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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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Serpico
    Pacino dominates the entire film. His inner personal torment is vividly detailed. (Review of Original Release)
  2. Up in the Air
    The timing in the Clooney-Farmiga scenes is like splendid tennis, with each player surprising the other with shots but keeping the rally going to breathtaking duration.
  3. Milk
    Brolin's work is superlatively expressive of the inchoate impulses roiling inside his sorry character. But good as most of the cast is, the show belongs squarely to Penn.
  4. Roll Red Roll
    The phenomenon of rape culture has emerged, more than anywhere, from the frat house (and from spring break, that ritualized bacchanal for kids who aren’t necessarily in frats), and it has been growing there — metastasizing — for decades. Roll Red Roll captures, with potent power, how the “If it feels good, wreck it” ethos of the beer-pong drink-till-you-submit forced “hookup” is finding more and more of a home among high schoolers.
  5. I Was a Simple Man
    All Yogi’s actors work in subtle, effective deference to his natural command of atmosphere and place: This is a film where Hawaiian rainfall has as prominent and evocative a voice as any human presence, and where the growth of a tree marks time as clearly as the deepening crevices in a character’s face.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lilya 4-Ever
    Hard-hitting, dark and tragic story that rarely lets up.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From Russia with Love
    From Russia with Love is a preposterous, skillful slab of hardhitting, sexy hokum. After a slowish start, it is directed by Terence Young at zingy pace.
  8. Who We Are Now
    Newton has made a beautiful little film about sacrifice and redemption, and he earns it one tiny brushstroke at a time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    Film carries all the explosive trappings that make for a hit in its intended market and is glossed with a melodramatic narrative to take full advantage of its theme.
  10. Cutie and the Boxer
    Zachary Heinzerling's five-years-in-the-making portrait of Brooklyn-based artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara is a warts-and-all portrait of love, sacrifice and the creative spirit.
  11. U2 3D
    The title says it all. Compact and exuberant, U2 3D may be no more than a pint-sized concert film with a lustrous surface, but the lensing is so vibrant and the music so buoyant, even nonfans may find their eyes popping and their heads bobbing.
  12. One Night in Miami
    King turns One Night in Miami into a real movie, staging it with a flowing visual confidence and vibrant emotional flair that gives it a fly-on-the-wall authenticity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    Good Samuel Fuller programmer about a prostie trying the straight route, The Naked Kiss is primarily a vehicle for Constance Towers. Hooker angles and sex perversion plot windup are handled with care, alternating with handicapped children 'good works' theme.
  14. Who Will Write Our History
    A vital and sobering documentary directed by Roberta Grossman, always knew that they were drafting the record of an existence whose memory — were it not for them — would be wiped away.
  15. The Reason I Jump
    Nimbly switching between different lenses and sonic streams, Rothwell invites viewers inside the psychological isolation and overwhelming sensory awareness felt by people at various points on the spectrum, as well as cathartic breakthroughs in expression and connection with others.
  16. Belle
    In a sense, movies aren’t so different from the virtual worlds a platform like U offers, and this one promises a special kind of escapism while going out of its way to keep it real.
  17. Babe
    The achievement here is a thoroughly compelling story in which the underlying technological razzle-dazzle never intrudes.
  18. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Originally conceived as one film, the two-parter that has finally emerged can now be seen as a truly epic work.
  19. Vera Drake
    Mike Leigh is at the peak of his powers with Vera Drake, a compassionate, morally complex drama that stands easily alongside his best work, "Secrets & Lies" and "Topsy-Turvy."
  20. Private Life
    It’s witty and moving but a touch repetitive, and it goes on for too long. That said, Jenkins has made the most intimate comedy imaginable about the fertility blues. Private Life hits some delicate nerves, and heals a few of them too.
  21. Moonage Daydream
    Watching Moonage Daydream, there are essential facts you won’t hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you’ll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was.
  22. Meeting with Pol Pot
    The result is a hauntingly timeless depiction of power and its mechanisms, filtered down to an intimate tale of journalistic integrity.
  23. BlacKkKlansman
    Lee’s latest is as much a compelling black empowerment story as it is an electrifying commentary on the problems of African-American representation across more than a century of cinema.
  24. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    It’s a delight to find these two, plus their penguin nemesis, back on the big screen.
  25. Janet Planet
    It’s striking proof of an original sensibility.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny Guitar (re-release)
    Love, hate and violence, with little sympathy for the characters, is stirred up during the overlong film.
  27. Echo
    Once a sense of rhythm is grasped, things fall into place, and audiences will exit the cinema debating their favorite scenes, recalling a wealth of graceful, humane interactions.
  28. The Novelist's Film
    Ultimately, The Novelist’s Film defends the idea of drift and hiatus, of time spent idling to hear your own thoughts, in their own sweet time.
  29. Lake of Fire
    An extraordinary docu achievement. Handsomely filmed on silvery 35mm and high-definition by Kaye himself, the shrewdly edited picture balances a full spectrum of views from all sides of the abortion debate without obviously taking a position itself.
  30. Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds
    A truly spectacular psychedelic excursion in the vein of head-trip classics “The Fantastic Planet” and “The Yellow Submarine.”
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