Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Best Years of Our Lives
    One of the best pictures of our lives.
  2. Band of Outsiders
    After shooting his most expensive film, Godard returned to the streets of Paris for the rough-hewn Band of Outsiders, which is 95 minutes of brilliant visual jazz. [31 Mar 2003, p.42]
    • Variety
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stagecoach
    Sweeping and powerful drama of the American frontier, Stagecoach displays potentialities that can easily drive it through as one of the surprise big grossers of the year. Without strong marquee names, picture nevertheless presents wide range of exploitation to attract, and will carry far through word-of-mouth after it gets rolling.
  4. Our Body
    Simon’s nonjudgmental, empathetic curiosity is the film’s great strength. But it’s also shocking that still now, in 2023, it can be such a revelation, as women, to see “Our Body” portrayed without sexualization and without stigmatization — without, in a word, shame.
  5. The Burial Of Kojo
    Though the film deals in tragedy, its sheer cinematic exuberance is immensely hopeful. As too, is the story of how one of the most exciting directorial debuts in recent memory was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing and planted in a few theaters before blossoming on Netflix.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Here is an excellent film whose basic story could have been told within normal feature limits, but which, instead, is extended close to three hours. Longer or shorter, this panorama of British army life is depicted with a technical skill and artistry that marks it as one of the really fine pix to come out of a British studio.
  7. TÁR
    The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power.
  8. Sherpa
    This film from experienced Aussie documaker Jennifer Peedom packs an emotional punch to match its awe-inspiring imagery.
  9. There Will Be Blood
    Boldly and magnificently strange, There Will Be Blood marks a significant departure in the work of Paul Thomas Anderson.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tristana (re-release)
    Those seeking the Bunuel touches of black humor, digs at Church and Establishment, irreverence and criticism, and an overall condemnation of Spanish mores and hypocrisy, will find a modicum of scenes here to titillate their palates. Yet Bunuel, despite occasional digs, has remained more or less respectful.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Last Picture Show
    Notre Dame professor Edward Fischer has said that the best films, like the best books, tell how it is to be human under certain circumstances. Larry McMurtry did a beautiful job of this in his small novel (which he transferred to the screen), The Last Picture Show.
  12. Hard to Be a God
    In essence it’s an historical artifact created in a time capsule: impressive in its way, yet its retardataire mannerisms require more distance before judgment can be passed on whether it’s a major work engaged in earlier forms, or an intriguing footnote trapped in a spent modality.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Do the Right Thing
    Combines a forceful statement on race relations with solid entertainment values.
  14. Sita Sings the Blues
    Paley sustains a consistently funny, sometimes even self-deprecatory comic tone.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Decline of Western Civilization
    A bracing, stimulating and technically superb close-up look at the LA punk scene, pic is pitched at a perfect distance to allow for simultaneous engagement in the music and spectacle, and for rueful contemplation of what it all might mean.
  16. Werckmeister Harmonies
    A stunning feature -- another hypnotic meditation on popular demagogy and mental manipulation.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    This one can't miss and the reasons are three - Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin's 11 songs and sufficient comedy between numbers to hold the film together.
  18. Crumb
    A frank, intimate look at a phenomenal popular artist and his extraordinarily dysfunctional family, Crumb is an excellent countercultural documentary.
  19. No Bears
    If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, No Bears is where he slams on the brakes.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    8½
    With 8 1/2 Federico Fellini tops even his trendsetting La Dolce Vita in artistry. Here is the author-director picture par excellence, an exciting, stimulating, monumental creation.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yojimbo
    Though this lacks the epic stature of Seven Samurai, Kurosawa here again shows his mastery of the medium.
  22. Spotlight
    Like so many films consumed with the minutiae of daily journalism, Spotlight is a magnificently nerdy process movie — a tour de force of filing-cabinet cinema, made with absolute assurance that we’ll be held by scene after scene of people talking, taking notes, following tips, hounding sources, poring over records, filling out spreadsheets, and having one door after another slammed in their faces.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Band Wagon
    Astaire, as the film star, shows his ability with a song and dance character.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ikiru
    Kurosawa performs a tour-de-force in keeping a dramatic thread throughout and avoiding the mawkish. It is technically excellent with a telling Occidental-type musical score.
  25. Sunday's Illness
    With breathtaking elegance and stunning assurance, Ramón Salazar takes a melodramatic chestnut and makes it flower with unexpected emotion in Sunday’s Illness.
  26. One More Time with Feeling
    If it’s sometimes a rambling, indulgent experience, it’s also a beautiful one.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Wizard of Oz
    It’s a mixture of childish fantasy and adult satire and humor of a kind that never seems to grow old.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    It is Sam Peckinpah’s direction, however, that gives the film greatest artistry. He gives N. B. Stone Jr.’s script a measure beyond its adequacy, instilling bright moments of sharp humor and an overall significant empathetic flavor.
  29. Memoria
    In Memoria, the disruptive sounds Jessica hears are a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed.
  30. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Most compelling in its attempts to re-create the experience of paralysis onscreen, gorgeously lensed pic morphs into a dreamlike collage of memories and fantasies, distancing the viewer somewhat from Bauby's consciousness even as it seeks to take one deeper.
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