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. Starless Dreams
    With the conceptual rigor and emotional directness associated with the best of Iranian cinema, Oskouei simply listens to the stories of those who have never been listened to before. Their shattering testimony, elegantly harmonized in a chorus of stolen childhood, has universal appeal.
  2. Sunless Shadows
    It quietly but pointedly interrogates the notion of victimhood, while tacitly letting a damning essay on Iranian gender politics and hierarchies emerge through the words of his subjects.
  3. Beyond Utopia
    What we’ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. Beyond Utopia looks behind the wall and shines a light.
  4. Vermiglio
    The remarkable, raw-boned and ravishing Vermiglio takes place in the past but operates like a future family secret playing out in the present tense.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Iron Giant
    Despite its p.c., humanistic overtones, the film manages to integrate the humor and action of a kid’s adventure tale and the message of a political allegory without beingheavy-handed.
  6. Beanpole
    Beanpole is incredibly bleak, but crafted with such care that it’s also deeply compelling. Events so disturbing that you long to look away are presented in images so striking that you cannot.
  7. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Neville’s fantastic archival footage reveals the man through his work — or at least, it reveals his philosophies, if not the childhood memories that gave Rogers the ability to understand a four-year-old’s brain, almost as if he still carried his in his cardigan pocket.
  8. Passing Strange
    This first-rate multicamera transcript of a terrific show should delight musical fans (and many who think they aren't) as a niche broadcast item.
  9. Meek's Cutoff
    Working on a richer and more intricate canvas than she's previously attempted, Kelly Reichardt has pulled off a rare thing with Meek's Cutoff -- a low-budget period Western with a bracing feminist spin.
  10. The Long Day Closes
    Strength of Davies’ vision is the crux, and it holds the line to the final, confident fadeout.
  11. Fruitvale Station
    Even if every word of Coogler’s account of the last day in Grant’s life held up under close scrutiny, the film would still ring false in its relentlessly positive portrayal of its subject.
  12. I'm Still Here
    Salles’ deeply invested filmmaking is remarkable in its grace and naturalism.
  13. A Useful Ghost
    A Useful Ghost is an entertaining and moving – if also somewhat sprawling – fable of love and loss that isn’t quite like anything you’ve seen before.
  14. Rachel Getting Married
    Brimming with energy, elan and the unpredictability of his "Something Wild," Jonathan Demme's triumphant Rachel Getting Married may just lay the wedding film to rest, being such a hard act to follow.
  15. The Last Days
    A hard-hitting, well-organized documentary grounded in the stories of five Hungarian Jews who lived through the Holocaust.
  16. Watchers of the Sky
    An impressive and artful cinematic thesis of palpable substance.
  17. Paragraph 175
    The definitive screen chronicle to date of homosexual persecution under the Third Reich.
  18. Long Night's Journey Into Day
    Demonstrates the impossibility of separating the private from the public dimensions of politics, and the pain involved in trying to account for behavior that cannot withstand rational examination.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Rain
    Richard Chamberlain is highly effective as a young lawyer caught up in a case of an aborigine murdered by some others in town.
  20. The Circle
    Both fascinates and horrifies with its bold assertions about what it means to be a woman under a cruel, institutionalized patriarchy.
  21. Since Otar Left
    The film is traditionally and effectively made; it also is superbly acted.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Atlantic City
    Film is blessed with a spare, intriguing script by Yank John Guare, which always skirts impending cliches and predictability by finding unusual facets in his characters and their actions.
  23. The Eternal Memory
    This insistent parallel between individual and national consciousness never culminates in quite the rhetorical kicker Alberdi seems to be seeking, but there’s power in it just the same: a reminder of how our best efforts to keep and curate memories — for ourselves and others — can be thwarted by time.
  24. The Handmaiden
    It’s sybaritic, cruel and luridly mesmerizing.
  25. Served Like a Girl
    Brassily shot, and assembled with no shortage of energy and humor, Served Like a Girl provides a close, emotionally vivid look at the often ignored female experience of the military.
  26. EO
    EO is a damning polemic on our relationship to other intelligent species — as free labor, food and companions — as seen through the dewy, wide eyes of a donkey whom we come to adore.
  27. Slumdog Millionaire
    Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, Slumdog Millionaire is a blast.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Juliet of the Spirits
    Fellini has put together an imperial-sized fantasy of a physical opulence to make the old Vincente Minnelli Metro musicals look like army training films.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Is King
    Black Is King excels as a celebration of Blackness in its many forms: Black women, Black men, Black children, Black motherhood, Black fatherhood, Black pasts, Black presents, and Black futures.
  30. The Work
    When the participants convulse and cry, the film’s empathetic connection is so direct and so strong, audiences may be driven to weep as well.
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