Variety's Scores

For 17,832 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:
17832 movie reviews
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Reivers is a nice bawdy film, sort of Walt Disney with an adult rating.
  1. For anyone who’s forgotten the extent of van Houten’s skill set, actress-turned-filmmaker Halina Reijn’s impressive, icily disciplined debut feature Instinct provides a fearsome reminder.
  2. Alternating a thinly fictionalised portrait of the artist isolating at his family’s country home with fully autobiographical narration by the director himself, this mildly amusing but vastly indulgent bagatelle feels a tardy entry in the first wave of lockdown cinema — too late to feel fresh, but still too soon to have accumulated much meaningful perspective on an experience we all remember too well.
  3. In almost every respect, this sequel is an improvement on its 2016 predecessor: Sharper, grosser, more narratively coherent and funnier overall, with a few welcome new additions. It’s a film willing to throw everything — jokes, references, heads, blood, guts and even a little bit of vomit — against the wall, rarely concerned about how much of it sticks.
  4. I’d love to see Affleck star in a film about an addict with nothing to explain his addiction but his own flawed, desperate, hungry soul. That’s a movie that could speak to us — the way that Ben Affleck’s real story already does — far more than this modestly well-made Sunday-school lesson.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Director Kagan and writer Gordon do wonders with the poignant material. Despite the obvious ethnic slant this is a picture which communicates universally.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For the most part, pic is about as engaging as what's found on Saturday morning TV.
    • Variety
  5. The director’s most rewarding decision: simply trusting McShane to summon the mood.
  6. We should be grateful that it exists, if only because it affords a long-overdue leading role to Kelly Macdonald.
  7. A sleekly unnerving thriller.
  8. Bryan Cranston gives the most authentic and lived-in performance as an agent pretending to be a criminal that I have ever seen.
  9. As spirited and irresistible as the college a cappella craze it celebrates, Pitch Perfect is a cheeky delight.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sea of Love is a suspenseful film noir boasting a superlative performance by Al Pacino as a burned-out Gotham cop. Handsome production benefits from a witty screenplay limning the bittersweet tale of a 20-year veteran NYC cop assigned to a case tracking down the serial killer of men who've made dates through the personal columns.
    • Variety
  10. Rather than simply preaching to you-know-whom, director David Charles Rodrigues ... succeeds in humanizing the individuals on both sides.
  11. The catchy title’s a clever way of saying “It gets better,” and in the end, that feels as true for Winona as it does for the high-potential writer-director who created her.
  12. Even as the twists and turns get ever more preposterous . . . Dale’s direction and Fox’s commitment go a long way toward making Till Death a glossy, entertaining lark. Just maybe not one with anything of substance to say about marriage as its cheeky title suggests.
  13. Paul Crowder’s Imax documentary feels both more honest than most in its intentions and more effective in highlighting that organization’s excellence.
  14. It’s a rapturous piece of nostalgia — a film that devotes itself, in every madly obsessive frame, to making you feel happy in the guileless way a movie still could back in 1964.
  15. The movie largely benefits from Abu-Assad’s natural talent for building suspense and rhythm; if the story’s elisions and fabrications occasionally feel too tidy, it more than earns its emotional impact on the strength of its excellent young cast.
  16. It jams too many villains, themes and gags into a brief run time. Many of its bigger ideas focused on therapeutic conflict resolution fail to coalesce, leading to an overall tonal imbalance.
  17. An involving family drama about a young boy's dreams and personal loss, Hard Goodbyes: My Father brings a light touch -- and a full measure of unaffected charm -- to potentially downbeat material.
  18. In The Fairy, Abel, Gordon and Romy have all of Le Havre as their playground. And now that the they've established the ideal format for their brand of comicbook-style humor, one can't help but wish they show the good sense to keep it at this level going forward.
  19. Despite the nostalgic glow that prettily coddles the film, there is a delectably unsubtle passing-the-baton theme that runs through the richly populated affair.
  20. Though set in present-day Montreal, this tender romance unfolds like an episode from another century, paying the sort of careful attention to social boundaries you’d expect to find in a classic forbidden-love novel.
  21. You can’t help feeling that something terrible will happen at any moment, unless something worse happens first.
  22. Daniel Kokotajlo‘s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    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.
  23. Vivo is strategically contrived to hit audiences’ pleasure spots, blending a grown-up-friendly story of a Latin-music couple whose careers took them in separate directions with all the hyper-caffeinated comedy action the kiddos expect from the medium. Plus, the songs build on one another, hooking in your head and snowballing as the movie develops.
  24. Goes down far easier than, say, an all-natural, fiber-enriched peanut butter sandwich without a glass of soy milk. It's that rare doc (these days) that could go theatrical, largely because it's a film about a couple, more than a movement.
  25. A sturdy runaway-train thriller that flaunts its influences but chugs up a decent amount of suspense.

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