Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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  1. Get Out
    Blending race-savvy satire with horror to especially potent effect, this bombshell social critique from first-time director Jordan Peele proves positively fearless — which is not at all the same thing as scareless.
  2. Network
    Sidney Lumet’s direction is outstanding.
  3. I Am Not Your Negro
    Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro is the rare movie that might be called a spiritual documentary.
  4. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    McQuarrie clearly believes in creating coherent set pieces: His combat scenes are tense, muscular, and clean, shot and edited in such a way that the spatial geography makes sense. He places audiences just over Cruise’s shoulder, or staring into the actor’s face as he grimaces with exertion.
  5. A Star Is Born
    Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Beauty and the Beast
    A lovely film that ranks with the best of Disney’s animated classics, Beauty and the Beast is a tale freshly retold.
  7. Contemporary Color
    It’s not every documentary that can so exhilaratingly make us feel a part of something so special.
  8. Detroit
    Bigelow, working from a script by her regular collaborator Mark Boal (it’s their first film since “Zero Dark Thirty”), has created a turbulent, live-wire panorama of race in America that feels like it’s all unfolding in the moment, and that’s its power. We’re not watching tidy, well-meaning lessons — we’re watching people driven, by an impossible situation, to act out who they really are.
  9. Call Me by Your Name
    Even as he beguiles us with mystery, Guadagnino recreates Elio’s life-changing summer with such intensity that we might as well be experiencing it first-hand. It’s a rare gift that earns him a place in the pantheon alongside such masters of sensuality as Pedro Amodóvar and François Ozon, while putting “Call Me by Your Name” on par with the best of their work.
  10. A Hidden Life
    Whether or not he is specifically referring to the present day, its demagogues, and the way certain evangelicals have once again sold out their core values for political advantage, “A Hidden Life” feels stunningly relevant as it thrusts this problem into the light.
  11. Thoroughbreds
    Thoroughbreds doesn’t look or sound anything like other teen-centric movies, but this is hardly a surface-only character study.
  12. White Sun
    Skillfully blending intimate human drama with sharp political observations, Deepak Rauniyar’s outstanding second feature sends a powerful message about the need for tolerance if Nepal is to overcome divisions that remain long after the Comprehensive Peace Accord of 2006
  13. First Man
    After seeing First Man, it’s doubtful you’ll think about space flight, or Armstrong’s historic walk, in quite the same way. You’ll know more deeply how it happened, what it meant and what it was, and why its mystery — more than ever — still lingers.
  14. The Work
    When the participants convulse and cry, the film’s empathetic connection is so direct and so strong, audiences may be driven to weep as well.
  15. Heal the Living
    It’s Quillévéré’s soaring visual and sonic acumen (with an assist from composer Alexandre Desplat, here in matchless form) that suffuses a potentially familiar hospital weeper with true grace.
  16. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    Farrell and Kidman are astonishingly gifted at playing the subtext of every scene.
  17. The Shape of Water
    Perhaps the greatest of The Shape of Water’s many surprises is how extravagantly romantic it is, driven throughout by an all-conquering belief in soulmates as lifelines.
  18. Good Time
    These restlessly independent auteurs have passed the genre-foray test with flying neon colors, at no cost or compromise to their abrasively humane worldview.
  19. You Were Never Really Here
    Ramsay has made more sensually rapturous films, but this may be her most formally exacting: No shot or cut here is idle or extraneous.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Gone with the Wind
    One of the truly great films, destined for record-breaking box office business everywhere. The lavishness of its production, the consummate care and skill which went into its making, the assemblage of its fine cast and expert technical staff combine in presenting a theatrical attraction completely justifying the princely investment of $3,900,000.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Casablanca
    Despite the fact that the fortunate turn or military events has removed the city of Casablanca, in French Morocco, from the Vichyfrance sphere and has thus in one respect dated the film, the combination of fine performances, engrossing story and neat direction make that easily forgotten. Film should be a solid moneymaker everywhere.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Left Foot
    That it features a brilliant performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and a fine supporting cast lifts it from mildly sentimental to excellent.
  23. Columbus
    The hypnotically paced drama carried by the serendipitous odd-couple pairing of John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson is lovely and tender, marking Kogonada as an auteur to watch.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Color of Money
    A keenly observed and immaculately crafted vision of the raw side of life. Pic has a distinctive pulse of its own with exceptional performances by Paul Newman and Tom Cruise.
    • Variety
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rosemary's Baby
    Several exhilarating milestones are achieved in Rosemary's Baby, an excellent film version of Ira Levin's diabolical chiller novel. Writer-director Roman Polanski has triumphed in his first US-made pic. The film holds attention without explicit violence or gore.
  26. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
    Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is an outstanding Stanley Kramer production, superior in almost every imaginable way, which examines its subject matter with perception, depth, insight, humor and feeling.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Spartacus
    There is solid dramatic substance, purposeful and intriguingly contrasted character portrayals and, let's come right out with it, sheer pictorial poetry that is sweeping and savage, intimate and lusty, tender and bitter sweet.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bad News Bears
    The Bad News Bears is an extremely funny adult-child comedy film. Walter Matthau stars to perfection as a bumbling baseball coach in the sharp production about the foibles and follies of little-league athletics.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Planet of the Apes
    Planet of the Apes is an amazing film. A political-sociological allegory, cast in the mold of futuristic science-fiction, it is an intriguing blend of chilling satire, a sometimes ludicrous juxtaposition of human and ape mores, optimism and pessimism.
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