Variety's Scores

For 17,757 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:
17757 movie reviews
  1. The push-pull kinetics keeping these increasingly raddled lovers together and apart eventually turn from manic to strenuous, not least because viewers are likely to be less invested than the film is in their final formation.
  2. Left-Handed Girl is an assured and lovely portrait of difficult motherhood and painful daughterhood, but it’s perhaps most entrancing for its turning-kaleidoscope-view of the director’s native city, where the characters are the bouncing beads, but Taipei is the glitter and the dazzle.
  3. Johansson, however, while she does a perfectly efficient job of directing, doesn’t hone the tone of her scenes. She keeps the whole thing earnest and rather neutral in a plot-driven way, with Squibb as her wild card.
  4. It’s a trifle, and not even fully successful on its own small-bauble terms. But oh, is it ever meant to bathe you in a warm retro glow.
  5. While the simple premise recalls certain post-WWII dramas in which survivors recognize the Nazi culprits who once terrorized them, the film’s chilling last scene feels like a call to action.
  6. Martone’s repetitive, tediously non-linear film attempts something more impressionistic and expansive, with emotionally muted and sometimes strangely exploitative results.
  7. There’s no defiling of peaches or precocious sexual experimentation between the roughly decade-apart duo, though the ambiguous subtext proves infinitely more fascinating, leaving everyone who sees it with a different interpretation.
  8. Laced with a wry sense of humor, Pillion manages to be both understated and explicit in the way Lighton presents practically everything that happens in Colin and Ray’s unconventional relationship.
  9. Sensitive and empathetic but a little timid in storytelling and style, The Little Sister rests considerably on its lead performance by first-time actor Nadia Melliti.
  10. In Two Prosecutors, perhaps out of deference to the source text, Loznitsa plays it straighter than in either of those titles and the result is much stronger for it, as though he has met some self-set challenge to see how efficiently a rigorously formal aesthetic can evoke the pervading, dehumanizing horrors of living under totalitarian control.
  11. Somehow, Lilo & Stitch has lost its unpredictable sense of anarchy in the retelling.
  12. In the end, Lee has taken “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed.
  13. None of this would work at all if it weren’t pinned to the unselfconscious gaze of Fuki (delightful newcomer Yui Suzuki), 11 years old and already an original.
  14. This 86-minute puzzle piece isn’t one of the director’s major works, but is distinguished by his trademark pleasures of texture and tone — and pushes his ongoing collaboration with star Paula Beer into ever more enigmatic territory.
  15. Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, “Case 137” keeps its mind strictly on the job.
  16. It’s painful to watch such talents pour so much into roles that are fairly common, if not clichéd by American indie standards.
  17. This thrilling directorial confidence, given his film’s elegant opacities and ambiguities, is a quality to marvel at, even as it’s binding your hands and tying you to your seat and forcing you to watch, possibly against your will.
  18. The film makes no claims to represent an entire disenfranchised demographic, but there’s resonant human texture and political feeling in its close-up individual portrait.
  19. Mendonça crams the film with vivid time-capsule details.
  20. The efficient and highly effective thriller scarcely allows a calm moment in which to question how deranged its premise truly is.
  21. The dense but undeniably enjoyable saga doubles as a moving father-daughter tale and ultimately seems far more interested in exploring the robber baron spirit of 20th-century capitalism than its consequences.
  22. The film reminds you that the real salvation of cinema will always come from those who understand that making a movie should be a magic trick good enough to fool the magician himself into believing it.
  23. By the time Die My Love reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie.
  24. While the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.
  25. It’s a polished, pedestrian biopic, with direction by British TV veteran James Strong that smooths over instead of elevating Eric Poppen’s cliche-riddled script. While the subject matter is compelling, one hopes Politkovskaya can someday get a punchier, less formulaic screen treatment.
  26. The Chronology of Water invites us to experience each moment as if it were happening, but the movie is really telling the story of a spirit — the one that tries to survive, and become whole, through each moment.
  27. [Aster] wants to show us the really big picture, and while “Eddington” isn’t a horror movie, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you’ll recognize with a tremor.
  28. No finer point of craft, performance or poetic nuance has been rushed or neglected in a film that ultimately sounds a warning against the dimming or blunting or de-specification of memory — not just for oneself, but for communities or lineages with more shared stories than they might think, but an inclination to clam up and carry on.
  29. The old-school classicist in me wishes that “Bring Her Back” were more tidy and logical, but the Philippous work in a mode that’s impressionistic in an accomplished enough way to justify itself. They don’t care about tying up every bloody loose end. They’re after a feeling, a lavish sensation of malevolent shock.
  30. Hurry Up Tomorrow bears all the signs of pop star hubris masquerading as artistic candor, despite game performances by Jenna Ortega and Barry Keogan to prop up the budding thespian.

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