Variety's Scores

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For 17,835 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: 9,166 out of 17835
  2. Mixed: 7,032 out of 17835
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17835
17835 movie reviews
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    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    There are a good many laughs on this simple premise and the script’s exploitation of them. The only time the film falters badly is in its choice of a gimmick to get the boy-who-turns-into-a-dog turned back, for good and all, into a boy.
  2. Serendipity
    Nourry isn’t the most self-effacing of artists, and Serendipity could stand to reveal more of her artistic process, rather than gazing upon the often formidable finished product. Still, on the occasions it stops self-curating and gives us a glimpse into Nourry’s frightened, still-restless soul, this is a stirring, imposing self-portrait.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackbeard's Ghost
    Blackbeard's Ghost, a lively and entertaining Walt Disney production, features Peter Ustinov in a tour de farce title role as the restless spirit of the famed pirate. Dean Jones and Suzanne Pleshette share top billing. Robert Stevenson's direction is highlighted by several very amusing chase and special effects sequences.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Escape to Witch Mountain
    Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann are happy choices as the orphans.
  5. No Safe Spaces
    No Safe Spaces is a smart, vital, urgent, and provocative exploration of that question.
  6. Mountaintop
    I’d say that Mountaintop provides a valuable service in capturing what it’s like to be in a recording studio at length, with all the bickering and tiny experiments and small eureka moments that entails, better than any other music doc ever has.
  7. 63 Up
    If this is the final chapter, as Apted suggests it could be, it’s a worthy cap to one of the boldest experiments in world cinema.
  8. First Kid
    The real strength of the Tim Kelleher script is its understanding that despite the two main characters’ considerable positive traits, they are misfits. Each appreciates the other for his qualities, not his station. The writer has effectively created an appealing fantasy and given it human dimension.
  9. Queen of Hearts
    In a conversation piece pitched halfway between the delicate Sirkian tragedy and Adrian Lyne at his most sensational, it’s the overridingly controlled nature of proceedings — from performance to production design — that keeps “Queen of Hearts” from sliding into the hysterical silliness that its provocations invite.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Honey, I Blew Up the Kid
    This lighthearted summer entertainment will give kids a vicarious kick while the elaborate visual effects help keep parents intrigued.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mystify: Michael Hutchence
    While Mystify in many ways amplifies the tragedy of Hutchence’s death, it also goes a long way toward explaining and humanizing it.
  12. Operation Dumbo Drop
    A well-crafted and entertaining pic with broad, cross-generational appeal.
  13. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    Flat-footed storytelling meets fleet-footed choreography and sumptuous production values in the untaxingly fun Ip Man 4: The Finale.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Betty Blue
    Director Jean-Jacques Beineix has adapted a novel by Philippe Djian, considered an enfant terrible of the new literary generation. It's another feverish tale of amour fou.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dracula
    Director John Badham and Frank Langella pull off a handsome, moody rendition, more romantic than menacing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pacific Heights
    The specter of a menace who invades one's home turf and can't be ousted is universally disturbing, and director John Schlesinger goes all out to make this creepy thriller-chiller as unsettling as it needs to be.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fright Night
    Director Tom Holland keeps the picture wonderfully simple and entirely believable (once the existence of vampires is accepted, of course).
  18. Judy & Punch
    The core narrative is rather simple, and the political metaphor not especially subtle. But the overall concept, from Foulkes and her trio of story collaborators, has a bracingly original air, from the film’s period anachronisms to its impressive design elements.
  19. I See You
    An eerie suspense exercise that starts out looking like a supernatural tale — one of several viewer presumptions this cleverly engineered narrative eventually pulls the rug out from under.
  20. Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator
    Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator is more than an indictment of a man. Orner cross-examines the community that protected a bully for four decades, ever since Bikram pranced before TV cameras flexing his pecs for a cheering audience.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Defending Your Life
    Defending Your Life is an inventive and mild bit of whimsy from Albert Brooks.
  22. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
    The great pleasure of these films’ bright, largely wordless slapstick is that it plays universally whilst accommodating all manner of obsessive, idiosyncratic detailing at the edges.
  23. After Parkland
    After Parkland has its gun politics, and its aching heart, in the right place, but we need more from a movie about this subject. We need to ask how where the contemporary American heart of darkness is coming from.
  24. My Friend the Polish Girl
    The film grabs at so many thematic strands — further including toxic female friendship, urban alienation and abusive sexual manipulation — that it can’t substantially sort through them all. Still, the attempt is audacious and stimulating.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deadly Friend
    Pic has enough gore, suspense and requisite number of shocks to keep most hearts pounding through to the closing credits.
  26. Incitement
    While Incitement is a compelling watch, with archival footage neatly woven in, and offers a salutary warning about how easily democracies are endangered, this psychological profile of a political assassin nevertheless falls into a kind of moral trap.
  27. Promising Young Woman
    Haphazard as “Woman” can seem, it all somehow pulls together at last with a satisfying smack.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The tender story, with its frank and unashamed assault on the emotions, still has its effective moments at times when the sentiment doesn’t grow a little too thick.
  29. Colewell
    The film’s finely crafted serenity is in keeping with its main character’s secluded state of affairs, and mind.
  30. Free Guy
    Free Guy is a lot of fun, despite the fact that Levy and the screenwriters seem to be changing the rules as they go.
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