Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. Left-Handed Girl
    Left-Handed Girl is an assured and lovely portrait of difficult motherhood and painful daughterhood, but it’s perhaps most entrancing for its turning-kaleidoscope-view of the director’s native city, where the characters are the bouncing beads, but Taipei is the glitter and the dazzle.
  2. Lavender Men
    Lavender Men is a heady and meta-theatrical excavation of Lincoln’s long-rumored gay affair that’s wildly ambitious if a tad overstuffed.
  3. Deaf President Now!
    The propulsive nonfiction story feels as inspirational as any scripted feature, reuniting the four Gallaudet grads who organized the movement to describe events in their own words — words of passion, dynamically signed on-screen and spoken aloud by unseen actors.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Paradine Case
    The Paradine Case offers two hours and 11 minutes of high dramatics.
  5. The Secret Agent
    Mendonça crams the film with vivid time-capsule details.
  6. Urchin
    The film makes no claims to represent an entire disenfranchised demographic, but there’s resonant human texture and political feeling in its close-up individual portrait.
  7. Dossier 137
    Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, “Case 137” keeps its mind strictly on the job.
  8. Renoir
    None of this would work at all if it weren’t pinned to the unselfconscious gaze of Fuki (delightful newcomer Yui Suzuki), 11 years old and already an original.
  9. Pillion
    Laced with a wry sense of humor, Pillion manages to be both understated and explicit in the way Lighton presents practically everything that happens in Colin and Ray’s unconventional relationship.
  10. It Was Just an Accident
    While the simple premise recalls certain post-WWII dramas in which survivors recognize the Nazi culprits who once terrorized them, the film’s chilling last scene feels like a call to action.
  11. Sentimental Value
    While not as stylistically radical as Trier’s last film, “The Worst Person in the World,” this layered family-centric drama (which was also written by Eskil Vogt) shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you’d think that cinema would have exhausted by now.
  12. Romería
    Simón’s sweetly sorrowful ode to lost family imagines what might have been, while acknowledging that not all memories can be passed down between generations — some die deliciously with us.
  13. The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo
    Whether the love it features on screen is simple or complex, and whether it’s romantic, platonic or maternal, the film lands on tremendously moving moments that stir the soul by scrutinizing the dueling cruelty and tenderness found within its characters.
  14. The President's Cake
    While The President’s Cake mostly plays like a genial fairy tale, with superbly balanced humor and drama, Hadi's still unsparing about the ills of patriarchal society.
  15. A Useful Ghost
    A Useful Ghost is an entertaining and moving – if also somewhat sprawling – fable of love and loss that isn’t quite like anything you’ve seen before.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strauss' Great Waltz
    The Great Waltz is a field day for music lovers plus elegant entertainment. Producers were nearly two years on this film, but the extra effort shows in the nicety with which its many component parts fit together. It is Luise Rainer who makes the film.
  17. Sovereign
    The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.
  18. KPop Demon Hunters
    Because the nimble, genre-hopping movie is set in the world of K-pop, it may not even occur to fans that they’re watching a musical — although it’s kind of hard to deny as you catch yourself singing along.
  19. The Baltimorons
    Duplass is careful to make a film where it’s up to the people involved to make Christmas a special occasion, rather than any relying on the genre’s traditional trappings. In that regard, The Baltimorons has something to celebrate.
  20. The Map That Leads to You
    Hallström’s tender touch and assured knack for leading with character-driven narrative action give the proceedings a grounded sense of naturalism. He and his ensemble finesse the more inevitable aspects so they ring as resonant and don’t feel expected.
  21. The Testament of Ann Lee
    The Testament of Ann Lee is rich in agnostic questioning and bemused human interest, but at such radiant peaks, Fastvold makes believers of us all.
  22. GOAT
    In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.
  23. Mother of Flies
    It’s a densely textured, quite gorgeous dive into folkloric witchiness that avoids nearly all anticipated clichés, finally arriving at something not so much terrifying as unexpectedly poignant.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mogambo
    The lure of the jungle and romance get a sizzling workout in Mogambo and it's a socko package of entertainment, crammed with sexy two-fisted adventure.
  25. Late Shift
    In its cool, propulsive procedural tracking of ward activity, Late Shift quite sufficiently makes its point regarding the monumental challenge and value of Floria’s work, and that of thousands like her.
  26. Before/After
    Though the film is mostly scripted fiction, its leads are two non-professional actors undergoing hair transplant surgery themselves, and the procedures and transformations depicted on screen are their own. That lends proceedings a bracing, candid authenticity, as well as unusually heightened human stakes — the anxieties shown at all stages of the process here are real.
  27. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
    Hassona is both fashionable and immensely talented (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the more we see of her over the movie’s 110 minutes, the more devastating it becomes that we will never meet her, or never truly get to know her.
  28. Arco
    Arco looks at once fantastical and recognizable, removed just enough from what we know in our present, but grounded on familiar, childlike amazement.
  29. Christy
    It’s a wrenching portrait of abuse, enabling, gaslighting, and just how far domestic violence can go. Yet part of the force of it is that Michôd has not contorted Christy Martin’s life into some false arc; what was going on beneath her triumph is portrayed with a desperate and idiosyncratic honesty.
  30. Cover-Up
    As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.
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