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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  1. Bobbi Jene
    For a film with such a narrow scope, this one oddly refuses to ask some of the basic questions that might have enriched our understanding.
  2. A Ciambra
    Creatively speaking, however, A Ciambra is something of a step sideways for the Italian-American filmmaker, consolidating his considerable formal and observational gifts while fumbling a bit as storytelling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blow Out
    Writer-director Brian De Palma's Blow Out is a frequently exciting $18 million suspense thriller which suffers from a distracting emphasis upon homages to other motion pictures.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Night Flier
    A creepy vampire tale that also offers some clever commentary on bloodthirsty tabloid journalists. While not the most memorable of King adaptations, it’s far from the worst of them.
  5. Some Freaks
    All the performances are very nicely turned in a movie that deliberately excludes any significant adult presence in order to immerse us fully in an adolescent world.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bad Influence
    Bad Influence proves a reasonably taut, suspenseful thriller that provides its share of twists before straying into silliness. Rob Lowe doesn’t really project enough menace or charisma to pull off his role as Alex, a babyfaced psycho who slowly leads Michael (James Spader) through a liberating fantasy that ultimately turns into a yuppie nightmare.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace
    Managing to transcend the formulaic plot are Frewer and Bergin, whose performances make the film work. Frewer, reunited with his “Max Headroom” director, Farhad Mann, veers from the real — and still somewhat dull-witted — Jobe to the megalomaniacal virtual Jobe without missing a beat.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lost in America
    Brooks, who directed and cowrote with Monica Johnson, is irrepressible but always very human.
  9. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
    A Madea Family Funeral isn’t good, exactly, but it’s Perry good. It combines weaponized comedy and sexualized soap opera in a way that defuses all shame.
  10. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    It leaves us with a character you won’t soon forget, but you wish that the movie were as haunting as he is.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    She's Gotta Have It
    This worthy but flawed attempt to examine an independent young woman of the 1980s was lensed, in Super 16mm, in 15 days but doesn’t appear jerrybuilt.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Frankie and Johnny
    Frankie and Johnny is an all-star, high-gloss, feel-good romantic feature sitcom. Amiably written and performed but fearsomely predictable, this middle-of-the-road adaptation of Terrence McNally’s off-Broadway hit [the 1987Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune] invites audiences to indulge in watching beautiful movie stars play lonely little people struggling to find love.
  13. Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
    The documentary is too tepid to generate anything like excitement or outrage, and elicits admiration more for its intentions than for its execution.
  14. Chaplin
    Telling the entire story of Chaplin's 88 years was probably a hopeless goal, but the biopic does offer the saving grace of a truly remarkable central performance by Robert Downey Jr. and some lovely moments along the way.
  15. Live and Let Die
    The most significant Bond ingredient missing from Live and Let Die is Q, whose gadgets still play a central role. The film also offers a few key additions, including an illuminating glimpse of Bond’s home.
  16. The Man with the Golden Gun
    Enjoyment requires denying the increasingly problematic truth about Bond: As heroes go, 007 represents a bygone notion of the privileged white man taking what’s his and leaving destruction in his wake.
  17. The Spy Who Loved Me
    Triple X posed an ideal opportunity for the series to rectify its dismissive treatment of women until this point, putting a lady on equal footing with Bond. To its credit, the film does feature a bit of screwball badinage between the two (a clunky bit about female drivers, unfortunately), but it has yet to introduce a single female character who doesn’t want to sleep with our hero.
  18. Diamonds Are Forever
    Whatever connection Bond had to the real world has now been severed in favor of delivering the most satisfying possible experience for audiences, such as a throwaway scene of Q using an electromagnetic device to beat the slot machines or allowing homosexual henchmen Wint and Kidd to devise elaborate (and yet easily escapable) traps.
  19. Dave Made a Maze
    The idiosyncrasy and resourcefulness are impressive, even inspiring to a point. But at 80-odd minutes, the self-conscious novelty begins to seem stretched, enough so that you notice this clever conceit is never particularly funny or meaningful — just cute.
  20. Fun Mom Dinner
    A film that, for all its tinniness of craft and carelessness of storytelling, gets by on sheer force of personality.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Desert Hearts
    Helen Shaver, playing the lead, does a most commendable job as a character who starts by being all tied up inside, and ends up by melting and opening up to emotions she couldn’t even conceive before.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Andromeda Strain
    The Andromeda Strain is a high-budget science-fact melodrama, marked by superb production, an excellent score, and intriguing story premise and an exciting conclusion. But Nelson Gidding's adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel is too literal and talky.
    • Variety
  23. 68 Kill
    Haaga and crew aren’t aiming for realism (let alone plausibility) in their raw-luck tall tale, but they straddle cartoonishness and cruelty evenly enough that what some will find hilarious may strike others as just gratuitously mean-spirited.
  24. Amnesia
    There are a lot of compelling ideas afloat in “Amnesia” that never fully congeal, but the undeniable sincerity and personal commitment of Schroeder’s vision help to carry the film over its rough patches.
  25. Lemon
    Lemon is a comedy of miserablism that keeps poking you in the ribs — and, quite often, fails to hit the rib it’s aiming for. Yet it’s a watchable curio, because beneath it all the director, the Panamanian-born Janicza Bravo, has a more conventional sensibility than she lets on.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Martin
    Pittsburg-based auteur George A. Romero is still limited by apparently low budgets. But he has inserted some sepia-toned flashback scenes of Martin in Romania that are extraordinarily evocative, and his direction of the victimization scenes shows a definite flair for suspense.
    • Variety
  27. Benny & Joon
    Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson render such startling performances in the romantic fable Benny & Joon that they almost overcome the trappings of an emotional tale that is not particularly well written or directed.
  28. All the Money in the World
    We may never know how Spacey would have been, but Plummer is easily the best thing about a film that is technically accomplished, yet a bit too mechanical in the way it sets up and executes the high-stakes kidnapping at its center.
  29. Wolf Warrior 2
    More apolitical moviegoers are likely to simply enjoy the runaway train of action set pieces that Wu propels with his flimsy but serviceable plot, and dismiss all the jingoist chest-thumping as roughly akin to John Rambo’s stated desire to refight the Vietnam War — and, dammit, win this time! — in “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Interiors
    Watching this picture a question keeps recurring: what would Woody Allen think of all this? Then you remember he wrote and directed it. The film is populated by characters reacting to situation Allen has satirized so brilliantly in other pictures.
    • Variety
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