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. Cover-Up
    As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.
  2. April
    April is loath to explain itself, inviting us instead to watch, listen and feel our way through it — a work marked, like the benevolent but unreachable woman at its center, by immense empathy and isolated, inconsolable despair.
  3. Vitalina Varela
    Costa’s elongation of time (made more acute since there’s rarely enough light coming from the screen to check your watch) combined with his habit of doling out a few narrative details without exploration, results in a film that distances spectators not already in his thrall.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
    Done in the satirical Sturges vein, and directed with that same touch, the story makes much of characterization and somewhat wacky comedy, plus some slapstick, with excellent photography figuring throughout.
  5. Happening
    Happening is filmed and performed in such a delicate, skin-soft register, meanwhile, that the escalating terror of Anne’s situation is all the more pronounced, eventually pivoting into a realm of wholly realism-based body horror.
  6. The Human Surge 3
    The Human Surge 3 doesn’t have defined characters or even very coherent conversations, but its swirling of reality conjures an absorbing dreamscape.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Patton
    War is hell, and Patton is one hell of a war picture, perhaps one of the most remarkable of its type ever made.
  8. The Lost Daughter
    Through it all, Gyllenhaal assumes an unfussy, practically invisible non-style that conveys the essential (like that missing doll, visible in the background of a key scene) while privileging the performances.
  9. Black Mother
    A beguilingly immersive, multifaceted, vividly sensorial portrait of his mother’s homeland, Jamaica.
  10. The Big Sick
    Comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon mine their personal history for laughs, heartache, and hard-earned insight in The Big Sick, a film that’s by turns romantic, rueful, and hilarious.
  11. Argo
    Ultimately, the thrill of Argo is in watching how the illusion-making of movies found such an unlikely application on the world political stage, where the stakes were literally life and death.
  12. Summer Hours
    A family ensembler of utter simplicity, Oliver Assayas' Summer Hours is a salutory (and belated) reminder that, as with his earlier Cold Water and Late August, Early September, some of this writer-director's best work comes in modest packages.
  13. Traffic
    Enormously ambitious and masterfully made, Traffic represents docudrama-style storytelling at a very high level.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (re-released)
    It takes nerve to make a pic in which all dialog is sung. Also, there is no dancing and this is not a filmed operetta or opera. [review of original release]
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Grifters
    A curiously uneven movie.
  16. Talk to Her
    An engaging, well-crafted and imaginative meditation on solitude and communication.
  17. Our Daily Bread
    Looks at the agricultural industry across Europe through sound and images alone. Pic offers a tabula rasa in which some auds will see a horrifying indictment of the industry's cruelties, others a realistic depiction of mechanized farming, and some a soft-spoken tribute to manual labor. Meanwhile, precisely composed lensing and painstaking sound design create moments of sublime beauty.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Strawberry Blonde
    Cagney and de Havilland provide topnotch performances that do much to keep up interest in the proceedings. Rita Hayworth is an eyeful as the title character, while Jack Carson is excellent as the politically ambitious antagonist of the dentist.
  19. The Master
    The writer-director's typically eccentric sixth feature is a sustained immersion in a series of hypnotic moods and longueurs, an imposing picture that thrillingly and sometimes maddeningly refuses to conform to expectations.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Boys Don't Cry
    The poignant and candid Boys Don't Cry can be seen as a "Rebel Without a Cause" for these culturally diverse and complex times, with the two misfit girls enacting a version of the James Dean/Natalie Wood romance with utmost conviction.
  21. The Wild Pear Tree
    Even more than in his previous film, Ceylan and his fellow scriptwriters (wife Ebru Ceylan along with Akın Aksu, also acting) develop astonishingly complex spoken recitatives that weave philosophy, religious tradition, and ethics together into a mesmerizing verbal fugue.
  22. My Imaginary Country
    While in formal terms it’s more of a standard, reportage-based doc than any of his recent essays, it is also the rarest of projects: one in which a venerated member of an older generation of political activists communicates a fervent admiration for his younger counterparts and a deep, grateful optimism for the future they are building.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    The film is full of singing, as the characters break into familiar songs at family gatherings or in the local pub. This isn’t a film based on nostalgia, though; its very special qualities stem from the beautiful simplicity of direction, writing and playing, and the accuracy of the incidents depicted.
  24. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    Story has made a potent political film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that data alone cannot possibly express.
  25. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
    Miyazaki’s first hit fascinates as a glimpse into the master’s then-developing style, even when the final-act storytelling gets woozy.
  26. Aladdin
    Floridly beautiful, shamelessly derivative and infused with an irreverent, sophisticated comic flair thanks to Robin Williams' vocal calisthenics, Aladdin probably won't equal its beastly predecessor but should still enjoy a magic carpet ride through the holiday season.
  27. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Los Angeles may be the most photographed city in the world, but it has never have been captured with such complex layers of meaning and fascination as in Thom Andersen's remarkable Los Angeles Plays Itself.
  28. Sentimental Value
    While not as stylistically radical as Trier’s last film, “The Worst Person in the World,” this layered family-centric drama (which was also written by Eskil Vogt) shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you’d think that cinema would have exhausted by now.
  29. This Is England
    With its knockout lead perfs and taut if slightly familiar construction, this '80s-set dramedy about a skinhead gang reps Meadows' most fluently made film so far.
  30. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Each of these episodes is well acted, follows a reasonably conventional three-act structure and emphasizes interesting female characters in a compelling situation — which is more than can be said for many portmanteau films, where one segment is markedly more satisfying than the others. But it also suggests an ongoing resistance on Hamaguchi’s part to engage with the feature form itself.
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