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. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    [Corbijn's] creation of this delightful doc as an acolyte, if hardly copycat, will be a boon for an audience that grew up pondering the mysteries of the twisted monolith on Zeppelin’s “Presence” cover; LP porn, if we can call it that, could come to no finer culmination.
  2. The Iron Ministry
    While cerebral in intent and planning, the pic doesn’t feel overly straitjacketed by theory and offers unexpected moments of amusement.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Witness for the Prosecution
    A courtroom meller played engagingly and building evenly to a surprising and arousing, albeit tricked-up, climax, Witness for the Prosecution has been transferred to the screen (from the Agatha Christie click play) with competence.
  4. (500) Days of Summer
    Boy gets girl and boy loses girl in convoluted, sometimes cloying but ultimately winning fashion in 500 Days of Summer.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    With Alfred Hitchcock pulling the suspense strings, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a good thriller.
  6. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    Brings a fresh perspective to age-old human dilemmas.
  7. Spencer
    Spencer is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance.
  8. The Image Book
    Our world, in The Image Book, has finally caught up to Jean-Luc Godard’s doom-laden dream of it. He seems to be saying that we all have a choice: to change it, or to sit back in our TV armchairs and watch.
  9. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Director Alan Rudolph achieves fresh as well as humorous insights into family life and strategies for keeping a damaged relationship from expiring. But a tiresome final act proves trying.
  10. The Revenant
    In aiming to steer his dark, fatalistic vision toward something genuinely contemplative and cathartic, Inarritu has managed to appropriate the beauty of Malick’s filmmaking but none of its sublimity — another word for which might be humility. There is plenty of amazement here, to be sure, but all too little in the way of grace.
  11. Natasha
    A pair of rich central performances, an authentic eye for its second-generation immigrant milieu and a novelist’s comfort with ambiguity allow Natasha to modestly transcend its overpopulated genre.
  12. The Kingmaker
    Marcos’ print-the-legend philosophy has particular resonance in a post-truth world, although such sinister undertones sneak up on audiences in a movie that begins, innocently enough, as the latest of Greenfield’s astonishing portraits of wealth run amok.
  13. Incredible But True
    Incredible but True is a fun little trinket that unmistakably comes from Dupieux’s far-out perspective, but if you find yourself chiming more than usual with its quixotic quandaries, who’s to say whether that’s because Dupieux has mellowed, or because the past couple of years have driven us all so nuts that now we’re meeting him halfway.
  14. Cassandro
    In Williams’ hands, the laughs never come at Saúl’s expense, ridiculous as this arena might seem to audiences. Luchadores are entertainers, first and foremost, and “Cassandro” celebrates that while taking Armendáriz’s achievements seriously.
  15. Night Across the Street
    The valedictory sentiments at the heart of this mysterious experiment are conveyed with characteristically wry wit and great generosity of spirit.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    House Party
    House Party captures contemporary black teen culture in a way that’s fresh, commercial and very catchy.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Music Man
    Allowing something of slowness at the very start and the necessities of establishing the musical way of telling a story, plus the atmosphere of Iowa in 1912, that's about the only criticism of an otherwise building, punching, handsomely dressed and ultimately endearing super-musical.
  18. No Sudden Move
    No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.
  19. Safe
    The audaciousness that marked Todd Haynes’ earlier work has been supplanted by self-important preachiness in Safe.
  20. Stronger
    Green looks for small but meaningful ways to complicate and deepen the well-trod story he’s telling, and by the end, those complications help the film earn its uplift.
  21. Smoke Signals
    Breezy, often self-mocking tone proves fresh and invigorating.
  22. The Miners' Hymns
    Morrison sometimes slows down imagery to a hypnotic, frame-by-frame trance-like state; one can imagine townsfolk scrutinizing the faces of long-dead relatives magically raised.
  23. Nostalgia
    Even in its more generic stretches, Martone’s latest feels both inviting and convincingly inhabited, a siren song to the past that confronts us with a violent, unromantic present, paved under with the same old, blood-washed cobblestones.
  24. Horses of God
    Ultimately, the training and suicide mission are less interesting to Ayouch than the initial forming of character, and the fundamentalist cell members are only stock figures; what’s important is the group’s sense of disenfranchisement and the lure of inner peace.
  25. September 5
    In this case, revisiting it half a century later, knowing what happened doesn’t preclude us from wanting to get a better understanding of the specifics. But this movie’s insights are limited to the newsroom.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
    Crass, broad, irreverent, wacky fun - and absolutely hilarious from beginning to end.
  27. At Eternity's Gate
    Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy.
  28. The Dance of Reality
    At more than two hours, The Dance of Reality unquestionably has its longueurs, but on balance it is alive with enough images and ideas for several movies — as if Jodorowsky were afraid he might have to wait 20 more years before making another.
  29. In the Heat of the Night
    An excellent Sidney Poitier performance, and an outstanding one by Rod Steiger, overcome some noteworthy flaws to make In The Heat of the Night an absorbing contemporary murder drama, set in the deep, red-necked South.
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