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. 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.
  2. Household Saints
    After building up some cockeyed charm through the first half, Nancy Savoca’s third feature peels off into obscure and particularized religious mysticism, leaving the viewer grasping in vain for a handle to hold onto for the second hour.
  3. Passages
    Sachs excels at investigating thorny, uncomfortable situations, and he treats all three characters fairly here, which allows audiences to decide which one they identify with.
  4. The Queen of Versailles
    This timely and involving documentary elicits both sympathy and schadenfreude, as Greenfield regards her all-too-vilifiable subjects with a complexity that should impress viewers of all economic and political persuasions.
  5. Theeb
    Like all well-done adventure tales, especially those with an intimate human focus and an expansive, epic vision, “Theeb” works on multiple levels.
  6. Incendies
    Incendies vaults Denis Villeneuve to the status of serious director.
  7. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    A charming look at the mildly eccentric man who gained modest feature-page celebrity for his familiarity with San Francisco's tropical parrot flock.
  8. Nine Queens
    A seductively structured and superbly acted suspenser that breathtakingly piles swindle upon scam without giving away the game until the very end.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Fish Called Wanda
    Curtis steals the show with her keen sense of comic timing and sneaky little grins and asides.
  10. Trophy
    Trophy’s wealth of conflicting facts, figures, and arguments routinely force one to re-calibrate their feelings about the issues at hand. The result is a lament for both the animals at the center of so many crosshairs, and for a modern world seemingly only capable of saving lives by taking them.
  11. Incredibles 2
    What was organic, and even obsessive, in the first outing comes off as pat and elaborate formula here. The new movie, energized as it is, too often feels like warmed-over sloppy seconds, with a what-do-we-do-now? riff that turns into an overly on-the-nose plot.
  12. Totally Under Control
    Subsequent docs will surely tell a different story, after survivors have risen up and confronted the individual they deem responsible — and Gibney et al. want this film to be instrumental in that solution.
  13. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    It’s to the credit of “She’s Beautiful” that it seems neither hectic nor glib despite the enormous amounts of material that doubtless had to be excluded to fit a single feature’s frame.
  14. Gleason
    Tweel masterfully assembles roughly four years of footage, much of it shot by Gleason himself, and the result is painfully raw at times but undeniably rewarding.
  15. Casino Royale
    Craig comes closer to the author's original conception of this exceptionally long-lived male fantasy figure than anyone since early Sean Connery.
  16. Much Ado About Nothing
    A film that is continuously enjoyable from its action-filled opening to the dazzling final shot, one that offers a very generous welcome to newcomers to the play, and reminds those familiar with it of its heady pleasures. Only real drawback, and not an insignificant one, is pic’s visual quality, which is unaccountably undistinguished, even ugly, especially considering the sun-drenched Tuscan location.
  17. Concerning Violence
    Though Fanon’s words serve to justify the seemingly unconscionable — violence — the film ends with a very different call to action, one that stresses the need for “new concepts,” as if trying to calm the blood the film has brought to a boil over the dense and daunting 80-odd minutes that have come before.
  18. Big Night
    This unlikely collaboration between actors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott is extremely well directed, making for a smartly made, delightfully acted period piece whose sensibility neatly straddles art films and the mainstream.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    3:10 to Yuma
    Aside from the fact that this is an upper-drawer western, 3:10 to Yuma will strike many for its resemblance to High Noon. That the climax fizzles must be laid on doorstep of Halsted Welles, who adapts Elmore Leonard's story quite well until that point.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cinema Paradiso
    Tornatore is an able storyteller who knows the value of cute kids and easy emotion.
  21. The Strange Little Cat
    Despite all that it withholds, The Strange Little Cat ultimately proves a far more revealing form of family portrait.
  22. Drowning Dry
    Audiences open to a different sort of world cinema that repays careful attention should find it a stimulating and imaginative work.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Saraband
    A bitter but finally moving story about lost love, hatred between generations and a curious kind of liberation, Saraband officially closes one of the most prestigious and influential careers in the history of cinema.
  24. Ad Astra
    Gray proves beyond measure that he’s got the chops to make a movie like this. He also has a vision, of sorts — one that’s expressed, nearly inadvertently, in the metaphor of that space antenna. Watching Ad Astra, you may think you’ve signed on for a journey that’s out of this world, but it turns out that the film’s concerns are somberly tethered to Earth.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brute Force
    A closeup on prison life and prison methods, Brute Force is a showmanly mixture of gangster melodramatics, sociological exposition, and sex [from a story by Robert Patterson].
  26. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Unfussy in form, open in expression and gentle in reach as its maker revisits such recurring preoccupations as loneliness, regret and the value of love in life and art.
  27. The Secret of Roan Inish
    John Sayles’ latest marks his entry into family-pic terrain, a crossing that draws pleasant but unexciting results.
  28. Nine Lives
    Though the episodic structure results in a whole not quite equal to some of its parts, pic is an unusually tender, perceptive character study buoyed by stellar performances from a who's who of talented (and many underused) actresses.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harlan County U.S.A. (re-release)
    The stars of the film are the men and women of Harlan County, portrayed here not as patronized mountain folks but as human beings. (Review of Original Release)
  30. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    A throughly researched and extremely informative survey of the life and work of one of the great figures of world cinema, Richard Schickel's Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin is a must for lovers of cinema.
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