I've never had a bad review, but I've had a bunch that I thought were blatantly unfair.
Different managers have different expectations. Sometimes those expectations are not communicated to you ahead of time, and you can totally satisfy one manager and totally disappoint another one in the same department, with the same work. Much depends on what they think you should be doing, not what you actually are doing. If you're a superstar at tasks A and B but lagging at task C, you can expect to get reprimanded for task C even if tasks A and B totally saved the company that year and paid for all of your manager's salary.
I previously tried to deal with this situation by going to my manager and getting a written list of required achievements in order to get the highest possible rating, because I felt many of the factors I was evaluated on were very subjective. I asked for hard numbers. How many times do I have to accomplish a specific thing? How much money do I have to save the organization? How many people do I have to supervise or direct? Exactly how many months ahead of schedule do I need to be? What specific product did I need to deliver by what deadline? In cases where a detail-oriented manager was able to provide that level of specificity, I always got top marks. In cases where a manager refused to provide specifics and told me it was more of a holistic evaluation, I was always found lacking in something that warranted a downgrade.
This frustrating experience is a big part of what motivated my path to early retirement. I've always been a bit of a ladder climber, ticking off the boxes for various successes in life, and my job finally stopped providing me any new ladders to climb. I craved the approval of people I thought were more successful than me, but eventually I realized that within the confines of this job there were no remaining possible professional achievements that would ever be good enough to warrant moving on to something better. Except for the biggest professional accomplishment of all, that is, making and saving so much money that I could choose to work or not to work.
And as soon as I hit that one, and I no longer needed to work for money, I quickly realized that work was unsatisfying without anything else to strive towards. I liked the job well enough, but it wasn't leading me anywhere. I wasn't being encouraged to learn anything new, and every time I branched out into something new and worthy I was quickly scolded for painting outside the lines, and reminded of my specific job rubric and my upcoming progress review. It didn't matter that I was outperforming my supervisor at their job, I was failing at parts of my own job and was therefore a problem employee.
It also didn't help that I was never shy about expressing these frustrations to my bosses. I thought I was clearly communicating my desire to excel, they thought I was whining and complaining about how unfair the system was.
So my advice is to not whine about it, but to go ask for specifics if you want to stay in this job. Find out what exact measures they were unhappy with, and then ask for details on what you need to accomplish in what timeframe and budget in order to meet that criteria. Make sure these expectations align with the performance of your coworkers who were rated the way you want to be rated. Then cooperate with your manager on laying out a plan to accomplish those things, being proactive about your desire to excel.
And lastly, you may just have to accept that the reviews may not be fair. Some workplaces play favorites by gender, by age, by family status, by who can drink the most whiskey or plays the best round of golf, or by who's sleeping with the boss's neice. In those situations, you're not really being evaluated on your job performance so as much as your ability to "fit in with the corporate culture" and success means learning to play the game they're playing, instead of the one you've been playing.