Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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:
  1. Positive: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. Of an Age
    Equal parts wistful and sensual, vivid and gentle, Stolevski has gifted us with a swoon-worthy romantic drama that looks at that first blushing crush not as an ephemera in need of being remembered but as a living memory that can pulsate and ache precisely because it’s never left you.
  2. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    The film is meticulously evenhanded and revealing.
  3. Bantú Mama
    At once an intimate portrait of a makeshift family and a treatise on motherhood and motherlands, Bantú Mama is a quiet achievement.
  4. Bruiser
    From the squarish Academy ratio and unconventional framing to composer Robert Ouyang Rusli’s tense, bracing-for-conflict score, Warren’s choices frequently surprise, building to an ending that does exactly the right thing with the showdown we could feel coming all along.
  5. Children of the Mist
    It’s an auspicious arrival for first-time feature director Diem, who handles delicate subject matter (not to mention vulnerable human subjects) with a frankness that stops short of button-pushing. That tact is crucial in a film operating as both close-quarters character study and wider ethnographic portrait, offering a rare, dedicated view of Vietnam’s little-represented Hmong population.
  6. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams creates a character haunting in his extremity. But his dream becomes ours, as does the heartbreaking prospect of it being snuffed before our eyes.
  7. Fair Play
    The key to the film’s potential success isn’t just that it’s made in a commercial genre. It’s that Fair Play, while full of sex, money, corporate backstabbing, and a lot of other things that are fun to watch, really is a good little movie.
  8. Eileen
    The formal rigor that made Oldroyd’s “Lady Macbeth” such a striking debut is in evidence here throughout, but this time that directorial precision is applied to a narrative of bold, even garish ambition, which “Eileen” conceals, along with its unhinged heart, beneath a controlled, placid exterior.
  9. Flora and Son
    It’s catchy and touching, it weaves the music into the story with a spontaneity that can leave you laughing with pleasure, and it navigates an honest path from despair to belief, which is Carney’s disarmingly sweet calling card.
  10. birth/rebirth
    Laura Moss’ superbly performed, enjoyably queasy Birth/Rebirth proves just how well the classic tale of scientific hubris and the desire to conquer death maps onto a gory maternity morality play, reanimating the truism that there’s little more (un)deadly than a mother’s love.
  11. Cinema Sabaya
    Based on helmer-writer Orit Fouks Rotem’s experience as a teacher and the real women she encountered, the film is full of life, love, humor and authenticity without being didactic. At the same time, it cleverly questions the ethics and responsibility of filmmaking.
  12. Beyond Utopia
    What we’ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. Beyond Utopia looks behind the wall and shines a light.
  13. Bottoms
    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. Seriously Red
    Director Gracie Otto’s Seriously Red disarms and delights as a sensationally spirited concoction that neatly balances unfettered outrageousness and unabashed sentimentality.
  15. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    In “The Covenant,” Guy Ritchie tells a story of two men, but he’s really giving this war that never succeeded a kind of closure. He uses the power of movies to coax out the heart that fueled our actions, and that made our loss so hard to bear.
  16. Reality
    Reality can be stranger than fiction, but “Reality” fuses the two to become stranger, and more riveting, still.
  17. The Echo
    Examining the unique ties that bind farming families, where everyone’s welfare hangs on the same unkind elements, this exquisitely textured film observes how children’s lives echo those of their parents, repeating for generations on the same constantly inconstant land, until somebody breaks the pattern.
  18. Tótem
    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.
  19. Prom Pact
    The film is an exemplar of its genre, one that honors its forebears while also acknowledging and attempting to correct their more glaring faults.
  20. Flamin' Hot
    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.
  21. Chang Can Dunk
    Chang Can Dunk doesn’t go the way you’d expect, and that’s a good thing.
  22. The Thief Collector
    The Thief Collector is a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime. It’s also a portrait of art and obsession. But by the time it makes you say “Oh. My. God.,” it’s a movie that has used art to touch something essential about how strangers — or maybe I should just say the downright strange — walk among us.
  23. Chile '76
    What begins as a muted marital melodrama slowly boils into a restrained political thriller, with an ease and skill all the more impressive in a first feature.
  24. The Beasts
    The film’s big scene is upsetting and unforgettable, one of those movie moments you can’t unsee and which seems destined to haunt you for years to come.
  25. Jason Isbell: Running with Our Eyes Closed
    Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed.
  26. The Plains
    Skilfully creating an engaging and likable protagonist without fully showing his face until the three-hour running time has all but elapsed, David Easteal’s first feature is a thematically rich and quietly compelling portrait of a man at the crossroads.
  27. Nuclear Now
    The case it makes for nuclear power is sober, grounded, journalistic. But don’t take my word for it — seek the movie out. It demands and deserves to be seen.
  28. Falcon Lake
    Coming-of-age movies are usually, like growing up itself, some combination of funny, sad, rueful, awkward or frightening, but rarely are they so successfully all those things at once as in Falcon Lake.
  29. Our Body
    Simon’s nonjudgmental, empathetic curiosity is the film’s great strength. But it’s also shocking that still now, in 2023, it can be such a revelation, as women, to see “Our Body” portrayed without sexualization and without stigmatization — without, in a word, shame.
  30. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    Director Sammi Cohen and screenwriter Alison Peck bestow this hilarious, heartrending adaptation of Fiona Rosenbloom’s novel with an uplifting, effervescent vision and vitality, giving voice to a young Jewish girl’s struggle to figure out who she is before the most important night of her life so far.
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