Variety's Scores

For 17,782 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:
17782 movie reviews
  1. By turns pulse-quickening and contemplative, The Crash Reel is a thoroughly winning docu portrait of former pro snowboarder Kevin Pearce.
  2. While the interview-driven documentary may not adhere to Hitchcock’s cinematic ideal, it welcomes one and all into the medium’s embrace.
  3. An affectionate and supremely entertaining celebration of the all-American nerd, Science Fair may look like a straightforward super-kid contest doc, à la “Spellbound” and “Mad Hot Ballroom,” but there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes of Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster’s thoroughly researched crowd-pleaser.
  4. Order of Myths looks good, and its characters are memorable. It's important to know that the "traditions" extolled by both sides of Mobile involve keeping people apart. But it's not clear at all that Brown is bringing them together.
  5. Uniquely Southern documentary has become surprisingly timely this election year.
  6. As a forlorn kind of hangout movie, then, Hotel by the Sea proceeds at a pleasing shuffle, spiked with bittersweet humor and even a gentle, surprising hint of sentimentality.
  7. A Disneynature documentary that drops on Disney Plus on April 3, simply get out of the way and let the ancient creatures of the sea seduce us with their surreal evolutionary form-follows-function wild splendor.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Derek Jarman's Jubilee is one of the most original, bold, and exciting features to have come out of Britain in the 1970s.
  8. Ambitiously tackling his biggest canvas to date, Clint Eastwood continues to defy and triumph over the customary expectations for a film career in Flags of Our Fathers.
  9. Final result, with its peculiar happy ending that may or may not be a further fantasy, may leave some auds feeling more drained than satisfied. It's a bit like spending 105 minutes with a litter of frisky, mischievous puppies.
  10. Witty, thoughtful and illuminating.
  11. Feels Good Man offers an inside peek at the internet’s growing ability to affect and shape modern society, which often makes the film a nightmare about extremism and technology.
  12. Very English, very period and very polite.
  13. Unfolding over a faintly indulgent but never dull two hours, this is a rare children’s entertainment that isn’t afraid to perplex kids as much as it enchants them, down to a coda that prompts a certain level of junior existential contemplation (not to mention a mournful tear or two).
  14. Its tightening tension seeks to push frayed characters to eventually tell on themselves.
  15. While pic remains sympathetic and appealing, the endless dialogue and repetitive settings become wearing through the couple's one long night together, and the artifice of the premise may contribute to the difficulty the film has in coming to romantic life.
  16. Night Comes On is, true to its title, blanketed in a dim, crepuscular state of waiting. Fishback, her film career unfurling clearly before her from scene to scene, blazes a way out of it.
  17. Punchy dialogue, excellent thesping and a real feel for the universal tuning fork of great classical music make this a prime candidate for international arthouse play.
  18. Villeneuve treats each shot as if it could be a painting. Every design choice seems handed down through millennia of alternative human history, from arcane hieroglyphics to a slew of creative masks and veils meant to conceal the faces of those manipulating the levers of power, nearly all of them women.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A richly textured and thoroughly engrossing drama that ranks with indie filmmaker John SaylesJohn Sayles' finest work.
  19. Celebrating youthful experimentation and midlife renewal alike, Judy Blume Forever strips its subject’s work of any dated aura of danger, inviting everyone to the party.
  20. Fourth feature by Mainland helmer Lou Ye ("Suzhou River," "Purple Butterfly") shoots for metaphysical drama but ends up saying very little beneath all the poetic voiceovers, sexual encounters and political seasoning.
  21. Starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stuntman/getaway driver, Drive takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process.
  22. Imax 3-D process has lost its original novelty, and little is done in Deep Sea to find new and exciting ways of using the medium.
  23. While Winter Flies might not tell us anything new, it relates its old story with a vivid specificity and a beguiling sense of mischief that makes it feel fresh.
  24. If The Fighter feels like kind of a mess, lurching from one scene to the next as if the film itself has taken a few hits to the head, that's not entirely a bad thing.
  25. Pavich does an admirable job tracking down surviving parties (except for the suspicious-sounding cast), opting for a humorous rather than indignant tone to the interviews.
  26. Though billed as a documentary, The Five Obstructions doesn't easily fall into any category. Perhaps it's best described as a game, in which a pair of Danish film directors from different generations spar with one another in a highly civilized, and surprisingly entertaining, fashion.
  27. While Fukunaga creates Agu’s world with an extraordinary attentiveness to detail, he hasn’t quite found a way to approximate the novel’s radically childlike perspective, or to bridge the gap between this child soldier’s psyche and our own.
  28. Turns out, this movie isn’t so much about space as it is about time travel, or more specifically, taking Linklater and his followers back more than half a century.

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