Variety's Scores

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For 17,810 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: 9,150 out of 17810
  2. Mixed: 7,023 out of 17810
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17810
17810 movie reviews
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  1. Dinner for Schmucks
    An uproarious odd-couple remake of Francis Veber's hit French farce "The Dinner Game."
  2. Charlie St. Cloud
    Religious overtones, however, could make this the rare mainstream feature that connects with the faith-based entertainment market.
  3. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    This fawning docu goes to lengths to portray the octogenarian Playboy magazine founder as among the greatest figures of 20th-century American popular culture, while only cursorily acknowledging his status as a pioneering softcore pornographer.
  4. Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
    A faster, funnier follow-up in which CGI-enhanced canines and felines effect a temporary truce to combat a common enemy.
  5. The Concert
    The story regurgitates the usual trappings of underdog tales, milking stereotypes as well as tear ducts.
  6. The Extra Man
    Although too devoted to matters literary, theatrical, operatic and sexually outre to make it with general audiences, this adaptation of Jonathan Ames' novel exudes the sort of smarts and sophisticated charm specialized audiences seek.
  7. Get Low
    With a mix of sly humor, homespun grace and affecting poignancy, Get Low casts a well-nigh irresistible spell.
  8. Smash His Camera
    This entertaining docu by "When We Were Kings'?" Leon Gast is more eccentric personality portrait than the in-depth scrutiny of celebrity-culture madness afforded by fellow Sundance preem "Teenage Paparazzo."
  9. Who Killed Nancy?
    Despite the presence of Glen Matlock, Steve Dior and a handful of other punk rockers, plus a slew of oblique eyewitness who lurked around before and after the fact, the documentary soon bogs down in tiresome minutiae.
  10. Salt
    As a fierce superspy and mistress of many disguises, Jolie represents the one indisputably kickass element in this brisk, professionally assembled but finally shrug-inducing thriller.
  11. Ramona and Beezus
    It's not the personal, distinctive portrait of misfit girlhood it could have been.
  12. Audrey the Trainwreck
    An edgier Richard Linklater for a less privileged generation, mumblecore helmer Frank V. Ross captures his characters' dead-end disaffection not through stasis, but through nervous activity.
  13. Countdown to Zero
    A politically urgent picture, it will also literally scare the breath out of what will certainly be a worldwide audience.
  14. Farewell
    It's juicy, fascinating stuff, well orchestrated by Carion and finely thesped -- especially by Kusturica.
  15. Life During Wartime
    In revisiting his darkly comic 1998 ensembler "Happiness," Todd Solondz may have made his best film with Life During Wartime.
  16. Mugabe and the White African
    The documentary sometimes bears an eerie resemblance to Claire Denis' brilliant "White Material" in its tense evocation of menace stalking the periphery of the frame.
  17. Spoken Word
    Spoken Word benefits from an improbably perfect storm of production circumstances: The muscular, balanced script, the brainchild of an unusual alliance between professional poet Joe Ray Sandoval and TV writer William T. Conway, consistently plays to Nunez's strengths.
  18. Slingshot
    Supplies no end of shock, but an underdeveloped emotional core keeps the viewer at arm's length.
  19. Inception
    If Inception is a metaphysical puzzle, it's also a metaphorical one: It's hard not to draw connections between Cobb's dream-weaving and Nolan's filmmaking -- an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality, intended to seduce us, mess with our heads and leave a lasting impression. Mission accomplished.
  20. Standing Ovation
    At once annoyingly hyper and underwhelmingly dull.
  21. Alamar (To the Sea)
    A lovely, soulful feature from multihyphenate Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio that plays on the border between documentary and fiction.
  22. To Age or Not to Age
    Pappas' scattershot musings on the social, political and metaphysical implications of extended healthy seniority come off as positively crystalline compared with the random natterings of the director's friends and neighbors, who are invited to chime in.
  23. Valhalla Rising
    With very little dialogue, and even less plot, five chapter stops lend the movie a skeletal structure: "Wrath," "Silent Warrior," "Men of God," "The Holy Land" and "Hell." But any discussion of the Dark Ages conflict between paganism and Christianity is reduced to just grunts or insults.
  24. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    The magic here feels machine-made and depressingly state-of-the-art.
  25. The Kids Are All Right
    Sparked by wonderfully lived-in performances from Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right is alright, if not up to the level of writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's earlier pair of new bohemian dramas, "High Art" and "Laurel Canyon."
  26. Predators
    Perfs are adequate in a movie lacking much use for better ones, though Brody disappoints by using the stock sotto voce rasp of the uber-macho action hero who really, really means business.
  27. Despicable Me
    There's nothing like a little world domination to melt the most dastardly evildoer's heart. Since villains so often steal the show in animation, Despicable Me smartly turns the whole operation over to megalomaniacal rogue Gru.
  28. The Girl Who Played with Fire
    This subpar Nordic crimer, leaves ample room for improvement for the inevitable U.S. remake.
  29. Winnebago Man
    A curious young helmer tracks down the profanity-spewing subject of a two-decade-old viral video with results at once scabrously funny and uncomfortably poignant.
  30. [Rec] 2
    A sequel to the Spanish cult hit that offers an explanation for something that was far more effective when left largely unexplained.
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