Variety's Scores

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For 17,833 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: 9,165 out of 17833
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17833
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17833
17833 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  8. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  18. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    Over-production-designed as the film is, Bening and Bell manage to hold their own within it.
  23. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. Solino
    A slick, entertaining, if never very original, study of family and roots.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
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