Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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:
  1. Positive: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Carmine Street Guitars
    Carmine Street Guitars is a one-of-a-kind documentary that exudes a gentle, homespun magic.
  2. Kalank
    Despite the preponderance of sets and costumes spectacular enough to make Baz Luhrmann weep with envy, and a handful of thrillingly choreographed production numbers that sporadically quicken the movie’s pulse and boost its eye-candy quotient, the attractive yet underwhelming lead players are too hampered by the lethargic narrative to sufficiently distract viewers from their awareness of time passing and interest diminishing.
  3. Stuck
    “Oftentimes these connections are neglected or rejected,” sings Lloyd early on to complete the couplet, “but every now and then the universe succeeds.” So, in its sincere and refreshingly scrappy way, does Stuck.
  4. Hagazussa
    This is a frequently ravishing film, as attuned to the mysticism of landscapes as prime Herzog, while capable of jolting us with the occasional brutal image.
  5. Midnight Traveler
    Shot on three mobile phones, Fazili’s Midnight Traveler is a documentary that feels like a modern-day message in a bottle, an urgent appeal for help from a family that’s still searching for a home.
  6. Someone Great
    This fun, feminist-friendly feature, about a woman devastated by the disintegration of her long-term romance and the two best friends who rally around her for one final night of frivolity, taps into that collective yearning for more. It gifts us with the next big “Girls Night In” event, for which Netflix has cornered the market.
  7. Body at Brighton Rock
    Deftly employing the power of suggestion and an emotionally potent sound design, Body at Brighton Rock is a well-crafted thriller with some crafty tricks up its sleeve.
  8. Penguins
    With irreverence, charm, sparkling cinematography, and a catchy pop soundtrack, this marks the series’ youngest-skewing, most comedic Earth Day documentary yet. That’s not a bad thing, however.
  9. Olympic Dreams
    An engagingly wistful dramedy.
  10. Mia and the White Lion
    Despite a heartfelt sentiment that one person has the power to uproot societal structure and inspire change, and the filmmakers’ desire to raise awareness about an abhorrent practice, packaging it in a family-friendly narrative proves to be wildly problematic.
  11. The Professor and the Madman
    For those that have been anticipating this curious, much-delayed oddity, the good news is that Gibson is fine; it’s everything else that doesn’t work.
  12. William
    Tim Disney’s film strikes a bland compromise between science-fantasy, suspense-melodrama and family entertainment, developing no element to a level that generates more than mild interest. It’s a polished but dull enterprise that leaves one wondering just what the filmmakers had in mind.
  13. Penguin Highway
    To simplify matters: If you see just one anime feature this year, it ought to be Penguin Highway. It’s not that the style or story is mind-blowingly original, the way the best Miyazaki movies are; rather, this well-written cartoon playfully complements the kind of storytelling that Westerners are already enjoying via American-made, live-action series, while incorporating lots of delightfully Japan-specific details along the way.
  14. After
    An innocuous teen pulp soap opera that flirts with “danger” but, in fact, keeps surprising you with how mild and safe and predictable it turns out to be.
  15. Wild Rose
    Wild Rose, the closest thing to a sleeper I’ve seen at Toronto this year, is a happy-sad drama of starstruck fever that lifts you up and sweeps you along, touching you down in a puddle of well-earned tears.
  16. Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
    Top-class fighting and fabulous production design overcome the stale plot.
  17. Hellboy
    It’s lunging to be a badass hard-R epic, but it’s basically a pile of origin-story gobbledygook, frenetic and undercooked, full of limb-hacking, eye-gouging monster battles as well as an atmosphere of apocalyptic grunge that signifies next to nothing.
  18. Little
    Consistently funny if all-around a bit too familiar.
  19. A Dark Place
    The result is diverting enough, yet ends up more a mildly offbeat time-filler than something memorable.
  20. Breakthrough
    What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.
  21. The Best of Enemies
    The Best of Enemies while not nearly as good as “Green Book,” is a rock-solid movie: squarely deliberate, a little long and predictable, but honest and thoughtful enough, precise in its period and locale, with very strong performances.
  22. Chance
    “Bambi” perhaps did it best, but Chance is on the opposite end of the spectrum in both overall tone and filmmaking skill. Though the message here is one everyone should hear, clichéd characters and a dark, derivative dirge of a story end up feeling more manipulative than motivational.
  23. The Haunting of Sharon Tate
    The movie’s petty folly — its failure of imagination and morality — is that it actually goes out of its way to turn the Manson murders into schlock horror.
  24. Billboard
    Zelker’s three-ring circus of digital and social-media content needs a compelling main event, and this movie seems unlikely to inspire many to check out the supplementary materials.
  25. Missing Link
    Sooner or later, Laika was bound to branch out, which makes this funnier, more colorful film the link previously missing between the company’s Goth-styled past and whatever comes next.
  26. Suburban Birds
    Viewers, too, may feel at once cast adrift in the film’s amorphous quests, and languidly seduced by its disorder.
  27. The Chaperone
    The Chaperone leaves you wanting to see a movie about the star Louise Brooks became, on camera and off. It could be the great movie that has yet to be made about the silent era, and about the things that women in Hollywood have always faced. Especially one who was unlike any woman the world had seen.
  28. Slut in a Good Way
    I don’t want to oversell Slut in a Good Way here. It’s a tiny movie, and the bleary black-and-white cinematography looks only a notch better than “Clerks,” and yet, like Antoine Desrosières’ “Sextape” (easily the funniest film I’ve ever seen in Cannes, but still without U.S. distribution), Lorain’s film challenges traditional gender roles in such a way that’s surface-level entertaining but also deep enough to inspire a college term paper or two.
  29. Tread
    Tread abounds in memorable images and interviews that range from darkly comical to deeply disquieting.
  30. Manta Ray
    This superficially simple tale of identity, displacement and friendship is wrapped in layers of symbolism that will likely be pleasurably hypnotic for many viewers.
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