Variety's Scores

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For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    Perry Henzell emerges a director with a solid visual flair who can mix action and inchoate rage sans excess to give the film a taut pacing and use the local color and a basically predictable tale with a few new twists.
  2. Introduction
    This tiny little movie makes seemingly effortless work of convincing us that a comment, a story, a film and maybe even a whole filmography can be both important and casual — in Hong’s case, radically casual — at the same time. It makes Introduction as bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.
  3. The Messenger
    Nobody plays angry like Ben Foster, but compassion is something new for the actor, who softens his crazy-man shtick to deliver a complex and moving performance in The Messenger.
  4. Private Fears in Public Places
    Despite a perfect cast of Resnais regulars plus the master's own impeccable crafting, the characters fail to grip, and with approximately 50 short scenes, development comes in fits and starts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Play It Again, Sam
    The placid direction of Herbert Ross keeps Allen in the spotlight for some good laughs, several chuckles and many smiles.
  6. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Picture is particularly well-crafted, managing to avoid the ambulance-chasing tenor that might easily have turned this into a voyeuristic freakshow.
  7. Sin Nombre
    Fukunaga refrains from artificially amping up excitement for its own sake, maintaining an intimate, observational style that offers up a host of things to look at and think about.
  8. Children of Heaven
    Much humor and suspense is wrung from incidents that would be minuscule from anything but a child’s p.o.v., many repeated until they become ingenious running gags.
  9. Marona's Fantastic Tale
    Provides pleasures for all ages, but especially for dog lovers.
  10. Incitement
    While Incitement is a compelling watch, with archival footage neatly woven in, and offers a salutary warning about how easily democracies are endangered, this psychological profile of a political assassin nevertheless falls into a kind of moral trap.
  11. The Nightingale
    Kent’s elemental revenge tale attains a near-mythic grandeur over the course of its arduous, ravishing trek. Some stricter editing wouldn’t go amiss, particularly in a needlessly baggy, to-and-fro finale, but it’s a pretty magnificent mass of movie.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mountain Patrol
    Exquisite to behold and with a stimulating storyline that mixes guns with ecological consciousness, picture is a considerable change of pace for director Lu Chuan.
  13. Grandma
    Though likely to be variously praised and pilloried as a pro-choice film, Weitz’s film is really a movie about choice in both the specific and the abstract — about the choices we make, for good and for ill, and how we come to feel about them through the prism of time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    An unusually fine dramatic story handled excellently from a production standpoint. Built along gangster lines, but from an international crook standpoint, with a lot of melodramatic suspense added.
  15. Presence
    You want the movie to add up to something, but what it adds up to is another half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, only this time he’s the ghost in the machine.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Road Warrior
    Director Miller keeps the pic moving with cyclonic force, photography by Dean Semler is first class, editing is supertight, and Brian May’s music is stirring.
  17. I, Tonya
    It’s a serious blast, with a plot that zigs and zags (but only because it sticks, within reason, to the facts), and a cast of characters who are so eccentrically scuzzy that maybe no one could have dreamed them up.
  18. God Loves Uganda
    Roger Ross Williams’ forceful polemic succeeds to a startling degree, rightly decrying the use of the gospel to incite homophobia, and allowing the most fervent interviewees to damn themselves with their own proselytizing words.
  19. Evolution
    With its linear narrative and clear sense of a protagonist, Evolution is both more beautiful (thanks to gorgeous widescreen cinematography, including stunning underwater and nighttime footage, from “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears” d.p. Manu Dacosse) and accessible than “Innocence,” though the two films clearly function best as the twisted diptych that they are.
  20. Fat Girl
    Despite the disappointing conclusion, it's hard not to be affected by the film, because of the director's frank approach to her subject and the sheer skill with which she tells her story.
  21. Ulee's Gold
    Nunez achieves a rare, and rarely earned, emotional depth that rewards the moderate demands he makes on contemporary viewers' short attention spans.
  22. Grindhouse
    Planet Terror delivers only momentary kicks...while Tarantino's Death Proof is a juicy, delicious treat, its pleasures stem much less from the play with genre conventions than from great dialogue and electric performances.
  23. How to Change the World
    Jerry Rothwell’s film focuses engagingly on the human dynamics, particularly the role of late leader Bob Hunter.
  24. The Price of Freedom
    The Price of Freedom is an absorbing, disturbing, and scrupulously well-researched documentary.
  25. The Pool
    Smith's utterly natural filmmaking there is impressive.
  26. Benda Bilili!
    Audiences will find the group's triumph inspiring.
  27. The Twentieth Century
    The more familiar one is with Canadian history, the funnier it is. But even without prior knowledge of our neighbor to the north, it can be enjoyed for its combination of supreme creativity, jaw-dropping audacity and amusing tongue-in-cheek dialogue.
  28. The War Tapes
    The picture's deepest fascination lies in the soldiers' complicated reactions to the war, perceived simultaneously as funny, horrific, stirring and traumatic.
  29. Maestro
    Maestro can’t help but be dominated by the grandeur of Bernstein’s passion, his outsize flaws, and the tightrope he walked between the need to find the meaning of beauty and the desire to stay fancy free. Yet Cooper and Mulligan make the movie a duet to remember.
  30. Jerry Maguire
    An exceptionally tasty contempo comedic romance.
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