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. A Separation
    Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    Indemnity is rapidly moving and consistently well developed. It is a story replete with suspense, for which credit must go in a large measure to Billy Wilder’s direction.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunrise
    Sunrise is a distinguished contribution to the screen, made in this country, but produced after the best manner of the German school. In its artistry, dramatic power and graphic suggestion it goes a long way toward realizing the promise of this foreign director in his former works, notably Faust.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    La Dolce Vita
    The performances are uniformly excellent. Mastroianni is perfect in the key role of the basically good and honest boy who succumbs to the sweet life. Ekberg is a revelation as the visiting star, while Furneaux almost runs off with the picture as the reporter's instinctive, possessive mistress. (Review of original release)
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Schindler's List
    Evinces an artistic rigor and unsentimental intelligence unlike anything the world's most successful filmmaker has demonstrated before.
  6. WALL-E
    Walks a fine line between the rarefied and the immediately accessible as it explores new territory for animation, yet remains sufficiently crowd-pleasing.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    His Girl Friday
    Casting is excellent, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the top roles.
  8. Carol
    Even high expectations don’t quite prepare you for the startling impact of Carol, an exquisitely drawn, deeply felt love story that teases out every shadow and nuance of its characters’ inner lives with supreme intelligence, breathtaking poise and filmmaking craft of the most sophisticated yet accessible order.
  9. Before Midnight
    Honoring all that was memorable about its forebears while taking the story to new depths of catharsis, Before Midnight stands as a unique and uniquely satisfying entry in what has shaped up to be an outstanding screen trilogy
  10. Amazing Grace
    The effect is ecstatic; she sounds like the holiest of trumpets, with every note piercingly bright yet as soft as velvet. Listening to Franklin, you feel like you could ride that voice into the heavens. She’s not just a singer, she’s a human chariot.
  11. Dunkirk
    This is what audiences want from a Nolan movie, of course, as a master of the fantastic leaves his mark on historical events for the first time.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an entertaining and emotionally involving western. Yet, while it is an enjoyable film it falls distinctly shy of its innate story potential.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Searchers
    The box office appeal of John Wayne combined with the imprint of John Ford makes The Searchers a contender for the big money stakes. It's a western in the grand scale - handsomely mounted and in the tradition of Shane.
  14. 45 Years
    Above all, 45 Years is a drama of quiet restraint.
  15. Taxi Driver
    It’s a powerful film, an excellent credit for Scorsese, and a terrific showcase for the versatility of star Robert De Niro.
  16. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    This is challenging but seductive art cinema that invites comparisons to such titans as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang and even Theo Angelopoulos, without feeling derivative of any.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Servant
    The Servant is for the most part strong dramatic fare, though the atmosphere and tension is not fully sustained to the end.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Manchurian Candidate
    One of the wildest fabrications any author has ever tried to palm off on a gullible public. But the fascinating thing is that, from uncertain premise to shattering conclusion, one does not question plausibility of the events being rooted in their own cinematic reality.
  19. Mr. Turner
    Leigh has made another highly personal study of art, commerce and the glacial progress of establishment tastes, built around a lead performance from longtime Leigh collaborator Timothy Spall that’s as majestic as one of Turner’s own swirling sunsets.
  20. The Irishman
    Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.
  21. Once Upon a Time in Harlem
    Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”
  22. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Brilliance of the action and effects are supplemented by a consistently superior and resourceful score by Tan Dun.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wild Child
    It progresses slowly but absorbingly. Truffaut underplays but exudes an interior tenderness and dedication. The boy is amazingly and intuitively well played by a tousled gypsy tyke named Jean-Pierre Cargol. Everybody connected with this unusual, off-beat film made in black-and-white rates kudos.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shadow of a Doubt
    Hitchcock deftly etches his small-town characters and homey surroundings. Wright provides a sincere and persuasive portrayal as the girl, while Cotten is excellent as the motivating factor in the proceedings.
  25. Inside Out
    In execution, Pixar’s 15th feature proves to be the greatest idea the toon studio has ever had: a stunningly original concept that will not only delight and entertain the company’s massive worldwide audience, but also promises to forever change the way people think about the way people think, delivering creative fireworks grounded by a wonderfully relatable family story.
  26. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    Loktev’s immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together.
  27. Sideways
    A beautifully observed, small-scale study of personal foibles, romantic uncertainty and two sides of the sadly predictable male animal.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Meet Me in St. Louis
    Meet Me in St. Louis is wholesome in story [from the book by Sally Benson], colorful both in background and its literal Technicolor, and as American as the World's Series.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sunset Boulevard
    Performances by the entire cast, and particularly William Holden and Gloria Swanson, are exceptionally fine.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Apartment
    Second half of the picture is loosely constructed and tends to lag as the rahers go through their paces in over-extending the major plot angle. Most of the time, it’s up to director Wilder to sustain a two-hour-plus film on treatment alone, a feat he manages to accomplish more often than not, and sometimes the results are amazing.
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