Variety's Scores

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For 17,807 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: 9,148 out of 17807
  2. Mixed: 7,022 out of 17807
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17807
17807 movie reviews
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What's Up, Doc?
    The script and cast are excellent; the direction and comedy staging are outstanding; and there are literally reels of pure, unadulterated and sustained laughs.
  2. Three Monkeys
    But gripping as the film often is, its unrelenting doom and gloom offers fewer lasting rewards.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Long Walk Home
    An effectively mounted drama about the human impact of changing times on two families, with sturdy performances by Sissy Spacek as an uppercrust white housewife and Whoopi Goldberg as her maid.
  4. Tuner
    A laid-back rom-com crossed with a low-key crime thriller, combined with something more serious — unafraid to ask existential questions about overcoming a handicap that directly impacts one’s art — Tuner feels like the discovery of the Telluride Film Festival.
  5. Zootopia 2
    These movies are comedies first and crime-film homages second, but it’s their tertiary value as social commentary that makes the franchise so indispensable: Behind the laughs are teachable moments.
  6. Bowfinger
    So lunatic that it creates as much puzzled disbelief as it does carefree delight.
  7. One Of Them Days
    Palmer, though she has the “straight” role, is so witty in her attack that she commands the screen. And SZA, in her film debut, simply sizzles. She’s a volcano of camp fury. The director, Lawrence Lamont, is a helmer of hip-hop videos making his feature-film directing debut, and while it might seem his main task is to keep the comedy crackling, the film’s secret weapon is the visual and rhythmic flow he imparts to it.
  8. The Adults
    The Adults is most moving in its understanding of the trivial quips, asides and slight, splintered anecdotes that are sometimes all that remains between adult relatives who once shared richer connective tissue.
  9. The New World
    Malick's exalted visuals and isolated metaphysical epiphanies are ill-supported by a muddled, lurching narrative, resulting in a sprawling, unfocused account of an epochal historical moment.
  10. Fire Will Come
    You know exactly what climax is coming in Oliver Laxe’s rustically beautiful rural parable, but its dreamy, mesmeric power lies in the waiting.
  11. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    Crude, sophomorically homophobic but frequently funny, pic also overstays its welcome a bit and indulges in some juvenile excesses. All told, though, The 40 Year Old Virgin delivers enough belly laughs.
  12. In This Corner of the World
    Adapting Fumiyo Kono’s 2007 manga of the same title, director Sunao Katabuchi captures the manifold experiences of a housewife during WWII with beguiling intimacy and appealing hand-drawn illustration.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bull Durham
    A fanciful and funny bush league sports story where the only foul ball is its overuse of locker-room dialog.
  14. Herman's House
    A portrait of an invisible man, Herman's House is a raised voice in the constitutional debate over solitary confinement.
  15. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    The movie plays like a career summation in which the 68-year-old writer-director has simply run out new ideas.
  16. The Cats of Mirikitani
    Always surprising documentary makes excellent use of its many serendipidities.
  17. Dark Waters
    What gives Dark Waters its singular texture is that Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”), who has never made a drama remotely like this, colors in the scenario with an underlying dimension of personalized obsession.
  18. Attenberg
    A captivating and vaguely disturbing experience.
  19. Hello, Bookstore
    Hello, Bookstore is a salute to the sacramental qualities of art that are threaded through everyday life.
  20. The Original Kings of Comedy
    Consistently hilarious.
  21. Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    Superbly crafted documentary is strong enough to make believers out of non-metalheads, and inside enough to get the devil's-horns salute from the most diehard followers.
  22. Shattered Glass
    Credibly and absorbingly relates the tale of journalistic fraud perpetrated by young writer Stephen Glass at the New Republic five years back.
  23. A Man of His Time
    Though it can be genuinely wearying and not a little depressing to spend 148 minutes in the company of a man so deeply wrongheaded and in such maddening self-denial (even Paulette, complicit in her own way in her husband’s ambition will eventually insist that he stops calling her his little lady) it is certainly instructive and horribly relevant.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    A simple, low-budget, contempo dramedy -- with plenty of clever plot reversals.
  25. War of the Worlds
    A gritty, intense and supremely accomplished sci-fier.
  26. In My Mother's Skin
    “In My Mother’s Skin” finds a rare sweet spot between story-book nightmare and historical allegory.
  27. I Believe in Unicorns
    A sensitively observed and arrestingly impressionistic drama that feels at once deeply personal and easily accessible.
  28. Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang
    “Sky Ladder” may not fully penetrate the mystery of Cai’s artistic identity, but it ends with the poignant suggestion that the most significant accomplishments often stem from the simplest, most personal impulse.
  29. Love & Basketball
    The pic is so well directed and lead performance by Sanaa Lathan so charismatic that audiences will overlook the script's flaws and root for the central duo.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Breaker Morant
    As a sheer exercise in manipulation, it approaches the masterful and is extremely effective.
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