Variety's Scores

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For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
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    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Rose
    Result is an ultra-realistic look at the infusion of money, sex, drugs and booze into the simple process of singing a song, a chore Midler does faultlessly in several excellent concert sequences.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Cousin Vinny
    Tomei, sashaying through the proceedings as kind of a sexy hood ornament, creates a buoyant chemistry with her combative boyfriend.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heartburn
    Heartburn is a beautifully crafted film with flawless performances and many splendid moments, yet the overall effect is a bit disappointing. Where the film does excel is in creating the surface and texture of their life.
    • Variety
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It Could Happen to You
    What really make the film are Bergman’s general restraint despite the nature of the material, and the strong central performances.
  5. All Saints
    Director Steve Gomer’s well-crafted faith-based film is affecting without undue heartstring-yanking, almost entirely saccharine-free and, perhaps most impressively, not entirely predictable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Day of the Jackal
    The major asset of the film is that it succeeds in maintaining interest and suspense despite obvious viewer foreknowledge of the outcome.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Soapdish
    Soapdish aims at a satiric target as big as a Macy’s float and intermittently hits it. Sally Field and Kevin Kline play a feuding pair of romantically involved soap opera stars in this broad but amiable sendup of daytime TV.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The 'Burbs
    Director Joe Dante funnels his decidedly cracked view of suburban life through dark humour in The ‘Burbs. Hanks does a fine impersonation of a regular guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Dern adds another memorable psychotic to his resume.
  9. Our Time Will Come
    By highlighting the value of artists and intellectuals, and the importance of protecting them, [Hui] imbues the authentic historical episode with timely universal relevance.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sleeper
    The film is loaded with throwaway literacy and broad slapstick, and while it fumbles the end, the parade of verbal and visual amusement is pleasant as long as it lasts.
  11. The Living Daylights
    With a hint of that my-way problem-solving approach, The Living Daylights freshens the Bond series’ cornball formula elements while reprising details that had made director John Glen’s debut, For Your Eyes Only, such a superior outing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crocodile Dundee
    Hogan is comfortable enough playing the wry, irreverent, amiable Aussie that seems close to his own persona, and teams well with Kozlowski, who radiates lots of charm, style and spunk.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bananas
    Allen and Mickey Rose have written some funny stuff, and Allen, both as director and actor, knows what to do with it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joe Kidd
    Not enough identity is given Clint Eastwood in a New Mexico land struggle in which no reason is apparent for his involvement, but John Sturges' direction is sufficiently compelling to keep guns popping and bodies falling.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
    The Planet of the Apes series takes an angry turn in the fourth entry, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Train Robbery
    Crichton’s films drag in dialog bouts, but triumph when action takes over.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stripes
    Stripes is a cheerful, mildly outrageous and mostly amiable comedy pitting a new generation of enlistees against the oversold lure of a military hungry for bodies and not too choosy about what it gets. There’s little in the way of art or comic subtlety here, but the film really seems to work.
  18. A Taxi Driver
    While the film clearly taps into the national zeitgeist, buoyed by a sweeping show of people’s power that ousted the president, international audiences should also appreciate the actors’ feisty turns.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Planes, Trains & Automobiles
    John Hughes has come up with an effective nightmare-as-comedy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Disaster-prone duo of Steve Martin and John Candy repeatedly recall a contemporary Laurel & Hardy as they agonizingly try to make their way from New York to Chicago by various modes of transport.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night of the Living Dead
    Although pic’s basic premise is repellent – recently dead bodies are resurrected and begin killing human beings in order to eat their flesh – it is in execution that the film distastefully excels.
  21. Bushwick
    Even if the low-budget execution is uneven at times, there’s enough snap to the filmmaking, and enough raw power in the premise, to make for solid B-movie excitement.
  22. Hana
    Kore-eda keeps the tone mostly light and frothy, infusing the proceedings even at their darkest moments with humor. Although at times it feels like two or three characters too many have been crammed into its two-hour running time, every one of them is likable to some degree, maintaining the generosity of spirit Kore-eda displayed in his previous films.
  23. Lowlife
    Prows and company don’t simply play the often outrageous (and occasionally grisly) content for tasteless sensationalism, comic or otherwise. They treat it with an interesting, empathic yet slightly detached tone somewhere between the respectful and the droll.
  24. The Last Dalai Lama?
    The thing you want from a documentary about his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the chance to get right up close to him, in the way that movies can do. You want the chance to bask in his presence and come out with a heightened sense of what he’s about. The Last Dalai Lama? accomplishes that, and with an offhand eloquence, though it’s a sketchy, catch-as-catch-can movie.
  25. Game Night
    The movie manipulates its audience in cunning and puckish ways. It’s no big whoop, but you’re happy to have been played.
  26. The Force
    The strength, and fascination, of The Force is that the movie isn’t on anyone’s side. It’s cognizant of the brutality and violence that police officers, in our era, have been caught on phone cameras committing. At the same time, it’s not out to demonize the police — it’s out to capture the pressures they’re under, and to show us what their job looks like from the inside.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
    Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is a pleasant disappointment, pleasant because he gets all the laughs he goes for in a visually charming, sweetly paced picture, a disappointment because he doesn’t go for more.
  28. It's Not Yet Dark
    Not a film for cynics, It’s Not Yet Dark at times risks overplaying its heart-on-sleeve emotions, as Fitzmaurice also hazards in his writing. But both subject and execution here summon the skill, as well as sincerity, required to overcome skepticism.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Some Kind of Hero
    Some Kind of Hero is yet another example of how Richard Pryor can take a mediocre film and elevate it to the level of his extraordinary talents.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cape Fear
    As a forthright exercise in cumulative terror Cape Fear is a competent and visually polished entry.
  31. Red Christmas
    The film is an energetic, candy-colored romp through genre tropes that manages to take its subject matter seriously while poking fun at itself at the same time.
  32. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    Over-production-designed as the film is, Bening and Bell manage to hold their own within it.
  33. The Death of Stalin
    Though sporadically brilliant, this too-often uneven send-up of Russian politics attempts to maintain the rapid-fire, semi-improvisational style of Iannucci’s earlier work...while situating such madness within an elaborately costumed and production-designed period milieu.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Urban Cowboy
    Director James Bridges has ably captured the atmosphere of one of the most famous chip-kicker hangouts of all: Gilley’s Club on the outskirts of Houston.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nighthawks
    Nighthawks is an exciting cops and killers yarn with Sylvester Stallone to root for and cold-blooded Rutger Hauer to hate.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You Only Live Twice
    Donald Pleasence makes a suitably menacing German heavy who appears in film’s final scenes.
  37. Our Souls at Night
    It’s hard to deny that the small screen may be the most natural fit for Batra’s film, given its pleasantly mollified storytelling and blandly unassuming visual style.
  38. Solino
    A slick, entertaining, if never very original, study of family and roots.
  39. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    "Soldado” may not be as masterful as Villeneuve’s original, but it sets up a world of possibilities for elaborating on a complex conflict far too rich to be resolved in two hours’ time.
  40. City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold
    City Slickers II is a welcome sequel, much in the spirit of the original but keen to mosey into new terrain. It’s definitely the yee-hah! film of the season.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fried Green Tomatoes
    Celebrating the crucial, sustaining friendships between two sets of modern-day and 1930s Southern femmes, pic [based on Fanny Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe] emerges as absorbing and life-affirming quality fare, but for a story celebrating fearlessness, it’s remarkably cautious.
  42. Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
    Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman is designed to go down easy among exactly the audiences who might assume all environmentalists are “radicals,” but would readily identify with the folksy protagonists herein.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Carny
    Edgy tale [from a story by Phoebe and Robert Kaylor and Robbie Robertson] of three born outsiders living on a tightrope vividly recalls, both in style and content, the doom-laden films noir of the late 1940s.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Code of Silence
    Code of Silence is a predictability cacophonous cops-and-crooks yarn [by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack] that is actually quite good for the type.
    • Variety
  45. Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton
    Even at two full hours, “Take Every Wave” must do a lot of condensing. Still, as ample and awesome as Hamilton’s exterior doings are, one gets something of a classic “authorized portrait” vibe here in that he’s not about to let us get too far into his head.
  46. Borg vs. McEnroe
    When the big tennis finale arrives, Metz finds all sorts of ways to make the match interesting, blending urgent music, creative camera vantages and ridiculously hyperbolic announcer commentary to generate the desired tension. But the real reason we’re invested is far simpler than that: Metz and his cast have made us care about both Borg and McEnroe by this point.
  47. Everybody Knows
    Though the film is slow to reach a place where its revelations can have an impact, once that starts to happen, it becomes compulsively absorbing.
  48. A Skin So Soft
    Côté assures them a humanity as well, without trying to analyze their obsession with this extravagant concept of masculinity, nor the need for self-display.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bronco Billy
    Bronco Billy is a caricature of many of the strong heroes whom Eastwood has played in other pix and he's obviously having a wonderful time with the satire.
    • Variety
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sharky's Machine
    Directing himself in Sharky’s Machine, Burt Reynolds has combined his own macho personality with what’s popularly called mindless violence to come up with a seemingly guaranteed winner [from the novel by William Diehl].
  51. Euthanizer
    The script’s more grotesque aspects integrate well enough into a portrait of everyday life among the least-reputable citizens of a grime-flavored community...while the film’s grungy aesthetic likewise keeps the bizarre story feeling at least somewhat grounded.
  52. The House by the Sea
    The House by the Sea feels like the work of a filmmaker gazing back over his own filmography as one might across a sparkling blue sea, and observing its tides.
  53. Nico, 1988
    Dyrholm’s performance is a powerhouse of authenticity. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and her singing is uncanny.
  54. Papillon
    On its own terms, Noer’s adventure is ultimately a dramatic and dynamic-enough telling of an indelible fact-based story to connect with viewers.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Eiger Sanction
    Eastwood, who also directs and according to studio did his own mountain climbing without doubles, manages fine suspense. His direction displays a knowledge that permits rugged action.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blue Thunder
    Blue Thunder is a ripsnorting live-action cartoon, utterly implausible but no less enjoyable for that.
  57. Ad Astra
    Gray proves beyond measure that he’s got the chops to make a movie like this. He also has a vision, of sorts — one that’s expressed, nearly inadvertently, in the metaphor of that space antenna. Watching Ad Astra, you may think you’ve signed on for a journey that’s out of this world, but it turns out that the film’s concerns are somberly tethered to Earth.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Amityville Horror
    Flies swarm where they shouldn't, pipes and walls ooze ick, doors fly open, and priests and psychic sensitives cringe and flee in panic. It's definitely a house that audiences will enjoy visiting, especially if unfamiliar with the ending.
    • Variety
  59. Under Siege
    Under Siege is an immensely slick, if also old-fashioned and formulaic, entertainment. Steven Seagal fans and action buffs should eat up this taut suspenser, which is set entirely on board a battleship.
  60. Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives
    Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives...is an example of how a movie can be flagrantly hagiographic, sentimental, and hypnotized by its own subject — and still make you want to keep watching it.
  61. It: Chapter Two
    It: Chapter Two is much longer than it needs to be, but it builds to something significant — and a lot of that filler feels justifiable in terms of how audiences’ consumption patterns are changing.
  62. Boy Erased
    Edgerton shows an admirable sense of restraint, even when hitting all the usual beats. He includes moments of quiet introspection for the characters and the audience alike.
  63. Crooked House
    With such an enticing cast, it’s tougher than one might think trying to divine which of these eccentrics might be responsible for the crime, and “Crooked House” keeps you guessing, right up to its shocking conclusion.
  64. Sylvio
    Even when their bananas premise grows a bit stale, the directors prove at least semi-serious about their material’s rawer emotions, thereby making the film an uncanny character study about an alienated anthropomorphic primate who yearns to be himself.
  65. Diamond Island
    this compassionate film is as much about its very specific Cambodian setting as it is the characters, with the film’s standout star its neon-pastel location work.
  66. Bad Match
    The movie is “Fatal Attraction” for the age of the revolving-door hook-up, and in its fevered low-budget way it’s just clever enough to do what it sets out to do. It gives toxic masculinity its just desserts.
  67. Ghost Stories
    There’s the phantom of a psychothriller for the ages inside “Ghost Stories” that never quite fights its way out of the film’s tightly structured creepshow homage, but the goosebumps it raises are real, and honestly earned.
  68. I Am Not a Witch
    Singular as that story might be, what makes I Am Not a Witch unique, however, is Nyoni’s abundant, maybe even overabundant directorial confidence. It’s rare and exhilarating that a new filmmaker arrives on the scene so sure of herself and so willing to take bold, counter-intuitive chances.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guilty by Suspicion
    First writing-directing effort by vet producer Irwin Winkler squarely lays out the professional, ethical and moral dilemmas engendered by the insidious political pressures brought to bear on filmmakers in the early 1950s. Robert De Niro is excellent as a top director brought down by reactionary paranoia. But the drama comes to life only fitfully.
  70. Deliver Us
    The documentary wisely avoids questioning beliefs, but it does force audiences to question how those responsible for shepherding the faithful use their influence, for good or bad.
  71. Bad Day for the Cut
    Chris Baugh’s accomplished debut feature manages to develop its own distinct flavor while fitting snugly into the general tradition of latter-day U.K. gangster pics, with their rueful humor, colorful characters and realistically nasty violence.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night on Earth
    An easy to take followup to his previous pic Mystery Train. Beginning with an outer-space shot gradually zeroing in on planet Earth, the director covers in five separate segments his favorite theme of lonely people interacting but ultimately facing the great void alone.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Down by Law
    The Jim Jarmusch penchant for off-the-wall characters and odd situations is very much in evidence. The black-and-white photography is a major plus, and so is John Lurie’s score, with songs by Tom Waits. Both men are fine in their respective roles, but Benigni steals the film.
  74. Along for the Ride
    What’s ultimately moving about Along for the Ride is that it communicates how Dennis Hopper, by sticking true to his reckless muse, was an artist who changed things, and maybe changed everything.
  75. Best Men
    At heart, Best Men is a modest picture that harks back in many ways to U.S. movies of the late ’60s and early ’70s in its unconventional attitudes and anti-establishment tone. Pacing never lingers, and, unlike in Guncrazy, there’s no narrative fat; at the same time, there isn’t much emotional residue either. In short, it’s simply a quality B movie.
  76. Adventures in Public School
    More antic and likable than it is laugh-out-loud funny, Adventures in Public School is handled with skill on modest means.
  77. The Rhythm Section
    This isn’t an easy role, but Lively aces it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mystery Train
    Mystery Train is a three-episode pic handled by indie writer-director Jim Jarmusch in his usual playful, minimalist style.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hellraiser
    Hellraiser is a well-paced si-fi cum horror fantasy. Pic is well made, well acted, and the visual effects are generally handled with skill.
  80. A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.
  81. The Mercy
    Directed with even-keeled intelligence by James Marsh, and buoyed by a performance of customary reserve and resolve from Colin Firth, The Mercy tells its story...about as well as it can be told. Yet there’s no denying it’s a muted, disconsolate affair, one that by necessity shrinks before viewers’ eyes into something less rousing and noble than what they were initially promised.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cotton Club
    Dramatically, Coppola and co-screenwriter William Kennedy, juggle a lot of balls in the air. The parallel stories of Gere and Hines’ professional rise prove more potent, thanks largely to a mixture of romance, music and gangland involvement. Hines and McKee generate real sparks in their relationship and latter adds an interesting dimension as a light-skinned singer trying to hide her racial origins.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The French Lieutenant's Woman
    The casting of Meryl Streep as Sarah/Anna could not have been better. Sarah comes complete with unbridled passions and Anna is the cool, detached professional. There is never a false note in the sharply contrasting characters.
  84. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    This low-key and deeply felt indie is unsentimentally blunt while addressing the humiliating debilitations that often define geriatric life. At the same time, however, it scrupulously eschews excessive grimness and shameless heart-tugging, and elicits more than a few laughs in the bargain, while focusing more often on how the title characters deal with last chances and unfinished business.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Aristocats
    Helped immeasurably by the voices of Phil Harris, Eva Gabor, Sterling Holloway, Scatman Crothers and others, plus some outstanding animation, songs, sentiment, some excellent dialog and even a touch of psychedelia.
  86. In the Land of Pomegranates
    By the end of this meandering yet fascinating documentary, viewers are left with the impression that such attempts to bridge gaps and heal wounds, however well-intentioned, will have, at best, extremely limited success.
  87. Every Day
    There’s a playfulness to Every Day, to how the film says to its audience — through the very structure of its Afterschool Special sci-fi design — that if you want to find love, you’ve got to look beyond the surface.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Light Sleeper
    Paul Schrader has created a pointed companion piece to his earlier portraits of lonely outcasts (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo). Contemplative and violent by turns, this quasi-thriller about a long-time drug dealer leaving the business has a great deal to recommend it but could have been significantly better had Schrader done some fresh plotting and not relied on his standby gunplay to resolve issues.
  89. Life of the Party
    This is a heartier celebration of McCarthy’s talents, a mash note to a comic who can also play flirtatious, empathetic, and human. She’s believable, even if the scenes setting-off her performance aren’t.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Muppet Christmas Carol
    This adaptation of Charles Dickens' Christmas classic is not as enchanting or amusing as the previous entries in the Muppet series. But nothing can really diminish the late Jim Henson's irresistibly appealing characters.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    3 Men and a Baby
    3 Men and a Baby is about as slight a feature comedy as is made - while at the same time it's hard to resist Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg shamelessly going goo-goo over caring for an infant baby girl all swaddled in pink.
  92. What They Had
    Chomko mitigates a fairly heavy narrative agenda with a great deal of humor, sometimes threatening to make things a little too seriocomic, but never quite crossing the line into pat dramedy.
  93. The Life of Jesus
    An uncompromising portrait of thwarted emotions and small-town tedium, The Life of Jesus is a luminous and disconcerting feature debut from scripter-helmer Bruno Dumont. Pic’s deliberate pace, as it details the actions of adolescents with stifled inner lives, poses a commercial obstacle in markets unfriendly to leisurely fare, but film holds definite rewards for patient viewers and fest auds.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Species
    A propulsive sci-fi actioner genetically engineered from spores of the Alien and Terminator series, Roger Donaldson's Species provides a gripping if not overly original account of an extraterrestrial species attempting to overwhelm our own.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Broadway Danny Rose
    Broadway Danny Rose is a delectable diversion which allows Woody Allen to present a reasonably humane, and amusing gentle character study without sacrificing himself to overly commercial concerns.
  96. Bomb City
    Bomb City will keep you in its grasp during every moment leading to its climactic violence. And it won’t let go until the closing credits roll.
  97. Living in Oblivion
    An amusing look at the perils of film production, Living in Oblivion is an inside joke with a generosity of heart that makes it accessible to anyone who would take an interest.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big Picture
    The Big Picture is a surprisingly genial, good-natured satire on contemporary Hollywood mores.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Long Walk Home
    An effectively mounted drama about the human impact of changing times on two families, with sturdy performances by Sissy Spacek as an uppercrust white housewife and Whoopi Goldberg as her maid.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alice
    Performances are strong all around, with a succession of top actors making the most of their brief turns. But the center of the pic is Farrow, who’s funny and touching.
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