Variety's Scores

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For 17,832 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: 9,164 out of 17832
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17832
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17832
17832 movie reviews
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  1. Citadel
    Writer-director Ciaran Foy skillfully taps into primal fears and urban paranoia to keep his audience consistently unsettled in Citadel, an intensely suspenseful horror-thriller.
  2. Christmas in Compton
    With a first-rate cast led by Keith David and Sheryl Lee Ralph, generously funny dialogue and a supporting cast capable of crisp comic timing, writer-director David Raynr's feature is warm and likable enough to jumpstart the holiday movie season.
  3. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    A powerful, necessary contribution to a chilling body of reportage that, one senses by film's end, has just begun to take stock of the human costs of a monstrous conspiracy.
  4. 16 Acres
    An uncommonly engrossing and articulate documentary.
  5. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    The film, produced by Cherney, makes a clear and cogent case (later upheld by a court verdict) that police and FBI falsified evidence in order to discredit Bari's cause.
  6. Turning
    The 13 women, all born or made New Yorkers -- all born or made women -- of various ages, shapes, sizes and backgrounds, lose none of their mystique by being captured "behind the scenes," traipsing through airports or meticulously applying weird makeup. Rather, they reveal themselves as more conscious, integral parts of a spectacle that unfolds to hypnotic effect.
  7. The King (2012)
    Revelatory for the disabled and entertaining for the rest of us.
  8. Saving America's Horses: A Nation Betrayed
    Clearer, more thoughtful editing would have greatly enhanced the effectiveness of this sometimes-revelatory documentary.
  9. Parked
    This engaging character study functions best as a two-hander: The male leads build a wholly believable, offbeat co-dependency, while their interactions with others tend toward the more generic.
  10. Beware of Mr. Baker
    When a documentary begins with its subject using his crutch to deliver a vicious blow to the director's nose, it's reasonably safe to expect less-than-smooth sailing ahead.
  11. Elza (Le bonheur d'Elza)
    Suffused with buoyant, sunlit sensuality, like its free-flying heroine, Elza confounds logic while seducing the senses.
  12. The Rabbi's Cat
    This feature-length 3D adaptation of Sfar's comicbook series shares many of the same virtues and problems of his solo, live-action helming debut, the biopic "Gainsbourg," in that it is often colorful, witty and inspired, but also too episodic, and lacks a strong ending.
  13. Let Fury Have the Hour
    A curiously warm-and-fuzzy hindsight interpretation of artistic aggression, delivered by the artists themselves.
  14. Consuming Spirits
    This labor of love from do-it-all animator Chris Sullivan has the same rough-edged, cantankerous charms as the characters that populate it. Narrative alone is too uneven to captivate fully for the picture's two-hour-plus duration, though there's so much to see that "Spirits" should nonetheless prove a draw for adult audiences.
  15. Barbara
    A story of love and subterfuge in 1980 East Germany that never quite accelerates into an outright thriller, Barbara reps another assured collaboration between director Christian Petzold and his main muse, actress Nina Hoss.
  16. My Brooklyn
    Filled with colorful, articulate neighborhood champions, this absorbing picture eschews militant outrage for a quietly devastating look at social commodification.
  17. My Best Enemy
    Entertaining, though conventionally told war story.
  18. Uprising (2013)
    Amid the flood of documentaries about the Arab Spring in general and the Egyptian Revolution in particular, Uprising takes a clear, cohesive approach to the spontaneous events at its center.
  19. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    A modestly less quotable but generously funny new adventure for scotch-and-mahogany-loving 1970s newsman Ron Burgundy.
  20. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
    A most enjoyable flashback. Laura Archibald's documentary about Ground Zero for the 1960s folk explosion -- and its enormous influence on the shape of rock music to come -- isn't assembled in a particularly distinctive manner, but the materials and voices culled offer more than enough reward in themselves.
  21. Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives
    Warm, spirited and occasionally slathered in goo, Birth Story is a celebratory tribute to the endangered art of midwifery and its most influential practitioner, Ina May Gaskin.
  22. A Place at the Table
    A useful, engaging and enraging movie that will enlist supporters for its cause.
  23. Hercules
    It’s a grandly staged, solidly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure movie that does something no other Hercules movie has quite done before: it cuts the mythical son of Zeus down to human size (or as human as you can get while still being played by Dwayne Johnson).
  24. The Brass Teapot
    Despite the inherent perversity of the concept, Mosley succeeds in maintaining a certain sweetness throughout. Even more impressively, she makes her low-budget enterprise look as slick as most midrange studio comedies, demonstrating herself a director with both imagination and technical ingenuity.
  25. The Pirogue
    Toure crafts a handsome work that makes up in skill and honesty what it lacks in originality.
  26. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    There’s no denying, though, that Daniels knows how to push an audience’s buttons, and as crudely obvious as The Butler can be...it’s also genuinely rousing. By the end, it’s hard not to feel moved, if also more than a bit manhandled.
  27. Lore
    Lore offers a fresh, intimate and mostly successful perspective on Germany's traumatic transition from conqueror nation to occupied state.
  28. Trance
    A trippy variation on the dream-within-a-dream movie, Boyle’s return-to-form crimer constantly challenges what audiences think they know, but neglects to establish why they should care.
  29. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia
    The helmer generates suspense with shrewd pacing, deft emotional manipulation and efficient use of familiar tricks -- jittery editing, flickering lights and unsettling sounds -- common to haunted-house pictures.
  30. Night Across the Street
    The valedictory sentiments at the heart of this mysterious experiment are conveyed with characteristically wry wit and great generosity of spirit.
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