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. The Fever
    It is Myrupu’s beguiling performance what anchors this intimate and entrancing epic, a modern-day fable about the very concept of modernity and the promise of fabulation.
  2. Gone Girl
    Surgically precise, grimly funny and entirely mesmerizing over the course of its swift 149-minute running time, this taut yet expansive psychological thriller represents an exceptional pairing of filmmaker and material.
  3. The Central Park Five
    Mixing a breathtaking array of archival materials with new talking-head interviews, the film analyzes the monumental miscarriage of justice repped by the 1989 Central Park Jogger case.
  4. Mountains May Depart
    If “Mountains” feels a touch schematic at times, and awkward in its third-act English-language scenes, the cumulative impact is still enormously touching, highlighted by Jia’s rapturous image-making and a luminous central performance by the director’s regular muse (and wife), Zhao Tao.
  5. Wagner's Dream
    Tension flows organically from every phase of this dangerous endeavor, making for a highly entertaining outing for operaphiles and operaphobes alike.
  6. The Goldman Case
    Kahn’s crafty, compelling portrait gives Goldman the floor, but his walls remain fixed around him.
  7. Kinsey
    Lively, sometimes funny and, inevitably, provocative.
  8. Sami Blood
    This handsome debut feature from Swedish-Sami writer-director Amanda Kernell robustly blends adolescent fears that resonate across borders and generations with a fascinatingly specific, rarely depicted cultural context: Sweden’s colonial oppression of the indigenous Sami folk.
  9. The Feeling of Being Watched
    Equal parts angry and anxious, Boundaoui’s smart, unsettling documentary functions both as a real-world conspiracy thriller and a personal reflection on the psychological strain of being made to feel an outsider in one’s own home.
  10. Another World
    In this hard, unblinking film, even a moral victory feels like defeat.
  11. Small, Slow But Steady
    Director Shô Miyake’s measured, unsentimental adaptation of a memoir by Keiko Ogasawara — who turned professional despite the difficulties of lifelong deafness — turns out to be somewhat aptly described by its own title, though none of those adjectives quite conveys its rare and delicate grace.
  12. Flux Gourmet
    To call “Flux Gourmet” an acquired taste would be an understatement. It’s really more of an elaborate inside joke by Strickland on the peculiar relationship between artists and the institutions that fund, develop and encourage their folly.
  13. The Auschwitz Report
    The film is a powerful reminder never to underestimate the historical evils that have been, and could again be, unleashed.
  14. Gabrielle
    Though it won't appeal to everyone, the concoction actually works, thanks to Huppert and Greggory's powerful negative chemistry.
  15. Sexy Beast
    Often enjoyable, massively uneven Brit ganglander with an almost surreal approach to the genre.
  16. Policeman
    This fascinating but uneven pic has a conceptual rigor that doesn’t always translate into compelling viewing or even a smooth narrative whole. Nevertheless, it reps a strong debut from tyro helmer-writer Nadav Lapid.
  17. Ricky
    Ricky is a movie that plunges into the depths and also lifts the spirit honestly.
  18. Paper Tiger
    The movie is engineered to be seen as “powerful.” Right now, though, I’d say that he’s an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.
  19. Fjord
    The two-and-a-half-hour result is riveting, acted with careworn nuance down the line by an excellent ensemble, yawing this way and that in terms of narrative and emotional momentum, even as we sense early on that no clear, cathartic resolution will ever be forthcoming.
  20. Copa 71
    As subjects share vivid memories of taking the field, their stories appear to stir back up the attitudes that made them great competitors.
  21. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    How many thrillers could put the outcome in the title and still provide as many white-knuckle moments as Harvard Beats Yale 29-29?
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Midnight Cowboy
    The sometimes amusing but essentially sordid saga of a male prostitute in Manhattan,...Midnight Cowboy is of the modern moment moderne. It has a hot topical theme; a popular actor from last year’s greatest film comedy; a miscellany of competent bit players, a good deal of both sly and broad humor. If the women object, and some will, that it accords their sex scant courtesy, the story hardly presents males as admirable. Indeed in this film the scenery is lovely and only the human race is vile.
  23. Dear White People
    Bristling with arguments about the complexities of black identity in a supposedly post-racial America, this lively and articulate campus-set comedy proves better at rattling off ideas and presenting opposing viewpoints than it does squeezing them into a coherent narrative frame.
  24. Ahed's Knee
    Quite possibly brilliant, and very definitely all but unbearable, Ahed’s Knee is filmmaking as hostage-taking. If such language seems charged, this is Nadav Lapid: All language is charged.
  25. Broken Flowers
    Working in his typically idiosyncratic and episodic vein, Jim Jarmusch has nonetheless pitched the film slightly more toward mainstream tastes than usual for him, using excellent thesps in the service of accessible material.
  26. Loving
    Nichols’ film is seemingly less interested in its own glory than in representing what’s right, and though it features two of the best American performances of the past several years, from Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga (neither of whom are American, hailing from Australia and Ethiopia, respectively), its emotional impact derives precisely from how understated they are.
  27. The Christophers
    Some things you simply can’t fake. Take talent: There’s no room for anything shy of genius in The Christophers.
  28. Silence
    Though undeniably gorgeous, it is punishingly long, frequently boring, and woefully unengaging at some of its most critical moments.... Still, viewed through the narrow prism of films about faith, Silence is a remarkable achievement.
  29. November
    It’s having the ordinary in such close proximity to the outlandish that makes November so uncanny. And it’s rooting the bizarre behaviors of its characters in such understandable motivations (usually greed) that makes it so unexpectedly funny and scabrously relatable.
  30. I've Loved You So Long
    A movie that is utterly engrossing despite being, on the surface, about very little.
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