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. The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile
    There are remarkably few serious hiccups along the way in achieving the career reclamation Carlile envisions for Tucker at the start. But any heightened sense of drama isn’t really necessary when it comes to the pleasures of spending time with two such strong musical personalities in what amounts to a documentary two-hander, fully justifying tagging the younger artist’s name onto the film’s title as an awkward but fitting addendum.
  2. The School for Good and Evil
    Sure, it’s a “Harry Potter” rip-off, but had Feig taken the time to let the film breathe, it might have stood on its own. Unlike Hogwarts, where fresh surprises lay waiting around every corner, this school seems to exist in concept only — and not a particularly good one at that.
  3. Black Adam
    The surprisingly serious-minded (but still plenty pulpy) project deprives Johnson of his greatest superpower — his sense of humor — while giving the now-straight-faced star a chance to play a character with some interesting contradictions.
  4. The Same Storm
    It’s an often-touching time capsule of a harrowing moment in which rampant death and police brutality, white privilege and surging activism answered the call of so much grief.
  5. She Said
    Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.
  6. Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.
  7. The Other Tom
    The film’s intimate scenes of mother-son discord are remarkable, played with raw, nerve-pushing testiness by two first-time actors.
  8. My Father's Dragon
    [A] winningly sweet-natured, visually transporting adaptation.
  9. Rosaline
    There’s something fresh about the story’s unwillingness to pit a woman’s romantic quests against her career goals.
  10. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema.
  11. The Bohemian
    Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic Il Boemo seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.
  12. Lynch/Oz
    Lynch/Oz is bursting with ideas about it, and about how it colonized the consciousness of David Lynch, but the movie is too pie-in-the-sky to quite make it over the rainbow.
  13. Last Flight Home
    It is a tribute, a grappling with mortality, an exercise in self-surveillance, a messy home movie, a brief account of aviation history and a lesson in letting go and grief.
  14. Luckiest Girl Alive
    Because of its unwieldy aspects, primarily those shoe-horned into the climax, its simplistic conclusion draws ire instead of the inspired elation these filmmakers crave.
  15. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
    For all the purity of its pedigree, and as agreeable and lightly touching as it sometimes is, I wish that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile didn’t still seem, at heart, like a likable movie that had come out of the processor.
  16. Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
    The film, on balance, is cheery, sherbet-colored stuff, bursting with goodwill for all good people. What you remember from it, however, is each scene in which elder malevolence deliciously spoils the party.
  17. Marlowe
    A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir.
  18. Hellraiser
    The new Hellraiser works as metaphor, as flesh-annihilating spectacle. Yet it doesn’t work as a story.
  19. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    The results, balancing overfamiliar warm-and-fuzzy growing-up saga and halfhearted horror revenge tale, evaporate quickly from the mind — there’s little cumulative force that might linger. Yet at the same time, Hancock does an admirable job keeping this hour and three-quarters polished and engaging, maintaining consistent viewer interest even if the ultimate reward underwhelms.
  20. Till
    It would take a tough constitution not to be moved by Till, although that doesn’t necessarily make it great drama.
  21. Please Baby Please
    Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar.
  22. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    Though this ’80s-set horror-comedy takes an old-school approach to capturing the horrific happenings, the stunts are lackluster and the comedic hijinks are a tiresome bore. With very little interest conjured from the filmmakers to properly develop their characters, there’s little incentive to stay interested.
  23. Walk Up
    Existing sharply in such a naturalistic register that they scarcely seem scripted at all, all the film’s interactions are still so cleverly designed that despite being blurry with alcohol or attraction or self-analysis, they all highlight the funny, sad truism that no one human can ever really know what it’s like to be another.
  24. The Munsters
    The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way.
  25. Hocus Pocus 2
    Hocus Pocus 2 is actually the better made film, even if it amounts to little more than a stealth remake, with strategic decisions about the present-day and old-Salem witch trios being engineered to allow for more sequels, whether or not its star trio return.
  26. Sr.
    Sr. packs a wallop in the end, when it comes time for father and son to say goodbye.
  27. The Girl with a Bracelet
    The Girl With a Bracelet comments intelligently on our culture’s propensity to sex-shame and emotionally instruct young women in particular — points which stand regardless of whether shedunnit or not.
  28. Dalíland
    It’s both a highly entertaining movie and, by the end, a haunting one. It revels in Dalí’s artifice even as it mercilessly peels away his layers.
  29. Smile
    Smile will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie.
  30. Amsterdam
    The result has all the red flags of a flop, but takes a strong enough anti-establishment stand — and does so with wit and originality — to earn a cult following. There’s too much ambition here to write the movie off, even if Amsterdam, like the history it depicts, winds up taking years to be rediscovered and understood.
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