Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. 18 Presents
    Neither emotional enough to pay proper tribute to the true story it captures, nor hokey enough to qualify as “so bad, it’s good,” this is a flaccid, failed attempt at heart-tugging poignancy.
  2. Becoming
    Far more than the memoir, the film presents a manicured version of the way Michelle Obama sees herself — and yet, even such a carefully image-managed impression can be telling, since it diverges so significantly from the way the world perceives her.
  3. Arkansas
    Not everything here works, including some lead casting. But this daylight noir should please viewers willing to roll along with a crime meller more interested in character quirks than action thrills.
  4. Cat in the Wall
    Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova’s smart, bristly film makes some room for oblique everyday poetry in its depiction of immigrants asserting their ground in an unstable country, but is angry enough not to bury its rhetoric in artifice and niceties: Shot through with intimate love-hate knowledge of its South London turf, this is a funny, frustrated yell from a demographic tired of being talked over.
  5. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
    This is a movie that provokes a consistent sense of “Whoa!” By the end, you’ll know with greater clarity than you did before why we’re in the mess we’re in.
  6. Our Mothers
    Notwithstanding a few genuinely affecting moments, Our Mothers never breaks free from being a standard social-issue movie mostly invested in preaching the cause.
  7. Tammy's Always Dying
    Competently crafted, Tammy is too glib to be poignant and too defeatist to be amusing.
  8. All Day and a Night
    All Day and a Night is made with empathy and skill, but it’s as clear-eyed and remorseless as a news report.
  9. Tesnota (Closeness)
    Closeness is a tough-minded, rigorously composed, quite brilliantly acted story of the challenges of everyday religious prejudice and ethnic divides in the bleak heart of Russia’s North Caucasus, and in many ways Balagov’s uncompromising but stylized social realism rewards as much as it punishes.
  10. Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story
    What begins as seemingly another lurid Netflix true-crime excavation emerges as a considerably more affecting testament to the damage wrought by generation upon generation of sexual abuse.
  11. The Flood
    A relatively modest, low-key tale about global refugee issues that are usually portrayed in a higher dramatic key, The Flood makes a somewhat underwhelming first impression. But it gradually overcomes that to arrive at a potent (if still quiet) cumulative impact, bolstered by strong performances from leads Ivanno Jeremiah and Lena Headey.
  12. My Darling Vivian
    Deftly illustrating the testimonies with a treasure trove of material — photos, home movies, personal correspondence — provided by the daughters, the filmmakers have fashioned a narrative that begins as a sweet fairly-tale romance, then gradually turns sour.
  13. The Half of It
    It’s also made fresh by the myriad literary and cinematic references Wu weaves into Aster’s correspondence with “Paul.” With its slightly nerdy, play-on-wordy title, The Half of It alludes to the ancient Greek belief that two-faced humans were separated by the gods, devoting their lives to finding their lost soulmates (if you like the idea, read Plato’s “Symposium,” or check out “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”).
  14. The Wretched
    The film successfully mixes together a lot of things, from the waterfront tourist-town setting of “Jaws” to a general teen fantasy-adventure feel that tempers (without weakening) horror content variably redolent of “It,” “Fright Night” and myriad other predecessors. If originality isn’t a strong suit here, the film’s conviction and polish make that a minor sin.
  15. Blood Quantum
    Despite sufficient gore, there’s more style than bite to this undead opus, which does not excel at scares or action set-pieces.
  16. Stray
    Placing among the upper ranks of films for dog lovers, Stray successfully takes this mission to heart, revealing in the process not only the wholesomeness of humans’ four-legged best friends, but also the soulful voice of an exciting new filmmaker with immense moral queries on her mind.
  17. A Secret Love
    At once a misty-eyed romance and a harsh depiction of the practical and emotional challenges of giving up independent living, A Secret Love isn’t subtle in its Kleenex-clutching tactics — as you’d expect from a project bearing the imprint of TV titan Ryan Murphy — but it’s certainly effective.
  18. Bit
    On the one hand, it’s nice that in 2020 this hook should (despite our current political chaos) seem no big deal. On the other, one does wish this exercise in blase attitudinizing paid a little more attention to suspense, thrills, plot, mythology, and the other basic horror elements it leaves underdeveloped.
  19. Robert the Bruce
    McGowan knows how to invest ire with intelligence, and he has mastered the art of making riding a horse look like a form of strutting. When he’s onscreen, the film vibrates. When you’re watching MacFadyen’s Robert, it swells with nobility and deflates at the same time.
  20. Rising High
    This is a competently crafted movie too shallow to come up with much reason why we should root for these people, and too derivative to make their vertiginous rise and fall more than forgettable formula entertainment.
  21. Planet of the Humans
    There’s nothing particularly elegant about the way Planet of the Humans arrives at that downbeat thesis. Though well-shot and edited, the material here is simply too sprawling to avoid feeling crammed into one ungainly package even narrator Gibbs admits “might seem overwhelming.”
  22. Extraction
    Extraction isn’t the smartest movie you’ll see during lockdown, but it’s liable to be the most kinetic — assuming you have Netflix, since it’s the service’s big tentpole of the season, a dumbed-down bit of blow-uppy distraction that’s every bit as entertaining as the equivalent pyrotechnic offering from a theatrical motion picture studio might have been.
  23. The Willoughbys
    While The Willoughbys might not be very original, its novelty comes through in the delivery and execution, owing to a witty screenplay (by Pearn and Mark Stanleigh) that combines nimble wordplay with highly compressed, well-paced plotting.
  24. The Quarry
    In The Quarry, sin has its wages, but that’s all it has. It’s too dry to offer anything like temptation.
  25. Beastie Boys Story
    Beastie Boys Story is less seamless, but more personal, than a classic documentary. Horovitz and Diamond are infectious company, and the film does a meticulous job of presenting the evolution of Adam Yauch, who was always on the edge of technology (it was his idea to tape-loop “When the Levee Breaks”), as well as postmodern pranksterism.
  26. Butt Boy
    If your sense of humor favors stupid ideas done smartly, however, Butt Boy offers pleasures that aren’t even all that guilt-inducing.
  27. Stardust
    The movie gives us only a small taste of it, but it’s enough to whet your appetite: for a Bowie biopic that captures this cracked actor in all his funhouse-mirror rock ‘n’ roll glory.
  28. Sergio
    Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.
  29. Selah and The Spades
    Writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s cold and stylish debut, commands attention. More specifically, Simone’s Selah seizes it.
  30. Abe
    It’s kind of a tradition among cooking-themed movies (from “Like Water for Chocolate” to “Chocolat”) for a bit of magical embellishment to sneak into the kitchen. Abe is stubbornly earthbound by contrast, but that’s OK. It’s more responsible this way, and young audiences will devour it with no less enthusiasm.
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