Variety's Scores

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For 17,805 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: 9,148 out of 17805
  2. Mixed: 7,020 out of 17805
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17805
17805 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. The Impossible
    Wrenchingly acted, deftly manipulated and terrifyingly well made.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Francine
    A glum but tenderly observed micro-portrait of a woman struggling to re-enter society after being released from prison.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Branded
    This messy amalgam of mysticism, romance, satire, social criticism and cartoonish f/x seems destined for discount DVD bins.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. Liberal Arts
    This makes the film feel perilously close to widescreen sitcom, as do montages of New York set to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.
  16. Arbitrage
    Between this cast and the conviction Jarecki brings to the table, the film feels incredibly accomplished for a first feature.
  17. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. Detropia
    Among several recent documentaries about Detroit, the elegiac Detropia is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing, if not the most informative or insightful.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. Dredd
    Grim, gritty and ultra-violent, Dredd reinstates the somber brutality missing from the U.K. comicbook icon's previous screen outing.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    The low-budget production feels chintzy and impossibly square, even by tyke standards.
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