Variety's Scores

For 17,835 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:
17835 movie reviews
  1. Virtuosic kick-ass filmmaking can be its own reward, but to paraphrase “Idiocracy,” you still need to care about whose ass it is, and why it’s being kicked.
  2. It’s not that “My Love” feels inherently dubious; it’s that its execution is just a little too smiling-through-tears slick to be swallowed whole.
  3. As directorial debuts go, Amber Tamblyn’s Paint It Black is kind of a mess, but then, so are its characters, which makes the film’s raw, off-kilter style somehow right for the material.
  4. What the film lacks in originality, it makes up for via its star’s naturally glamor-resistant sensibility, giving us an unpolished glimpse into the personal life of a professional runner.
  5. Though The Discovery starts out with a great premise, its mystery dissipates over a somewhat tepid course as the concept ultimately heads in a direction we’ve seen many times before, and depends overmuch on chemistry that fails to materialize between stars Jason Segel and Rooney Mara.
  6. Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.
  7. Psycho Raman often entertains most with its most lurid formal, musical and narrative gambits.
  8. The Foreigner amounts to an above-average but largely by-the-numbers action movie in which Chan does battle with generic thugs and shadowy political forces.
  9. The fact that the films that serve as her models often sported the same flaws doesn’t excuse this fairly poker-faced spoof’s sometimes borderline-torpid pace and disappointing fade-out.
  10. Though relatively conservative in its approach, Lars Kraume’s teleplay-style treatment of a still-touchy subject has the nerve to name names.
  11. Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.
  12. This directing debut by helmer-scribe Shim Sung-bo echoes Bong’s trademark cynical vision of human nature, but the characters lack dimensionality and psychological depth.
  13. This revamp (which ignores several interim direct-to-video sequels Van Damme did not participate in) is a bit shorter, a tad more stylish, and utilizes the same clichés a little less ponderously.
  14. This study of adolescent desire and alienation across class lines takes its time nurturing a tensely ambiguous relationship between its two young female leads — alertly played by newcomers Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis — only to squander a measure of that intrigue on a blunt third-act twist.
  15. For Vinterberg, this uneven but nonetheless absorbing pic at least marks a return to characteristically bristly territory.
  16. The film overstays its welcome by punctuating his story with ill-advised dramatic fantasy sequences that are meant to illustrate the anguish of a gay man in mid-century America, but come across as heavy-handed and mean-spirited.
  17. By turns poignant and plodding, affecting and affected, Ithaca is the sort of frustrating movie that’s just good enough to make you wish it were a lot better.
  18. It comes as little surprise that Howard, a nimble and proficient storyteller in non-fiction and fiction like, hasn’t a natural documentarian’s drive for information: This diverting, brightly assembled boomer nostalgia trip won’t open the eyes of any existing Fab Four fans, however much it pleases their ears.
  19. Though there’s much to savor in the pic’s lavishly distressed visuals and soundscape, its narrative feels increasingly stretched and desultory.
  20. Where “Trainspotting’s” dive into the void was targeted, bristling with snarky anger at a Conservative system that provided few lifelines, “T2” — despite landing in a Britain once more under divisive Tory rule — is mostly content to let its characters alternately indulge and excoriate themselves.
  21. Like Disney’s “True-Life Adventures” of yore, it educates while deploying some likely sleight-of-hand, and doesn’t really invite the kind of methodological scrutiny a more verite-style documentary would.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Viva...is faithful to those cult-adored obscurities in nearly every detail, including their soporific pace. Here, however, sly in-jokes come often enough to make said pacing funny in itself. Performances are slightly stilted or over-the-top in ways true to the original genre.
  22. The screenplay by Chris Dowling and Tyler Poelle is, at best, predictable pulp with a smidgen of religion. Indeed, the characters are so thinly written that they are defined entirely by the actors portraying them. But director Ben Smallbone (brother of the movie’s lead player) is adept at generating suspense.
  23. The screenplay by Matthiessen and co-writers Martin Pieter Zandvliet and Anders Frithiof August is compelling up until the melodramatic, credulity-straining final act, although the characters, apart from Emma, feel underdeveloped.
  24. Deb Shoval’s uneven first feature demonstrates greater assurance in conveying a sense of place (the filmmaker’s native northeastern Pennsylvania) than it does with narrative and character development.
  25. Morelli and tyro scribe Matt Hansen unpack this Charlie Kaufman-lite premise with more cleverness than wit, struggling particularly to find the right racy tone for various erotic interludes — but the part-toon pic’s neatly collapsing structure and pop-art flourishes ensure it’s never dull.
  26. A tougher, wiser film might still have extended the characters a measure of compassion, but it might also have left the audience with a deeper curiosity about where life’s challenges could take them next.
  27. Viewed in a vacuum, it’s hard to fault the movie’s earnestness; Hallström’s canine cinema pedigree (which includes the superior “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale”) shows through; and Rachel Portman’s score is understandably sentimental without going completely saccharine.
  28. The movie gives us bits and pieces of drama, but in a larger way it doesn’t invite us in.
  29. Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.

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