Variety's Scores

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For 17,839 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 17839
  2. Mixed: 7,035 out of 17839
  3. Negative: 1,638 out of 17839
17839 movie reviews
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  1. Turn the River
    Atmospheric picture positively vibrates with authenticity, and Janssen's intense, febrile performance earned a special jury prize at the Hamptons fest.
  2. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    This fawning docu goes to lengths to portray the octogenarian Playboy magazine founder as among the greatest figures of 20th-century American popular culture, while only cursorily acknowledging his status as a pioneering softcore pornographer.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Demon Seed
    Excellent performances and direction (Donald Cammell), from a most credible and literate screenplay [from a novel by Dean R. Koontz], make production an intriguing achievement in story-telling.
  4. Beast Beast
    Beast Beast’s plot twist is a swing at gravitas that disrupts the balance of Madden’s naturalistic character study. This is the way teen life is, Madden says, until suddenly the film accelerates from reality to sensationalism, and trades humanity for pulp.
  5. Old
    Old, like most Shyamalan movies, has a catchy hook along with some elegant filmmaking gambits. But instead of developing his premise in an insidious and powerful way, the writer-director just keeps throwing a lot of things at you.
  6. The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
    Still, there are moments of minor magic here. Deep friendship is among the most enchanting inventions after all. And Odette, Clarice and Barbara Jean show how to honor it.
  7. Dark Shadows
    This bizarre but weirdly bloodless retro-camp exercise is neither funny nor eerie enough to seduce the uninitiated, and will court bemused reactions at best from the series' still-estimable fan following.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Purple Rain
    Playing a character rooted in his own background, and surrounded by the real-life members of his Minneapolis-based musical 'family,' rock star Prince makes an impressive feature film debut in Purple Rain, a rousing contemporary addition to the classic backstage musical genre.
  9. The Fall of the American Empire
    Arcand tries a little too hard at the very end to demonstrate his deep-down earnestness. But never mind: The performances across the board are everything they need to be, and the satirical thrusts are well aimed at the right targets.
  10. We Summon the Darkness
    We Summon the Darkness is a psycho thriller that pulls the bloody rug out from under you, and does it in a shivery sly way.
  11. Eagle vs Shark
    Result is still innocuously mild and inconsequential.
  12. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    More than anything a fascinating portrait of how much New York has changed in 35 years, the film delivers the goods in excitement and big-star charisma.
  13. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Casual, engaging documentary doesn't attempt a Hinduism 101 lesson, instead going for an impressionistic mix of on-the-fly spectacle and human interest.
  14. Below
    This hokey thriller reps what one can only hope will be a one-of-a-kind hybrid between a World War II actioner and a ghost story outfitted with innumerable false-alarm shock cuts and shot with enough colored lights and filters to delight Baz Luhrmann.
  15. Camp
    A big-hearted, exuberant, compassionate film with a wicked sense of humor and terrific songs performed by some preternaturally talented kids.
  16. Square Grouper
    Think of it as the cinematic equivalent of a buzz-kill.
  17. Life's a Breeze
    It takes a special kind of imagination to recognize the entertainment potential trapped in such a mundane scenario, and an incredibly resourceful filmmaker to spin it into as much fun as Daly does here.
  18. Street Kings
    A brutal look at police corruption that allows director David Ayer and "L.A. Confidential" author James Ellroy to pool their deeply cynical insights.
  19. Money Monster
    As an indictment of Wall Street chicanery, it’s largely toothless; as a pure thriller, it only quickens the pulse once or twice; as a conspiracy saga, its central mystery falls flat. Yet somehow the film hangs together surprisingly well.
  20. Yesterday
    In Yesterday, [Boyle and Curtis] reduce the Beatles to the ultimate product by declaring, at every turn, “These songs are transcendent!” And it’s the fact that they keep telling us, rather than showing us (i.e., with musical sequences that earned their transcendence), that makes Yesterday, for all the timeless songs in it, a cut-and-dried, rotely whimsical, prefab experience.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An American Werewolf in London
    A clever mixture of comedy and horror which succeeds in being both funny and scary, An American Werewolf in London possesses an overriding eagerness to please that prevents it from becoming off-putting, and special effects freaks get more than their money's worth.
  22. Ambulance
    Ambulance is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.
  23. Drift Away
    Beauvois brings everything together in the movie’s final minutes, although it’s hard to shake the feeling that Drift Away has dodged what should have been its central social concern. Renier, a former child actor who began his career a quarter-century ago in the Dardenne brothers’ “La Promesse,” only gets better with age.
  24. The Purge: Election Year
    You’d think the concept would now be wearing thin, but Election Year, which feels like the final chapter in a trilogy...is the best “Purge” film yet. The action is excitingly sustained in a way that it wasn’t in the previous two, and the political dimension, while crude as hell, exerts a brute-force entertainment value.
  25. Seven Years in Tibet
    Despite some magnificent widescreen lensing, faultless ethnographic detail and a timely sympathy for the plight of the Tibetan people, director Jean-Jacques Annaud's true-life tale about a self-obsessed Austrian mountaineer who learns selflessness in the Himalayas too rarely delivers at a simple emotional level.
  26. Forgetting the Girl
    First-time feature helmer Nate Taylor, working from an adroitly constructed screenplay by Peter Moore Smith, skillfully evokes a clammy sense of dread in this stealthily suspenseful indie.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Light of Day
    Despite the over-the-edge quality of her character, Rowlands makes even the most ludicrous lines seem feasible. Fox is basically miscast as the good-natured brother who idolizes his sister and tries to cover for her. Jett looks the part and even manages to hit the mark from time to time, but for every hit there’s a miss.
  28. The Boogeyman
    Savage’s confidence behind the camera sustains the film’s intensity even when the connective tissue between plot and theme, logic and tone is tenuous at best. But even working alongside sturdy collaborators like Messina and young Blair, it’s Thatcher who sells the improbable reality of an old-as-time spirit preying upon the frightened and grieving.
  29. Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
    But here’s the cool thing: The film’s consistently clever script, from empowerment-minded “The Handmaid’s Tale” writers Nina Fiore and John Herrera, isn’t nearly as interested in the mystery as it is in Nancy Drew herself, or in the circle of characters and relationships that surround her. And that’s the smart way to approach such a case, since the movie was clearly intended to be more than a one-off.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Valmont
    Milos Forman's meticulously produced Valmont is an extremely well-acted period piece that suffers from stately pacing and lack of dramatic high points.
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