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. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    McCormack is fantastic in a role so subtle it could appear flatlined and phony if people aren’t playing attention.
  2. Rocks in My Pockets
    Boasting a narrative of extraordinary complexity and density, stuffed with irony, humor and tales-within-tales, the imaginative animated memoir Rocks in My Pockets merges a mini-history of 20th-century Latvia with that of helmer Signe Baumane and her forebears.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Elephant Man
    Hopkins is splendid in a subtly nuanced portrayal of a man torn between humanitarianism and qualms that his motives in introducing the Elephant Man to society are no better than those of the brutish carny. The center-piece of the film, however, is the virtuoso performance by the almost unrecognizable John Hurt.
  4. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Even if the film itself is relatively conventional, its exposure of a squalid city's most benighted neighborhood and its introduction of hope into nearly hopeless lives give it strong human interest value.
  5. Putty Hill
    This curious blend of documentary and narrative, held together less by any plot device than by a rigorous aesthetic, proves all the more effective for being in service of casual naturalism.
  6. Breathe
    Melanie Laurent brings a sure, sensitive hand to tonally tricky material and draws superb work from relative newcomers Josephine Japy (“Cloclo”) and Lou De Laage (“Jappeloup”).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Freshman
    Pic’s weakest element is the recurring satire of film studies. Although Benedict is droll as an academic poseur, the mocking of film analysis is puerile and obvious.
  8. John Wick: Chapter 4
    The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.
  9. We Met in Virtual Reality
    We Met in Virtual Reality is a warmhearted, often humorous look at the sociology of such spaces. It can’t really be described as vérité — more fly-on-the-virtual-wall filmmaking.
  10. Enys Men
    Visually and sonically, Enys Men is utterly intoxicating, but a lack of any nourishing interplay between form and content makes it feel like getting drunk on an empty stomach, alone on an island where everything happens at the same time, and nothing really happens at all.
  11. Clash
    Boasting superb camerawork from d.p. Ahmed Gabr and stellar crowd direction, Clash might strike some as crossing too often into hysteria, yet this is bravura filmmaking with a kick-in-the-gut message about chaos and cruelty (with some humanity).
  12. Number 37
    Far more substantial than a run-of-the-mill Hitchcock homage, Number 37 is richly satisfying on its own terms as a singularly crafty and strikingly well-crafted thriller that signals the arrival of a promising filmmaking talent.
  13. The Grief of Others
    More experimental in form and wobbly in execution than its predecessor, this searching adaptation of Leah Hager Cohen’s 2011 novel nonetheless evokes a family’s fragile inner life in ineffably moving fashion, capturing how distant and isolated parents and children can feel from one another even when living under the same roof
  14. Shuffle
    It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.
  15. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    The film presents a psychological, almost novelistic portrait of how Bourdain evolved as a person during the years of his celebrity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Color Purple
    There are some great scenes and great performances in The Color Purple, but it is not a great film. Steven Spielberg’s turn at ‘serious’ filmmaking is marred in more than one place by overblown production that threatens to drown in its own emotions. But the characters created in Alice Walker’s novel are so vivid that even this doesn’t kill them off and there is still much to applaud (and cry about) here.
  17. Amanda Knox
    A gripping and incisive documentary.
  18. High Flying Bird
    It’s certainly more interested in ideas than characters, and the film stumbles when it makes half-hearted attempts at romantic intrigue or tragic backstories, but its subversive view of race, money and power in modern sports couldn’t be more timely.
  19. The Humans
    I’ll admit that Karam’s camera strays down one too many empty hallways for my taste, but I love the patience with which he lets things unfold, the respect he shows this family, and the way these characters don’t feel like characters at all, but real people — fellow humans.
  20. The Card Counter
    Part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything. It’s just a game. The Card Counter is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement.
  21. Beatles '64
    It takes this fabled, high-swoon moment of pop-music history, almost all of which we now view through a mythological lens, and humanizes it in an exhilarating way.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Near Dark
    Main point of interest will be the work of Bigelow, who has undoubtedly created the most hard-edged, violent actioner ever directed by an American woman.
  23. 5 Broken Cameras
    An undeniably powerful record of the Palestinian village of Bil'in's course of civil disobedience from 2005 to the present...the pic is also shamelessly sentimental and manipulative in its construction.
  24. How to Draw a Bunny
    Debuting helmer Walter assembles an aptly colorful package, with stylistic integration of elements from Johnson's delightful visual art. A major plus is the skittering percussion score by bebop jazz great Max Roach.
  25. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    Exhaustively informative and powerfully emotional.
  26. LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
    The balance between feeling and distance is never a contradiction here but, rather, the dynamic that makes this film an especially humanistic entry in the Maysles canon.
  27. Dirty Pretty Things
    An intelligent and extremely well-made romantic drama that tells an intriguing story with economy and insight.
  28. Punch-Drunk Love
    Entirely unpredictable and marked by audacious strokes of directorial bravado.
  29. Chungking Express
    Overall, Wong’s movie doesn’t leave as big a wash behind it as the more ambitious “Days” and his “Mean Streets”-like debut, “As Tears Go By,” but it’s an enjoyable cruise.
  30. O'Horten
    On screen non-stop, Owe is Buster Keaton-like perfection.
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