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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  1. Like Someone in Love
    As it turns out, it's the first, not the last, word of the title that's key to this droll, elegant but faintly trying study in emotional artifice.
  2. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
    The enterprise would be something to celebrate if the movie itself weren’t so flawed, not just in scholarly terms but in her mania for visualizing seemingly every phone call she made in the hunt for Guy-Blaché material. Sadly, all these problems overwhelm Green’s noteworthy success in tracking down previously unknown documents and photos.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sid and Nancy
    The film’s dialog is extremely rough, the settings sordid, the theme of wasted lives (and talent?) depressing. But Sid and Nancy is a dynamic piece of work, which brings audiences as close as possible to understanding its wayward heroes.
  4. Lady Macbeth
    An impressively stark, narratively ruthless Victorian chamber piece that feels about as modern as its crinolines will permit, William Oldroyd’s pristine debut feature slowly reveals a violent moral ambiguity that needles the mind far longer than its polite period-piece trappings suggest.
  5. Inside Man
    A flashy cast, clever script and vibrant showcasing of New York City as the ultimate melting pot are strong plusses for Spike Lee's most mainstream studio venture.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Though shy on background info, the docu offers a fascinating portrait.
  7. Much Ado About Dying
    Death isn’t an ending in this achingly funny-sad film, just an anxiety passed between loved ones.
  8. Chico & Rita
    Think of Chico and Rita as a test, one that gauges whether your love of Cuban jazz can exceed your threshold for lousy animation -- a real "good tunes/bad toons" quandary.
  9. Something in the Air
    Decidedly not revolutionary cinema, Something in the Air instead quietly demystifies its subject. The tone of the piece is wryly affectionate but never indulgent; the experiences depicted feel emotionally true and lived-in without ever catching the viewer up in a rush of intoxication or excitement.
  10. Dolemite Is My Name
    A total motherf—kin’ blast. ... You might have to go all the way back to the ’80s to find a Murphy performance driven by this much pleasurable funky verve.
  11. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Director James Gunn’s presumptive franchise-starter is overlong, overstuffed and sometimes too eager to please, but the cheeky comic tone keeps things buoyant — as does Chris Pratt’s winning performance as the most blissfully spaced-out space crusader this side of Buckaroo Banzai.
  12. Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    What keeps Ain’t in It for My Health from being a really satisfying portrait isn’t a lack of access, but a lack of intimacy.
  13. Nancy, Please
    For Semans’ conceit of an obsessively narrow world to really work, he needed to have established an initially more expansive milieu.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Birdman of Alcatraz
    Birdman of Alcatraz is not really a prison picture in the traditional and accepted sense of the term. Birdman reverses the formula and brings a new breadth and depth to the form. In telling, with reasonable objectivity but understandably deep compassion the true story of Robert Stroud, it achieves a human dimension way beyond its predecessors.
  15. Lore
    Lore offers a fresh, intimate and mostly successful perspective on Germany's traumatic transition from conqueror nation to occupied state.
  16. We Are Little Zombies
    No pulsating, psychedelic, pop-punk phantasmagoria ought to be as moving and smart as We Are Little Zombies. But Makoto Nagahisa’s explosively ingenious and energetic debut (imagine it as the spiritual offspring of Richard Lester and a Harajuku Girl) holds the high score for visual and narrative invention, as well as boasting [insert gigantic-beating-heart GIF] and braaaains, too.
  17. A Prayer Before Dawn
    At once exhausting and astonishing, this no-holds-barred adaptation of British junkie-turned-pugilist Billy Moore’s Thai prison memoir is a big, bleeding feat of extreme cinema, given elevating human dimension by rising star Joe Cole’s ferociously physical lead performance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    When Harry Met Sally...
    Rob Reiner directs with deftness and sincerity, making the material seem more engaging than it is, at least until the plot machanics begin to unwind and the film starts to seem shapeless.
  19. Jesus' Son
    An intermittently compelling and occasionally hilarious road movie.
  20. In America
    Warm and borderline sentimental...also brimming with true and privileged moments, as well as an optimism in the face of tough circumstances that serves as a corrective to some of the more fashionably grim modern accounts of similar stories.
  21. Morning Sun
    Admirably balanced production that pulls the curtain back slightly on a little-charted period of modern Chinese history.
  22. Corsage
    Full of odd glitches and deliberate flubs in period detail, the film feels like an invitation into a secret conspiracy to reach back through time and, with deft, irreverent 21st-century fingers, loosen the stays on Empress Elisabeth’s corsetry just a little.
  23. The Army of Crime
    Guediguian's lengthy period yarn features a wide array of characters filmed with his habitual simpatico eye, but loses the dramatic thread in too many plots, too little action and not enough originality.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Escape from Alcatraz
    Screenwriter Richard Tuggle and director Don Siegel provide a model of super-efficient filmmaking. From the moment Clint Eastwood walks onto The Rock to the final title card explaining the three escapees were never heard from again, Escape from Alcatraz is relentless in establishing a mood and pace of unrelieved tension.
    • Variety
  25. Dirty Wars
    It takes pains to make the political personal, forging the viewer’s identification with Scahill by making persistent use of his voiceover narration and keeping him oncamera throughout.
  26. Grosse Pointe Blank
    The zeal and good nature of the cast overcome the artificial quality of the situations.
  27. Machuca
    Richly human in focus, the drama steadily cranks up its political and emotional charge.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boyz n the Hood
    Ultra socially responsible, sometimes to the point of playing like a laundry list of difficulties faced specifically by the urban black community.
  29. Red Rocket
    Everything in Red Rocket happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours.
  30. 3:10 to Yuma
    James Mangold's remake walks a fine line in retaining many of the original's qualities while smartly shaking things up a bit.
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