Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. Heat
    Stunningly made and incisively acted by a large and terrific cast, Michael Mann's ambitious study of the relativity of good and evil stands apart from other films of its type by virtue of its extraordinarily rich characterizations and its thoughtful, deeply melancholy take on modern life.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Apocalypse Now
    Apocalypse Now was worth the wait. Alternately a brilliant and bizarre film, Francis Coppola’s four year ‘work in progress’ offers the definitive validation to the old saw, “war is hell.”
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Manchurian Candidate
    One of the wildest fabrications any author has ever tried to palm off on a gullible public. But the fascinating thing is that, from uncertain premise to shattering conclusion, one does not question plausibility of the events being rooted in their own cinematic reality.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Terminator
    A blazing, cinematic comic book, full of virtuoso moviemaking, terrific momentum, solid performances and a compelling story.
  5. Calle 54
    Looks and sounds wonderful, and while more information about these giants of African-Latin music might have been welcome, the music's the thing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Annie Get Your Gun (re-release)
    Annie Get Your Gun is socko musical entertainment on film, just as it was on the Broadway stage. (Review of original release)
  7. The Wind Will Carry Us
    Takes the refined work of Iranian helmer Abbas Kiarostami up another notch to ever more metaphoric ground.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lone Star
    A richly textured and thoroughly engrossing drama that ranks with indie filmmaker John SaylesJohn Sayles' finest work.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Exorcist
    The climactic sequences assault the senses and the intellect with pure cinematic terror.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Leopard (re-release)
    Italy's top bestseller of recent literary history, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's The Leopard comes to the screen in a magnificent film, munificently outfitted and splendidly acted by a large cast dominated by Burt Lancaster. (Review of Original Release)
  11. Russian Ark
    Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.
  12. Saving Private Ryan
    A searingly visceral combat picture, Steven Spielberg’s third World War II drama is arguably second to none as a vivid, realistic and bloody portrait of armed conflict.
  13. Home of the Brave
    di Florio emerges with a serenely powerful, handcrafted film that navigates into a place Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called "the tangled discords of our nation."
  14. Festival Express
    An instant ancillary classic for music fan.
  15. Ten
    10 dazzling and perceptive snapshots of women with which femmes everywhere can identify.
  16. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Originally conceived as one film, the two-parter that has finally emerged can now be seen as a truly epic work.
  17. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    The first-ever screenplay written in the Inuit language, Inuktitut -- and the first time's a charm.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hannah and Her Sisters
    He (Allen) makes nary a misstep from beginning to end in charting the amorous affiliations of three sisters and their men over a two-year period.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Usual Suspects
    The Usual Suspects is an ironic, bang-up thriller about the wages of crime. A terrific cast of exciting actors socks over this absorbingly complicated yarn that's been spun in a seductively slick fashion by director Bryan Singer.
  20. High Fidelity
    Trenchantly witty and acutely insightful.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    A magnificent film. George Lucas set out to make the biggest possible adventure fantasy out of his memories of serials and older action epics, and he succeeded brilliantly.
  22. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Rare proof that a gigantic production in contemporary Hollywood can possess a distinctive personality and its own approach to storytelling, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World proves as bracing as a stiff wind on the open sea.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fanny and Alexander (re-release)
    Emerges as a sumptuously produced period piece that is also a rich tapestry of childhood memoirs and moods, fear and fancy, employing all the manners and means of the best of cinematic theatrical from high and low comedy to darkest tragedy with detours into the gothic, the ghostly and the gruesome. (Review of Original Release)
  24. Tokyo Godfathers
    With its masterful grasp of comedy, pathos, social commentary and mystical weirdness, Tokyo Godfathers takes anime to a whole new level.
  25. Band of Outsiders
    After shooting his most expensive film, Godard returned to the streets of Paris for the rough-hewn Band of Outsiders, which is 95 minutes of brilliant visual jazz. [31 Mar 2003, p.42]
    • Variety
  26. Time of the Wolf
    Haneke demonstrates profound insight into the essence of human behavior when all humility is pared away, raw panic and despair are the order of the day, and man becomes more like wolf than man.
  27. Jaws
    Robert Shaw [is] absolutely magnificent as a coarse fisherman finally hired to locate the Great White Shark; and Richard Dreyfuss, in another excellent characterization as a likeable young scientist.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pulp Fiction
    A spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture, Pulp Fiction is the "American Graffiti" of violent crime pictures.
    • Variety
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Schindler's List
    Evinces an artistic rigor and unsentimental intelligence unlike anything the world's most successful filmmaker has demonstrated before.
  30. The Truman Show
    A gemlike picture crafted with rare and immaculate precision.
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