Variety's Scores

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For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
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  1. Honour
    Earnest issue drama and pulpy B-thriller mechanics make awkward but not uncompelling bedfellows in Honour.
  2. Rage
    Proficiently made but fatally unpersuasive in its portrayal of internecine gang warfare, this thuggish melodrama piles on the foreign accents and paint-by-numbers brutality, all served up with a grim, operatic self-seriousness that gives Cage’s antihero little room to maneuver.
  3. And So It Goes
    For all of its 93 minutes, you never feel anything significant is at stake for anyone — save for a paycheck.
  4. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
    A fast-paced valentine to Russell and his quixotic vision so rife with underdog victors and hairpin twists of fortune that, if it weren’t all true, no one would believe it.
  5. The Empty Hours
    Fernandez (“Used Parts”) has a masterful handle on narrative, structure and character, skillfully blending them all in a tale with atmosphere to spare.
  6. Closed Curtain
    Less satisfying than his previous pic, yet still a bold, melancholy statement.
  7. Heatstroke
    An underwhelming survival thriller.
  8. The Green Prince
    An extraordinarily engrossing tale becomes an extremely uncinematic experience in the hands of Israeli documentarian Nadav Schirman.
  9. Web Junkie
    With filmmakers Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia granted extraordinary access to one facility, they make for a bizarre and entertaining documentary.
  10. Cannibal
    The film’s slow deliberation and aesthetic rigor act as a form of seduction, luring the viewer into unwilling identification with Carlos.
  11. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    Planes: Fire & Rescue is a slight but improbably successful example of a movie that, despite its profusion of chrome and steel, somehow succeeds in touching something human.
  12. Han Gong-ju
    For some time, the pic holds interest while constantly frustrating curiosity with the way it parses out information, but soon after the midway point the game becomes tedious, and attention slackens considerably even as Gong-ju’s ordeal becomes clear.
  13. Premature
    Premature winds up resembling nothing so much as the coarsely smutty teen-sex comedies that abounded throughout the ’80s in the wake of “Porky’s.”
  14. Deliver Us From Evil
    Deliver Us From Evil is a professionally assembled genre mashup that’s too silly to be scary, and a bit too dull to be a midnight-movie guilty pleasure.
  15. A Picture of You
    Competently written and skillfully acted, the film seems to be melodrama-bound, when a shocking discovery and the sudden arrival of friends instead send it careening into comedy.
  16. Drones
    Drones is a middling real-time thriller.
  17. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    "Whitey” emerges as yet another of Berlinger’s gripping, irony-laced snapshots of the American criminal justice system, in which his eponymous subject comes across as an incontestable monster who may, nevertheless, also be an unwitting patsy.
  18. The BreakUp Guru
    A helming debut for mainland star Deng Chao and theater director Yu Baimei, who have claimed that they’re pushing the envelope of Chinese comedy but have in fact merely pushed the genre to a new low in terms of racist and homophobic humor.
  19. Tammy
    Falcone’s attempts to spin this flat, formulaic comedy into an affecting character drama are frustrated by filmmaking choices that work against a sense of persuasive reality.
  20. America: Imagine a World Without Her
    For the most part, however, D’Souza gives the impression of someone obsessed with whitewashing any and all dark chapters in U.S. history books. There are times when his defenses and rationalizations come across as almost laughably facile.
  21. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    An altogether smashing sequel to 2011′s better-than-expected “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” this vivid, violent extension of humanoid ape Caesar’s troubled quest for independence bests its predecessor in nearly every technical and conceptual department.
  22. The Guest
    The Guest is blood-soaked action trash of a high grade.
  23. Archipelago
    This is a beautifully distilled and literally still work that lingers in the mind long after its conclusion.
  24. Unrelated
    A thinly scripted mood piece centered on an estranged fortysomething among vacationing friends in Italy, Unrelated doesn’t carry the viewer along with its protag’s emotional problems.
  25. Humshakals
    The problem is not the stretched improbability of the film’s premise, or even the political incorrectness of its caricatured stereotypes (this is slapstick, after all), but rather that the actors fail to come off as funny in any of their incarnations.
  26. Coherence
    Coherence devolves into a noisy, cluttered portrait of dysfunction, all clenched fists and shouted expletives. The twists may be novel, but the talk, and the upshot, are all too dispiritingly familiar.
  27. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    The Internet’s Own Boy is a beautifully crafted film that opens a window on a world not everyone has entered yet, and exposes ways in which both the legal system and the U.S. government is lagging hopelessly behind technology.
  28. Life After Beth
    Blending smart fantasy elements, broad comedy, tender romance and an atypically slow-burning apocalypse, the directorial debut of “I Heart Huckabees” co-writer Jeff Baena is charming, thoughtful and laugh-out-loud funny.
  29. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is at once too much and yet somehow not enough. On the one hand, it’s exciting to see the always envelope-pushing Lee working without a studio- or distributor-imposed safety net... But while the film never lacks for ambition, it fails to satisfy emotionally or intellectually in the ways Lee intends.
  30. Radio Free Albemuth
    The narrative delivers satisfying intrigue and suspense.
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