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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  1. 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.
  2. Juliet & Romeo
    Improperly developed, poorly executed and containing no indelible music numbers for us to tap our toes to, this “La La Land”-wannabe take on the Bard’s story serves to frustrate and bore.
  3. Sharp Corner
    Led by an against-type performance from Ben Foster, writer-director Jason Buxton’s languidly paced psychological thriller about domesticity and masculinity may be handsomely mounted but ultimately strikes an all too hollow tone to land its kicker of a final shot.
  4. Marcella
    "Marcella” is most interesting, however, when it peels away the layers of achievement and adulation to show us the brisk, unpretentious woman who surprised nobody more than herself by becoming a culinary icon, and articulates something of the oddly intimate but entirely parasocial relationships we form with our most trusted cookery writers.
  5. Shadow Force
    It takes a certain esprit to pull off this kind of bombastic yet larky star vehicle. Joe Carnahan’s film provides passable diversion for a couple hours, but the fun to be had is limited by uninspired action staging, less-than-sparkling dialogue and a maudlin streak of the “It’s about family!!” type.
  6. Fight or Flight
    Ultimately, it’s extremely doubtful that any of this would work nearly as well as it does without Hartnett at the center of the storm, anchoring the bloody chaos and generating rooting interest with a performance defined by propulsive physicality, industrial-strength enthusiasm and an indefatigable willingness, even eagerness, to repeatedly make himself the butt of the joke.
  7. Nonnas
    Nonnas repeatedly drives home its point about the unifying force of a homecooked meal as an embodiment of community, and even as it overcrowds its narrative pot with too many unnecessary condiments that get lost in the mix, the result is ultimately palatable.
  8. Bullet Train Explosion
    Bullet Train Explosion feels like a blockbuster made for adults — or let’s say, not for a lowest-common-denominator audience — where the priority is throwing challenges and complications at smart characters instead of sparking conflict with cheap narrative shortcuts and bad, even dumb choices.
  9. Neighborhood Watch
    There’s no great effort at building tension, or orchestrating major setpieces. But the narrative moves along at an engaging clip, and there’s a pleasing emotional payoff to the way things ultimately come together in Farley’s screenplay.
  10. Until Dawn
    It’s monotonous and derivative and numbing. It’s a grab bag that traps you in a version of hell, though the problem isn’t that the movie is like a video game. It’s that it’s like a video game that’s got no game.
  11. Queens of Drama
    The only way to enjoy Queens of Drama is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers.
  12. Cheech and Chong's Last Movie
    I’d never spent a minute thinking about how these two put their act together, but the evolution of their career, which took shape with not much more calculation than the comedy bits they often improvised, turns out to be a story at once fascinating and enchanting.
  13. Salvable
    Franklin & Marchetta have made a respectable first feature that is well-realized in every aspect — save the earnest but mediocre basic material it ultimately fails to elevate.
  14. Henry Johnson
    Watching it, you feel the depth of Mamet’s talent. It’s never left him. But you also feel the contempt he now has for the verities of entertainment. He wants to take us out of our comfort zone. The trouble is that he’s created his own rarefied discomfort zone of self-indulgence posing as importance.
  15. The Death of Snow White
    It’s a sort of fan-film magnum opus, impressively ambitious on limited means (purportedly around 1/200th the estimated Disney budget) yet still not quite ready for prime time, feeling more like an especially elaborate amateur cosplay than a honed vision with its own distinctive style and ideas.
  16. Sketch
    With his stellar indie family adventure Sketch, commercials director Seth Worley has come up with a creative — and highly teachable — concept for his feature debut, using imaginative visual effects to impart a valuable lesson about dealing with grief and other strong feelings.
  17. A Desert
    A Desert aims for the enigmatic, supernaturally-tinged mystery of something like Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” but in the end lacks the tension and atmosphere to pull that tricky gambit off.
  18. Rust
    It’s a handsome and watchable indie art Western, set in 1882, that turns into a sentimental cross-generational buddy film. Yet I can’t say that the movie, in the end, is especially good. It’s got a bare-bones plot, it lopes along more than it takes wing, and for no good reason it’s two hours and 19 minutes long.
  19. Thunderbolts*
    As with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, what works here is the uneasy tension within a team that comes together out of necessity, rather than any natural sense of affinity.
  20. Drop Dead City
    Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.
  21. The Comeback Trail
    Some people just don’t have the patience for lead performances that are as broad as a “Yellowstone” barn, and as hammy as a butcher shop specialty. I laughed unashamedly throughout the entire film. But your mileage may vary.
  22. Havoc
    The cheesy screenplay, shallow characters and wince-worthy acting (from all but A-listers Hardy, Whitaker and Olyphant) suggest that Evans might be better suited to specializing in the second unit or action sequences on a major franchise, rather than writing and directing a quasi-dramatic feature.
  23. Blue Sun Palace
    More akin to European art films than to American indies, “Palace” prioritizes mood over plot. Tsang allows her experienced actors plenty of breathing space to convey the melancholy of their existence in situations where dreams are more likely to be deferred than to come true, but are necessary nevertheless.
  24. Friendship
    Robinson’s brand of middle-class psycho surrealism works perfectly in bite-size sketch-comedy doses. Stretched out to feature length, a character like Craig simply stops making sense.
  25. Dead Mail
    Set in the 1980s Midwest with a mix of the drab and the eccentric, Dead Mail is an effective, twisty thriller with a singular edge of off-kilter black comedy.
  26. Summer of 69
    It’s a big step backward from the likes of “Anora” in terms of respecting sex workers, but at least it scores as many laughs.
  27. Ghost Trail
    Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis.
  28. Sneaks
    Though the story wears down its tread, strong performances elevate the material. Mackie, Fishburne, Lawrence, Bailey and David all pour a ton of heart into their vocal dynamics, allowing nuanced vulnerability and a bubbly buoyancy to shine through, keeping us tethered to the emotional pull of the picture.
  29. Sacramento
    Angarano has the showpiece role, but it’s Cera who proves himself, more than ever, to be a major actor.
  30. The Teacher
    What the characters can or cannot do in response, and the catharsis they’re prevented from attaining, are both key parts of their story, and of life in the West Bank at large — a reality Nabulsi conveys in stark, realistic hues, despite her first-feature growing pains.
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