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. What You Wish For
    Filmmaker Nicholas Tomnay’s sophomore feature percolates with atmospheric dread and austerity, but only superficially explores the twisted amorality of the 1% and those who service their whims. While not always successful in cooking up tantalizing commentary on human behavior, it offers a decent helping of Hitchcockian intrigue.
  2. Ezra
    The underlying integrity of “Ezra,” what makes it an honest film despite some formula devices, is that its message about how to help children with special needs is that there’s no magic way. Beyond celebrating them for who they are and showing them who you are.
  3. Young Woman and the Sea
    Throughout Rønning’s sophisticated film and alongside Ridley’s stunning performance — a career highlight for her — we all hold our collective breath and swim with Trudy. Talk about the kind of film they hardly ever make anymore.
  4. Filmlovers!
    Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber form than in his recent narrative features “Deception” and “Brother and Sister,” “Filmlovers!” is formed of two halves, nimbly interleaved by editor Laurence Briaud.
  5. Jim Henson Idea Man
    If it’s easy to wish “Idea Man” were as bold as its subject, though, it’s just as easy to be won over by this deservedly heartfelt tribute to him.
  6. Misericordia
    Instead it’s a slippery, changeable parable about a particularly amoral cuckoo looking to feather a new nest.
  7. Souleymane's Story
    If the hero’s dire situation is a ticking clock, Lojkine’s intelligent and empathetic film places us right alongside him, with each cog of circumstance and each gear of good fortune grinding against him at every turn.
  8. Santosh
    While often more intellectually stimulating than emotionally engaging, Santosh lays bare the dark heart of communal divisions in modern India.
  9. Everybody Loves Touda
    The film holds back from showing us Touda’s soul in its chaotic, capricious entirety — her life as a single mother, in particular, is rather sketchily drawn — and remains most fixated on her in performance mode, where’s she’s fully in her power.
  10. Black Dog
    Achieving a delicate balance between drama and deadpan comedy, Guan’s approach gives the scenes of violence or tragedy a certain antic, Buster Keaton quality, which is enhanced by both Peng’s impassive yet physically expressive performance, and that of his wonderful canine co-star.
  11. Universal Language
    Rankin may have conceived Universal Language in the spirit of homage, but there’s something undeniably original about the end result. Don’t be surprised if that translates into a modest cult following and more creative ideas in the future.
  12. The Other Way Around
    Trueba has drawn a funny little valentine, shot through by a bright, sharp arrow of feeling.
  13. The Most Precious of Cargoes
    Director Michel Hazanavicius finds a poignant way to address not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but the kindness that combated it, crafting an indelible parable destined to be watched and shared by generations to come.
  14. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The situation Rasoulof depicts is hardly limited to Iran. There are echoes of Nazi Germany and modern-day China in the way average citizens submit, while the pressures to inform on one’s neighbors recall pre-perestroika Soviet policies. Rasoulof’s genius comes in focusing on how this dynamic plays out within a family, which makes it personal.
  15. Beating Hearts
    Beating Hearts never bores, least of all when François Civil and the ever-electric Adèle Exarchopoulos take over as the young lovers’ adult (but far from grown-up) incarnations, while the consistent, cartwheeling kineticism with which Lellouche and DP Laurent Tangy shoot the whole thing is an ongoing rush.
  16. All We Imagine as Light
    Just two features into her young career, Kapadia has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life.
  17. Marcello Mio
    Marcello Mio winds up saying very little about industry power structures, or even about the barbed nature of celebrity.
  18. Atlas
    Atlas is predictable, overlong and bland, the kind of experience it’s hard to get excited about when the star player seems to be perfunctorily running the bases.
  19. Queen of the Deuce
    Psychotronic cinema fans may wish Queen of the Deuce spent more time on her celluloid stomping ground, and a bit less on family ties. Still, she did have a fascinating backstory, and surviving relatives’ (as well as some colleagues’) reminiscences are colorful.
  20. Motel Destino
    As an erotic thriller, it’s more preoccupied with the first half of that term than the second, and that’s just fine.
  21. Armand
    The movie, while elegantly photographed, is mostly a shambles. It keeps throwing things at you in an oblique and random way, and it’s constructed like a puzzle with no solution.
  22. Grand Tour
    But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust-for-life.
  23. Rumours
    The massed foibles and outright idiocies of the seven principals — all sharp individual comic creations, but collectively a devastating hot-air hydra of enfeebled contemporary democracy — add up to a frustrated protest against our elected elite fiddling while Rome (or the planet, rather) burns, offering mealy-mouthed sentiments that gesture toward coordinated action without ever getting there.
  24. Limonov: The Ballad
    Given all its omissions and elisions, and the sense of coolness-cosplay that permeates this noisy but lifeless film, “Limonov” might not be a total misapprehension of the mercurial, charismatic and infuriating Eduard Limonov, but it is at least a mispronunciation.
  25. Eephus
    Its pearls of practical wisdom and jewels of melancholic wit make Eephus a gem, which is fitting, for a movie about a game played on a diamond.
  26. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    Tyler Taormina‘s delightful stocking-stuffer Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is as alive to the domesticated magic of the season as a classic carol.
  27. 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.
  28. Parthenope
    Parthenope is a film that rumbles with the hum of nostalgia, recapturing the feeling of youthful, summer freedom while refusing to shy away from the uncertainties of young adulthood. But it’s no mere coming-of-age story; rather, it’s a film about coming-to-oneself.
  29. Anora
    Baker’s subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce makes "Pretty Woman" look like a Disney movie.
  30. The Shrouds
    As The Shrouds goes on, it becomes more earnest and more nutty. I think Cronenberg thinks he’s making movies that audiences will experience as feature-length versions of his own dreams. Here’s the difference: When you’re in a dream, you believe what’s happening.
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