Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. Marguerite & Julien
    The film is a painfully silly, laughably naive Romance with a capital “R.”
  2. Daddy's Home
    Daddy’s Home isn’t so much a lump of coal as an empty box.
  3. Big Significant Things
    It’s as hard for us to get invested in his journey as it is for the film to find a narrative foothold.
  4. Jellyfish Eyes
    By second-guessing what audiences want, Murakami falls into the same trap studios do when trying to appease mass tastes, delivering a film that features many of his familiar designs and characters but precious little in the way of personal vision.
  5. Safelight
    A handful of solid performances and some subtle ’70s period detailing are hardly enough to recommend this flat, predictable drama.
  6. Return to Sender
    A queasy but strangely gutless exploitation pic.
  7. The Boy
    So little happens in The Boy, and so little suspense is effectively built around its central figure, that by the time things finally do heat up the movie has flatlined too completely for us to care.
  8. Addicted to Fresno
    A mean-spirited farce whose strenuous bad taste seldom translates into actual laughs.
  9. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    A dramatically flat and tediously disjointed drama that comes across as a standard-issue, cliche-littered, struggling-writer-finds-fulfillment biopic that has been cut-and-pasted into borderline incoherence.
  10. Before We Go
    [A] talky, contrived and ultimately tedious actors’ exercise.
  11. The Curse of Downers Grove
    Although it’s being marketed as a horror film, The Curse of Downers Grove turns out to be something else — a messy hash of teen soap opera, stalker thriller and whatnot whose titular, possibly supernatural aspect is basically irrelevant.
  12. Hellions
    Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract.
  13. Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism
    A chintzy children’s fantasy that summons the powers of suggestion, but falls well short of mesmeric.
  14. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.
  15. Big Sky
    Evan M. Wiener’s screenplay throws in too many disparate elements without developing any of them very effectively, while Grau’s direction is slick but unable to provide the tension or consistency needed.
  16. Norm of the North
    With plot elements cobbled together from recent animated hits, the blandly executed pic might as well be titled “Happy Minions of Madagascar’s Ice Age.”
  17. Fathers and Daughters
    In its shape and sheen, Fathers and Daughters seems dated even before Michael Bolton surfaces to cough up a gelatinous closing-credits ballad.
  18. Love the Coopers
    Decked out in the usual tinsel-and-mistletoe trappings, the film lurches awkwardly between gloominess and giddiness, never hitting the boisterously bittersweet groove it seeks.
  19. The Reflektor Tapes
    Joseph winds up with an disorganized mishmash of visual gimmicks, empty exoticism, and soundbites worthy of “This is Spinal Tap.” Great music and some dynamic, up-close concert footage gives it the occasional life, but The Reflektor Tapes will appeal to Arcade Fire devotees only and even their patience might be tested.
  20. My All American
    Based on fact but mired in cliches, My All-American pays respectful tribute to U. of Texas football legend Freddie Steinmark (1949-71) with the sort of on-the-nose sincerity that transforms biography into hagiography
  21. London Fields
    [A] misbegotten mess.
  22. Asthma
    Ritter’s performance is the liveliest thing in a callow, shallow cautionary tale, which wears its influences on its artfully frayed sleeve and no closer than that to its heart.
  23. The Book of Henry
    The film’s muted yet still rather flamboyant terribleness derives from the fact that it seems to be juggling three or four borderline schlock genres at once.
  24. Expend4bles
    This is true 21st-century trash: a movie in which the action itself is expendable.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Halloween III: Season of the Witch
    There’s not much to say about Halloween III that hasn’t already been said about either of the other two Halloween pics or a slew of imitators.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
    In its only novel twist, Halloween 5 takes the liberty of setting up its sequel (albeit clumsily) at the film’s end rather than ‘killing’ that pesky Michael Myers and then figuring out how to revive him after counting b.o. receipts. Otherwise, this is pretty stupid and boring fare.
  27. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    What could have been a powerful ode to the impact that movies have in shaping our identities — and by extension, the reason broken people are drawn to the profession, through which they hope to reach others like themselves — becomes an over-the-top celebration of Dolan himself.
  28. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    The sheer abundance of on-screen ornamentation isn’t quite enough to make The Huntsman: Winter’s War a beautiful film.... Still, it’s one that has been exhaustively designed by many hands — which only further shows up its inelegant patchwork in the writing department.
  29. Body
    The polished, bland low-budget presentation doesn’t raise much tension, and the script springs no real surprises
  30. Fifty Shades of Black
    At a minimum, a parody should be funnier than the film it’s sending up, but Fifty Shades of Black, a quick-and-dirty riff on last year’s S&M romance “Fifty Shades of Grey,” falls a laugh or two short of even that low standard.
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