Variety's Scores

For 17,791 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:
17791 movie reviews
  1. While Palo Alto doesn’t seem to be saying anything new exactly, it boasts a clear and confident voice of its own, and it will be exciting to see where the young Coppola goes from here.
  2. Kelly Reichardt blends her lucid observational approach with a topical-thriller format to engrossing effect in Night Moves.
  3. A gloriously off-the-charts study in perversity.
  4. Joe
    A patiently observed, often unsettlingly violent drama that can’t help but feel overly familiar in some of its particulars, rich in rural texture but low on narrative momentum or surprise.
  5. So tastefully mounted and brilliantly acted that it wears down even the corset-phobic’s innate resistance to such things.
  6. Both the kindest and most damning thing you can say about The Fifth Estate is that it primarily hobbles itself by trying to cram in more context-needy material than any single drama should have to bear.
  7. John Turturro brings sensitivity and intelligence to a subject that could have gone terribly awry in Fading Gigolo.
  8. This is essentially an absorbing and intelligent exploration of queer desire spiced up with thriller elements.
  9. Roughly three parts charming to one part cloying, The F Word attempts and largely succeeds at pulling off a smart, self-aware riff on romantic-comedy conventions while maintaining a core of earnest feeling.
  10. Undeniably impressive as a visual-psychological construct, The Double is ultimately a rigid, one-joke movie that feels hard pressed to sustain any sort of momentum over the course of its 92-minute running time.
  11. Shepard balances a livelier-than-life script with striking, super-saturated images, which makes the film feel bigger than it is.
  12. It’s a measure of Benson’s sure, skillful hand with actors that all the relationships in the movie — husband and wife, parent and child — feel lived-in and true, even when the dialogue strains too hard for the meaningful and poetic.
  13. Devil’s Knot only occasionally feels weightier than a high-end Lifetime original or “Law & Order” episode.
  14. The film manages to educate without ever feeling didactic, and to entertain in the face of what would, to any other character, seem like a grim life sentence.
  15. A film that lays emotions on the line and then drives them home with music.
  16. This exuberantly foul-mouthed and mean-spirited comedy goes somewhat soft in the final stretch but remains an often uproarious model of sharp scripting and spirited acting.
  17. Enough Said may be her cleanest, most polished and broadly funny effort to date; its emotional generosity is undeniable, but so is its tendency to smooth over some of the hard, brittle edges that have been the more interesting hallmarks of Holofcener’s work.
  18. Much like a work of art, the film invites a range of reactions, though it’s far easier to process than the daubs, doodles and other weird works that now hang all over the country.
  19. Though a lot of it is well written and directed and, quite often, funny or poignant, the individual scenes rarely become part of a larger whole.
  20. This two-ton prestige pic won’t win the hearts of highbrow critics or those averse to door-slamming, plate-smashing, top-of-the-lungs histrionics, but as a faithful filmed record of Letts’ play, one could have scarcely hoped for better.
  21. There’s something decidedly old-fashioned — and also dull as ditchwater — about Jonathan Teplitzky’s retelling of events.
  22. Curiously airless, weightless and tonally uncertain, the picture mixes mass murder, dismemberment and rape threats with sappy sentimentality, fish-out-of-water gags and groan-worthy meta-humor, yet very little of it manages to leave any impression.
  23. A modestly scaled and highly pleasurable sequel to Wan’s low-budget 2011 smash that should have genre fans begging for thirds.
  24. Miyazaki is at the peak of his visual craftsmanship here, alternating lush, boldly colored rural vistas with epic, crowded urban canvases, soaring aerial perspectives and test flights both majestic and ill-fated.
  25. A beautifully made rocky-road-to-love comedy in which many obstacles intrude before the right people finally get together, although not in quite the way you might expect.
  26. Simply relating the narrative of Andrew Dosunmu’s seductive immigrant drama Mother of George would do little to convey the film’s stark, poetic power, much less its extraordinary visual and sonic acumen.
  27. This confused and confusing pic delivers no thrills, chills or anything remotely surprising.
  28. Serviceable but uninspired.
  29. While mostly swerving past the pitfall of tastelessness, this sincerely intended account of the last two years of Princess Diana’s life risks an even more perilous roadblock: dullness.
  30. Acquitting herself capably in a lead role that strips her bare in more ways than one, Robin Weigert (HBO’s “Deadwood”) proves worthy of a future in features, whereas first-time writer-director Stacie Passon mainly exposes her background in commercials.

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