Variety's Scores

For 17,758 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:
17758 movie reviews
  1. For every inventive or simply satisfying rom-com, there are dozens of clumsy, rote ones — French Girl falls among the latter.
  2. “Stormy” shows you what the scandal looks like from inside the sensationalist bubble of fame, and by the end of the film you may be a little bit ashamed of us all.
  3. No small part of the satisfaction of Immaculate comes from witnessing someone find faith in herself.
  4. This true-life tale about perseverance, compassion and second chances cuts right to the quick. While it doesn’t stray from a predictable path, the journey is rarely dull, making our travels and these characters’ travails feel worthy of the big screen.
  5. The Fall Guy is funny, it’s sexy, and it features the boy toy version of “Barbie” MVP Ryan Gosling — which is to say, this time around, he embodies the ultimate action figure.
  6. The movie has three extended action sequences, and I would have been happier if it had eight of them — that is, if it had less pretensions and, like the “Wick” films, was more willing to wear its pulp on its sleeve.
  7. Throughout much of The Ballad of Davy Crockett, it’s hard to shake the impression that an hour’s worth of plot has been padded to feature length.
  8. Undemandingly entertaining, director Mark Bristol’s well-crafted indie can be savored as a heaping helping of palate-cleansing sherbet, best enjoyed between viewings of bigger and louder but by no means better movies. And yes, that’s meant as a compliment.
  9. Little insight is gained from what’s on screen.
  10. Frenetic, repetitious and simplistic, it relies heavily on the stylized spectacle of the song numbers and lyrics to bolster the disappointing drama.
  11. Though its loose, improvisatory feel is suited to the material, most of its humor feels like the first draft of a better film — as though the entire movie consists of what should have been deleted scenes.
  12. Y2K
    It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.
  13. It does little to separate itself, thematically or stylistically, from a now repetitive form of “third culture” storytelling.
  14. Its autobiographical elements are keenly felt, as Campillo grapples intelligently not just with the blind spots of his personal past, but those of his national heritage.
  15. With Adlon there to spot them, Glazer and Buteau trust-fall into their respective parts, potentially unlikable qualities and all. At times, the pair get so filthy, you may not believe your ears. But strength, as the saying goes, comes from the mouth of babes.
  16. The action in Road House is beyond brutal; at moments, it’s vicious. Yet if the movie is far more violent than your average action film, in its slightly crackpot bare-knuckle way it’s also more humane.
  17. Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.
  18. What matters most is whether we believe Brown in the role, and the “Stranger Things” star has no trouble embodying the kind of quick-thinking independent mind it takes to survive such an adventure.
  19. Cena makes it impossible to imagine another person in the part. He’s game to go big, which fits Rod’s frustrated-actor persona, while also having the capacity to play vulnerable and sincere.
  20. Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.
  21. A climactic tilt into a fight for survival remains sharply rendered by Abrantes, but it unfolds towards a forecast destination. The film’s evocative edge is gone.
  22. Outlaw Posse proceeds at something a bit slower than a full gallop, and incorporates more subplots than it can adequately do justice. But it never feels dull, thanks in large measure to the game performances of well-cast supporting players in an ensemble.
  23. The film’s attitude seems to be: Come for the pierogis and goulash, stay for the humanitarian valor. Fair enough, but I wish the movie had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.
  24. The Greatest Love Story Never Told, the third part of her album-cycle media offensive, delivers precisely the revelatory perspective that its counterparts lack.
  25. Far more than a showcase of his talent and productivity, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus lets Sakamoto deliver an elegy, and in the process, an autobiography of his creative journey, as captured through the precision and poetry of director Neo Sora’s camera.
  26. Not unlike its subject, the documentary’s power, beauty and complexity lie in Harper’s use of rhetoric and lyricism.
  27. The Roundup: Punishment minimizes unnecessary originality, while gloriously maximizing the opportunities for Lee to crack wise, or look aggrieved and a little bored, as though he’s just remembered he needs to do laundry, all while his meaty forearms land a flurry of sledgehammer punches so rapid their recipients, often quite literally, do not know what hit them. This, truly, is cinema.
  28. De los Santos Arias sends us on an uncategorizably odd journey down the river of his noodling, needling imagination in a rickety canoe that keeps on capsizing, upended by another sideswiping reference, another jarring change of scene and timeframe or yet another stretch of borderline incomprehensible narration from Pepe himself, a creature who is as surprised as we are that he has suddenly acquired language.
  29. Despite fun trappings . . . the actual conflict in the film boils down to a series of very simplistic binaries: good and evil, sacred and secular, female and male, one and zero, being and nothingness.
  30. If Huppert’s endearingly scatty, offhand performance lends proceedings a veil of comfy familiarity, however, A Traveler’s Needs nonetheless finds the indefatigable Korean auteur at his most puckishly cryptic.

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