Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. Dreams
    At times, the dramatic tension is so strong, “Dreams” could almost be a thriller.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Watch on the Rhine
    Watch on the Rhine is a distinguished picture. It is even better than its powerful original stage version. It expresses the same urgent theme, but with broader sweep and in more affecting terms of personal emotion.
  3. Hallow Road
    With its dramatic themes spread across two wildly different halves, it makes for a unique, propulsive thrill ride whose baffling existence is key to its enjoyment.
  4. LifeHack
    The result is a genuinely funny and ultimately heart-pounding production, with an execution that feels like a heist itself.
  5. Ghost Trail
    Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis.
  6. The Smashing Machine
    The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavolvian response of triumph out of us. It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way.
  7. Young Mothers
    Deeply moving but never manipulative, Young Mothers amounts to the brothers’ best film in more than a decade.
  8. The Chronology of Water
    The Chronology of Water invites us to experience each moment as if it were happening, but the movie is really telling the story of a spirit — the one that tries to survive, and become whole, through each moment.
  9. Highest 2 Lowest
    In the end, Lee has taken “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed.
  10. Sketch
    With his stellar indie family adventure Sketch, commercials director Seth Worley has come up with a creative — and highly teachable — concept for his feature debut, using imaginative visual effects to impart a valuable lesson about dealing with grief and other strong feelings.
  11. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
    The film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship.
  12. Amrum
    There are no grand moments, enormous revelations or manipulatively overpowering scores in his delicately constructed and produced film — it is as narratively straightforward as movies come.
  13. Resurrection
    For those who miss the way the movies used to act on us, it is a reminder of the uniquely paradoxical pleasures of immersion and surrender: a dazzlingly cineliterate lesson in the lost art of letting go.
  14. Two Prosecutors
    In Two Prosecutors, perhaps out of deference to the source text, Loznitsa plays it straighter than in either of those titles and the result is much stronger for it, as though he has met some self-set challenge to see how efficiently a rigorously formal aesthetic can evoke the pervading, dehumanizing horrors of living under totalitarian control.
  15. Yes
    A whirling, maximalist satire at once despairing and exuberant, subtle as a cannonball in its evisceration of the ruling classes and those who obey them, it’s both absurdist comedy and serious-as-cancer polemic: as grave as any film with an extended dance break to 2000s novelty hit “The Ketchup Song” can possibly be.
  16. My Father's Shadow
    As the audience is taken in by this intimate and well-observed drama, the rug gets pulled from beneath them by revealing the violence and strife that was simmering underneath. It’s a trick so devastating that it completely upends the movie, elevating it into a deeply humanist narrative.
  17. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is an enticingly clever and droll, nearly pitch-perfect piece of murder-mystery fun — a whodunit that lives up to the expectations set six years ago by “Knives Out,” which offered its own perfect revival of the Agatha Christie spirit, with a tasty frosting of meta cheekiness.
  18. Diciannove
    Tortorici evidently remembers that disorienting sense of being released (or perhaps abandoned) into the world before you’ve quite found yourself; if you don’t, his funny, nervy, aptly unformed film will give you quivery flashbacks. It’s an auspicious arrival for both the filmmaker and his intense, mercurial young star Manfredi Marini, who holds the camera with the guilelessness of a newcomer and the ease of a natural.
  19. She Rides Shotgun
    Rowland ratchets up the suspense with cunning and confidence, advancing the narrative and introducing secondary characters with suitable swiftness and meticulous precision that never call undue attention to themselves.
  20. Broken Voices
    Provazník’s focus is not on trauma, and it’s fitting that such a sensitive, understated treatment of real-world abuse should end on a poignant note of solidarity.
  21. Heightened Scrutiny
    Beyond all the legal and even medical specifics resides a sense of communal understanding, and — at the risk of sounding mawkish — a deep and abiding love for one’s fellow human beings, which Feder taps into with aplomb.
  22. Better Go Mad in the Wild
    Theirs is an outwardly simple life made complex with yearnings, resentments and impossible dreams: equally mythic and mundane, as presented in Miro Remo‘s wonderfully sui generis portrait Better Go Mad in the Wild.
  23. Preparation for the Next Life
    Thanks to its terrific stars and Liu’s patient direction, which luxuriates in the smallest of gestures, “Preparation” transcends its most predictable beats.
  24. Hoppers
    Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.
  25. No Other Choice
    The more chaos descends, the more meticulous Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture.
  26. Father Mother Sister Brother
    Father Mother Sister Brother is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening.
  27. Is God Is
    Both wildly entertaining and viciously upsetting, this remarkable debut boldly reaps what others have sown.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Diva
    Diva is an extraordinary thriller and first film from Jean-Jacques Beineix, complex, stylish and fast-moving.
  29. Hedda
    Not everyone knows Ibsen going in, but that needn’t diminish the satisfaction of watching “Hedda Gabler” so vividly reinvented.
  30. Rose of Nevada
    The richest, most enduring pleasures here are formal ones, beginning with the exacting still-life compositions and oily, vehement primary hues of Jenkins’ 16mm lensing, which can make a painterly subject of a maritime squall or a mustard-yellow wading boot.
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