Variety's Scores

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For 17,831 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: 9,163 out of 17831
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17831
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17831
17831 movie reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hold Back the Dawn
    While Hold Back the Dawn is basically another European refugee yarn, scenarists Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder exercised some ingenuity and imagination and Ketty Frings' original emerges as fine celluloidia.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clara's Heart
    Buoyed by a beautifully measured star turn by Whoopi Goldberg and a smashing screen debut for young Neil Patrick Harris, Clara's Dream is a powerful, unabashedly sentimental drama.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Miss Marker
    This picture is a good response to that element that claims there is nothing good in pictures. Clean, funny, with thrills and heart appeal all nicely blended. [22 May 1934, p.15]
    • Variety
  4. Jack Frost
    Jack Frost is a slickly packaged and engagingly sentimental fantasy-comedy that stands out as one of the season's most pleasant surprises. Pic offers a shrewdly balanced mix of humor, high concept and heart tugging, along with some amusingly impressive special effects.
  5. Hopper/Welles
    Given its gnarly small focus, Hopper/Welles is surprisingly entertaining to sit through.
  6. The Eight Hundred
    Guan’s direction may be less radical or propulsive than Nolan’s, but it too plunges audiences into both the intimacy and magnitude of brutal war spectacle while immersing them in a stunningly mounted period canvas.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Major and the Minor
    A sparkling and effervescing piece of farce-comedy.
  8. Totally Under Control
    Subsequent docs will surely tell a different story, after survivors have risen up and confronted the individual they deem responsible — and Gibney et al. want this film to be instrumental in that solution.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Written on the Wind
    Tiptop scripting from the Robert Wilder novel, dramatically deft direction by Douglas Sirk and sock performances by the cast give the story development a follow-through.
  10. City Hall
    The result is both sober and inspiring: an urban progress report taking into account a plethora of government services, scutinized by Wiseman’s patient but unblinking eye.
  11. Children of Heaven
    Much humor and suspense is wrung from incidents that would be minuscule from anything but a child’s p.o.v., many repeated until they become ingenious running gags.
  12. Wife of a Spy
    The film is a relatively unfamiliar fit for its prolific helmer, given its sharply evoked period milieu and restrained, classical storytelling. He wears it well: After a slowish start, Wife of a Spy unmasks itself as one of his most purely enjoyable, internationally accessible entertainments.
  13. And Tomorrow the Entire World
    The filmmaking is muscular and immersive, with athletic camerawork and ringing sound design keeping us in the stressed headspace of its young protagonist throughout.
  14. The Duke
    The Duke is a romp first and foremost: Michell’s merry direction makes sure of that. But its stars put a small, dignified lump in its throat.
  15. Mandibles
    Mandibles is as brazenly and riotously stupid as it sounds, but with a chill, dopey sweetness that makes it stick.
  16. Shiva Baby
    Having grown up in a tight-knit Jewish community herself, Seligman tightly orchestrates it all with loving cultural specificity and nuance, working her satirical muscles to a thrilling extent.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Man Godfrey
    William Powell and Carole Lombard are pleasantly teamed in this splendidly produced comedy. Story is balmy, but not too much so, and lends itself to the sophisticated screen treatment of Eric Hatch's novel.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beau Geste
    Beau Geste has been produced with vigorous realism and spectacular sweep. Director William Wellman has focused attention on the melodramatic and vividly gruesome aspects of the story, and skimmed lightly over the episodes and motivation which highlighted Percival Christopher Wren's original novel.
  19. H is for Happiness
    Provides feel-good entertainment for the entire family without pandering — and definitely without sacrificing style or substance.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beau Geste
    Third time out for one of the most memorable silent films still packs hardy entertainment. The production is an expertly-made translation of Percival Christopher Wren's novel of the French Foreign Legion in a lonely Sahara outpost, distinguished by good acting, fine photographic values and fast direction. Guy Stockwell delineates the title role.
  21. The Last Shift
    A gut punch with a side of anguish.
  22. Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
    “Alex Wheatle” is like a sketch for the biopic it might have been, but by the end you feel you’ve glimpsed the key fragment of a life.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Road to Morocco
    Morocco is a bubbling spontaneous entertainment without a semblance of sanity; an uproarious patchquilt of gags, old situations and a blitz-like laugh pace that never lets up for a moment. It's Bing Crosby and Bob Hope at their best, with Dorothy Lamour, as usual, the pivotal point for their romantic pitch.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dracula
    On the screen it comes out as a sublimated ghost story related with all surface seriousness and above all with a remarkably effective background of creepy atmosphere.
  25. Supernova
    But it’s Firth’s Sam who finally carries the film’s heart, and exquisitely so, as his fear, anger and mounting insecurity lash out the more he tries to remain undemonstrative. (He also pulls off some able, plaintive piano-playing by his own hand.)
  26. The Human Voice
    The Human Voice, in all its delicious absurdity and kitsch extravagance, ties into the concerns of emotional abandonment and disrupted communication that have long run through his [Almodóvar's] more ostensibly serious works.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Informer
    The Informer is forcefully and intelligently written, directed and acted.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witches
    The wizardry of Jim Henson's Creature Shop and a superbly over-the-top performance by Angelica Huston gives The Witches a good deal of charm and enjoyment.
  29. The Kid Detective
    Both entertainingly old-fashioned and defiantly fresh.
  30. Belushi
    In the film, Belushi’s own letters betray his fear that he had reached the point of no return. Yet there can be a shadow hint of intentionality to all that. Belushi was a bighearted person who craved no limits. In some terrible way, he went out like the rock star he was.
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