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. Writing with Fire
    Thomas and Ghosh have found their angle, and it’s a powerful one.
  2. Becoming Cousteau
    Becoming Cousteau, Liz Garbus’s ardent and transporting documentary, is one of those movies that puts a life together so beautifully that you feel it heightening your awareness of everyday things.
  3. Beba
    An insightful, engaging and all-around affirmational auto-portrait from an Afro-Latina New Yorker with an ear for poetry and an eye for the ineffable, Beba never questions its own right to exist.
  4. Procession
    Procession is, in its own elegant and uneasy way, an inspiring film, idealistically invested in cinema itself as a medium for confession, confrontation and self-expression, not least when Greene hands over the camera to other filmmakers in need of its power.
  5. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    It shows you, through the ironic empathy summoned by Washington’s performance, just how fast the human race can slip off the tracks. And it brings that drama into ravishing deep focus.
  6. Being the Ricardos
    The dialogue in Being the Ricardos has the blunt directness, dagger wit, and perfectly cut corners of Sorkinese ­­— a sound that might be described as hardass Talmudic screwball. Beyond that, though, the entire movie is a piece of thrillingly stylized compression. It gets a real head of steam going, a hurtling energy and anxiety that rides on everything Lucy is feeling.
  7. Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen
    It’s a performance film, a delectable slice of nostalgia, and a testament to how one gorgeously raucous rock ‘n’ roll moment can reverberate through the decades.
  8. Dune: Part Two
    Villeneuve treats each shot as if it could be a painting. Every design choice seems handed down through millennia of alternative human history, from arcane hieroglyphics to a slew of creative masks and veils meant to conceal the faces of those manipulating the levers of power, nearly all of them women.
  9. Playground
    Wandel’s immersive, impressive debut is rigorous in its resolute focus on one little girl fighting a lonely, frightened battle for her future selfhood, in which what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the shape and measure of her developing soul.
  10. Love It Was Not
    The result of long years of research, Love It Was Not is remarkable not only for its unusual central story and unique creative execution, but also for its extensive eyewitness testimonies.
  11. Marx Can Wait
    Straightforward in concept yet psychologically profound, the film draws the audience in with a lingering sadness made more potent by the director’s clear yet unspoken sense of guilt.
  12. The Pink Cloud
    Gerbase’s thoughtful, precise little film would have marked an impressive enough arrival under normal circumstances. As it is, it might endure as more era-evocative than many of the intentional pandemic dramas to come.
  13. Lucy and Desi
    A nimble and fascinating documentary.
  14. Mija
    Castro’s debut feature deals with heartache and vulnerability but also shimmers with joy and genuine insight.
  15. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    Palm Trees and Power Lines finds a truth, one it wrenches out of an experience.
  16. Tantura
    The film is a record of what went on during the War of Independence — a much uglier and more brutal story than Israel has ever wanted to acknowledge. The film includes graphic testimony, and it comes from the most authoritative sources possible: those who fought in the war and lived it — the Palestinians, but also the Israeli soldiers themselves.
  17. Three Minutes: A Lengthening
    Stigter’s method is simultaneously creative and forensic, but never sentimental. Working with a digitized copy that bears the blemishes left by the deterioration of the original celluloid, she conjures up exactly what she declares in the subtitle: a lengthening.
  18. The Territory
    This short, sharply crafted Sundance premiere makes an impact with both its bleak, blunt messaging and its muscular formal construction, as the turf war in question takes on the heated urgency of a thriller.
  19. Utama
    [A] sublime, quietly elegiac feature debut.
    • 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.
  21. Rimini
    This is not, in the end, a tale of hubris brought low, or even of a tacky life staring down a long lens at a tawdry, dwindling death. Instead it’s a chilling parable about the sins of the father becoming the punishments of the son, and about the moral arc of the universe bending, across generations, toward the coldest justice imaginable.
  22. Alcarràs
    The film balances a bristling political conscience against its tenderly observed domestic drama.
  23. Unrest
    A gorgeously playful oddity glimmering with insight into ideology, photography, cartography, telegraphy, celebrity, solidarity, the flow of capital, the unruliness of time and the somehow noble lunacy of trying to tame such a massive concept into a brass doodad small enough to fit in a waistcoat pocket
  24. This Much I Know to Be True
    This remarkable performance documentary may be for the Nick Cave-curious exclusively, but for them (us) it is close to essential.
  25. The Automat
    The Automat taps into so many resonant aspects of what America used to be that to watch it is to be drawn into an enchanting and wistfully profound time-tripping reverie.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Around the World in 80 Days
    Around the World In 80 Days, is a smasheroo from start to finish.
  27. The Innocents
    This superior chiller is both a satisfying genre exercise and a minute observation of the process by which young children acquire morality; its most striking aspect may just be the empathy Vogt displays for his 7- to 11-year-old stars, and the extraordinary juvenile performances that empathy brings out.
  28. To Leslie
    It’s a downbeat diary that hooks us by taking the form of an addict’s picaresque. For two hours, we don’t know where Leslie is going to land next any more than she does, and that lends the film a searing, unvarnished quality.
  29. Master of Light
    The light here emanates from Morton. His curiosity about art, about his place in the world after his incarceration, makes visible the darkness he’s experienced.
  30. La Mami
    Amid its textured, occasionally conflict-scarred portrait of female community, La Mami is rife with sharp, tacit socioeconomic criticism of an unequal, patriarchal society in which making joyless business out of pleasure is the best hope many women have.
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