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. Raw
    Raw is a deliciously fevered stew of nightmare fuel that hangs together with a breezily confident sense of superior craft.
  2. Chicken People
    An illuminating and amusingly entertaining look at the thriving subculture of competitive poultry breeders.
  3. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    The film is a master class in comic timing, employing pacing and repetition with the skill of a practiced concert pianist.
  4. Test Pattern
    Test Pattern — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages just outside the door.
  5. R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is a slow-motion snapshot of a deeply riven community flying apart in all directions, as though some bomb, detonated years or perhaps even centuries ago, has never stopped exploding.
  6. Inherent Vice
    Anderson’s seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp that has less in common with “The Big Lebowski” than with the strain of fatalistic, ’70s-era California noirs (“Chinatown,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Night Moves”) in which the question of “whodunit?” inevitably leads to an existential vanishing point.
  7. Under the Sun
    While at about the two-thirds mark, Under the Sun begins to seem a bit attenuated, its obvious (if only implied) points already made, the ending is a stunner.
  8. Three Identical Strangers
    A gripping, stranger-than-fiction account of a real-world medical conspiracy, the film begins as a human-interest story and builds to an impressive work of investigative journalism into how and why they were placed with the families who raised them.
  9. Wrinkles
    Although nothing here quite matches the moving, life-in-five-minutes montage in Pixar’s “Up,” one swooping flashback sequence comes very close.
  10. Little Trouble Girls
    This is a striking statement of intent from its Slovenian writer-director — there’s an airy delicacy here that invites comparisons to early Céline Sciamma, but with its own raw, restless edge.
  11. Midnight Family
    Portraits of institutional dysfunction don’t come much more urgent, and quietly bleak, than this.
  12. Tina
    I went into Tina feeling like I knew this story in my bones, but the film kept opening my eyes — to new insights, new tremors of empathy, and a new appreciation for what a towering artist Tina Turner is.
  13. American Fiction
    The helmer trusts his audience to bring themselves to the material. Ultimately, that’s what makes reading “American Fiction” so rewarding.
  14. Il Divo
    An intensely political film so wildly inventive and witty that it will become a touchstone for years to come, Il Divo is a masterpiece for maverick helmer-scribe Paolo Sorrentino.
  15. Leviathan
    Picture's title comes from the sea creature mentioned in the book of Job, which is briefly quoted at the film's opening. Cast list cheekily includes not only the names of the men aboard the vessel where the documentary was filmed, but also the Latin names of the species caught.
  16. Fish Tank
    What makes the picture feel special is its unflinching honesty and lack of sentimentality or moralizing, along with assured direction and excellent performances.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweetie
    Sweetie is an original, audacious tragicomedy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Shop of Horrors
    Little Shop of Horrors is a fractured, funny production transported rather reluctantly from the stage to the screen.
  19. The Things You Kill
    With The Things You Kill Khatami turns in an absorbing and twisty take on introspection.
  20. No
    After "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem," his devastating portraits of how the Pinochet regime psychologically brutalized the people of Chile from 1973-90, Chilean helmer Pablo Larrain satisfyingly completes the trilogy with an affirmative victory for democracy in No.
  21. Riders of Justice
    The film’s significant humor comes from amusingly implausible situations coupled with rapid-paced droll dialogue; its equally sizable heart derives from the script’s respect for society’s outcasts and Jensen’s way of nimbly endowing every character with their own emotional backstory, all in need of healing.
  22. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a nimble documentary made with a personal touch of nostalgia, and it should prove nothing less than catnip to Sondheim obsessives.
  23. A River Below
    In the stories of both men, Grieco’s film highlights the double-edged nature of eye-opening visuals, which are just as apt to enrage others and endanger the messenger as they are to achieve noble ends.
  24. A Crime on the Bayou
    [An] engrossing, flavorful document.
  25. Ama Gloria
    The considerable power of Ama Gloria lies not in its take on colonial conscience, nor even in its insights into the complex economical and emotional dynamics of the child-nanny bond. It is in its unmatched portrait of one brave little heart, bruised but learning to beat on its own.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The China Syndrome
    A moderately compelling thriller about the potential perils of nuclear energy, whose major fault is an overweening sense of its own self-importance.
  27. My Architect
    This fascinating portrait of an eccentric visionary and his chaotic triple family life is an accomplished, enormously satisfying non-fiction work.
  28. In Fabric
    There’s no reason a movie about a devil dress should work, and yet Strickland strikes the right tone, inviting laughter by taking it all so seriously.
  29. Hot Fuzz
    A sustained genre parody that's equally funny but (maybe in deference to the genre) much more pumped up.
  30. Police, Adjective
    Porumboiu is one of the few helmers working today who so completely understands both the power of language and the power of visuals.
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