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. Love and Diane
    Tremendous emotional force and uncompromising honesty.
  2. About Schmidt
    Films exist for different reasons, and the indisputable raison d'etre for About Schmidt is to showcase Jack Nicholson giving a master class in the art of screen acting.
  3. Return to Homs
    What the film lacks in context it gains in visceral eyewitness value.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Asphalt Jungle
    Ironic realism is striven for and achieved in the writing, production and direction. An audience will quite easily pull for the crooks in their execution of the million-dollar jewelry theft around which the plot is built.
  5. Hero
    A dazzlingly lensed, highly stylized meditation on heroism.
  6. Butterfly Girl
    Although limited in scope, the feature documentary debut of TV news veteran Cary Bell benefits greatly from the infectious personality of its subject, Abigail Evans.
  7. Alcarràs
    The film balances a bristling political conscience against its tenderly observed domestic drama.
  8. Homebound
    It’s a film of great tragedy, but one so rooted in beating humanity that you can’t help but be left furious, in addition to teary-eyed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shane
    George Stevens handles the story and players in a manner that gives his production and direction a tremendous integrity. The casting is exceptionally good and the male stars have never been seen to better advantage.
  10. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.
  11. Simple as Water
    A graceful, touching sampler of dilemmas few viewers are likely to have experienced, even as they become ever-more-common reality for the less fortunate in many nations.
  12. The Taste of Things
    Food is the subject, the objective and the driving motor of this scantly plotted but utterly captivating love story.
  13. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    The concert film has never looked or sounded classier than Jonathan Demme's superbly crafted Neil Young: Heart of Gold.
  14. In Front of Your Face
    Hong’s film and his radiant star are not made for melancholy, and so instead they laugh — at the absurdity of hoping for some castle in the air when there’s so much life all around you, always, right in front of your face.
  15. Mudbound
    Though the sheer scope of the material overwhelms “Pariah” director Dee Rees at times, she finds shoots of optimism among the mire that couldn’t be more welcome at a moment when the country seems more divided than ever.
  16. Passing
    This radically intimate exploration of the desperately fraught concept of “passing” — being Black but pretending to be white — ought to be too ambitious for a first-time filmmaker, but Hall’s touch is unerring, deceptively delicate, quiet and immaculate, like that final fall of snow.
  17. My Life as a Zucchini
    On one hand, the cartoon is never afraid to be cute, but more importantly, it’s committed to being real.
  18. In the Same Breath
    The film’s form is glancing, exploratory, open to the moment. Yet Nanfu Wang captures things that other documentaries leave out, like the private emotions bred by policies of neglect. And her theme, in the end, is larger than you think. It’s that big governments failed to control the virus because their real investment was in controlling everything else.
  19. Atlantis
    As cinematographer and editor in addition to writer, director and producer, Vasyanovych is very much in charge of a vision whose aesthetics are rigidly controlled. The ironically titled “Atlantis” may well alienate some viewers with its austerity, but those willing to tough it out will feel rewarded.
  20. Honeyland
    The opening frames of Honeyland are so rustically sumptuous that you wonder, for a second, if they’ve somehow been art-directed.
  21. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Despite some imaginative packaging too often proves a drag in more than the sartorial sense. Taking Mitchell's sketchy book far too seriously, the movie grows leaden between its terrific songs.
  22. The Beasts
    The film’s big scene is upsetting and unforgettable, one of those movie moments you can’t unsee and which seems destined to haunt you for years to come.
  23. All of a Sudden
    The Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature, is the rarest type of film, not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be.
  24. Holy Motors
    Audaciously giving itself license to do whatever it wants, Leos Carax's narratively unhinged, beautifully shot and frequently hilarious Holy Motors coheres -- arguably, anyway -- into a vivid jaunt through the auteur's cinematic obsessions.
  25. God's Own Country
    Skipping some of the more predictable narrative obstacles we’ve come to expect from the coming-out drama, this sexy, thoughtful, hopeful film instead advances a pro-immigration subtext that couldn’t be more timely amid the closing borders of Brexit-era Britain.
  26. Kaili Blues
    Led by performances imbued with barely concealed sorrow, regret and longing to come to terms with that which has been lost, Kaili Blues affords a view of people, and a nation, caught in between a haunting yesterday and — as implied by the film’s conclusion — a hopeful tomorrow.
  27. Unforgiven
    Clint Eastwood has crafted a tense, hard-edged, superbly dramatic yarn that is also an exceedingly intelligent meditation on the West, its myths and its heroes.
  28. The Intruder
    A beautiful, complex work that challenges viewers to mentally sift interior and exterior journeys.
  29. Forbidden Lie$
    Broinowski commits the crucial error of hanging around way too long once all key questions have been answered.
  30. No Greater Love
    A fascinating and heartfelt documentary.
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