Variety's Scores

For 17,771 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 2.5 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:
17771 movie reviews
  1. The documentary captures how Shatner, as he began to make a career out of performing his public legend, merged his very identity with that of the hambone thespian inside him.
  2. Hooray! A romantic comedy that revives the screwball formula where two people talk themselves silly — and we only had to go to the end of the solar system to make it happen.
  3. Hopelessly shallow Down Low is still light-years ahead of mainstream movies (including last year’s “Bros”) as debuting feature director Rightor Doyle delivers what an entire contingent of queer audiences have been asking for all their lives: namely, a comedy that’s as raunchy and inappropriate as the jokes they make among themselves.
  4. To be sure, the fans will appreciate it a lot more than casual viewers. But it’s also an irresistible hoot for anyone with fond memories of star-studded 1970s musical/variety TV specials.
  5. Inside has an intriguing premise and an actor who makes whatever’s thrown at him intriguingly watchable. What it lacks is sufficient sense of who this character is, and a resonant enough narrative to justify being locked up together.
  6. Short, sweet and sparky, Raine Allen-Miller's immensely likable debut doesn't reinvent the wheel, but instant chemistry between stars Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson keeps it spinning.
  7. A distant cousin to “Zodiac,” with splashes of “Seven” mixed into its homages, this thriller falls short of its influences yet carves out a small space of its own. It makes a searing indictment of the sloppy, sexism-laced police work that might’ve resolved the case, and pays tribute to the two women who broke the investigation wide open.
  8. In keeping with “Evil Dead” tradition, there’s also an abundance of bloody mayhem that increases exponentially until a hugely satisfying and splatterific climax.
  9. Tapping into late-1980s nostalgia — including the launch of the handheld Game Boy console — the movie doubles as a nifty history lesson, reminding audiences of just how tense things were between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.
  10. The origin story was the charm, but the sequel is hobbled by a less buoyant hero and bland villains.
  11. With a twist-packed plot to match its labyrinthine location, Zhang’s fast-paced film motors along nicely as an engaging “Knives Out”-style whodunnit before stumbling a little in the protracted final act.
  12. The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.
  13. Bottoms is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect.
  14. Director Anthony Nardolillo and writer Michael Corcoran’s film strikes a pose of sly ingeniousness throughout that is uncorroborated by any actual cleverness, surprise, wit, tension, thrills or much else you’d hope for in a high-end-heist tale.
  15. Inspiration and entertainment can make corny bedfellows, but Longoria pulls it off, to the extent that a moment of faith when Richard and Judy pray doesn’t feel preachy, but a reflection of their priorities.
  16. As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.
  17. It’s at once cheesy and charming, synthetic and spectacular, cozily derivative and rambunctiously inventive, a processed piece of junk-culture joy that, by the end, may bring a tear to your eye.
  18. Chang Can Dunk doesn’t go the way you’d expect, and that’s a good thing.
  19. 65
    Anchored by another in a series of committed performances from Adam Driver and an ensemble of suitably menacing prehistoric beasts that chase him for just over 90 minutes, Beck and Woods’ adventure delivers requisite thrills even if its creativity seems stuck in the distant cinematic past.
  20. Director Maren doesn’t trust Shannon to convey this inner monologue via his performance — just one example of the film’s plodding lack of wit or sophistication.
  21. Laura Poitras’s 2017 documentary “Risk” was a close-up portrait of Assange, shot during his early years of infamy and as fascinating, in a squirmy way, as Assange himself. “Ithaka” is less about the man than the cause — how the continued prosecution of Assange fits into the issue of free speech. It’s a more morally clean-cut watch. But it’s a lot less dramatic.
  22. Scream VI, while it goes on for too long, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a homicidal shell game that‘s clever in all the right ways, staged and shot more forcefully than the previous film, eager to take advantage of its more sprawling but enclosed cosmopolitan setting.
  23. The performances come with certain limitations (the line readings sound memorized, never spontaneous), but as a whole, the movie makes memorable, three-dimensional characters of its players, and that’s a start.
  24. he nonfiction film is a clear-eyed look at how everyday life and the accompanying humdrum tasks go on despite the threat of violence at any moment.
  25. The result is a useful mix of the pseudo-random and finely honed that refuses to hand-wring over Clem’s travails, yet simultaneously makes an upbeat case for her emerging from them intact — even if she’ll never exactly be Miss Congeniality.
  26. Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.
  27. Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.
  28. Operating at a strange remove from modern reality, it seems to belong more to the teen experience of a couple of decades ago, the very era from which so many of its reference points hail.
  29. On the Adamant is most moving when it stands back, letting its most disenfranchised subjects talk, or shout, or sing.
  30. Rich with detail while also being intensely specific to the large middle-class family it observes, Avilés’ lifelike and lived-in second feature alternates among roughly half a dozen characters, inviting audiences to pick their own points of identification in the ensemble.

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