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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    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Gigi
    It has all the ingredients. It's a naughty but nice romp of the hyper-romantic naughty 90s of Paris-in-the-spring, in the Bois, in Maxim's, and in the boudoir. How can it miss?
  2. Transit
    A refugee portrait that piles contrivance upon contrivance to somehow land at a place of piercing emotional acuity.
  3. Venus
    Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout.
  4. Dear Comrades!
    Meticulous and majestic, epic in scope and tattoo-needle intimate in effect, this scrupulous recreation of the lead-up to and aftermath of the Novocherkassk massacre six decades ago is excoriating proof that not all filmmakers are made sloppy or slipshod by anger. Some are made ever more righteously, icily precise.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shoeshine
    With the shoeshine boys of Rome’s streets as background, this film is a preachment on Italian juvenile delinquency. Producers used real shoeshine boys and the absence of experienced actors works out okay. Scenes in Rome’s jail emphasize the need for drastic reforms there.
  6. The Love Witch
    The fact that the films that serve as her models often sported the same flaws doesn’t excuse this fairly poker-faced spoof’s sometimes borderline-torpid pace and disappointing fade-out.
  7. Hundreds of Beavers
    On paper, it would hardly be expected to remain funny for eight minutes, let alone 108. But this ingeniously home-made lark never runs out of steam.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diner
    Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser and Timothy Daly are terrific as the friends as are Ellen Barkin and Kathryn Dowling as the two females involved with different group members.
  9. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    Mixing archival photos and TV footage with straightforward to-the-camera remembrances, Greenfield-Sanders’ deft structural approach isn’t as daring as those found in Morrison’s own work.
  10. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    For most fans, this show isn’t so much about watching her career flash before their eyes — although there’s that — but their own roller-coaster lives. It’s sort of Broadway, kind of psychotherapy/church, and all too well-executed.
  11. Peter Hujar's Day
    In its tiny-scaled staged-documentary way, Peter Hujar’s Day is exquisitely done and arresting to watch.
  12. The Killing of Two Lovers
    Crawford’s dominating performance makes David no hick but a sensitive and accommodating man a bit intimidated by his admittedly “much smarter” wife, flailing in his efforts to hold together a family unit he can’t go on without.
  13. Night of the Kings
    With this project, in which magical realism lends everything a mystical dimension, Lacôte confidently delivers on the promise of his 2014 Cannes-selected “Run.”
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billy Liar (re-release)
    An imaginative, fascinating film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3 Women
    Absorbing moody and often compelling story.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flirting with Disaster
    Although it eventually throws more balls in the air than it can easily juggle, Flirting with Disaster is, most of the time, a diabolically clever satire that has its way with any number of contemporary shiboleths.
  17. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Takes a beautifully lensed look at the work of Scottish "landscape sculptor" Andy Goldsworthy, whose unique creations -- composed of icicles, leaves, sticks, rocks, etc. -- are often as not simply swept away by the next tide or wind gust.
  18. These Birds Walk
    Instead of explaining the system through conventional narration, which would have been extremely helpful, the filmmakers immerse auds in the world they found, capturing its subjects’ behavior with startling candor.
  19. The Second Mother
    The script is executed with enough naturalism to ward off complaints of contrivance — all the way up to a tidy, but quite satisfying, denouement.
  20. Window Horses
    Director-writer-animator Ann Marie Fleming creates an entertaining, educational, and poignant tale about identify and imagination that is filled with stories and poetry.
  21. Born and Bred
    Flirting with predictable tragedy but displaying an immense sense of empathy toward its central character, pic is finally an emotionally stunning journey of a father's return to his senses after a horrible accident.
  22. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
    Chuck Smith’s documentary is at once accessible and formally daring, echoing its subject’s style while simultaneously celebrating her radical achievements. It’s an enlightening nonfiction portrait of a feminist pioneer that, in this #MeToo era, should strike a timely chord.
  23. Broken Voices
    Provazník’s focus is not on trauma, and it’s fitting that such a sensitive, understated treatment of real-world abuse should end on a poignant note of solidarity.
  24. Three Times
    Less accessible than recent "Cafe Lumiere," picture will appeal strongly to fans.
  25. Anselm
    More a portrait of Kiefer’s work than a standard biographical study of Kiefer himself, “Anselm” is a very particular study of a singular man’s soul, told through images of his oeuvre, augmented by sensational use of archive rendered in 3D.
  26. Hit Man
    Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.
  27. Ghostlight
    Any critic sitting through their show probably wouldn’t have much patience for all the characters’ personal catharses, but seen from the right distance, as beautifully told as this, the experience amounts to something special.
  28. Afire
    It’s the film’s great, disorienting structural risks, its humoring of human untidiness and confusion, that make it so subtly thrilling and moving.
  29. Ajami
    Time shifts may overcomplicate the narrative for some, but the pay-off packs a major punch.
  30. Wrestle
    Suspenseful as the actual matches are, there’s more tension in worrying just how intact these near-adults will make it to the even bigger stakes of post-high-school life, or whether they’ll be hobbled before they even leave the gate.
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