Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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 2.3 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Jazz Singer
    Undoubtedly the best thing Vitaphone has ever put on the screen.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ring
    Hitchcock gets more out of Lilian Hall-Davis than any Continental director and at times makes her reminiscent of Lya de Putti.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
    A Woman of Paris is a serious, sincere effort, with a bang story subtlety of idea-expression.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Intolerance
    Intolerance reflects much credit to the wizard director, for it required no small amount of genuine art to consistently blend actors, horses, monkeys, geese, doves, acrobats and ballets into a composite presentation of a film classic.
  5. Check It
    Despite occasional narrative gaps, Check It is consistently compelling, with a brisk pace and vivid personalities making up for the occasional unanswered question.
  6. Distance
    There’s almost none of the generous, involving humanity (and warm humor) of the previous film, nor any clear take on the personalities in the slackly structured script, largely improvised by the actors.
  7. Solino
    A slick, entertaining, if never very original, study of family and roots.
  8. A Family (Una Famiglia)
    With a surface dusting of realist grit hardly covering for the strained contrivances and one-note characterization propelling its lurid narrative, Riso’s sophomore feature never shakes the artificial, soapy aroma at its core.
  9. The House by the Sea
    The House by the Sea feels like the work of a filmmaker gazing back over his own filmography as one might across a sparkling blue sea, and observing its tides.
  10. I Love You, Daddy
    There’s a better, tighter, more emotionally focused movie hidden somewhere in the sprawl of “I Love You, Daddy.” It’s a movie that’s just as rude, funny, and observant as this one but that doesn’t tie itself in knots trying to “say” something.
  11. Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno
    Another gorgeous three-hour study of young, attractively housed hearts in often turbulent motion, Mektoub is a frequently seductive sensory epic of equivalent ambition, yet despite its woozily pleasurable set pieces, the fraught emotions binding them are less urgent, and the perspective of its protagonist far less immediate.
  12. The Life of Jesus
    An uncompromising portrait of thwarted emotions and small-town tedium, The Life of Jesus is a luminous and disconcerting feature debut from scripter-helmer Bruno Dumont. Pic’s deliberate pace, as it details the actions of adolescents with stifled inner lives, poses a commercial obstacle in markets unfriendly to leisurely fare, but film holds definite rewards for patient viewers and fest auds.
  13. August Winds (Ventos de Agosto)
    Mascaro isn’t interested in psychology and instead simply sketches in thoughts and motivations (Shirley’s boredom, Jeison’s father’s dissatisfaction) without exploring them, much in the manner of an observational documentary. The real connective tissue is the locale.
  14. Our New President
    The relentless flow of manufactured scandal and over-the-top lies in Our New President, all packaged with “authentic” video footage and flash-cut techniques, is sometimes funny, and sometimes depressing.... But mostly it’s scary.
  15. Loveling
    Brazilian director Gustavo Pizzi crafts a warm and wonderfully universal love story that comes across surprisingly unconventional for something so familiar.
  16. Pity
    If Pity doesn’t quite have the shock of the new on its side, then, its sharpest passages nonetheless exert the bracing, mouth-shuddering tang of neat ouzo: You know how it’s going to taste, but it leaves you wincing anyway.
  17. Maktub
    Beyond their obvious talent as a writing team, Amir and Savyon have terrific chemistry — particularly with each other but also with their love interests here.
  18. Hunting Season
    If there’s a slightly pat arc to the tetchy father-son bond driving the narrative that smacks of indie script workshopping, Garagiola’s direction is more impressively watchful and flinty, drawing keen, complex performances from her two well-matched leads.
  19. A Woman Captured
    Though Tuza-Ritter somewhat overeggs the urgent genre stylings: The human story she unfolds is nerve-rattling enough before it’s cranked up to quite this extent.
  20. The Nothing Factory
    Though the intentions are pure, the combination of social-realist austerity and cinematic exuberance never coheres.
  21. Eva
    Eva begins as hot buttered nonsense of the least resistible variety before, echoing the writer’s block that propels its daft narrative, it runs drily out of ideas.
  22. Utoya: July 22
    U – July 22 is designed to be as immersive as it is exhausting, and largely succeeds.
  23. Season of the Devil
    There are some raw, stirring interludes here...but the film’s sheer mass of similar material rather reduces their impact.
  24. Mug
    Szumowska...wants to tackle manifold issues, often unrelated to each other, and her attention feels magpie-ish and unsettled.
  25. The Prayer
    Agnostically observant in its approach to spiritual matters, but more devout in its quiet celebration of human compassion, this film’s most complicated lines of inquiry largely play out on the young, unformed face of its protagonist Thomas — impressively played by breakthrough star Anthony Bajon.
  26. Born and Bred
    Flirting with predictable tragedy but displaying an immense sense of empathy toward its central character, pic is finally an emotionally stunning journey of a father's return to his senses after a horrible accident.
  27. American Woman
    “American Woman” tries to give us a fresh angle on a familiar subject, but the film is listless and desultory. It sketches in the scuzzy power dynamics of these characters but fails, in most cases, to dramatize what made them tick.
  28. Atarrabi & Mikelats
    Atarrabi and Mikelats isn’t a movie for everyone — in fact, by design, it’s probably a movie for very few. Yet it confirms the reverent audacity of Eugène Green’s talent. He’s 73 years young. He still has the chance to make a film that will blow the world away.
  29. My Best Friend
    My Best Friend is a sex farce on steroids, overflowing with energy and excessive curiosity about what the movie camera actually can do.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Madame Bovary
    As a character study, Madame Bovary is interesting to watch, but hard to feel. It is a curiously unemotional account of some rather basic emotions. However, the surface treatment of Vincente Minnelli's direction is slick and attractively presented.
  31. The World of Love
    Expertly balancing its lighter and darker themes while unfolding with almost documentary-like realism, The World of Love rings achingly true at every humorous and heartbreaking turn.
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