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. It’s a fun movie that lands on the right side of “innocuous,” being pleasantly formulaic rather than simply bland.
  2. It’s a delight to find these two, plus their penguin nemesis, back on the big screen.
  3. As always, Eastwood respects our intelligence. And yet, Juror No. 2 registers as something of an anomaly in his oeuvre: It ranks among his quietest films, forgoing spectacle in favor of self-reflection.
  4. Director Robert Zemeckis clumsily replicates the fixed-camera conceit in what plays as an elaborate visual-effects experiment.
  5. There’s something so schematic about Iris’ situation, it feels like an insult to those who deal with actual thoughts of self-harm. That doesn’t mean it’s not compelling to watch at times, as Iris does her best to overcome her immobility, but nothing about it feels believable.
  6. As you watch “The Last Dance,” the film obliterates any distinction between shooting the works and jumping the shark and just saying, “WTF, let’s do it!”
  7. As expansive and inviting as its picturesque New Zealand landscapes, a joyous sense of adventure shines through in Ant Timpson’s Bookworm, a delightfully quirky father-daughter adventure with the perfect blend of childlike wonder and grown-up bite.
  8. Its meditative, hyper-fixated approach to process — as seen through the eyes of seasoned lepidopterists — proves so hypnotic that any appeals or augments the movie makes are deeply felt before they’re intellectually understood.
  9. A scattered but intimate drama about a queer immigrant left adrift, Marco Calvani’s High Tide boasts an impeccable leading performance that buoys the movie even at its weakest.
  10. While the entire ensemble comes across fully committed to roles that are well beneath them, it’s not at all clear what the point was in presenting the Moke and Jady characters as twins.
  11. While The Line doesn’t offer an especially unique take on this milieu, it plays well and acts as a solid showcase for its young cast.
  12. The film climaxes with a body-horror maximalism coupled with a minimum of logic. Until then, though, it wrings honest jolts out of the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.
  13. Despite its new thematic wrinkle, the five segments here feel familiar in ideas and unmemorable in execution. It’s a middling addition to a variably inspired anthology brand that will no doubt trundle on through more installments yet.
  14. You can feel the tension as Morris untangles the trail of responsibility, drawing a thin, clear line through a real-world conspiracy that resulted in more than 4,000 kids — some no more than infants — being whisked away to facilities far removed from their parents.
  15. The sight loss the children are experiencing is irreversible, and it’s naturally difficult to find the positive angle on that, but their parents are determined to give it their best shot, and the film follows their lead.
  16. The Radleys is a vampire horror comedy that can’t quite figure out its tone, so more often than not, it ends up in a lukewarm middle ground.
  17. The Fire Inside gives us that catharsis; it’s a real rouser. Yet the film is rooted in a sobering grasp of the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph. The arc of the drama is built around an enormous curveball it throws at the audience. And that’s when the movie really gets good.
  18. Everything that unfolds in The Crooked Man does so with exceptional dullness, including various psychic visions experienced by the characters, which feel more obligatory than inspired.
  19. In Her Place — Chile’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar this year — finally resembles a nifty short-film premise wrapped around an untapped subject for a full-scale documentary or biopic
  20. Not only does it lack a satisfying payoff when it comes to its set-up of intriguing, character-driven action sequences, the narrative’s emotional pull also yields diminishing returns.
  21. Thornton gives a hell of a performance, like Marcel Marceau inhabited by the fiendish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his silent-clown way, he imitates ordinary human emotion — the grins and wide-eyed surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns — with a stylized frivolity.
  22. While many of the picture’s finer details are in desperate need of ironing out, the wrinkles within these two characters’ lives are compelling enough.
  23. Paradoxically, the Lego approach gives the film a far more imaginative visual range than traditional documentaries, even as it robs us of the thing we most want to see: human faces.
  24. The film draws its various techniques from far better and more accomplished documentaries, resulting in a multifaceted, mixed-bag approach that never clicks, thanks in large part to how the movie chooses to reveal information.
  25. McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex.
  26. Has some gaps in storytelling and contextualization that leave it feeling like a less-than-complete picture of the protagonist’s career to date. Yet the film more than succeeds in its primary goals of providing an inspirational role model plus lots of stupendous surfing footage, a combination that will enthrall most viewers.
  27. In this case, revisiting it half a century later, knowing what happened doesn’t preclude us from wanting to get a better understanding of the specifics. But this movie’s insights are limited to the newsroom.
  28. If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale.
  29. The film’s gaze is arguably as mocking as it is dazzled — with the macho posturing and hero-worship of Roca Rey a tacit source of comedy — while Serra, living up to his reputation for challenging arthouse fare, doesn’t flinch in his presentation of animal abuse and suffering.
  30. This unabashedly derivative movie makes so little pretense of aiming for the qualities it lacks, you can hardly begrudge boilerplate slasher enthusiasts the fun they’ll have with it.

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