Variety's Scores

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:
17847 movie reviews
  1. Pizza Movie is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.
  2. With its many references, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice takes a cue from its lead character Nick, who sees the past as something to build on rather than recycle, and ends up delivering quite a good time.
  3. There are times when the film can feel weighted down by its clever framework. Externalizing the steps of deeply internal emotional progress Jimmy and Margot make with one another’s help can occasionally seem like a separate pursuit from satisfying genre expectations when it really does appear there’s a killer on the loose. However, the approach proves fresh more often than not.
  4. What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.
  5. Buoyed by Scott’s level-headed turn — he doesn’t transform into a scream king — Hokum is a proficient horror exploit, which hinges on atmosphere instead of gore, even if its many frightening threads feel disjointed, like rooms in distinctly different hotels.
  6. “Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.
  7. "The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is totally worth seeing, but the film feels like an indirect act of contrition, which may be why it turns into an overdone lament.
  8. It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.
  9. Marc by Sofia isn’t particularly penetrating or eye-opening on Jacobs as an artist, businessman or human being, but it is a pleasant and casually glamorous hang.
  10. Reminders of Him is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.
  11. With a standout central protagonist and an urgent quest that is every parent’s nightmare, the film plays like a thriller but manages to deliver honest and piercing emotions at almost every sequence along the way.
  12. Barbara Forever stands as a confident feature documentary for its filmmaker, yet also as a singular artistic statement after Hammer that should add new admirers for her work.
  13. Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.
  14. Gugu’s World is such a crowd pleaser that it deserves to be seen widely by audiences. They’ll be in for a real treat.
  15. Goher, a screenwriter and producer making her feature debut, proves herself to be a director-writer of uncommon sensitivity.
  16. Midwinter Break does nothing earth-shattering (it remains wee), but the movie touchingly colors in how it might be possible for two people to know each other too well and also not well enough.
  17. Magnificent as Pagnol’s achievements may have been, it’s a pity that the decades-spanning account of one of France’s greatest storytellers didn’t make for a better story unto itself.
  18. At times, the dramatic tension is so strong, “Dreams” could almost be a thriller.
  19. "The Immortal Man” serves as a handsome reminder of what always felt quite cinematic about the series — both in its beefy-but-pulpy storytelling and its robust, well-patinated production values.
  20. It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.
  21. For Worse might be a tiny step among its kind, but it still feels like a leap for its thoughtful auteur, ultimately celebrating new beginnings as an ageless milestone.
  22. Edler and editor Barbara Bascou maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by foregrounding human convictions and frailties amid a surfeit of increasingly ugly rhetoric.
  23. It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.
  24. Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.
  25. Popov delivers a boisterous tale of a woman coming into her own, told with real humor and heart.
  26. Simply put, Scream 7 isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).
  27. In its cool, propulsive procedural tracking of ward activity, Late Shift quite sufficiently makes its point regarding the monumental challenge and value of Floria’s work, and that of thousands like her.
  28. It is a necessary watch because it dares its audience not to look away, forcing the question not only of whose story is told, but whose deaths matter and make headlines.
  29. At once armored, guarded and intensely vulnerable, Hüller’s performance is the human factor here — a volatile, unpredictable element, but one nonetheless attuned to the film’s meticulous shaping and mise-en-scène.
  30. At its core is the kind of cinema that has long sustained the medium at large: the family drama. But it’s presented here with invigorating flourishes that encircle the story within specific moments in time, while also granting it a stirring dramatic transcendence. The scope of its ambition is met, at every turn, by deft control over what is witnessed, and how.

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