Variety's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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  1. The Void
    At least its failings aren’t formulaic ones — or perhaps they’re the fault of jamming in more fantastic-cinema formula than one modestly scaled film can support.
  2. Mine
    The Fabios appear to have some talent, but not a lot of common sense. They’ve made a land-mine suspense thriller with a few heart-in-the-throat, hair-trigger moments, but Mine is so eager to be a “metaphor” (it’s a little Beckett, a little Tarantino, a little Lifetime channel) that it’s the film’s pretension that winds up exploding in your face.
  3. Despite the Falling Snow
    When a film’s basic strategy is to cut between the past and the present, it should create ripples of anticipatory tension. But Despite the Falling Snow is one of those movies in which the cross-cutting keeps destroying all mood and momentum — it feels more like channel-surfing.
  4. Truman
    Cesc Gay’s wise, wistful and well-observed film about two friends enjoying a final reunion in the shadow of impending death, is by turns amusing and affecting — and quite often both at once.
  5. Pitching Tents
    The big giveaway: While some of the genuine articles sporadically earned chuckles with vulgar sight gags and gratuitous nudity, Pitching Tents is too timorous to risk being truly offensive.
  6. God Knows Where I Am
    The film gradually thaws out the stark, frozen mystery at its heart, but the warm-blooded, breathing truth of Linda’s life is no less tragic than that of her cold death.
  7. Live Cargo
    Live Cargo is one of the most evocatively shot debut films in recent memory, which is why its shabby storytelling is such a crushing disappointment.
  8. Gifted
    Gifted wants to be an “honest” tearjerker, but it’s as plotted out as an equation on a blackboard. It’s the undergirding of formula that roots the movie in the commercial marketplace, but that may ultimately limit its appeal.
  9. The Work
    When the participants convulse and cry, the film’s empathetic connection is so direct and so strong, audiences may be driven to weep as well.
  10. Bokeh
    The result is a “What if?” exercise that ultimately doesn’t take its starting premise to any place that’s terribly interesting. However, for at least as long as it appears to be heading somewhere, Bokeh holds attention with polish and resourcefulness on a limited budget.
  11. Tickling Giants
    Tickling Giants is a terrific movie that leaves you cherishing (a little more) the freedom we have, and holding in contempt (a little more) those who would compromise it. Mostly, the movie makes you understand how every society — and ours more than ever — needs people like Bassem Youssef to demonstrate that laughter will always be one of the essential ways to keep power in check.
  12. A Woman, a Part
    A Woman, a Part knows how to hold an audience, and it’s got a fresh, if commercially limited, subject: What happens when hipsters get old.
  13. Leap!
    An unabashed wish-fulfilment fantasy that sweetly checks off every conceivable follow-your-heart cliché.
  14. Cézanne et Moi
    The cinematic equivalent of calendar art.
  15. The Levelling
    The Levelling is an intimate story, waterlogged with guilt, grief and blame, but it explores this dark spectrum with such unsentimental honesty that its tiny moments of uplift, when its repressed characters form tentative connections despite themselves, are magnified and moving.
  16. For Here or to Go?
    Writer-producer Rishi S. Bhilawadikar’s too-busy script nevertheless scores legitimate points about the complexities and paradoxes of the visa application process, the resulting limbo in which many legitimately productive immigrants find themselves, and other frustrating and soul-searching issues facing ethnic communities.
  17. Summer 1993
    Striking a careful balance between narrative and atmosphere, the writer-director paints a vivid portrait of a light-filled summer when a little girl has to face the loss of her mother and integration into a new nuclear family
  18. The Death of Louis XIV
    The vividness of the realization — with a sound design that emphasizes every chew and tick of the clock — makes the movie continually engrossing.
  19. Ghost in the Shell
    Spectacularly honoring the spirit and aesthetic of Mamoru Oshii’s beloved animated adaptations without resorting wholly to slavish cosplay, this is smart, hard-lacquered entertainment that may just trump the original films for galloping storytelling momentum and sheer, coruscating visual excitement — even if a measure of their eerie, melancholic spirit hasn’t quite carried over to the immaculate new carapace.
  20. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Nominally focused on the celebrated filmmaker’s lesser-known dabblings in fine art, The Art Life emerges as a more expansive study of Lynch’s creative impulses and preoccupations, as he relates first-hand the formative experiences that spurred and shaped a most unusual imagination.
  21. All This Panic
    All This Panic is more remarkable for the way it looks than the actual, somewhat banal, girl-talk content.
  22. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    It’s not a rousing animated comedy that parents will cherish along with their kids. It’s more like a colorful and diverting pacifier.
  23. Band Aid
    Band Aid has wit and nasty charm to burn in the earlygoing, generating enough goodwill to power it through an uneven final act.
  24. I, Olga Hepnarová
    Unforgivingly rigorous to its final, exactingly composed monochrome frame, I, Olga Hepnarova shows us scarcely a flickering moment of light or joy in its anti-heroine’s short, loveless life, depicted on screen from adolescence upwards.
  25. Dig Two Graves
    It’s all quite nicely handled by Adams’ direction and his script (co-written with Jeremy Phillips), though the latter ultimately somewhat disappoints.
  26. Karl Marx City
    Epperlein offers Karl Marx City as her own act of painful transparency, an essential warning about what happens to societies when ordinary citizens are being watched.
  27. CHIPS
    Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”
  28. The Time of Their Lives
    A likably lame rattletrap of a road movie that gets what limited spark it has from the “Dynasty” diva’s still-lascivious on-screen charisma.
  29. The Zookeeper's Wife
    There’s no nice way to put it in this case, but The Zookeeper’s Wife has the unfortunate failing of rendering its human drama less interesting than what happens to the animals — and for a subject as damaging to our species as the Holocaust, that no small shortcoming.
  30. Most Beautiful Island
    The movie’s payoff is every bit as delicious as its build-up.
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