Variety's Scores

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For 17,777 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 2.4 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: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. The Red Turtle
    Michael Dudok de Wit’s hypnotizing, entirely dialogue-free The Red Turtle is a fable so simple, so pure, it feels as if it has existed for hundreds of years, like a brilliant shard of sea glass rendered smooth and elegant through generations of retelling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hope and Glory
    Essentially a collection of sweetly autobiographical anecdotes of English family life during World War II.
  3. How to Survive a Plague
    A concise overview's clarity and an epic narrative shape, with a happy ending to boot.
  4. My Happy Family
    Providing certain vivid detail but rather lacking in vitality, Ekvtimishvili’s screenplay is stronger on sociology than drama.
  5. Chasing Coral
    You walk out of Chasing Coral feeling that Richard Vevers is correct: The more that people see, and understand, the death of our coral, the more they’ll realize that climate change isn’t just about wrecking the planet, it’s about humanity destroying itself.
  6. Loveless
    The dramatic aesthetic of a movie like Loveless — rock-solid yet leisurely in its observance, grounded yet metaphorical — makes it a quietly commanding film.
  7. Showing Up
    In its minimalist quotidian way, Showing Up is a movie made by someone in masterly control of her medium.
  8. In the Bedroom
    Beautifully acted by a diverse ensemble, this Good Machine production is carefully crafted and deliberately paced.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Thin Man
    The Thin Man was an entertaining novel, and now it's an entertaining picture.
  10. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    There’s a purity and natural-born dazzle to EPiC. What you see is what you get: Elvis in the raw, driven by the awareness that it doesn’t get any better than that.
  11. Barbara
    A story of love and subterfuge in 1980 East Germany that never quite accelerates into an outright thriller, Barbara reps another assured collaboration between director Christian Petzold and his main muse, actress Nina Hoss.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Of Gods and Men
    As the film patiently (perhaps too much so for some) heads toward its foregone conclusion, Beauvois gradually raises his style to a level of baroqueness reminiscent of 1995's "Don't Forget You're Going to Die."
  13. To Die For
    Delivers continuous pinpricks of irreverent humor and subversive cultural commentary.
    • Variety
  14. One Cut of the Dead
    “One Cut” captures all the craziness and exhilaration of movie-making on a minuscule budget. High-energy performances from a cast of little-knowns are perfectly tuned to the material. The outstanding technical package is a great example of how to create a Poverty Row look for what’s actually a very sophisticated filmmaking exercise.
  15. Museo
    Ruizpalacios spins an irresistibly inventive and unusually intelligent tall tale from this kernel of truth. All the mischief, however, is precisely counterbalanced by a deep affection for his funny, flawed (largely fictional) characters and shot through with a surprisingly biting assessment of the compromised nature of the museum trade.
  16. Nobody's Fool
    Nobody's Fool is a gentle, flavorsome story of a loose-knit, dysfunctional family whose members essentially include every glimpsed citizen of a small New York town. Fronted by a splendid performance from Paul Newman as a spirited man who has made nothing of his life, Robert Benton's character-driven film is sprinkled with small pleasures; the dramatic developments here don't take place in the noisy, calamitous manner that is customary these days.
  17. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The wrenching tale has something for anyone who likes their melodrama spiked with palpable tension and genuine suspense.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stranger Than Paradise
    Stranger than Paradise is a bracingly original avant-garde black comedy. Begun as a short which was presented under the same title at some earlier festivals, film has been expanded in outstanding fashion by young New York writer-director Jim Jarmusch.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bonnie and Clyde
    This inconsistency of direction is the most obvious fault of Bonnie and Clyde, which has some good ingredients, although they are not meshed together well.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Beaches of Agnès
    Oddball mix that may strike some as overly whimsical but should delight the filmmaker's many fans.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    West Side Story
    West Side Story is a beautifully-mounted, impressive, emotion-ridden and violent musical which, in its stark approach to a raging social problem and realism of unfoldment, may set a pattern for future musical presentations. Screen takes on a new dimension in this powerful and sometimes fascinating translation of the Broadway musical to the greater scope of motion pictures.
  22. On-Gaku: Our Sound
    True to Ohashi original manga, Iwaisawa’s illustrations are geometric, employing abstract backgrounds and bright, dominant colors. Faces, reduced to a few stark, scrawly lines, heighten the comical effect of the characters’ poker-faced dialogue, without compromising the richness of their expressions.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Raiders of the Lost Ark
    Spielberg has deftly veiled proceedings in a sense of mystical wonder that makes it all the more easy for viewers to suspend disbelief and settle back for the fun.
  24. I Saw the TV Glow
    This character-centered setup is where I Saw the TV Glow is most affecting, grounded by the tense, tacit bond between two highly guarded people — and given an electric jolt by Lundy-Paine’s fragile, volatile performance as someone certain there’s no accepting place for them outside the rectangular confines of the TV set. But
  25. Deliver Us from Evil
    So harsh and damning is the pic toward the current Catholic leadership -- personified by Los Angeles-based Cardinal Roger Mahony, who oversaw O'Grady's stewardship at various central California parishes in the 1970s and '80s, that charges the church operates "like the Mafia" sound spot-on.
  26. May December
    It’s a thorough dive into the psychology of everyone involved, not least of all the woman who’d be drawn to play such a role.
  27. Maidan
    Beyond the film’s immediacy, “Maidan” is an impressive, bold treatment of a complex subject via rigidly formalist means
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Say Anything...
    A half-baked love story, full of good intentions but uneven in the telling.
  29. Drug War
    A nail-biter that’s actually quite light on action but so well-scripted and shot, it’s nonetheless edge-of-your-seat material.
  30. The Great Beauty
    Sorrentino continues to tackle major topics using an extraordinary combination of broad brushstrokes and minute detail. Passion via the intellect has become his trademark, well suited to this dissection of empty diversions, indulged in by latter-day Neros fiddling while Rome burns.
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