Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wings of Desire
    Wim Wenders returns to Germany with a sublimely beautiful, deeply romantic film for our times. (Review of Original Release)
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Gandhi
    Once in a long while a motion picture so eloquently expressive and technically exquisite comes along that one is tempted to hail it as being near perfect. Such a film is Gandhi.
  3. Look Into My Eyes
    Agnostic but empathetic, Wilson’s film suggests communing with the dead may just be a roundabout way of reaching the living.
  4. Tu Dors Nicole
    The actors, some of whom have worked with Lafleur before, are entirely in tune with his intentions and display a beguiling chemistry.
  5. The Venerable W.
    “Evil” is one of those tricky words usually best avoided, since its quasi-mythological sense of moral absolutism tends to downplay the human agency involved. Yet as Barbet Schroeder well knows, there are times when no other term properly conveys the insidious nature of intolerance and carnage robed in the trappings of power.
  6. Sequin in a Blue Room
    Van Grinsven is conscious of consequences, but more interested in exploring the newfound freedoms that technology offers queer self-discovery.
  7. Petrov's Flu
    Through its heady stew of impulses and influences, however, Petrov’s Flu is cinema to the breathless last, riding the camera like a bucking horse as single shots carry us between locations, eras and states of mind — the thrilling, messy work of a man released.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Angel at My Table
    A potentially painful and harrowing film is imbued with gentle humor and great compassion, which makes every character come vividly alive. Campion constructs the film in a series of short, sometimes elliptical scenes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Quest for Fire
    Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest for Fire is an engaging prehistoric yarn that happily never degenerates into a club and lion skin spinoff of Star Wars and resolutely refuses to bludgeon the viewer with facile or gratuitous effects.
  10. Girls Will Be Girls
    Both Panigrahi and Kusruti deliver immensely lived-in performances that write sonnets through silent stares, as a mother and daughter who aren’t accustomed to truly connecting, or communicating beyond customary debriefs.
  11. Monster
    By sharing only select pieces of each character’s private life, he all but obliges us to leap to incorrect conclusions, distracting with topics such as bullying, aggression and suicide when the real subject — how children are socialized, and the unfair pressures this puts on anyone who doesn’t fit the norm — is so much simpler than any of the intriguing dimensions teased along the way.
  12. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    Since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing. Yet The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie.
  13. Fourteen
    A wise, graceful but viciously felt study of middle-school best friends whose bond becomes a burden the further they recede into adulthood, it resorts neither to buddy-movie cliché nor melodramatic angst in portraying the ways we outgrow our friends, and they us.
  14. Disclosure
    Essential, thoroughly engaging documentary.
  15. The Visitor
    A combination immigrant/resurrection tale, Visitor tilts toward the soulful rather than the political, and could be this year's humanistic indie hit.
  16. Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World
    It’s exciting, cloak-and-dagger stuff, no less exciting (or valid) for having been done from someone’s armchair at home. Pool pulls some cheap shots by cutting to Putin, Trump, and Kim Jong-un whenever he needs to personify who they’re up against. But in a world where those three are leading the charge to break the news, Bellingcat are doing their best to put it together again.
  17. A Normal Family
    The whole matter seems so morally ambiguous that it makes for an unpredictable ride, right up to the film’s abrupt but darkly poetic smash ending.
  18. Green Room
    Characterization and emotional investment, however, are in disappointingly short supply, while crucial tension is permitted to dissipate in an anti-climactic final third.
  19. The Plague
    Drawn from experience and benefiting from some standout performances among its well-selected young cast, The Plague has a familiar coming-of-age narrative, but stranger, subtler undercurrents of creeping dismay at the men these boys will become when, at this formative age, cruelty chlorinates the water they swim in.
  20. Colliding Dreams
    Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s excellent history of the changing faces of the ideology that built the State of Israel offers a careful antidote to the shrill entrenchment that attends the very mention of Zionism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Family Plot
    Family Plot is a dazzling achievement for Alfred Hitchcock masterfully controlling shifts from comedy to drama thoughout a highly complex plot. Witty screenplay, transplanting Victor Canning's British novel, The Rainbird Pattern, to a California setting, is a model of construction, and the cast is uniformly superb.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harvey
    Harvey, Mary Chase's Pulitzer Prize play, loses little of its whimsical comedy charm in the screen translation.
  23. In Our Day
    Neither switch-your-brain-off-escapist, nor the kind of arthouse filmmaking that makes heavy demands on your time or willpower, Hong’s cinema remains one of the most reliable sources of this particular pleasure.
  24. Iron Man
    Ever-eclectic director Jon Favreau, who briefly pops up onscreen as a Stark minion, maintains a brisk but not frantic pace, and, in concert with lenser Matthew Libatique, production designer J. Michael Riva and the first-rate visual effects team, has made an unusually elegant looking film for the genre.
  25. Silent Light
    Reygadas' typically arresting widescreen visuals and the presence of non-pro actors speaking in German-derived Plautdietsch makes for an initially hypnotic combination, but the spell breaks its hold well before the end of the picture's inflated running time, signaling an endurance test for all but the most ascetic arthouse auds.
  26. Control Room
    Compelling docu about the independent Arab news service, Al Jazeera.
  27. Torn
    Though Torn flirts with filmmaking-as-therapy, it doesn’t dig discomfitingly deep.
  28. How to Have Sex
    How to Have Sex resists much of the obvious confrontation and catharsis you’d expect in movies of this type, instead trading in the thwarted impulses and micro-reactions of real life, and it’s all the more devastating for it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Salaam Bombay!
    Director Mira Nair indulges in some melodramatic explorations, however, dangerously verging on a romanticized Oriental tearjerker mood.
  30. Only Lovers Left Alive
    A sweet but slight love story about world-weary hipster bloodsuckers.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »