Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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 2.3 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Murder!
    Well photographed and mounted, it contains all the gadgets of the pet Alfred Hitchcock technique, from quick cutting to skillful dialog blending. The dialog is very well written. Long episodes have clever satirical values as attacks on the conventional and lower-class English.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hell's Angels
    It’s no sappy, imbecilic tale.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Animal Crackers
    First give Paramount extreme credit for reproducing Animal Crackers intact from the stage, without too much of the songs and musical numbers.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    A harrowing, gruesome, morbid tale of war, so compelling in its realism, bigness and repulsiveness that Universal’s Western Front becomes at once a money picture.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Juno and the Paycock
    Irish atmosphere of the tenement life incidental to the country is well caught, director Alfred Hitchcock having a flair for sniping the real feeling of the submerged tenth.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big House
    As Butch, Morgan and Kent, Wallace Beery, Chester Morris and Robert Montgomery are a great trio in ‘the big house’, where each is serving a stretch for homicide, forgery and manslaughter, respectively. Prison life on the half-shell is plainly exposed.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Manxman
    The Hall Caine novel from which this film was adapted is a weak one, but the director has done his best with it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blackmail
    Blackmail is most draggy. It has no speed or pace and very little suspense.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cocoanuts
    That's all it has --comedy-- but that's enough. [29 May 1929, p.14]
    • Variety
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Broadway Melody
    It’s pretty near a classic in how to take a talker and then cut it to keep it moving.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Passion of Joan of Arc
    Here is a deadly tiresome picture that merely makes an attempt to narrate without sound or dialog an allegedly written recorded trial in the 15th or 16th century of Joan of Arc for witchery, leading to her condemnation and burning at the stake. [10 Apr 1929, p.25]
    • Variety
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wings
    When the action [from a story by John Monk Saunders] settles on terra firma there is nothing present that other war supers haven’t had, some to a greater degree. But nothing has possessed the graphic descriptive powers of aerial flying and combat that have been poured into this effort.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Circus
    In clinging to a tale of logical sequence, without the expected interpolations or detached incidents, Chaplin's Circus for speed, gags and laughs has not been equalled on the sheet. But it's very broad, for Chaplin makes no attempt at subtlety in this one.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunrise
    Sunrise is a distinguished contribution to the screen, made in this country, but produced after the best manner of the German school. In its artistry, dramatic power and graphic suggestion it goes a long way toward realizing the promise of this foreign director in his former works, notably Faust.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Jazz Singer
    Undoubtedly the best thing Vitaphone has ever put on the screen.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ring
    Hitchcock gets more out of Lilian Hall-Davis than any Continental director and at times makes her reminiscent of Lya de Putti.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
    A Woman of Paris is a serious, sincere effort, with a bang story subtlety of idea-expression.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Intolerance
    Intolerance reflects much credit to the wizard director, for it required no small amount of genuine art to consistently blend actors, horses, monkeys, geese, doves, acrobats and ballets into a composite presentation of a film classic.
  19. Check It
    Despite occasional narrative gaps, Check It is consistently compelling, with a brisk pace and vivid personalities making up for the occasional unanswered question.
  20. Distance
    There’s almost none of the generous, involving humanity (and warm humor) of the previous film, nor any clear take on the personalities in the slackly structured script, largely improvised by the actors.
  21. Solino
    A slick, entertaining, if never very original, study of family and roots.
  22. A Family (Una Famiglia)
    With a surface dusting of realist grit hardly covering for the strained contrivances and one-note characterization propelling its lurid narrative, Riso’s sophomore feature never shakes the artificial, soapy aroma at its core.
  23. The House by the Sea
    The House by the Sea feels like the work of a filmmaker gazing back over his own filmography as one might across a sparkling blue sea, and observing its tides.
  24. I Love You, Daddy
    There’s a better, tighter, more emotionally focused movie hidden somewhere in the sprawl of “I Love You, Daddy.” It’s a movie that’s just as rude, funny, and observant as this one but that doesn’t tie itself in knots trying to “say” something.
  25. Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno
    Another gorgeous three-hour study of young, attractively housed hearts in often turbulent motion, Mektoub is a frequently seductive sensory epic of equivalent ambition, yet despite its woozily pleasurable set pieces, the fraught emotions binding them are less urgent, and the perspective of its protagonist far less immediate.
  26. The Life of Jesus
    An uncompromising portrait of thwarted emotions and small-town tedium, The Life of Jesus is a luminous and disconcerting feature debut from scripter-helmer Bruno Dumont. Pic’s deliberate pace, as it details the actions of adolescents with stifled inner lives, poses a commercial obstacle in markets unfriendly to leisurely fare, but film holds definite rewards for patient viewers and fest auds.
  27. August Winds (Ventos de Agosto)
    Mascaro isn’t interested in psychology and instead simply sketches in thoughts and motivations (Shirley’s boredom, Jeison’s father’s dissatisfaction) without exploring them, much in the manner of an observational documentary. The real connective tissue is the locale.
  28. Our New President
    The relentless flow of manufactured scandal and over-the-top lies in Our New President, all packaged with “authentic” video footage and flash-cut techniques, is sometimes funny, and sometimes depressing.... But mostly it’s scary.
  29. Loveling
    Brazilian director Gustavo Pizzi crafts a warm and wonderfully universal love story that comes across surprisingly unconventional for something so familiar.
  30. Pity
    If Pity doesn’t quite have the shock of the new on its side, then, its sharpest passages nonetheless exert the bracing, mouth-shuddering tang of neat ouzo: You know how it’s going to taste, but it leaves you wincing anyway.
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