Variety's Scores

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For 17,833 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: 9,165 out of 17833
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17833
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17833
17833 movie reviews
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  1. Casablanca Beats
    It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.
  2. Wes Craven's New Nightmare
    An ingeniously conceived and devilishly clever opus.
  3. I Am Taraneh, I Am Fifteen Years Old
    An appealing film thanks to its irresistible teenage heroine, I, Taraneh, Am Fifteen delivers the message that there's a new generation of strong-minded femmes out there who aren't afraid of bucking social norms.
  4. Fighting for Life
    The only people who seem immune to the politics of the Iraq War are also at its epicenter: the doctors and nurses who mend and tend to the wounded, and who provide the heart and soul of Terry Sanders' Fighting for Life.
  5. Sacro GRA
    In keeping with Rosi’s style, there are no explanations and no interactions with the camera, and Sacro GRA suddenly ends without a sense of having come to any conclusions.
  6. The Goodbye Girl
    The Neil Simon script evolves a series of increasingly intimate and sensitive character encounters as the adults progress from mutual hostility to an enduring love. Performances by Dreyfuss, Mason and Cummings are all great, and the many supporting bits are filled admirably.
  7. Ride or Die
    Although the journey feels rather drawn out in the film’s 142-minute running time, and is strewn with one ear-splitting brawl too many, the mystery of each protagonist’s true intentions, and the unpredictability of their course of action, keep tensions on a continuous simmer.
  8. Adoration
    This ambitious think-piece ultimately smothers its good intentions in didactic revelations, earnest pleading and incessant violin music. Engrossing nonetheless, the story of a high schooler troubled by his parents' legacy reps one of the Canadian writer-director's most accessible efforts.
  9. Gaia
    Gaia’s resourceful visuals, however, aren’t matched by equivalent nimbleness in the writing; after a time, the storytelling feels more anemic than enigmatic.
  10. The King's Choice
    It has a few traumatic and bedazzling scenes of combat, but mostly it’s about the backroom bureaucratic gamesmanship of war.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thunderball
    Terence Young takes advantage of every situation in his direction to maintain action at fever-pitch.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    In Looking for Mr Goodbar, writer-director Richard Brooks manifests his ability to catch accurately both the tone and subtlety of characters in the most repellant environments - in this case the desperate search for personal identity in the dreary and self-defeating world of compulsive sex and dope. Diane Keaton's performance as the good/bad girl is excellent.
  13. Outbreak
    Whether scarily charting the spread of the virus or choreographing a cat-and-mouse chase of choppers above a winding riverbed, Petersen demonstrates a smooth stylistic savvy that keeps the film highly absorbing from beginning to end.
  14. Give Me Future
    Somewhere buried beneath Peters’ new-day-rising clichés and superficial celebration of electronica stars, there’s an intriguing documentary about Cuba’s transformation struggling to break free.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Road to Bali
    There’s no story to speak of in the script [from a story by Frank Butler and Harry Tugend] but the framework is there on which to hang a succession of amusing quips and physical comedy dealing with romantic rivalry and chuckle competition between the two male stars.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kid Galahad
    The treatment is sophisticated and production deluxe. Also more than the usual amount of romance for a slugfest
  17. The Listener
    Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, The Listener plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era.
  18. Sitting in Bars with Cake
    Where Jane feels thinly sketched in pastels, Corrine’s portrait has been detailed in bright permanent markers. A’zion roils with emotions and her character is funny, mercurial, reactive and real.
  19. JCVD
    A French-language meta-movie parody par excellence, constitutes the headiest stretch of the beefy star's career since, well, ever.
  20. Cop Land
    The increasingly broad strokes with which the story is painted serve to simplify rather than deepen it, and to make it seem more artificially constructed than need be.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Girls Town
    Lili Taylor...gives a superlative, gut-wrenching performance in "Girls Town," a powerfully raw, ultra-realistic drama about a trio of abused teenage girls and their struggle to survive in a rigidly defined, male-dominated society.
  22. Day of the Fight
    The light and shade here is all in Peter Simonite’s splendid, inky-shadowed monochrome lensing; Huston’s visual sense outweighs his screenwriting.
  23. Captain Marvel
    Boden and Fleck are low-key American neorealists, and in Captain Marvel they barely retain a vestige of their signature style. Yet they have brought off something exciting, embracing the Marvel house style and, within that, crafting a tale with enough tricks and moods and sleight-of-hand layers to keep us honestly absorbed.
  24. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    Rough as can be in both content and style, Ghosts will be welcome everywhere tough, provocative docus are shown.
  25. Dolphin Tale
    Though garnished with some heavy dollops of cheese, Dolphin Tale is a surprisingly solid, earnest family picture.
  26. A Better Life
    Director Chris Weitz's problematic new picture, which, despite Demian Bichir's affecting lead performance and a strong feel for Los Angeles' Mexican-American communities, emerges an earnest and overly programmatic heart-tugger.
  27. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    If the first mission made roughly $50 million domestically, the sky could be the limit for this much better sequel -- a clever spoof of "Rambo" and a dozen other movies that employs the usual scattershot "Airplane!" approach but boasts a higher shooting percentage than its forebear. Look out, comedy fans: Fox is coming to get you.
  28. How to Survive a Pandemic
    Smart, humane and gripping even as it rakes over events all too fresh in our memories, How to Survive a Pandemic ends with plenty yet to be discussed and explored: It provides a road map to survival, but doesn’t suggest we’ve all made it just yet.
  29. The Notorious Bettie Page
    A superficial look at the '50s sex icon, picture feels like it was researched via press clippings rather than attempting a fresh rethinking of its era and provocative subject.
  30. Rental Family
    A movie like Rental Family lives or dies by its tone, and the one Hikari strikes is reflected in the concerned creases of Fraser’s forehead: It’s maudlin and unconvincing, means well but isn’t above manipulating us for the desired emotional outcome.
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