Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,831 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: 9,163 out of 17831
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17831
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17831
17831 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Somewhere
    The ever-perceptive writer-director further hones her gifts for ruefully funny observation and understated melancholy with this low-key portrait of a burned-out screen actor.
  2. Smile 2
    The film climaxes with a body-horror maximalism coupled with a minimum of logic. Until then, though, it wrings honest jolts out of the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.
  3. Frequency
    An oddly schizophrenic fantasy thriller that ultimately succumbs to a fatal case of sentimentality.
  4. Home Movie
    A modest charmer.
  5. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    Her (Wauer) attempt to relieve uncomfortable events with happy stories makes for a disturbing superficiality, and a "make your own Jewish grave" student project is plain offensive. Score is omnipresent and insufferable.
  6. Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives
    Warm, spirited and occasionally slathered in goo, Birth Story is a celebratory tribute to the endangered art of midwifery and its most influential practitioner, Ina May Gaskin.
  7. All Creatures Here Below
    It’s a decently acted and crafted drama that nonetheless seems built on a foundation of phony pathos, revolving around doomed lovers whose fate seems more a matter of contrived miserabilism than authenticity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dracula
    Director John Badham and Frank Langella pull off a handsome, moody rendition, more romantic than menacing.
  9. Lost Girls
    In Lost Girls, Liz Garbus takes the serial-killer thriller and turns it on its head, insisting that we see the victims as larger than the crimes that destroyed them.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wind and the Lion
    Generally literate and very commercial period action drama, well written and better directed by John Milius.
  11. Oxygen
    A clever example of creativity thriving within the strict protocols of the coronavirus pandemic, tense confinement thriller Oxygen plays like “Buried” in outer space.
  12. The Alpinist
    The images here are often dizzying and dazzling.
  13. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    The movie derives its energy almost entirely from the bristling quality of the dialogue and the easy ensemble flow of the performances.
  14. The Book of Life
    The Book of Life is undoubtedly stuffed with more business than its fleet, kid-friendly running time can properly handle. Yet Gutierrez’s confident delivery of the material remains so buoyant and passionately felt throughout that he almost gets away with it.
  15. The Wrecking Crew
    This nostalgia-drenched rockumentary remains a hugely entertaining treasure trove of witness-at-creation anecdotes and enduringly potent ’60s pop hits.
  16. The Contestant
    Titley consistently anchors her unfolding chronicle to the kind of backstage emotional truths often hidden from the audience, and in the process, she crafts something halfway between sensationalist exposé and intimate confessional — a remedy to reality TV based on its own format — co-authored by her subjects
  17. The Page Turner
    Scripter-helmer Denis Dercourt's sixth feature is spare but classy, with an impressively controlled perf by Deborah Francois (the young mother in the Dardenne Bros.' "L'enfant") opposite popular and spot-on vet Catherine Frot.
  18. Flanders
    A somber, beautifully acted reflection on the barbarity of war and the bestiality of man.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Unbelievable Truth
    The Unbelievable Truth is a promising, reasonably engaging first feature of the art school film variety. Very consciously designed and stylized in all departments, pic has a minor-key feel to it.
  20. White Elephant
    The lensing is flawless in White Elephant, but the same can't be said for the script, which tries to keep too many thematic balls in the air without privileging any one.
  21. The Final Member
    The Final Member finds hilarity in humanity.
  22. The Workers Cup
    What emerges is a nuanced, if somewhat undernourished, portrait of the poorest inhabitants of the richest country in the world.
  23. The Future
    For all the superficial hilarity of July's approach, a much sadder streak runs deep through the entire film, reinforced by Jon Brion's score (more tones than melody). Still, it's curious that this is the feeling she chooses to leave us with in the end.
  24. North Face
    An often grippingly staged mountain movie that's good but not great.
  25. The Balconettes
    The directorial energy being channelled here is closer to that of early Pedro Almodóvar, as Merlant piles up saturated, hot-hued melodrama, garrulous female bonding and cheerful lashings of blood and sex.
  26. Workingman's Death
    Pic reps a sequel of sorts to his 12-part "Megacities" about poor folk in separate burgs, and comes soaked in good old-fashioned humanist respect for the dignity of labor, but eventually grows a little monotonous.
  27. 3 Idiots
    3 Idiots takes a while to lay out its game plan but pays off emotionally in its second half.
  28. The House by the Sea
    The House by the Sea feels like the work of a filmmaker gazing back over his own filmography as one might across a sparkling blue sea, and observing its tides.
  29. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    The film is undeniably overlong, and far more engaging in its first half, which covers Ferragamo’s hard-up Neapolitan beginnings and lively career as a shoemaker to the stars in 1920s Tinseltown with a mixture of romantic evocation and chewy historical expertise.
  30. Cinderella
    Though this Cinderella could never replace Disney’s animated classic, it’s no ugly stepsister either, but a deserving companion.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »