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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    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lady Eve
    Laugh entertainment of top proportions with its combo of slick situations, spontaneous dialog and a few slapstick falls tossed in for good measure.
  2. We Are Little Zombies
    No pulsating, psychedelic, pop-punk phantasmagoria ought to be as moving and smart as We Are Little Zombies. But Makoto Nagahisa’s explosively ingenious and energetic debut (imagine it as the spiritual offspring of Richard Lester and a Harajuku Girl) holds the high score for visual and narrative invention, as well as boasting [insert gigantic-beating-heart GIF] and braaaains, too.
  3. The Wolf House
    It’s an endless metamorphosis that unfolds like some kind of real-time art installation, and in all honesty, it can be a touch overwhelming to take in at times — which is why the digital release of The Wolf House is a blessing in disguise, as audiences can rewind to fully appreciate this awe-inspiring film’s layers of details.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Thieves Like Us
    Thieves Like Us proves that when Robert Altman has a solid story and script, he can make an exceptional film, one mostly devoid of clutter, auterist mannerism, and other cinema chic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jubilee
    Derek Jarman's Jubilee is one of the most original, bold, and exciting features to have come out of Britain in the 1970s.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    42nd Street
    Everything about the production rings true. It's as authentic to the initiate as the novitiate.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wild Strawberries
    Pic sometimes talks too much in philosophical asides, but it remains a searching pictorial analysis of a man’s life. Expert directorial touches and notations of director Ingmar Bergman, and the dignified miming of oldtime director Sjostrom, plus other fine thespic additions, make this an offbeater. It’s a personal and profound work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Front Page
    A very entertaining picture for anyone anywhere. [25 Mar 1931, p.17]
    • Variety
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Nun's Story
    Fred Zinnemann's production is a soaring and luminous film. Audrey Hepburn has her most demanding film role, and she gives her finest performance. Despite the seriousness of the underlying theme, The Nun's Story [from the book by Kathryn C. Hulme] has the elements of absorbing drama, pathos, humor, and a gallery of memorable scenes and characters.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Patch of Blue
    Film has very good scripting plus excellent direction and performances, including an exceptional screen debut by Elizabeth Hartman as the gal.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The 39 Steps
    Yes, they can make pictures in England. This one proves it. International spy stories are most always good, and this is one of the best. [19 Jun 1935, p.21]
    • Variety
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tortilla Flat
    A sincere, tender, beguiling and at times exalting picture. It is sympathetically and adroitly adapted, handsomely produced, expertly directed and eloquently acted.
  13. Shanghai Triad
    Triad oozes a confidence that carries the viewer almost without pause to its shocking climax and ironic close.
  14. Sweat
    With her eerily flawless image and pathological narcissism, it would be all too easy to make Sylwia a monstrous figure of fun — yet the more circumstances turn against her, the more nuance and moral curiosity von Horn and Koleśnik find beneath her hyper-contoured surface.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Richard III
    At all times Shakespeare’s poetry, impeccably spoken by this outstanding cast, heightens the dramatic atmosphere. The production, and notably Roger Furse’s decor, is consistently spectacular. The climactic battle sequences rival the pageantry of Henry V.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
    Top-flight cinematic entertainment.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Roberta
    Roberta is musical picture-making at its best - fast, smart, good looking and tuneful.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    Orson Welles has reworked the docu material of Francois Reichenbach on noted art forger Elmyr De Houry, made for TV about 1968, into an intriguing, enjoyable look at illusion in general and his own, Clifford Irving’s and De Houry’s dealing with it in particular.
  19. All In: The Fight for Democracy
    A powerfully timely and absorbing documentary.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    All through the picture there's charm, romance, gaiety and eclat.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. Giraffe
    It’s a film of big themes on an intimate scale that lovingly acknowledges the unimaginable wealth of stories inside everyone we encounter, while also looking at how we negotiate the place of memory in our lives.
  24. A Thousand Cuts
    Ressa’s seemingly boundless energy, good humor and intelligence make her basically a power plant for the manufacture of inspiration in embattled times.
  25. Robin's Wish
    A documentary that’s honest and scary, wrenching and moving.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sunrise at Campobello
    In the journey from stage to screen this chapter from the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses none of its poignant and inspirational qualities, none of its humor and pathos.
  28. Apocalypse '45
    The hell we see here isn’t heightened; it’s graphic and terrifying. Yet the greatest terror may be that it was necessary. Apocalypse ’45 is a haunting document of men who fought their way through hell to save all of us.
  29. Pieces of a Woman
    Mundruczó and Wéber gave her the pieces from which to assemble this character, but only Kirby could have taken that puzzle and turned it into such an astonishing portrait.
  30. 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.
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