Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Sugar
    Its compassion and careful sidestepping of exploitation tropes can’t make up for a fundamental lack of depth and urgency in the storytelling.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.”
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Narco Cultura
    Narco Cultura is as overwhelming as it is absorbing.
  15. 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.
  16. Lenny Cooke
    A penetrating and ultimately heartbreaking inventory of hard lessons learned on and off the court.
  17. 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.
  18. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    A trek across the Himalayas to raise climate-change awareness is respectfully packaged as inspirational comfort food in Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey.
  19. The Starving Games
    It seems even more slapdash and desperately unfunny than their earlier work.
  20. Five Dances
    The sensual movement of bodies through space creates a visual language whose infinite variations seduce and fascinate over the course of the film’s numerous rehearsals.
  21. Delivery Man
    The circumstances may be contrived, but the characters feel refreshingly genuine.
  22. Lone Survivor
    Berg’s blunt, pummeling style offers few nuances and makes no apologies, but his broad brushstrokes have clearly found an ideal canvas in this grimly heroic rendering of hell on earth.
  23. It's Me, It's Me
    Most of the comedy in It’s Me, It’s Me is behavioral, playing off the plausible notion that meeting exact copies of yourself would not be terrifying so much as socially awkward.
  24. The Best Man Holiday
    The cluttered, overlong narrative never really finds its footing.
  25. Everyday
    As the years go by and the kids grow — perhaps the only real benefit of Winterbottom’s approach — time begins to run together, making it all too easy for the mind to wander.
  26. Free Ride
    The script’s autobiographical roots tend to substitute for a well-constructed dramatic throughline, giving the film an open-endedness that feels more dismissive than ambivalent.
  27. We Will See Tomorrow
    Essentially a homemovie cobbled together with bland talking-head interviews, director Yuliya Tikhonova’s film offers little to interest jazz aficionados or those simply curious about the band’s lineup of veteran sidemen from the era of classic jazz.
  28. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    [Francis] Lawrence and his team have calibrated the entire experience for maximum engagement. And while its pleasures can’t touch the thrill of seeing the Death Star destroyed — not yet, at least — the film runs circles around George Lucas’ ability to weave complex political ideas into the very fabric of B-movie excitement.
  29. Contracted
    The ick factor is high in Contracted, a body-horror opus that will satisfy genre fans who like to be grossed out, but doesn’t have much to offer on any other count.
  30. The Motel Life
    So full of explanatory flashbacks and animated sequences visualizing the characters’ invented yarns that their real dramas are indeed almost obscured.
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