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. 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.
  2. Our Time Machine
    Sun and Chiang strike a tricky balance between a high-stakes making-of documentary and an intimate, observational family portrait, but Maleonn is such a thoughtful, sensitive, brilliant subject that the film is compelling no matter where on the creative spectrum they find him.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back
    Pennebaker has fashioned a relentlessly honest, brilliantly edited documentary permeated with the troubador-poet's music.
  4. 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.
  5. The Disciple
    Tamhane patiently constructs his characters out of small details, relying on his audience to pick up on small changes and muted shifts of tone that signal the passage of time and Sharad’s interior journey.
  6. Gunda
    Its radiantly beautiful imagery and gently immersive storytelling aren’t in service of a single browbeating message, but a broader, holistic view of where we and the animals we rear, use and consume fit into a single circle of life.
  7. 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.”
  8. Apples
    What might have been the latest oddity of the Greek Weird Wave — or else a surreal collection of live-action “The Far Side” cartoons — instead feels soulfully relevant as reality aligns with the speculative world Nikou imagined.
  9. Shadow in the Cloud
    Hardly a minute of the movie registers as “realistic,” but that hardly matters, since Liang so fully commits to its over-the-top sensibility that you’ll be clutching the armrest and grinning with glee for most of the ride.
  10. Beans
    Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.
  11. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    Lovers Rock is nothing more (or less) than a snapshot of an era, a moment, a series of lives. Yet it lingers like a song you don’t want to get out of your head.
  12. Small Axe: Mangrove
    This may be “television” (in the sense that Amazon will release the films via streaming), but McQueen approaches it with all the seriousness of cinema.
  13. Small Axe: Education
    The brilliance of this particular episode is how it allows us to see ourselves in Kingsley and to consider the many unseen forces at play in our own socialization. For Black audiences, it confirms many of those invisible barriers. For white ones, it may lead them to question whether the myth of their “success” owes in part to keeping others back.
  14. The Prom
    The movie has a universalist spirit that’s wired into its very form. It turns doing the right thing into a fizzy and elating high-camp showbiz high.
  15. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
    What’s most moving about Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is that Sacks, whose extreme love of existence was there in every sentence he wrote, could embrace death because it would be the most out-there adventure of his life. What he saw is that we were all, in our ways, afflicted and all unique. And therefore all extraordinary.
    • 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.
  17. White Noise
    White Noise is a deadly serious movie, but it is also, in a certain way, a funny one, because it captures the comedy of how much trouble even the influencers of hate now have squaring their lives with their belief systems
  18. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Borat has lost none of his bite, treading that same fine line between sophomoric humor and pointed political satire.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Man with the Golden Arm
    Clinical in its probing of the agonies, this is a gripping, fascinating film, expertly produced and directed and performed with marked conviction by Frank Sinatra as the drug slave.
  20. Malcolm & Marie
    Levinson gives his stars roughly equal time, carefully modulating the sense of balance throughout. His direction seldom seems showy, and yet, we sense the intention behind each cut as power and control shifts throughout the movie.
  21. 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.
  22. Land
    Bless Wright for paring Land down to a beautiful haiku, and for delivering a performance that’s ambiguous and understated in all the right ways.
  23. The Color Purple
    Barrino’s soul-felt R&B sensibility lends itself to the role, and the patience it took to reach this point mirrors Celie’s long path to finding herself. Barrino may have embodied the character on Broadway 15 years earlier, but the moment is now right, and everyone else in the terrific ensemble seems to have fallen into place around that choice.
  24. I Blame Society
    Aside from all its other virtues, this film is a truly inspiring example of committing to the bit.
  25. Stray
    Throughout the mostly wordless “Stray,” we wonder with compassion and considerable self-critique whom the society uplifts and supports vs. whom it chooses to disregard and deem invisible.
  26. Nightmare Alley
    A gorgeous, fantastically sinister moral fable about the cruel predictability of human nature and the way entire systems — from carnies and con men to shrinks and Sunday preachers — are engineered to exploit it.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Crimes of the Heart
    Thoughtfully cast, superbly acted and masterfully written and directed, Crimes of the Heart is a winner.
  28. The Road to Mandalay
    Midi Z has now delivered a tightly edited and emotionally rewarding drama that places him in the top rank of Asian social realists.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Captain Blood
    Captain Blood, from the Rafael Sabatini novel, is a big picture. It's a spectacle which will establish both Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Director Michael Curtiz hasn't spared the horses. It's a lavish, swashbuckling saga of the Spanish main.
  30. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.
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