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. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    That original was split between charms and minuses, suffering primarily from careless scripting. Here, those faults are indulged wholesale, with so little attention paid to overall narrative development or individual scene-shaping that the bloated pic often suggests a crowd-funded venture existing solely to pay back (and showcase) the crowd.
  2. Butter
    Butter might have been a dark comedy; here, the humor is twisted but the world is bright as can be. Conservatives and liberals alike take a licking, and yet the art of butter carving emerges unscathed.
  3. The Paperboy
    A risibly overheated, not unenjoyable slab of late-'60s Southern pulp trash, marked by a sticky, sweaty atmosphere of delirium and sexual frustration that only partly excuses the woozy ineptitude of the filmmaking.
  4. Bel Borba Aqui
    A vibrant catalogue of his outdoor pieces presented in context with an exhaustive portrait of Borba as a boundlessly energetic, iconoclastic creator, the documentary ties itself too tightly to its subject, mimicking forms and rhythms it never fully makes its own.
  5. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Lacking the outrage and wit of Michael Moore's "Sicko," which dealt with the different matter of health insurance, this documentary is stronger on finding viable solutions.
  6. Trade of Innocents
    Unfortunately, with its unconvincing action, preachy script and flat performances, the picture winds up less moving than most typical journeyman documentaries on the subject.
  7. The House I Live In
    A ballsy mix of interviews and editorializing that's daring enough to question a costly crackdown that has long had the public's support.
  8. Fat Kid Rules the World
    Affecting performances and effective storytelling are the hallmarks of Fat Kid Rules the World.
  9. My Life as Abraham Lincoln
    Luft grounds the film with an insistently believable performance, while other thesps float in and out of cliche.
  10. Bringing Up Bobby
    A technically competent but painfully broad dramedy about a larcenous mother-and-son duo in the Midwest. This gender-flipped, latter-day "Paper Moon" lacks that film's judicious restraint, among other things, alternating hick Americana cartoonishness with maudlin appeals to the tear ducts.
  11. American Autumn: an Occudoc
    This strong, well-crafted documentary preaches eloquently to the choir.
  12. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    Setting his fact-based tale on the eve of democratic elections in 1980 Peru, Vila tends to err on the side of melodrama whenever possible, and John Robinson's lead performance offers no end of privileged American naivete. But the characters are solid and the action sound.
  13. Hellbound?
    By narrowing its range of voices to Christian leaders, thinkers and writers, Kevin Miller's sober, stimulating documentary on the hot topic of eternal damnation necessarily limits its audience, but achieves a level of rhetorical eloquence that would theoretically appeal to open-minded viewers of any religious stripe.
  14. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    There's something perversely fascinating about helmer John Hyams' freewheeling yet deliberately paced mashup of noirish mystery, splatter-movie intensity, first-person-shooter vidgame and "Apocalypse Now"-style surrealism.
  15. Red Dawn
    Despite the considerable impediment of a premise arguably even sillier than that of the original "Red Dawn," helmer Dan Bradley's long-delayed remake of John Milius' 1984 kids-vs.-Commies adventure delivers enough thrilling action sequences and rock-'em, sock-'em fantasy-fulfillment to amp its B.O. potential.
  16. Life of Pi
    This exquisitely beautiful adaptation of Yann Martel's castaway saga has a sui generis quality that's never less than beguiling, even if its fable-like construction and impeccable artistry come up a bit short in terms of truly gripping, elemental drama.
  17. Smashed
    A terrific performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a rock-bottom alcoholic is only one reason to appreciate Smashed, an affecting and immersive addiction drama about the unforeseen pitfalls along the road to recovery.
  18. Nobody Walks
    Reminiscent of 2010 Sundance breakout "The Kids Are All Right," Ry Russo-Young's Nobody Walks captures the fallout of an open-minded Los Angeles family shaken up by the arrival of a sexy outsider, only this time, it's the outsider whose perspective takes precedence.
  19. Middle of Nowhere
    Solidly acted but aloof and slow as molasses.
  20. V/H/S
    The segments vary in quality and the whole overstays its welcome at nearly two hours.
  21. Pitch Perfect
    As spirited and irresistible as the college a cappella craze it celebrates, Pitch Perfect is a cheeky delight.
  22. Won't Back Down
    Grossly oversimplifying the issue at hand, writer-director Daniel Barnz's disingenuous pot-stirrer plays to audiences' emotions rather than their intelligence, offering meaty roles for Maggie Gyllenhaal as a determined single mom, and Viola Davis as the good egg among a rotten batch of teachers, while reducing everyone else to cardboard characterizations.
  23. Electoral Dysfunction
    Satirist and "Daily Show" ex-contributor Mo Rocca's faux-disingenuous tone and nonstop jocularity dominate the documentary to quickly grating effect, significantly diminishing its impact.
  24. That's What She Said
    This crude, shrill day in the life of three ill-matched Manhattan women will prove as irksome to most viewers as it is to the protags.
  25. Solomon Kane
    This muscular yet monotonous "Kane" just isn't much fun.
  26. The Other Dream Team
    Smartly engineered to engage sports fans and non-fans, the picture's account of Lithuania's 1992 Olympics bronze medal-winning team, presented as a symbol of post-Cold War freedom.
  27. Sinister
    The scares are not just intense but unyielding in this compelling horror yarn from "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" director Scott Derrickson.
  28. Frankenweenie
    This beautifully designed canine-resurrection saga feels, somewhat fittingly, stitched together from stray narrative parts, but nonetheless evinces a level of discipline and artistic coherence missing from the director's recent live-action efforts.
  29. Hotel Transylvania
    A stale overprotective-dad story set within a location that could easily house a more inspired mix of characters and events.
  30. House at the End of the Street
    Exploiting Lawrence's newfound fame is the only hope this ill-conceived, poorly executed venture has of connecting with audiences before poisonous word of mouth sends potential buyers in search of a more attractive address.
  31. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    When discussing tastemakers of the 20th century, few names conjure "style" with the zest of Diana Vreeland, and documentary The Eye Has to Travel gets the zing just right.
  32. My Uncle Rafael
    A behind-the-scenes comedy about the making of a reality TV show, My Uncle Rafael looks suspiciously like an outright sitcom itself, with the same careful dosage of sententiousness and one-liners.
  33. Doctored
    What starts as an impassioned exploration of the medical establishment's court-proven conspiracy to "contain and eliminate" the chiropractic profession soon turns into a scattershot expose of the entire health care field in Doctored.
  34. Head Games
    Parents could be making their kids wear helmets to the library by the conclusion of helmer Steve James' science-and-sports docu Head Games, which scores solid hits on everyone from the NFL down to peewee hockey as it links contact sports, concussions and those calling for widespread reformation of the nation's athletic philosophies and priorities.
  35. Backwards
    Passably pleasant but thoroughly predictable.
  36. Fred Won't Move Out
    Irregularly spiked with some droll sitcom-style humor, this thoughtful but exceedingly modest miniature will be best nursed within the festival circuit.
  37. 17 Girls
    Impressively, the rookie scribe-helmers' sense of equilibrium is unerring and also surprisingly subtle.
  38. Silver Linings Playbook
    Never one to shy away from unlikely sources of comedy, David O. Russell tackles mental illness, marital failure and the curative powers of football with bracingly sharp and satisfying results in Silver Linings Playbook.
  39. Trouble with the Curve
    A defiantly analog rejoinder to last year's tech-savvy baseball drama, "Moneyball," Robert Lorenz's square but sturdy directing debut rests on the wonderfully spiky chemistry between Eastwood and Amy Adams.
  40. How to Survive a Plague
    A concise overview's clarity and an epic narrative shape, with a happy ending to boot.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Resident Evil: Retribution
    Even devoted fans may wonder whether this installment is actually a haphazard patchwork of outtakes from previous "Resident Evil" pictures.
  42. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    First-time writer-director Stephen Chbosky adapts his young-adult bestseller with far more passion than skill, which suits familiar scenes of adolescent awkwardness aptly enough.
  43. The Impossible
    Wrenchingly acted, deftly manipulated and terrifyingly well made.
  44. Rust and Bone
    A tender yet heavily de-romanticized love story between a boxer with broken hands and an orca trainer with missing legs, Rust and Bone serves as an impressive if somewhat overblown exercise in contrasts.
  45. A Late Quartet
    Centered around four outstanding performances, Yaron Zilberman's fiction-feature debut feels like the work of a filmmaker who knows and appreciates the art form under scrutiny, laying a credible foundation for a story that lays bare the often melodramatic passions of the artistic soul.
  46. Francine
    A glum but tenderly observed micro-portrait of a woman struggling to re-enter society after being released from prison.
  47. End of Watch
    Ultimately, the mock-doc device works because Gyllenhaal and Pena so completely reinvent themselves in-character. Instead of wearing the roles like costumes or uniforms, they let the job seep into their skin, a feat without which "End of Watch's" pseudo-reality never would have worked.
  48. Seven Psychopaths
    Compared to McDonagh's best work for stage ("The Lieutenant of Inishmore") and screen ("In Bruges"), Seven Psychopaths feels like either an older script knocking around the bottom of a drawer or a new one hastily tossed off between more ambitious projects.
  49. Branded
    This messy amalgam of mysticism, romance, satire, social criticism and cartoonish f/x seems destined for discount DVD bins.
  50. Cloud Atlas
    As inventive narratives go, there's outside the box, and then there's pioneering another dimension entirely, and this massive, independently financed collaboration among Tom Tykwer and Wachowski siblings Lana and Andy courageously attempts the latter.
  51. Argo
    Ultimately, the thrill of Argo is in watching how the illusion-making of movies found such an unlikely application on the world political stage, where the stakes were literally life and death.
  52. Looper
    In a genre infamous for loose ends, this thinking man's thriller marshals action, romance and a dose of very dark comedy toward a stunning payoff.
  53. Liberal Arts
    This makes the film feel perilously close to widescreen sitcom, as do montages of New York set to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.
  54. Arbitrage
    Between this cast and the conviction Jarecki brings to the table, the film feels incredibly accomplished for a first feature.
  55. 10 Years
    Oddly, 10 years barely qualifies as a comedy; in fact, the one interesting thing about it is the dire melancholy at its core.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Eye of the Storm
    Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis bookend a cast consisting of some of Oz's finest thesps, but Schepisi never gets a grip on a script with awkward literary tics.
  57. Girl Model
    While Girl Model falls a bit short in the delivery of hard facts and incriminating evidence, it more than makes up for that with its knotty psychological profile of Arbaugh.
  58. Detropia
    Among several recent documentaries about Detroit, the elegiac Detropia is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing, if not the most informative or insightful.
  59. Keep the Lights On
    Delicately tracing the troubled nine-year bond between two men living in New York, Ira Sachs mines his own memories to sensitive, melancholy if somewhat muted effect in Keep the Lights On.
  60. Killing Them Softly
    A routine, even mundane crime story relayed in tones of world-weary fatigue, Killing Them Softly deglams the mob movie to coolly distinctive if rarely pulse-quickening effect.
  61. Anna Karenina
    Setting most of the action in a mocked-up theater emphasizes the performance aspects of the characters' behavior, a strategy enhanced by lead thesp Keira Knightley's willingness to let her neurotic Anna appear less sympathetic than in previous incarnations.
  62. Dredd
    Grim, gritty and ultra-violent, Dredd reinstates the somber brutality missing from the U.K. comicbook icon's previous screen outing.
  63. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Brit sitcom The Inbetweeners, which tracked the travails of four male misfits in their last years at high school, makes a satisfying leap to the bigscreen in summer holiday adventure The Inbetweeners Movie.
  64. Hello I Must Be Going
    As a director, Louiso operates within a narrow emotional range; while not as bleak as "Love Liza," the film feels similarly monotonous and desperately needs more dramatic fluctuation.
  65. For Ellen
    As a struggling rocker making a last-ditch attempt to gain shared custody of his daughter, Paul Dano delivers a beautifully wrought performance in a different key from any of his previous roles.
  66. The Master
    The writer-director's typically eccentric sixth feature is a sustained immersion in a series of hypnotic moods and longueurs, an imposing picture that thrillingly and sometimes maddeningly refuses to conform to expectations.
  67. Bachelorette
    After a promisingly funny first half, this tale of three coke-snorting gal-pals trying not to screw up their friend's nuptials all but drowns in its own catty cynicism, turning as stingy with emotion and insight as it is with real laughs.
  68. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    The low-budget production feels chintzy and impossibly square, even by tyke standards.
  69. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    The 3D is terrific in Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, but helmer Tsui Hark's costume actioner -- the first Chinese-lingo movie shown in the stereoscopic Imax format -- is let down by two-dimensional characters.
  70. The Possession
    A ho-hum exorcism chiller that tries to spice up a formulaic screenplay by converting a predominantly Catholic-fixated horror subgenre to Judaism.
  71. The Ambassador
    Brugger ensures it's a fairly entertaining excursion, especially when he starts to enjoy getting into character as the nefarious white man in Africa.
  72. The Revenant
    An often hilarious living-dead comedy that just had to happen, given the current hunger for zombies, vampires and other things that refuse to keel over.
  73. For a Good Time, Call...
    Doesn't rise much above sitcom level in material or execution, but provides enough laughs and goodwill to be disarmingly entertaining.
  74. The Good Doctor
    Daly deftly creates a disturbing, Chabrol-like tension that plays on immediate identification with the handsome medico's lonely, shy vulnerability and slow-building horror at the depths to which his self-delusion can sink.
  75. The Apparition
    This enervating muddle of paranormal nonsense manages the difficult feat of seeming frenzied and lethargic all at once, while building toward the sort of ludicrous cop-out climax that often incites die-hard genre fans to shout rude things at the screen.
  76. Knight Knight
    Everyone's likable, but Katrina is the film's crowning achievement, portrayed by Bucher as if she were an irritable housekeeper on a telenovela.
  77. Premium Rush
    The lovably ridiculous bike-messenger thriller Premium Rush is a welcome throwback.
  78. The Words
    A literary film that stands to work best for those who don't read, The Words is a slick, superficially clever compendium of stories about authors of uncertain talent and varying success.
  79. Little White Lies
    With its bloated running time and tonal shifts, the story tends to steer off course, though strong performances help keep it in tow.
  80. Teddy Bear
    The low-key drama is well crafted and likable as far as it goes, but there's not enough narrative impetus or depth to maintain more than passing viewer interest.
  81. 2016: Obama's America
    While it's highly unlikely that anyone predisposed to championing Obama would be won over by the sound and fury here, there's no gainsaying the value of "2016" as a sort of Cliffs Notes precis of the conservative case against the re-election of our current U.S. president.
  82. Hit and Run
    Above all, real-life couple Shepard and Bell bring genuine chemistry to this high-energy excursion.
  83. Death by China
    One need not fully subscribe to Peter Navarro's demonization to appreciate his lucid wake-up call to the imminent dangers of the huge U.S.-China trade imbalance and its disastrous impact on the American economy.
  84. Sparkle
    Sparkle deals in such well-worn rise-and-fall music-bio tropes that it's hard to blame it for simply coasting on narrative shorthand at times. But the lackadaisical storytelling can inch toward outright laziness.
  85. The Expendables 2
    This muscle-bound meathead extravaganza is a sometimes blissfully cretinous endeavor, delivering the maximum firepower and zero brainpower its target audience expects.
  86. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    With just the right dose of magic and no shortage of sentiment, this inspirational parenting tale from writer-director Peter Hedges plays like "Mary Poppins" in reverse.
  87. Side by Side
    Although laid out with such clarity that any layperson could catch the gist of what's being discussed, Side by Side is not afraid to get nitty-gritty about more technical matters.
  88. The Matchmaker
    This look back at late-'60s Haifa makes for strong, accessible, character-driven drama.
  89. Sleepwalk with Me
    An endearing indie feature about the day-to-day indecisions and nocturnal perambulations of a commitment-phobic New Yorker.
  90. Robot and Frank
    Debuting helmer Jake Schreier, screenwriter Christopher D. Ford and a wry and wily Frank Langella all shine in a smart, plausible and resonant film.
  91. We Women Warriors
    Nicole Karsin's beautifully crafted documentary We Women Warriors highlights the activism of three strong, extraordinarily likable women from three different regions and indigenous cultures of Colombia.
  92. A Simple Life
    Suffused with the gentle, unforced humanity viewers have come to expect from Hong Kong helmer Ann Hui, A Simple Life is a tender ode to the elderly, their caregivers and the mutual generosity of spirit that makes their limited time together worthwhile.
  93. This Time
    The Sweet Inspirations ranked as one of the most important backup singing groups in record-industry history, having performed with Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Dionne Warwick, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, the Drifters, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield and Elvis Presley. Yet, aside from an occasional still photograph, not a single frame of archival footage from their illustrious careers shows up in This Time.
  94. Meet the Fokkens
    Rob Schroder and Gabrielle Provaas' raunchy, hilariously uninhibited documentary should wow arthouse audiences.
  95. Nitro Circus: The Movie
    Watching people take their lives into their hands shouldn't be as tedious as Nitro Circus: The Movie 3D, which could be described as "Jackass" with a death wish (or "Wipeout" without the water).
  96. The Lion of Judah
    Ultimately, this is perhaps useful, since "never forget" only applies if you know something in the first place, and in that regard The Lion of Judah serves as a cautionary tale.
  97. Cosmopolis
    An eerily precise match of filmmaker and material, Cosmopolis probes the soullessness of the 1% with the cinematic equivalent of latex gloves.
  98. The Green Wave
    Mixed-media approach is eye-catching, and the subject is unquestionably powerful, but the sentimental score and stridently drawn imagery detract from picture's impact.
  99. The Awakening
    Though handsome to look at, so-so supernatural chiller The Awakening recalls "The Others," "The Orphanage" and other haunted-house tales of recent vintage, making an impression more derivative than memorable.
  100. The Bourne Legacy
    Subbing character actor Jeremy Renner into a franchise that requires Matt Damon-caliber magnetism, series scribe Tony Gilroy takes over the helming duties with an overlong sequel that features too little action and an unnecessarily complicated plot.
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