Variety's Scores

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For 17,828 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: 9,160 out of 17828
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17828
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17828
17828 movie reviews
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  1. The Foxy Merkins
    Olnek and collaborators share a genuinely offbeat sensibility, and The Foxy Merkins would have made a hilarious short. Yet it simply doesn’t come up with enough inventive scenes, let alone overall narrative spine, to sustain itself at feature length.
  2. Southpaw
    The undeniable intensity of Gyllenhaal’s bulked-up, Method-mumbling performance may leave you feeling more pummeled than convinced in this heavy-handed tale of redemption, in which director Antoine Fuqua once more demonstrates his fascination with codes of masculine aggression, extreme violence and not much else.
  3. Wild Card
    As usual, Statham gets a lot of mileage out of his droll, ever-present scowl, but as in “Heat,” the movie’s disparate narrative strands never really come together, and the climactic showdown feels pretty anticlimactic.
  4. Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
    For all these missteps — including the convenient and predictable use of elderly death as a plot device — the leads’ odd-couple chemistry does become steadier and affectionate as their dance lessons continue, and the film manages to close on a quietly touching final note.
  5. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Where Haupt succeeds is in conveying the passion felt by everyone who works on the Sagrada, from foremen to sculptors.
  6. The King's Daughter
    It was on this film that Scodelario met Walker. The couple are now married, which suggests there’s a “happily ever after” to be found somewhere in this froufrou film maudit.
  7. A LEGO Brickumentary
    Most of the jokes are real groaners, though the humor is welcome, while shooting select exteriors with tilt-shift lenses (for a miniature-faking effect that makes real-world buildings look like tiny Lego sets) adds another creative touch to the overall package.
  8. Get Santa
    Midway through, the plot gets rather bogged down, unfolding on what seems like one of the longest December days for daylight hours ever witnessed in the Northern Hemisphere. However, Broadbent keeps the smiles coming in a wonderfully committed turn as the incarcerated toymaker.
  9. Difret
    The unwillingness to let nuance communicate lends a flat quality to the drama here; after the initial crimes, suspense situations are simply lopped off prematurely, the action jumping clumsily to their aftermath.
  10. The Great Wall
    Director Zhang Yimou capably gives period fantasy-action The Great Wall the look and feel of a Hollywood blockbuster, but his signature visual dazzle, his gift for depicting delicate relationships and throbbing passions are trampled by dead-serious epic aspirations.
  11. War for the Planet of the Apes
    It’s fitting that the visual effects have advanced so dramatically since 2011, as it allows the series to suggest that its ape protagonists have evolved to an equivalent degree, and yet, “War’s” story is beneath their intelligence.
  12. The Mountain Between Us
    Script shortcomings aside, Winslet and Elba make a reasonably good couple.
  13. Effie Gray
    This admirable, watercolor-delicate tale of individual feminist emancipation never quite blooms into living color, hampered by spotty casting and Richard Laxton’s overly deliberate direction.
  14. A Girl Like Her
    A mix of found-footage thriller, mock-doc realism and public service announcement that rings true almost as often as it rings false.
  15. 3 Nights in the Desert
    The characters, situations and dialogue too seldom escape cliche in Gabriel Cowan’s watchable but unmemorable feature.
  16. The Bronze
    Though no one would accuse The Bronze of not being funny, it somehow manages not to be funny often enough.
  17. The End of the Tour
    The two leads’ clashing styles might work if the film were entirely about two superficially similar people’s inability to truly find common ground. But as we’re finally intended to judge their meeting a profound connective one on at least some levels, the chemistry simply feels off.
  18. Concussion
    Effective enough as a cautionary tale about willful ignorance and as a showcase for Will Smith...the film is let down by its confused and cliche-riddled screenplay, which struggles mightily to take a complex story and finesse it to fit story beats it was never meant to hit.
  19. Ghostbusters
    While both funnier and scarier than Ivan Reitman’s 1984 original, this otherwise over-familiar remake from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig doesn’t do nearly enough to innovate on what has come before.
  20. Nasty Baby
    Silva assembles a loosely scripted, raucously nonconformist laffer that looks like it’s going one way, only to arrive somewhere else entirely — a change of heart that’s not at all to the advantage of a film.
  21. Stockholm, Pennsylvania
    From its opening scene, the film feels desaturated and airless, as if the intrusion of energy or color might upset the characters’ delicate task of healing.
  22. Don Verdean
    The expected satire of religious gullibility and charlatanism proves toothless; worse, a cast of very funny people is given very little funny to do.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Poltergeist
    Given the talents, Poltergeist is an annoying film because it could have been so much better.
  24. Diary of a Chambermaid
    The film milks some brisk comedy from its upstairs-downstairs peekaboo, but is too breezy to convince in its depiction of obsessive erotic fixation — making for a “Diary” that oddly feels less exposing as it goes along.
  25. Cut Bank
    Watching an estimable quintet of character actors do their thing is the chief pleasure of Cut Bank.
  26. Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal
    The decision to binge on CGI action setpieces overwhelms the romantic spark of the central characters, played by impossibly beautiful leads Lee Bingbing and Aloys Chen Kun, while the film’s themes of class division, human desire and hypocrisy find darker, more riveting expression only toward the end.
  27. Nightlight
    The relative restraint of keeping any supernatural creatures and most violence just offscreen works well to maintain suspense. It’s too bad Beck and Woods didn’t exercise equal caution in the dialogue department.
  28. Road Hard
    This feature directing debut for Adam Carolla and frequent writing/producing collaborator Kevin Hench is an amiable, nicely assembled semi-autobiographical fiction that will please the former’s fans.
  29. She's Lost Control
    Marquardt never buries her symbolic subtext very deep, what with a woman who freezes her eggs and a man who ensures that his patients feel nothing.
  30. Free State of Jones
    For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.
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