Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. The Unbelievers
    While every moment is captured with the reverence of a fawning fan, Holwerda’s star-struck approach neglects to shed new light on his subjects or even showcase their greatest hits.
  2. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    This robust, action-packed adventure benefits from a headier sense of forward momentum and a steady stream of 3D-enhanced thrills.
  3. UnHung Hero
    The film’s brisk progress is always genial and lively, hitting the expected off-color-humor marks without getting too juvenile.
  4. Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion
    An alternately enchanting and exhausting anime adventure in which cutesy characters and peppy vocal turns belie a darker, angst-ridden narrative.
  5. Live at the Foxes Den
    The pacing is tortured. Plot doesn’t so much twist as rupture and spill forth, and character arcs, as if part of a case being built by a cut-rate lawyer, frequently skip discovery and are forgotten before summation.
  6. Dear Mr. Watterson
    It is, in short, everything you’d expect from a crowd-sourced documentary, designed to celebrate its subject, while mostly just validating the aesthetic taste of its backers.
  7. Tracks
    Anchored by a fine and flinty performance from Mia Wasikowska, director John Curran’s gorgeously rendered adventure saga succeeds not only in capturing the harshness and wild beauty of Davidson’s journey, but also in mapping a delicate interior pathway into the heart of this most atypical explorer.
  8. American Hustle
    It’s a rich, glorious mess, and its underlying craftsmanship is apparent in the characters’ beautifully delineated relationships, each with its own jangly rhythm and distinct feel.
  9. Cousin Jules
    Yet even as the timelessness of the human activity on display seduces with its serenity, it evokes in modern viewers a definite impatience with the impracticality of traditional rites and rhythms, perhaps only enjoyable in 90-minute doses.
  10. Bullett Raja
    If it was more consistent, Bullett Raja would qualify as a solid piece of genre craftsmanship for director and co-writer Tigmanshu Dhulia (“Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster”), with action scenes that are crisply framed and edited for clarity.
  11. Ernest & Célestine
    A charming animated feature.
  12. The Punk Singer
    Dynamic performance footage and input from a variety of collaborators, colleagues and admirers, as well as Hanna herself, make the tightly edited Punk Singer a vivid watch even for those with no interest in or experience with the music itself.
  13. Levitated Mass
    Pray deftly maintains the integrity and momentum of his story’s various strands while moving backward and forward in time, and from one discreet subtopic to another, his segues as unpredictable as they are imperceptible.
  14. Oldboy
    Lee and Protosevich have made a picture that, although several shades edgier than the average Hollywood thriller, feels content to shadow its predecessor’s every move while falling short of its unhinged, balls-out delirium.
  15. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    For all its failings, there is one thing about “Long Walk to Freedom” that can’t be denied: Idris Elba gives a towering performance, a Mandela for the ages.
  16. Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case
    With the aid of Johnsen’s doc to overcome the obstacles China has put in his path, Ai’s voice carries louder than ever before.
  17. It's Better to Jump
    The three director-producers’ inability to come up with stronger narrative or thematic organization makes “It’s Better to Jump” play like the professionally polished side product of a vacation stay.
  18. Sugar
    Its compassion and careful sidestepping of exploitation tropes can’t make up for a fundamental lack of depth and urgency in the storytelling.
  19. Gori Tere Pyaar Mein
    The falseness of the exaggerated romantic comedy sequences here infect the aspects of the story that should be underplayed and gentle.
  20. Black Nativity
    Lemmons advances this story with straight-faced conviction, orchestrating narrative and spectacle with a grandiosity that proves easier to admire from a distance than it is to engage with onscreen.
  21. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    Gondry and his frisky hieroglyphs successfully convey Chomsky’s concept of language as the fleeting “meanings we impose on fragmentary experience.”
  22. Homefront
    What sounds like a veritable B-movie wet dream — with that master of the subzero scowl, Jason Statham, starring in a screenplay written by Sylvester Stallone — turns out to be considerably less than the sum of its parts.
  23. Lion Ark
    Overlong film quickly becomes tedious whenever the camera strays from the lions, who don’t have much personality but prove more compelling than the humans.
  24. Bettie Page Reveals All
    It has a somewhat routine midlevel-cable-production feel. But the content is engaging, and the use of old movie clips to illustrate biographical details... is amusing.
  25. Detroit Unleaded
    A lively slice-of-life that uses familiar romantic-comedy tropes and a vibrant cast of characters to humorously explore family relationships, cultural identity and love.
  26. In Fear
    Jeremy Lovering’s tense debut might have worked better had it left more to the imagination. Still, crisp camerawork and amplified sound yield paranoia aplenty.
  27. Narco Cultura
    Narco Cultura is as overwhelming as it is absorbing.
  28. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    Discerning Verhoeven’s hand in it all is difficult, though true to the helmer’s more intimate style, it largely revolves around sex, and has a few fun plot twists.
  29. Lenny Cooke
    A penetrating and ultimately heartbreaking inventory of hard lessons learned on and off the court.
  30. Ram-Leela
    Ram-Leela, a gorgeous, boisterous, ultimately ineffective new Bollywood adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet,” does accomplish one thing that is quite unusual: it manages to keep you in suspense about the outcome almost to the last frame.
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