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. Slow
    Slow reveals itself to be quite a tender portrait of love and companionship, of what our bodies yearn and want in others, and how we could do well to upend the stories we tell each other about living and loving another.
  2. Parthenope
    Parthenope is a film that rumbles with the hum of nostalgia, recapturing the feeling of youthful, summer freedom while refusing to shy away from the uncertainties of young adulthood. But it’s no mere coming-of-age story; rather, it’s a film about coming-to-oneself.
  3. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    A movingly sincere valentine from a filmmaker now due his own equivalent tributes, shortening the distance between youthful discovery and senior nostalgia.
  4. The Girl with the Needle
    The extremity of suffering on display here makes for difficult viewing, scarcely leavened by the expressionistic beauty of its presentation. But von Horn’s film never plays as empty miserablism, in large part thanks to its grave understanding of the moral and spiritual reasoning behind unimaginable acts of violence.
  5. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Blending molasses-dark comedy with searing poetic realism to capture contemporary Zambian society at a generational impasse between staunch tradition and social progress, this is palpably new, future-minded filmmaking, at once intrepidly daring and rigorously poised.
  6. Emilia Pérez
    Audiard wonders how much people really change when they transition. In Emilia’s case, less than she’d like, but enough to inspire positive change in society.
  7. Black Phone 2
    The movie strives to apply logic, inviting laughs (which are not unwelcome in the tense genre), but ultimately succeeds by devising a formula where two threats — ghosts and serial killers — come calling.
  8. Grand Tour
    But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust-for-life.
  9. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The situation Rasoulof depicts is hardly limited to Iran. There are echoes of Nazi Germany and modern-day China in the way average citizens submit, while the pressures to inform on one’s neighbors recall pre-perestroika Soviet policies. Rasoulof’s genius comes in focusing on how this dynamic plays out within a family, which makes it personal.
  10. Motel Destino
    As an erotic thriller, it’s more preoccupied with the first half of that term than the second, and that’s just fine.
  11. The Most Precious of Cargoes
    Director Michel Hazanavicius finds a poignant way to address not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but the kindness that combated it, crafting an indelible parable destined to be watched and shared by generations to come.
  12. Misericordia
    Instead it’s a slippery, changeable parable about a particularly amoral cuckoo looking to feather a new nest.
  13. Eephus
    Its pearls of practical wisdom and jewels of melancholic wit make Eephus a gem, which is fitting, for a movie about a game played on a diamond.
  14. Bread & Roses
    This film is a necessary howl of rage, one that argues cogently — via the simple expedient of capturing life as it is lived — that to ignore what it happening in Afghanistan is to condemn half the population of the country to oppression under a dictatorship that is both political and personal.
  15. Bugonia
    As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance.
  16. Vulcanizadora
    By the time its end credits roll, Vulcanizadora proves surprisingly moving in its depiction of mid-life crises and of two men who feel so betrayed by the world (and by their own actions) that they see no escape from their malaise. To turn that feeling into coherent drama is hard enough.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bite the Bullet
    Bite the Bullet is an excellent, literate action drama probing the diverse motivations of participants in an endurance horse race.
  18. To a Land Unknown
    To a Land Unknown is a film crafted with tremendous empathy.
  19. The Kingdom
    It’s like “The Sopranos,” as seen through Meadow’s eyes. And though we’re all familiar with the lesson that the cost of vengeance is a never-ending circle of violence, Colonna’s retelling lands like a bullet in the head.
  20. Faye
    As “Faye” presents it, Dunaway was too volcanic and troubled a personality not to pour herself into her roles. That’s part of what made her great. Yet the film also wants to cue us to the gossipy and reductive way that this kind of thinking has too often been applied to her.
  21. 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.
  22. Power Ballad
    What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.
  23. Memoir of a Snail
    Elements that might feel frivolous on first mention invariably pay off later, as Elliot brings things around in thoughtful and emotional ways, to the point you forget you’re watching people made of Plasticine.
  24. Bookworm
    As expansive and inviting as its picturesque New Zealand landscapes, a joyous sense of adventure shines through in Ant Timpson’s Bookworm, a delightfully quirky father-daughter adventure with the perfect blend of childlike wonder and grown-up bite.
  25. Babygirl
    Babygirl takes a few turns we don’t expect, but that’s because the movie’s ambition isn’t just to feed the thriller engine. It’s to capture something genuine about women’s erotic experience in the age of control.
  26. Black Bag
    Black Bag is a reminder of just how enjoyable Soderbergh can be when he’s riffing on well-worn genre material.
  27. A Complete Unknown
    A Complete Unknown is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical.
  28. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    Watching “Lost and Found,” you’re moved by a life that veered into tragedy, yet the place it lands lifts you up. More than a great photographer, Ernest Cole captured something essential. By the end you feel the ghost is speaking to you.
  29. Love
    Love’s commentary on modern relations may be more complex and chewy than just “live and let live,” but the film’s calm embrace of whatever works for the individual is refreshingly humane, rhetorically exciting and more than a little hot.
  30. ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!
    A hilarious behind-the-scenes account of that ill-advised investment, MTV Documentary Films’ unconventional — and unexpectedly inspiring — makeover doc follows along as the pair sink millions into rescuing the crumbling landmark out of bankruptcy.
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