Variety's Scores

For 17,777 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:
17777 movie reviews
  1. Sports a stronger narrative spine than is usual in Vietnamese rural dramas and a less fragile tone in its deployment of landscape and character.
  2. Equal parts colorful character study and real-world procedural, docu by Daniel Kraus retains interest throughout, even if it delivers just partial insight into the man, job and milieu.
  3. A staggeringly flat sequel that trades filmdom for the music bizbiz and could hardly be less cool.
  4. A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.
  5. If auds swallow this odoriferous exercise in calculated career repositioning, they'll swallow anything.
  6. Material that might have turned to standard dysfunctional family treacle in other hands is given stirring poignancy, warmth and emotional insight in Shona Auerbach's assured first feature.
  7. A well-meaning but schematic drama about three generations of Chinese women in America.
  8. Put together by Tucker and his co-director/editor wife Petra Epperlein without a hint of artifice, docu offers up its sounds and images bluntly, and they are very much sounds and images worth having as part of the record.
  9. Endowed with captivating simplicity, gentle humor, rich humanity and infectious generosity of spirit.
  10. Attempts the miraculous but achieves the adequate.
  11. A whimsical piece of deadpan drollery, Whisky plays like Aki Kaurismaki, South American style.
  12. At nearly six hours, pic's extreme length lets Giordana and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli build up a novelistic rhythm, pulling the audience so deeply and forcefully into their story that it becomes like a enveloping dream; when it's over, parting with the characters is truly sweet and sorrowful.
  13. This amusingly light (but oh-so-gut-busting) reverie on one man's titanic efforts to rise to the top ranks in the very unofficial sport of competitive scarfing goes down quickly as a good example of documaking on freakish behavior and freakier subcultures.
  14. Except for Eisenberg's superb comic timing and his ability to make the familiar seem interesting, the high school scenes play like "Scream" outtakes.
  15. An ungainly hodgepodge of vaudeville-style comedy, turgid soap-operatics, and joyful epiphanies of gospel-flavored uplift.
  16. More than passably amusing.
  17. A vibrant, immediate treatise on love and cultural identity in a complex new world of fluid borders and deep suspicions in the stunning new Czech drama Up and Down.
  18. A self-contained master class on cinema.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A diverting, if unspectacular, Brazilian drama centered on an aging female detective.
  19. Has more flash than finesse.
  20. Ghobadi in this pic displays a complete command of his art as he shifts between -- and even blends -- wrenching tragedy and amusing comedy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Uneven though it is, Because of Winn-Dixie, based on Kate Di Camillo's novel, is tough to dislike.
  21. This adaptation of the graphic novel "Hellblazer" blazes few new trails and bogs down in a confusing narrative muddle.
  22. The net result is a truly numbing experience.
  23. The punishment seems out of all proportion to the "crimes" committed, so that the film becomes no simplistic pro-feminist tract but is, on the contrary, more complex and disturbing.
  24. The most emotionally satisfying pic to date by Korean iconoclast Kim Ki-duk.
  25. Unconvincing poser.
  26. Not so much a Hitler movie as a portrait of a totalitarian machine's spiritual and emotional collapse, Downfall is a cumulatively powerful Goetterdammerung centered on the last 10 days of the bunkered Fuehrer and those around him.
  27. Small but charming film.
  28. Despite its faltering touch with the story's darker, more melodramatic threads, Her Majesty nonetheless proves winning overall thanks to a predominant emphasis on nostalgia, whimsy (heroine's royal audience fantasies include one full-on production number) and droll-to-broad humor.

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