Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. The Edge of Love
    While the period drama has several redeeming features, tonally it's all over the map, veering between artsy stylization and hum-drum, sometimes almost twee melodrama.
  2. The Perfect Sleep
    Unfortunately, Alter's often inventive work is kneecapped by a deliriously nonsensical script, which misses the mark as both over-the-top parody and straight-faced homage, and could have been intended as either.
  3. Race to Witch Mountain
    Strikes a deft balance of chase-movie suspense and wisecracking humor, with a few slam-bang action setpieces that would shame the makers of more allegedly grown-up genre fare.
  4. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
    "Pathfinder" meets "Gerry" in Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, a striking and virtually wordless story of two Vikings separated from their tribe and left to stumble through the North American wilderness.
  5. Tokyo Sonata
    Though there's nothing here that hasn’t been dealt with in other Japanese movies, picture benefits considerably from its pitch-perfect performances.
  6. Brothers at War
    Provides some interesting perspectives but also veers dangerously close to vanity project.
  7. Watchmen
    The movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated.
  8. Phoebe in Wonderland
    Partly produced by Lifetime, the pic attempts to elevate the disease-of-the-week movie into a moral dialectic between conformity and imagination.
  9. Everlasting Moments
    Artistically on a plane with or near the vet filmmaker's best work, this period drama about a woman slowly discovering her metier is an artisanal creation par excellence.
  10. Sherman's Way
    An agreeable tone and cast make Sherman’s Way go down easy.
  11. Tokyo!
    An uneven but enjoyable trio of films that take affectionate (and sometimes literal) aim at the Japanese capital.
  12. Reunion
    Drearily pretentious, ultra-stagy exercise in middle-age self-loathing.
  13. 12
    Expansively, dramatically, magnificently Russian, Nikita Mikhalkov's loose remake of "12 Angry Men" plays like vintage jazz from a veteran band.
  14. Crossing Over
    The way the picture dwells almost exclusively on cinematically exploitable elements -- gangbanger crime, prostitution, honor killing, terrorism paranoia -- gives it a sordid patina that even the classy, able thesps can't offset.
  15. Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
    At 76 minutes, the film is nearly twice as long as even the band's most dedicated admirers might need, with weariness setting in around the 40-minute mark.
  16. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
    Neither the best nor the worst of movies derived from videogames, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li at least gives action fans plenty to ogle besides the titular heroine (Kristin Kreuk), whose original incarnation, legend has it, was among the first distaff figures controllable by joystick.
  17. The Trouble with Romance
    Very little that anyone here says, or does, has the slightest connection to any known reality, and if a film is going to perform an autopsy on love, the corpse should at least be recognizable.
  18. An American Affair
    Like many aspects of An American Affair, the music and the lopsided dramatic priorities take the viewer right out of the movie.
  19. Examined Life
    Stimulating film, enlivened by creative location shooting.
  20. Madea Goes to Jail
    Wildly uneven effort, which is notably more strained and slapdash than such earlier efforts as "Madea's Family Reunion" and "Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns."
  21. Eleven Minutes
    A skillfully crafted, highly entertaining documentary.
  22. The Velveteen Rabbit
    A low-key charmer that's bound to enchant small children and amuse their parents during many hours of repeat viewings.
  23. Delhi-6
    Admirably ambitious but ultimately frustrating musical dramedy.
  24. Katyn
    This plays almost like an academic master class, meticulously exploring the event's ramifications but only catching full fire at the end.
  25. Gomorrah
    Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano's muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families' insidious control.
  26. Two Lovers
    This very New York tale is old-fashioned in good ways that have to do with solid storytelling, craftsmanship and emotional acuity.
  27. Friday the 13th
    As in his "Chainsaw" remake, Nispel's scare tactics amount to little more than carefully timed cattle-prod shocks, aided by high-volume speaker blasts that were beyond the budgetary reach of the early '80s films.
  28. The Caller
    Frank Langella's note-perfect, tour-de-force turn as a man elegantly shaping his own demise is nicely counterpointed by a shambling Elliott Gould as a bird-watching private eye.
  29. Coraline
    This eccentric and deliriously inventive fantasy finds stop-motion auteur Henry Selick scaling new heights of ghoulish whimsy, buoyed by a haunting score that works its own macabre magic.
  30. He's Just Not That Into You
    No one has anything to distract them from the minutiae of their love lives, which they proceed to incinerate through overanalysis. It's a moral fable, maybe, if you make half a million a year.
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