Variety's Scores

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For 17,758 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: 9,121 out of 17758
  2. Mixed: 7,002 out of 17758
  3. Negative: 1,635 out of 17758
17758 movie reviews
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  1. Theater Camp
    Mostly, audiences are stuck watching everybody trying to be funny: testing out one-liners, singing off-key, panhandling for laughs. Running jokes trip over their own shoelaces.
  2. A Thousand and One
    Rockwell uses the full range of cinematic expressivity to turn a small, often tragic story of raw deals and rash decisions into an admiring portrait of survivorship, determination and resourcefulness.
  3. The Mission
    There’s nothing terribly wrong with Anderson’s documentary — save that after 96 minutes, any viewer could well obliviously walk right past its principal subjects on the street, so fleeting an impression do they make in this surface-level portrait.
  4. Memories of My Father
    Trueba keeps things moving within and between eras in a graceful, affectionate, assured way that’s always enjoyable, even if the film overall seems a bit frivolous given its larger themes.
  5. Maybe I Do
    To be fair: Maybe I Do is undemanding, painless and pleasantly diverting, and has the saving grace of never trying too hard for a cheap laugh. There are quite a few undeniably funny lines, many of them made all the more amusing by the perfect-pitch delivery of the pros in the cast.
  6. AUM: The Cult at the End of the World
    Braun and Yanagimoto go for comprehensiveness over comprehension, bringing in many more commentators — writers, lawyers, reporters, eyewitnesses — each to peel back one further, fascinating fold in the infinite origami of the Aum story.
  7. Flora and Son
    It’s catchy and touching, it weaves the music into the story with a spontaneity that can leave you laughing with pleasure, and it navigates an honest path from despair to belief, which is Carney’s disarmingly sweet calling card.
  8. Earth Mama
    Leaf recognizes that whatever happens to Gia, the problem remains. Her portrait is intended to illuminate, and Nomore makes for a wonderful collaborator in this.
  9. Blood
    Brad Anderson’s film steers a middle course between dysfunctional domestic drama and supernatural horror. That balance doesn’t completely work. But solid performances and some strong, occasionally unpleasant content make this an involving if not entirely satisfying watch.
  10. Eileen
    The formal rigor that made Oldroyd’s “Lady Macbeth” such a striking debut is in evidence here throughout, but this time that directorial precision is applied to a narrative of bold, even garish ambition, which “Eileen” conceals, along with its unhinged heart, beneath a controlled, placid exterior.
  11. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    If “All Dirt Roads” perhaps does not connect quite as powerfully as it could on a narrative level, it marks the arrival of an arresting new talent in Raven Jackson, at the very least as the creator of the kind of cinema you do not watch as much as touch and smell and taste.
  12. Polite Society
    In many respects, Polite Society comes across as a giant pastiche of Manzoor’s favorite movie references, with homage paid to films from all over the globe via individual shots and sound cues throughout. But there’s no denying her creativity or the defiantly original voice she brings to her characters.
  13. Past Lives
    For all the films that have been made about love triangles, Song has fashioned hers in the form of a circle, defying so many of the clichés in her quietly devastating way.
  14. You Hurt My Feelings
    You Hurt My Feelings stays true to the droll casualness of its title. It’s not a major Holofcener movie; it’s closer to a lively and digressive short story. Yet it’s compelling to see Holofcener merge the fates of all her characters through a grand tweak of the piety of positivity.
  15. The Pod Generation
    The Pod Generation is very much about our flesh, and the forces that are only too happy to take it away from us.
  16. Run Rabbit Run
    What it lacks in thematic newness, Run Rabbit Run makes up for in the sophistication of its moment-to-moment scarifying and its performances from Sarah Snook and outstanding newcomer Lily LaTorre.
  17. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    It’s a thin, practically anemic observational movie for audiences who recognize themselves in Fran’s awkwardness.
  18. Justice
    Justice re-equips the anti-Kavanaugh side by pulling a more streamlined narrative from the blizzard of detail that threatened observers at the time with snow-blindness.
  19. 20 Days in Mariupol
    Structured by onscreen markers of the days passed, this nonfiction feature may not have a simple narrative arc, but the director’s unpretentious first-person narration and the intensity of the war-crimes evidence compiled make it riveting nonetheless.
  20. Fair Play
    The key to the film’s potential success isn’t just that it’s made in a commercial genre. It’s that Fair Play, while full of sex, money, corporate backstabbing, and a lot of other things that are fun to watch, really is a good little movie.
  21. Cat Person
    It’s a squirmy, uncomfortable movie no teenager wants to watch with their mom, but maybe everyone should — required viewing for freshman year.
  22. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
    Fox is a charismatic guy, and even though his personal story has been overshadowed by Parkinson’s disease, Guggenheim’s upbeat and ultra-polished documentary reminds what a peppy, relatable personality he was — and is — on-screen.
  23. Infinity Pool
    The Canadian helmer has created the cinematic equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing, which bends and breaks and folds back on itself in impossible ways. Brain-shattering as it all is, we can hardly tear our eyes away.
  24. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams creates a character haunting in his extremity. But his dream becomes ours, as does the heartbreaking prospect of it being snuffed before our eyes.
  25. Cassandro
    In Williams’ hands, the laughs never come at Saúl’s expense, ridiculous as this arena might seem to audiences. Luchadores are entertainers, first and foremost, and “Cassandro” celebrates that while taking Armendáriz’s achievements seriously.
  26. 80 for Brady
    Kyle Marvin’s directorial debut is a pleasant enough reminder that these gals are still game for a good time.
  27. New Gods: Yang Jian
    “Yang Jian” offers vivid and exciting animation matched with traditional Chinese mythic storytelling to deliver an entertaining film.
  28. Of an Age
    Equal parts wistful and sensual, vivid and gentle, Stolevski has gifted us with a swoon-worthy romantic drama that looks at that first blushing crush not as an ephemera in need of being remembered but as a living memory that can pulsate and ache precisely because it’s never left you.
  29. Blueback
    The film adopts a somewhat more grownup, realistic, less parabolic tenor, though its ecology-minded narrative remains a bit sketchy for feature treatment — resulting in a pleasant, very handsome-looking movie rather short on dramatic impact.
  30. You People
    You People alternates between energetic set-pieces by a nimble roster of comedians and intervals of tedium during which the actors seem lost, unable to jump-start the script’s plentiful thin stretches.
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