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. Blue Ruin
    A lean and suspenseful genre piece that follows a bloody trail of vengeance to its cruel, absurd and logical conclusion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Harder They Fall
    Budd Schulberg's vehement novel about the fight racket is given a strong pictorial going-over in The Harder They Fall. It's main-event stuff.
  3. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    It’s a handsomely crafted portrait overall, yet one whose middleweight content flatters the subject without ultimately quite doing him justice.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The War of the Worlds
    A socko science-fiction feature, as fearsome as a film as was the Orson Welles 1938 radio interpretation of the H.G. Wells novel.
  5. Pavilion
    The beauty of the footage is undeniable, and the aimlessness never overstays its welcome as the film documents that strange stretch in our lives when nothing seems to matter more than the present moment, suspended in a sort of idle immortality.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lassie Come Home
    From the novel of Eric Knight, and with Fred M. Wilcox directing his first feature picture, Lassie emerges as nice entertainment enhanced by color photography and good scenic shots.
  7. We
    Diop’s small but potent act of subversion, in choosing disparate lives and moments that could seem linked by a railway line and nothing more, is not just to enlarge the idea of who is meant by the collective French “We.” It is also to reclaim the selection process for inclusion within that tiny, divided pronoun.
  8. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is nothing if not an homage to the lasting impact that junk culture can have on impressionable minds.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    On Dangerous Ground
    Ray manages to inject an occasional bit of excitement into the yarn, and had the psychotic touches been eliminated in the script, film could have qualified as okay, even if grim, melodrama.
  10. Ex Machina
    Ex Machina turns out to be far wittier and more sensual than its coolly unblemished exterior implies; it’s a trick that mirrors Ava’s own apparent Turing-test-defying evolution.
  11. Oldboy
    A wild, intensely cinematic ride into two men's burning desire to get even.
  12. A Gentle Creature
    The film beguiles with its bravura but it’s a deliberately punishing journey, made by a male Cassandra impelled to point out his nation’s destruction yet sadly aware that it’s too late to change the tide of history.
  13. Saloum
    Revenge is a dish served with considerable style and imagination in Saloum, a fast and furious crime-horror-thriller that twists and turns its way around the mangroves, islets and inlets of Senegal’s Sine-Saloum coastal region.
  14. The Tribe
    Sans dialogue or translation, each interaction effectively becomes a puzzle to be solved, and Slaboshpytskiy is brilliant at using ambiguity to heighten rather than dull the viewer’s perceptions. Even when the meaning of a particular exchange eludes us, a greater sense of narrative comprehension begins to take hold.
  15. The Sisters Brothers
    I enjoyed the film as far is it goes, especially John C. Reilly’s straight-shooter performance, yet I also found myself, at certain points, growing impatient with it.
  16. La Ciénaga
    An atmospheric and cumulatively impressive feature-length debut from Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel.
  17. It's Not Me
    he fatal flaw of “It’s Not Me” is that it looks backward rather than forward, embodying films that have already been made, rather than those yet to be dreamed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jungle Fever
    Performances are all pointed and emotionally edgy. Film feels too long, but it ends powerfully, as the audience exits with the view that both the white and black communities are deeply troubled and have a very long way to go to resolve their differences.
  19. The Real Dirt on Farmer John
    Examines 50-odd years in the life of its eponymous subject -- a most compelling character -- and in doing so literally provides the viewer with food for thought.
  20. Blue Moon
    Like a backstage pass for Broadway buffs, it’s one hell of a show for those in the know, and a sparkling introduction for the uninitiated.
  21. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    Dazzlingly well made and perhaps deliberately less fanciful than the previous entries, this one is played in a mode closer to palpable life-or-death drama than any of the others and is quite effective as such.
  22. Zootopia
    It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story, a la “The Big Lebowski” or “Inherent Vice,” yielding an adult-friendly whodunit with a chipper “you can do it!” message for the cubs.
  23. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    With whip-smart filmmaking that weaves together the physical and digital worlds, Ibelin is powerful cinema that uses its stylistic experimentation for distinctly humanist means, breathing life into a person’s story when it seemed like there were few dimensions left to explore.
  24. Innocence
    This genuine curio maintains its mystery to the end.
  25. Hard Eight
    Four excellent lead performances, vividly evoked ambience and a masterfully sustained mood of quiet desperation mark Sydney as an impressive piece of work.
  26. Lost Boys of Sudan
    A potent, engrossing look at several young refugees from Sudan's disastrous, endless civil war who've been relocated to the U.S.
  27. Best in Show
    A barkingly funny new "mockumentary" that does for those canine pageants what the helmer's 1996 "Waiting for Guffman" did for smalltown theatrics.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Chariots of Fire
    The casting is pin point. Charleson and Cross, neither meaningful to film fans up to now, come over as plausible types rather than stereotypes. John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson contribute sharply as university officials dismayed by the upstart young Jew. Nigel Davenport is very good as the Olympic squad’s titular leader, and Patrick Magee is excellent in a brief turn as a blimpish peer of the realm.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    House of Games
    David Mamet's first trip behind the camera as a director is entertaining good fun, an American film noir with Hitchcockian touches and a few dead bodies along the way. The action unfolds at a steady pace.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pit and the Pendulum
    A physically stylish, imaginatively photographed horror film which, though needlessly corny in many spots, adds up to good exploitation.
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