Variety's Scores

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For 17,832 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: 9,164 out of 17832
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17832
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17832
17832 movie reviews
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  1. Letters from the Big Man
    Surely the least excitable beauty-meets-Bigfoot film ever made.
  2. Stink!
    No matter its cinematic derivativeness, Stink!’s outcry against continuing to use the American citizenry as chemistry experiment guinea pigs carries with it the unassailable whiff of common sense.
  3. Wedding Doll
    Though the darker tonal shift toward the end is a bit jarring, director/scenarist Gilady demonstrates a deft, confident hand with the storytelling, cast and general packaging, and makes assertive use of the dramatic desert setting.
  4. The Reagan Show
    The Reagan Show, unfortunately, isn’t the movie that it pretends to be. It’s a glib and scattered exposé.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valley Girl
    Valley is very good simply because director Martha Coolidge obviously cares about her two lead characters and is privileged to have a couple of fine young performers, Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman, to make the audience care.
  6. In Like Flynn
    Efficiently engineered by veteran Aussie director Russell Mulcahy (“Highlander,” “Razorback”) to achieve a hugely satisfying balance of seriocomic action sequences and sometimes boisterous, sometimes sentimental male bonding.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pretty Baby
    The film is handsome, the players nearly all effective, but the story highlights are confined within a narrow range of ho-hum dramatization.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Excellent cast performs well, but not well enough and Paul Schrader's story is strong, but not strong enough. In sum, it neither rolls nor thunders.
  9. The Gospel of Eureka
    This cheerful small town portrait makes for an idealistic crowd-pleaser (after all, Eureka Springs is the rumored home of healing waters), but this beautiful, and beautifully shot, documentary is a cure for the angry headline blues.
  10. Emanuel
    Most of all, Emanuel demonstrates forgiveness is hard work that requires a divine-level of fortitude. Especially when it comes at direct odds with the ones you hold dear.
  11. Cities of Last Things
    Cities of Last Things has a puzzle-box structure that makes it seem complex and that tasks us with teasing out allusions and associations that a straighter telling would miss, but emotionally it is also simple: Nestled in the middle of this loop-the-loop enigma, skewering the slippery narrative to its timeline like a pin through the heart, it’s a love story.
  12. Poupelle of Chimney Town
    As rich as the visuals can be at times, the music has it beat: Chimney Town may be a small-minded, smoke-choked industrial prison state for most, but to an optimistic loner like Lubicchi, it sounds like a symphony and glitters with possibility.
  13. Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (a SOUR film)
    A decently baked slice of fan service that still seems like it might be arriving a little too soon.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Red Dust
    Familiar plot stuff, but done so expertly it almost overcomes the basic script shortcomings and the familiar hot-love-in-the-isolated-tropics theme [from the play by Wilson Collison].
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, who produced A Boy Named Charlie Brown, focus most of their attention on the independent beagle who is the despair of his master, Charlie Brown.
  16. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
    Animated combo of laughs and life lessons charts its heroine's adventures in such an accessible and cheery way, it's easy to imagine her leaping into a Stateside remake.
  17. Perpetrator
    Operating at a strange remove from modern reality, it seems to belong more to the teen experience of a couple of decades ago, the very era from which so many of its reference points hail.
  18. Dandelion
    The evocative visuals here sing in unison with the characters’ yearning to fulfill the promise of their lifelong dreams. They are chasing a glimmer of light before twilight.
  19. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    Tony literary material, a fine cast and intelligent script and direction.
  20. Pieces of a Woman
    Mundruczó and Wéber gave her the pieces from which to assemble this character, but only Kirby could have taken that puzzle and turned it into such an astonishing portrait.
  21. Strange Days
    A technical tour de force for director Kathryn Bigelow and her team, pic is less accomplished in putting over its characters, emotions and dubious sociopolitical agenda.
  22. The Sky Is Everywhere
    The Sky Is Everywhere finds director Josephine Decker indulging in affectation overload in an effort to imbue her adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s young-adult novel with uplifting magic. Whereas individual moments might work on their own, however, the “Madeline’s Madeline” auteur’s latest never provides its romantic tale with room to breathe, so intent is it about operating with maximum whimsicality.
  23. American Teen
    Undeniably entertaining for its zippy presentation.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Carlito's Way
    Handsomely made, expertly directed and colorfully acted, it should satisfy action buffs and slightly more sophisticated audiences. That adds up to solid commercial prospects at home and abroad that are just shy of blockbuster returns.
  25. Slack Bay
    None of it seems to make much sense, though it’s clear that the absurdity is no accident.
  26. The Edge
    Although thin character motivation and some far-fetched plotting strain credulity in the late going, for the most part The Edge is a tense, visceral battle-of-wits thriller played out against a spectacular wilderness background.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dark Crystal
    The Dark Crystal, besides being a dazzling technological and artistic achievement by a band of talented artists and performers, presents a dark side of Muppet creators Jim Henson and Frank Oz that could teach a lesson in morality to youngsters at the same time it is entertaining their parents.
  28. Jackass Number Two
    This stunningly shameless follow-up to the 2002 theatrical sleeper (and homdevid mega-seller) offers more of the same -- a lot more -- while repeatedly upping the ante in terms of offensiveness. Which, of course, should greatly -- and profitably -- please is target aud.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Talk Radio
    Bogosian commands attention in a patented tour-de-force. Supporting performances are all vividly realized, notably Michael Wincott’s drug-crazed Champlain fan invited to the studio for a tete-a-tete with the host.
  30. Margot at the Wedding
    This study of a disastrous reunion of two sisters feels more like a collection of arresting scenes than a fully conceived and developed drama.
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