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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Shining
    The crazier Nicholson gets, the more idiotic he looks. Shelley Duvall transforms the warm sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    Star Trek II is a very satisfying space adventure, closer in spirit and format to the popular TV series than to its big-budget predecessor.
    • Variety
  3. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Emerges as the best in the overall series since "The Empire Strikes Back."
  4. Fratricide
    A hard-hitting, ultimately tragic tale of the struggle for identity among Kurdish emigres in urban Germany.
  5. Superman
    The new movie isn’t “dark” (Zack Snyder’s ambitious mistake) so much as it’s a loopy, spinning, multifaceted story with genuine emotional stakes. That’s why it treats Superman’s powers as the most spectacular and least interesting thing about him.
  6. Queens of the Dead
    Its aesthetic approach seldom lives up to its gestures toward camp as a guiding principle or its weighty themes (except, perhaps, in its surprisingly raucous final act). However, its flimsy aesthetic foundations are supported by remarkably well-formed characters.
  7. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    One of the best Westerns of the 1970s, which represents the highest possible praise. It's a magnificent throwback to a time when filmmakers found all sorts of ways to refashion Hollywood's oldest and most durable genre.
  8. Fracture
    An absorbing legal thriller that can't help but taste like exquisitely reheated leftovers.
  9. Departures
    TV scribe Kundo Koyama's first bigscreen script peppers the proceedings with rich character detail and near-screwball interludes that shouldn't fit but somehow do.
  10. Seeing Allred
    As the cases against Cosby, Trump, O’Reilly, Weinstein, etc. reveal, the courts don’t appear to be equipped to correct a gender-biased system, whereas Allred has pioneered a new way of fighting injustice.
  11. Inequality for All
    Covering a broad swath of liberal economic theory in brisk, simply stated fashion, Inequality for All aims to do for income disparity what “An Inconvenient Truth” did for climate change.
  12. Ghost Stories
    There’s the phantom of a psychothriller for the ages inside “Ghost Stories” that never quite fights its way out of the film’s tightly structured creepshow homage, but the goosebumps it raises are real, and honestly earned.
  13. Santoalla
    While Santoalla is a small story, its poignancy resonates, like an echo finding its way through the peaks and valleys of this windswept, eternal landscape.
  14. No No: A Dockumentary
    While the film’s sense of chronology is at times strained and its tale of redemption hardly unique, its subject is certainly one of a kind.
  15. The Valet
    Layers of intrigue mesh with Hollywood-style efficiency, pitting sincere feelings against ruthlessly mercenary machinations. Also in Hollywood style, sincerity and integrity carry the day.
  16. Feast of the Seven Fishes
    This easily digestible “Feast” is unlikely to join the holiday viewing canon, but the particularity of its focus on the eponymous, American-fried immigrant tradition is welcome: Any Christmas film that teaches us how to correctly soak baccala is more useful than most.
  17. 12 O'Clock Boys
    Using Baltimore’s dirt-bike groups as its entry point, the film offers a remarkable grassroots look at how the system is broken at the inner-city level.
  18. People Places Things
    For a film with one eye on messy, real emotions, People, Places, Things undercuts itself with goofy humor.
  19. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    The sense of immediacy and excitement is contagious.
  20. Reykjavík
    A funny, touching, off-the-wall relationer that's one of the freshest helming debuts in world cinema this year.
  21. The Italian Job
    The forthcoming line of high-octane summer entertainments will be hard-pressed to top this one for both thrills and wit.
  22. The Inheritance
    Arresting and fascinating.
  23. Come Undone
    The elusive, quicksilver nature of young love is often reduced to crude simplicities by the movies, but director Sebastien Lifshitz and writing partner Stephane Bouquet have observed it with a superb balance of aesthetics and insight in Come Undone.
  24. Chak De India!
    Shaky handheld lensing, terrific cutting and uplifting music build to a grandstand finish in which the main characters are bound tightly into the physical drama. It ain't subtle, but it packs a punch at a simple emotional level.
  25. Protagonist
    The dangers of extremism and the virtues of uncertainty are the keys to the remarkable Protagonist, docu helmer Jessica Yu's exploration of four men's journey through dysfunction, obsession and redemption.
  26. The New Black
    Laid-back yet incisive, The New Black examines the complexity of black attitudes toward same-sex marriage, which the mainstream media tend to oversimplify as church-dominated and uniformly negative.
  27. Voyage of Time: Life's Journey
    Voyage of Time has too many spellbinding images to count, but as a movie it’s just okay.
  28. Before You Know It
    Throughout, Before You Know It resists foundering in pathos or kitsch; its subjects are too complex and resistant, having survived decades of change, to be reduced to victims or examples.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Never Say Never Again
    What clicks best in the film is the casting. Klaus Maria Brandauer makes one of the best Bond opponents since very early in the series.
  30. I Blame Society
    Aside from all its other virtues, this film is a truly inspiring example of committing to the bit.
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