematographer David Watkin, Streisand has created a fine-looking period piece, working on Czech locations and in English studios.
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