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. Love Lies Bleeding
    Love Lies Bleeding turns consciously wild and garish, and you may think that the film is losing control, yet Rose Glass is fiercely in control of what she’s doing. She’s made a midnight noir that shoots over the top of our expectations but lands where it should, at a place where even valorous people have to go to extremes.
  2. 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.
  3. Frida
    Even those already familiar with the trajectory of Kahlo’s existence may find the delivery here raw, vulnerable, and refreshing.
  4. Founders Day
    There are enough formulaic elements, especially teens meeting gory deaths, to keep undiscerning viewers in their seats. But the script (co-written by Erik and sibling Carson) stumbles in its climactic revelations, with an even worse epilogue bound to send patrons out rolling their eyes in unamused disbelief.
  5. Presence
    You want the movie to add up to something, but what it adds up to is another half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, only this time he’s the ghost in the machine.
  6. Thelma
    Thelma may bill itself as an unconventional action movie, but it’s more of a sitcom, really.
  7. Freaky Tales
    Freaky Tales takes nearly 40 minutes to find its footing, but once it kicks in, there’s roughly an hour of grindhouse glory ahead (assuming streaming audiences make it that far).
  8. Love Me
    The Zucheros’ creation is audacious and original, but also suffers from some of the same ADHD issues that afflicted “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (both are movies made for multitaskers with brains wired for constantly switching between screens).
  9. I Saw the TV Glow
    This character-centered setup is where I Saw the TV Glow is most affecting, grounded by the tense, tacit bond between two highly guarded people — and given an electric jolt by Lundy-Paine’s fragile, volatile performance as someone certain there’s no accepting place for them outside the rectangular confines of the TV set. But
  10. Cobweb
    A film containing another film; a filmmaker referring to the trials of a filmmaker: it’s a movie of many layers, all of them garish and goofy, none of them great.
  11. 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.
  12. Bye Bye Tiberias
    If there is any one takeaway from the film, it’s the importance of family attachments and the succor they provide.
  13. Role Play
    The players are deft enough that a little more wit in the writing would have surely been well-served. (Nighy in particular makes much of relatively little.) And while briskly handled, none of the ideas here are fresh enough for Role Play to score points on narrative or character unpredictability.
  14. Lift
    Practically every scene is a cliché, every line of dialogue an echo of a better one you’ve already heard in a better film.
  15. Public Speaking
    Intermittently amusing and surely interesting, "Lebowitz" falls victim to the classic faux pas of overstaying its welcome.
  16. The Beekeeper
    The Beekeeper is the best kind of bad movie — which is to say, it’s the sort that puts entertainment ahead of pretentiousness, embracing the laughter sure to accompany such an unapologetically stupid, ultra-violent premise.
  17. Mean Girls
    You can rest assured that Mean Girls, the movie musical, sticks close to the spirit and to the letter of the movie that updated and mythologized the culture of gossip and backstabbing for a new generation. The new movie nudges the material into our own era in a handful of ways.
  18. Salaar: Part 1 – Ceasefire
    At 174 minutes long, with nested flashbacks overflowing with exposition, the movie has lengthy stretches that can feel like a chore. However, each extraneous segment eventually converges in some of the most exhilarating and cathartic on-screen violence Indian cinema has to offer.
  19. Amerikatsi
    Eventually, the two opposing modes of visual storytelling at its core (one distinctly intimate, the other distant and observational) come into explosive contact like matter and antimatter, as the idea of art metaphorically gazing back at its viewer takes distinctly literal form.
  20. To Kill a Tiger
    To Kill a Tiger depicts a shining, poignant example of the difference individuals can make in altering the social fabric.
  21. Robot Dreams
    Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.
  22. The Painter
    While most performers are fine within the material’s limitations, principal villains Avgeropoulos and Montesi are notably underwhelming.
  23. Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia
    It’s a competent yet uninspired overview of events.
  24. Night Swim
    Everything is at once telegraphed and derivative.
  25. In the Shadow of Beirut
    Despite so much cause for grief, what’s striking about the protagonists is their cordiality and resilient hopefulness.
  26. Good Grief
    Levy’s funny-sad contemporary drama acknowledges the supportive dynamic that Marc plays in Thomas and Sophie’s lives, even as it centers the gay best friend for a change — not so different from the one he played in “Happiest Season.” All three characters feel well rounded and real, especially in their imperfections.
  27. The Crime Is Mine
    It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine.
  28. My Love Affair with Marriage
    With My Love Affair with Marriage, animator Signe Baumane creates another dense personal narrative that expresses complicated concepts and ideas in images.
  29. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The movie, with all that combat, is staged on an impressively grand scale by the returning director, James Wan, but at the same time there’s something glumly standard about it.
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