Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. The Ground Beneath My Feet
    Without proselytizing, and without distracting from the main thrust of her gripping, intelligent psychodrama, Kreutzer and her predominately female team have created a story both knottily specific and usefully general in its understanding that for many women, an ultimately untenable level of watchful self-control is the price of ambition.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Horse Feathers
    The madcap Marxes, in one of their maddest screen frolics. The premise of Groucho Marx as the college prexy and his three aides and abettors putting Huxley College on the grid-iron map promises much and delivers more.
  3. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
    Hassona is both fashionable and immensely talented (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the more we see of her over the movie’s 110 minutes, the more devastating it becomes that we will never meet her, or never truly get to know her.
  4. Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC
    In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.
  5. Between the Temples
    There’s a sweetness here to Silver’s typically jaundiced humor, an affectionately gilded frame around his broken-off character portraiture, that feels both new and entirely natural to his work.
  6. The Wind Rises
    Miyazaki is at the peak of his visual craftsmanship here, alternating lush, boldly colored rural vistas with epic, crowded urban canvases, soaring aerial perspectives and test flights both majestic and ill-fated.
  7. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    The film's style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season's defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it's a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one.
  8. Limbo
    Limbo sincerely and intelligently finds its own way.
  9. In the Loop
    Intelligent political satire this expertly acted is nothing to sneeze at.
  10. Bus 174
    A tense documentary with multiple layers of meaning.
  11. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    It’s “The Bachelorette” wed to “The Iceman Cometh”: the setup is staged, but the tears are real.
  12. Soul
    It all blends together beautifully, a marriage of Pixar’s square, safe, feel-good sensibility with what could be described as the “real world” — and one that, much as “Inside Out” anthropomorphized the mind, will leave audiences young and old imagining their own souls as glowing idiosyncratic cartoon characters.
  13. Terrestrial Verses
    This is punchy first-person filmmaking, from the point of view of the last person you want to be.
  14. Amores Perros
    He (Gonzalez Inarritu) handles a complex plot with clarity and precision while keeping audience members on the edge of their seats.
  15. Osama
    Apart from its historical interest, this tragic tale of religious extremism and misogyny is a very good film able to catch audiences up emotionally.
  16. The Salt of the Earth
    Wim Wenders’ mastery of the documentary form is again on display in The Salt of the Earth.
  17. Glory
    The film quietly builds to a feeling of inexorable disaster, guided by terrific performances as well as spot-on editing.
  18. American Doctor
    It is a necessary watch because it dares its audience not to look away, forcing the question not only of whose story is told, but whose deaths matter and make headlines.
  19. Rat Film
    Artfully assembled and often entertaining, the diverse whole nonetheless doesn’t quite gel, with the film finally coming off as somewhat pretentious and heavy-handed.
  20. The Librarians
    Filmmaker Kim A. Snyder’s illuminating documentary — premiering at the Sundance Film Festival — offers a rattling look at coordinated efforts to ban books. More importantly, it introduces viewers to the everyday and increasingly vital heroes pushing back: the librarians who sound the alarm to both legislative and grassroots attempts to pull books from school and public libraries.
  21. The Perfect Neighbor
    The tragedy here doesn’t stop with a white woman shooting her Black neighbor, but the underlying belief that she felt she could and still get away it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
    A very special kind of picture, combining photographic ingenuity, imaginative story telling and fiscal daring.
  23. 20 Days in Mariupol
    Structured by onscreen markers of the days passed, this nonfiction feature may not have a simple narrative arc, but the director’s unpretentious first-person narration and the intensity of the war-crimes evidence compiled make it riveting nonetheless.
  24. Turning Red
    Irresistibly cute and thoroughly unashamed of its own silliness, Turning Red may be second-tier Pixar, but the emotions run every bit as deep as in the studio’s best.
  25. Better Days
    In Derek Kwok Cheung Tsang’s gripping, superbly performed melodrama — a deeply moving if occasionally overwrought exposé of bullying in the acutely competitive academic pressure cooker of a Chinese high school — it’s hard to imagine she can be nostalgic for her own school days.
  26. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    Lingui may return its maker to a familiar milieu, but it’s an exciting departure in other respects. This is Haroun’s first film focused expressly on women: Perhaps it’s a coincidence that it’s less stentorian in its melodrama than some of his previous work, though given the shift, it feels apt that the film listens as much as it speaks. Its surprises extend to its choices of emphasis and protagonist.
  27. Office
    This boardroom tuner charmingly mines humor, romance and no shortage of eccentric lyrics from the world of spreadsheets and stock portfolios, but its real achievement is a formal and conceptual one, conjuring a tongue-in-cheek vision of modern capitalism in splendidly Brechtian terms (and in widescreen 3D, to boot).
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Being There
    Being There is a highly unusual and an unusually fine film. A faithful but nonetheless imaginative adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's quirky comic novel, pic marks a significant achievement for director Hal Ashby and represents Peter Sellers' most smashing work since the mid-1960s.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Who Framed Roger Rabbit
    An unparalleled technical achievement... Yet the story amounts to little more than inspired silliness about the filmmaking biz where cartoon characters face off against cartoonish humans.
  30. Chop Shop
    Ultimately, the pic will be noted and remembered not for any inherent drama or analysis but for its simply having so thoroughly documented a strange place most people have never seen and never knew existed.
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