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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    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Right Stuff
    The Right Stuff is a humdinger. Full of beauty, intelligence and excitement, this big-scale look at the development of the US space program and its pioneering aviators provides a fresh, entertaining look back at the recent past.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bambi
    Bambi is gem-like in its reflection of the color and movement of sylvan plant and animal life. The transcription of nature in its moments of turbulence and peace heightens the brilliance of the canvas. The story [by Felix Salten] is full of tenderness and the characters tickle the heart.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bringing Up Baby
    Bringing Up Baby is constructed for maximum of laughs, with Ruggles and Catlett adding to the starring team’s zany antics. There is little rhyme or reason to most of the action, but it’s all highly palatable.
  4. Nostalgia for the Light
    Part of the beauty of Nostalgia is that the many metaphors and surprising parallels between the universe, archaeology and Chile’s recent past rise organically from the material.
  5. The Gatekeepers
    While no film from the narrow perspective of Israeli intelligence could purport to offer a thorough view of the conflict, what makes The Gatekeepers ultimately so compelling is its pervasive sense of moral ambiguity.
  6. The Brutalist
    It’s clear that Corbet made this movie because he wants it to mean something big. Whether it does may be in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, The Brutalist lets you feel that you’re seeing a man’s life pass before your eyes. That may be meaning enough.
  7. Before Sunset
    A savvy sequel that should speak to anyone who's let that one great love slip away.
  8. La Chimera
    [Rohrwacher] offers all her earthly and otherworldly preoccupations in scattered, bejeweled fragments, for us to gather and assemble and interpret — and doesn’t much mind if some pieces stay buried.
  9. The Worst Person in the World
    In essaying Julie, a character at once watery and opaque, shaped by everything around her but vocally resistant to influence, Reinsve has a tricky assignment that she nails with remarkable fluidity and grace.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    David Copperfield
    It was almost an adventure to try to bring to the screen the expansively optimistic Micawber, but he lives again in W.C. Fields, who only once yields to his penchant for horseplay.
  11. Saving Private Ryan
    A searingly visceral combat picture, Steven Spielberg’s third World War II drama is arguably second to none as a vivid, realistic and bloody portrait of armed conflict.
  12. Licorice Pizza
    Licorice Pizza delivers a piping-hot, jumbo slice-of-life look at how it felt to grow up on the fringes of the film industry circa 1973.
  13. The Girls in the Band
    Plentiful screen time for three generations of femme jazzers, led by energetic and witty gals from the golden age of big band and swing who unlock a treasure trove of memories, make this a real crowdpleaser.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ben-Hur
    Ben-Hur is a majestic achievement, representing a superb blending of the motion picture arts by master craftsmen.
  15. The Alabama Solution
    The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.
  16. 32 Sounds
    Full to bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity, 32 Sounds is a uniquely mind-expanding plunge into a dimension of the human experience so many of us take for granted, a rare and rewarding sonic journey with the potential to enrich our lives.
  17. Seeds
    Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white, this portrait of a people is affecting and achy.
  18. The Crying Game
    An astonishingly good and daring film that richly develops several intertwined thematic lines, The Crying Game takes giant risks that are stunningly rewarded.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Great Expectations
    Only rabid Dickensians will find fault with the present adaptation, and paradoxically only lovers of Dickens will derive maximum pleasure from the film.
  20. First Cow
    Reichardt specializes in pared-down narratives, sometimes stripping away so much that boredom sets in. First Cow may be lean, but it offers ample room to ruminate in the comparison between its two time periods.
  21. Mad Max: Fury Road
    There is gargantuan excess here, to be sure — and no shortage of madness — but there is also an astonishing level of discipline.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Le Samouraï
    It is intermittently successful.
  23. Winter's Bone
    Raw but utterly enveloping.
  24. The Queen
    Tradition and informality collide -- and mutually benefit -- in the deliciously written and expertly played The Queen.
  25. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    The beautifully modulated script, ripe with moments of liberating humor, builds to a crescendo of indignation, allowing Elkabetz several cathartic outbursts, but they’re no more riveting than the actress’ silences.
  26. I Called Him Morgan
    It’s fitting that Kasper Collin’s excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage.
  27. All of Us Strangers
    The entire journey is not based in logic so much as a kind of emotional intuition, and as such, no two viewers will experience it the same way. What strikes some as manipulative will crack open others, as the film offers a kind of connection that’s all too rare, and maybe even impossible.
  28. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Steven Spielberg's film climaxes in final 35 minutes with an almost ethereal confrontation with life forms from another world; the first 100 minutes, however, are somewhat redundant in exposition and irritating in tone.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Godfather: Part II
    Al Pacino again is outstanding as Michael Corleone, successor to crime family leadership.
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