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. The Courier
    Ironbark’s hook is that it’s based on true events, and the underlying history deserves to be shared.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Jewel of the Nile
    As a sequel to Romancing the Stone, the script of The Jewel of the Nile is missing the deft touch of the late Diane Thomas but Lewis Teague's direction matches the energy of the original.
  3. 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.
  4. Blast Beat
    Blast Beat cares far more about testing the limits of the family’s togetherness, and while the resolution doesn’t have the sweetness of a pop song, Arango is happy to settle for heavy metal discordance.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Foxes
    Foxes is an ambitious attempt to do a film relating to some of the not-so-acceptable realities among teenagers that ends up delivering far less than it is capable of.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tank
    James Garner’s persona gives the events a soft, human, and at times bemused edge.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cherry 2000
    A tongue-in-cheek sci-fi action pic which owes a considerable debt to the Mad Max movies, Cherry 2000's greatest asset is topbilled Melanie Griffith, who lifts the material whenever she's on screen.
  8. 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.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big Top Pee-wee
    Very little of this is interesting or amusing on paper, which must have been a real challenge to director Randal Kleiser, who ably keeps all the surrounding players in tune to whatever it is that Herman’s up to at any given moment.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Coca-Cola Kid
    The mix of earthy symbolism, offbeat eroticism, the picaresque and the rough-and-tumble social, rather unpolitical satire now seems poured from a bottle that has been left uncapped overnight.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fool for Love
    Robert Altman directs a fine cast with all the authority and finesse a good play deserves, so it's too bad the play fooled them all. Sam Shepard's drama of intense, forbidden love in the modern West is made to seem like specious stuff filled with dramatic ideas left over from the 1950s.
  12. Hooking Up
    In spite of its tweaks to gender roles, the duo’s sexcapades and Snow’s spirited performance, Hooking Up doesn’t offer much by way of surprise, which doesn’t mean that as the odd, amiable couple head toward their personal reckonings, you won’t find yourself rooting for them. Separately and together.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Agnes of God
    Fonda’s relentless interrogating, mannered chain-smoking and enforced two dimensionality cause her to become tiresome very early on. She remains a brittle cliche of a modern professional woman. Bancroft gives a generally highly engaging performance as a religious woman too knowledgeable to be one-upped by even the craftiest layman.
  14. Only
    An absorbing post-catastrophe drama.
  15. Extraction
    Extraction isn’t the smartest movie you’ll see during lockdown, but it’s liable to be the most kinetic — assuming you have Netflix, since it’s the service’s big tentpole of the season, a dumbed-down bit of blow-uppy distraction that’s every bit as entertaining as the equivalent pyrotechnic offering from a theatrical motion picture studio might have been.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fever Pitch
    Weak script, poor acting and miscasting aside, it's the power of the subject that makes this an enjoyable ride. Writer/director Richard Brooks thoroughly researched the Territory of the compulsive gambler and captures the obsession with almost a documentary eye.
  17. The Flood
    A relatively modest, low-key tale about global refugee issues that are usually portrayed in a higher dramatic key, The Flood makes a somewhat underwhelming first impression. But it gradually overcomes that to arrive at a potent (if still quiet) cumulative impact, bolstered by strong performances from leads Ivanno Jeremiah and Lena Headey.
  18. Banana Split
    The director, Benjamin Kasulke, is a veteran cinematographer who brings the L.A. settings a spangly glow, but he stages too many scenes with generic “punch.” I wish he’d played against the comedy instead of italicizing it, and that he’d come up with some pop-music epiphanies and ditched the film’s cloying synthesizer score.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The River
    Stripped down to the bare essentials few people actually ever come into contact with, pic remains a rather private ordeal observed from the outside looking in. There is a victory at the end, but not a sense of lasting triumph.
  20. Fatima
    While not especially artful, Fatima honors those who stand by their convictions. That its role models are children makes the message all the more remarkable.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    City Heat
    City Heat is an amiable but decidedly lukewarm confection geared entirely around the two star turns.
  22. Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street
    All this certainly constitutes an intriguing footnote to horror cinema history. But Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen’s film could’ve used more distance from its principal interviewee, a producer here.
  23. Undine
    There’s a stylistic and narrative elegance to Petzold’s approach, with its clean lensing and repeated use of a single piece of music (the rolling piano Adagio from Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974), that suggests restraint, where a queer filmmaker might have propelled things into camp territory. In a way, it’s a shame that Undine stops short, since the material feels thin, and the statement as murky as the lake to which the camera ultimately returns.
  24. Charlatan
    Caught between a respectful tribute to Mikolášek’s medical achievements and a more salacious examination of his moral transgressions — with a tender if speculative gay romance propped somewhere in between — it’s an ambitious portrait of human imperfection that doesn’t strain to arouse much affection for its subject in the audience.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Small Affair
    No Small Affair is an okay coming-of-age romance [from a screen story by Charles Bolt] in which the believability of the leading characters far outweighs that of many of the situations in which the script places them.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Reform School Girls
    Every character is a caricature, from the rifle-toting, Bible-quoting warden (Sybil Danning) to the lineup of lovelies who parade as reform school girls. Pat Ast, as the cantankerous and corpulent head matron, and Williams play their rotten roles to the hilt and get most of the juicy lines.
  27. Sublet
    With two screenwriters (including the director) and three script editors credited, it may be a classic “too many cooks” situation, as the whole structure is as risk-free and standardized as a TV film, though newcomer Niv Nissem provides a freshness that papers over the conventionality of it all.
  28. Archive
    The sleek result, like the scientist’s hi-tech Frankenstein creation, impressively looks and sounds the part, without quite having a soul of its own. That’s enough to make Archive a compelling calling card for the British freshman, with the promise of more advanced models to come.
  29. Inside the Rain
    Inside the Rain is so fresh and audacious in so many ways that it’s a bit of letdown when it leans heavily on the cliché of the Gold-Hearted Hooker — or, in this case, the Gold-Hearted Porn Actress and Part-Time Escort — to provide Benjamin with inspiration, emotional support, and, most important, a female lead for his film.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Still of the Night
    It comes as almost a shock to see a modern suspense picture that's as literate, well acted and beautifully made as Still Of The Night. Despite its many virtues, however, Robert Benton's film [from a story by him and David Newman] has its share of serious flaws, mainly in the area of plotting.
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