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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Roaring Twenties
    Because of James Cagney and the story’s circumstances, The Roaring Twenties is reminiscent of Public Enemy. Story and dialog are good. Raoul Walsh turns in a fine directorial job; the performances are uniformly excellent.
  2. Knock Down the House
    Knock Down the House has a clear political agenda. It wants to promote the hard work, courage and progressive policies of these women, who have all experienced financial hardship. Still, the film lets its subjects do the talking instead of cluttering things with statistics.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Train
    After a slow start, The Train picks up to become a colorful, actionful big-scale adventure opus.
  4. Junebug
    Has a washed-out look that may be off-putting to auds who might otherwise enjoy the pic's uncondescending view of Southern characters and customs.
  5. Dinner in America
    Beyond finding a godsend in Gellner, Rehmeier gets good mileage from nearly the entire supporting cast. They grasp the slightly warped humor he’s aiming for here, hitting a suitable range of comedic notes from the deadpan to the broadly farcical.
  6. Café Lumière
    Hou fans will find what they're looking for; others will wonder when the action starts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Footlight Parade
    Footlight Parade is not as good as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers but the three socko numbers here eclipse some of the preceding Busby Berkeley staging for spectacle.
  8. Children of the Mist
    It’s an auspicious arrival for first-time feature director Diem, who handles delicate subject matter (not to mention vulnerable human subjects) with a frankness that stops short of button-pushing. That tact is crucial in a film operating as both close-quarters character study and wider ethnographic portrait, offering a rare, dedicated view of Vietnam’s little-represented Hmong population.
  9. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    An entertaining if hardly exhaustive overview of how the unlikely success came to be. The story it tells might easily have filled an engrossing documentary twice the length of this competent, not-particularly-inspired one.
  10. Bad Press
    Following events over the course of several years, this cautionary tale has an impact not unlike watching the rise of similar anti-transparency policies and politicians elsewhere of late: dismaying, yet with all the lurid appeal and colorful personalities of any juicy public scandal.
  11. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Don’t miss this strange, special little film.
  12. Promises
    Provides deeply humanistic insight into the complexities of the Middle East conflict that political analysis or front-line news coverage often lacks.
  13. The Secret in Their Eyes
    A deeply rewarding throwback to the unself-conscious days when cinema still strove to be magical, The Secrets in their Eyes is simply mesmerizing.
  14. Good Time
    These restlessly independent auteurs have passed the genre-foray test with flying neon colors, at no cost or compromise to their abrasively humane worldview.
  15. Food, Inc.
    A civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry.
  16. Tony Takitani
    Ultimately, this is a striking-looking film -- consciously recalling the paintings of Edward Hopper in its architectural use of space -- which, like its protag, is a little short on real feeling.
  17. Everlasting Moments
    Artistically on a plane with or near the vet filmmaker's best work, this period drama about a woman slowly discovering her metier is an artisanal creation par excellence.
  18. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Although beautifully rendered throughout, with delicate, elegantly drawn watercolor-like illustrations, the picture may seem too plain and simple for the oversophisticated tastes of kids in Europe and North America, while Arrietty herself reps a slightly insipid heroine.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forbidden Planet
    Imaginative gadgets galore, plus plenty of suspense and thrills, make the production a top offering in the space travel category. Best of all the gadgets is Robby, the Robot, and he's well-used for some comedy touches.
  20. The Mastermind
    Very possibly her most accessible and enjoyable film to date, still it remains an unmistakably Reichardtian investigation into the fabric of ordinariness and what happens when it frays.
  21. We Come as Friends
    A masterfully composed and suitably outraged look at the neocolonialist exploitation of South Sudan.
  22. The Wound
    The Wound is rich in such small, observational details.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Prince of the City
    The film is a concentrated, unrelievedly serious and cerebrally involving entry, exhaustively detailing the true-life saga of a Gotham detective who turned Justice Dept informer to eke out widespread corruption in his special investigating unit during the 1960s.
  24. Dying
    A film of remarkable performance and subject matter, laid low by unremarkable filmmaking.
  25. Perfect Days
    This beguiling film may trade in the tranquil security of routine, but makes an occasional, heart-quickening case for the unexpected.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    All through the picture there's charm, romance, gaiety and eclat.
  27. Four Daughters
    With so many moving parts, it’s hard to isolate just one reason why Ben Hania’s film — a vast improvement on her terminally uneven, unexpectedly Oscar-nominated “The Man Who Sold His Skin” — should prove so gripping.
  28. Central Station
    Montenegro carries the film su-perbly with her portrait of gritty strength being worn down to a state of tattered vulnerability, while newcomer de Oliveira, a shoeshine boy who won the role over 1,500 other aspirants, is engagingly natural and happily doesn't beg for viewer sympathy.
  29. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    Now, 50 years later, the Justice Department has decided to reopen the case, due largely to Keith Beauchamp's documentary, which contains testimony from hitherto unseen witnesses.
  30. 20,000 Species of Bees
    Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.
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