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. Silence
    Though undeniably gorgeous, it is punishingly long, frequently boring, and woefully unengaging at some of its most critical moments.... Still, viewed through the narrow prism of films about faith, Silence is a remarkable achievement.
  2. The Bounce Back
    The Bounce Back was co-written, directed, and edited by Youseff Delara, and for a while he creates some lively screwball tension.
  3. Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America
    The differing responses Accidental Courtesy is likely to evoke in viewers make it a great conversation-starter for public and educational forums.
  4. Slash
    An effortlessly engaging dramedy that somehow manages to sustain an air of buoyant sweetness even while repeatedly referencing erotic fantasies and sexual anxieties.
  5. Abattoir
    Though it’s handsome enough to look at, Abattoir can’t quite seem to decide just how supernatural it wants to be or how meta its horror content should play
  6. Frank & Lola
    It’s poised between reality and paranoid daydream, it’s about the dangerous ways that love can go wrong, and it does the thing that noir was invented to do: It sucks you in.
  7. Old Stone
    Channeling the style of gritty mainland independent films but without the usual longueurs, the film deftly morphs into a suspense thriller with Dostoevskyan undertones.
  8. Beyond the Gates
    This fun if unmemorable occult thriller sports — all too faithfully at times — both the typical pleasures and shortcomings of the movies it pays homage to.
  9. Office Christmas Party
    Turn them loose, and this cast has nearly endless potential to be outrageous, and yet, the script...keeps interrupting the festivities with unnecessary details about whether the company will even be around tomorrow.
  10. Sky on Fire
    There’s really nothing new here. Still, it’s hard to deny the sporadically satisfying nostalgic appeal of this dash down memory lane.
  11. All We Had
    Katie Holmes makes an undistinguished helming debut with All We Had, a middlebrow drama with no pretensions but also no depth.
  12. Burn Country
    While Olds and Paul Felten’s screenplay requires some significant credulity leaps, The Fixer is flavorsome, engaging and unpredictable enough that one can give those gaps a pass, at least to an extent.
  13. Incarnate
    Offers a relatively fresh take on standard-issue exorcism-melodrama tropes, along with a performance by Aaron Eckhart that is more than persuasive enough to encourage the investment of a rooting interest.
  14. Anonymous
    Anonymous plods through a low-stakes tale that’s almost frictionlessly insulated against real-world consequences.
  15. The Belko Experiment
    As a self-aware guilty pleasure, The Belko Experiment may not quite seize greatness, but it does give it a playful squeeze.
  16. Run the Tide
    Lautner’s earnest turn, as well as those of familiar TV faces Johnson (“Bates Motel,” “The Shield”) and Zimmer (“Entourage,” “UnReal”), are hamstrung by writing that demands a certain emotional urgency while providing the performers little opportunity for surprise or nuance.
  17. Believe
    An aggressively sincere but off-puttingly saccharine drama.
  18. A Boy Called Po
    Noble intentions alone do not a great movie make, as evidenced by Po, whose heart is in the right place but whose drama is woefully lacking in momentum.
  19. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.
  20. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    This finely crafted docu may well long stand as the most balanced among such treatments, as it respectfully examines Sands’ folk-heroic legacy rather than simply amplifying it.
  21. Magnus
    Magnus, it turns out, is the anti-Bobby: a fascinatingly “normalized” prodigy.
  22. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a nimble documentary made with a personal touch of nostalgia, and it should prove nothing less than catnip to Sondheim obsessives.
  23. Seasons
    While it features some of the most breathtaking nature photography this side of BBC’s “Planet Earth” miniseries, this gorgeously cinematic docu ties said footage to a leaden all-purpose eco-consciousness message that nearly spoils the otherwise timeless experience.
  24. Fences
    Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.
  25. The Founder
    Keaton plays Kroc as a man both pathetic and singularly possessed, cannily resisting lovability at every turn, while delivering the internalized self-help speak of his sales pitches with chillingly glib precision.
  26. 100 Streets
    While the film initially exercises commendable restraint in braiding its separate narratives, its second half grows increasingly reliant on pat connections and coincidences.
  27. Allied
    Allied is tense and absorbing, yet the film’s climactic act somehow falls short.
  28. Prevenge
    While not every tonal downshift here is entirely fluid, this remains a smart, risky one-off, unconcerned with those (and there will be many) who can’t acquire its taste.
  29. Patriots Day
    It’s genuinely exciting megaplex entertainment, informed by extensive research, featuring bona fide movie stars, and staged with equal degrees of professionalism and respect.
  30. Officer Downe
    Imagine Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” stripped of its politics, its wit, its humanity, and its craft, and that only gets halfway down the bottom of the barrel scraped by Officer Downe, a hyper-aggressive and thoroughly repugnant piece of comic-book juvenalia.
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