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. Stamped from the Beginning
    It lulls the audience into thinking it’s only providing historical context. Yet by the end, it reveals the myths, the distortions and the made-up fallacies that have been presented as truth for centuries. And that is the most radical thing it could have done.
  2. Housekeeping for Beginners
    Stolevski’s lively, garrulous script may be plot-heavy, but the film isn’t propelled as much by grand narrative turns as it is by the powderkeg reactivity of its characters. Each scrap and squabble and occasional flash of understanding between them activates the film anew, so no interpersonal dynamic here ever feels comfortably settled.
  3. Anora
    Baker’s subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce makes "Pretty Woman" look like a Disney movie.
  4. In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
    In the Court of the Crimson King is really about as good as rock documentaries get, in capturing the essence of a group of musicians and how they relate to each other, the world and a muse whose demands result in literal and figurative calluses.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    King & Country
    The story of Private Hamp, a deserter from the battle front in World War I, has already been told on radio, television and the stage, but undeterred by this exposure, director Joseph Losey has attacked the subject with confidence and vigor, and the result is a highly sensitive and emotional drama, enlivened by sterling performances and a sincere screenplay.
  6. Inside Out 2
    Inside Out 2 is a transporting fable about the desire to fit in, to be validated by the Cool Culture that’s, more and more, our collective seal of approval and success. And while the movie is an enchanting animated ride of the spirit (be prepared for it to help save summer at the box office), it may also be the most poignantly perceptive tale of the conundrums of early adolescence since “Eighth Grade.”
  7. Conclave
    Conclave is one of those rare films that respects the audience’s attention, even as it sneaks a few tricks behind their backs.
  8. Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later
    The sequel provides an ever-maturing understanding of the tension between labels and identities, between a changing self, an expanding queer “community” and the broader society.
  9. The American Society of Magical Negroes
    The sly beauty of The American Society of Magical Negroes is that it’s a wicked satire of white people that’s also an empathetic satire of Black people.
  10. The Idea of You
    This is Hathaway’s movie, and she owns it: independent, desirable and never, ever desperate.
  11. The Legend of Ochi
    “Ochi” oozes wonder shot after shot, in part from the eye-popping environments produced through a combination of Evan Prosofsky’s lambent cinematography and the use of matte paintings.
  12. Blink Twice
    [Kravitz] composes the movie out of vibrant close-ups, using each shot (a cocktail, a glance, a social-media cutaway) to tell a story, drawing us into the center of an encounter, so that we’re staring at it and experiencing it at the same time. Her technique is riveting; this is the work of a born filmmaker.
  13. Handling the Undead
    Full of frail, mortal feeling and overcast last-days imagery, Handling the Undead lingers coolly in the bones longer than many zombie films that offer more immediate, grisly gratification.
  14. Between the Temples
    There’s a sweetness here to Silver’s typically jaundiced humor, an affectionately gilded frame around his broken-off character portraiture, that feels both new and entirely natural to his work.
  15. Daughters
    The film is rife with visually lyrical moments that connect viewers with the young ones’ sorrows, fears, insights and hopes.
  16. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Exhibiting Forgiveness sends you out on a note of hope, but it’s not exactly a feel-good movie. It’s a feel-the-reality movie, a drama willing to scald. That’s its quiet power.
  17. Skywalkers: A Love Story
    The film’s exhilaration is that it shows you, through its dangling-from-a-steel-beam footage, what love really is: scaling the heights of devotion, no matter how perilous, without a net.
  18. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
    Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a moving, wrenching, compellingly well-made documentary about Reeve’s life that inevitably ends up centering on his accident and its aftermath.
  19. Black Box Diaries
    Without undue manipulation or sentimentality, Black Box Diaries pulls viewers’ emotions in sharp extremes that mirror the peaks and valleys of this hard-fought five-year case.
  20. Kneecap
    Bursting with unruly energy that practically escapes the confines of the screen, Kneecap is a riotous, drug-laced triumph in the name of freedom that bridges political substance and crowd-pleasing entertainment.
  21. As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial
    Not unlike its subject, the documentary’s power, beauty and complexity lie in Harper’s use of rhetoric and lyricism.
  22. Ghostlight
    Any critic sitting through their show probably wouldn’t have much patience for all the characters’ personal catharses, but seen from the right distance, as beautifully told as this, the experience amounts to something special.
  23. Girls Will Be Girls
    Both Panigrahi and Kusruti deliver immensely lived-in performances that write sonnets through silent stares, as a mother and daughter who aren’t accustomed to truly connecting, or communicating beyond customary debriefs.
  24. In the Summers
    In the Summers is the type of personal, confidently executed first outing that should hopefully put the filmmaker on an auspicious track to produce other keenly humanist work.
  25. The Greatest Love Story Never Told
    The Greatest Love Story Never Told, the third part of her album-cycle media offensive, delivers precisely the revelatory perspective that its counterparts lack.
  26. Dahomey
    Dahomey is a striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living.
  27. No Other Land
    Given the conditions of its production, No Other Land would be vital even in a more ragged form. But the filmmaking here is tight and considered, with nimble editing (by the directors themselves) that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself.
  28. Night of Nights
    Night of Nights is documentary filmmaking at its most raw. A journalistic endeavor that’s also concerned with human attitudes, it captures not just the facts but also the experience.
  29. The Black Garden
    The Black Garden is more than just a chronicle of a conflict. With a probing camera conveying images both beautiful and intimate and observational filmmaking that coaxes real emotions, it manages to tell a story of four men who represent their village and people.
  30. Touch
    This gentle, unfussy romance contains a heart-clutching finale that’s as classically restrained as it is emotionally resounding.
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