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 Munsters
    The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way.
  2. My Policeman
    Alas, the older actors don’t have all that much to do (editor Chris Dickens keeping cutting back to McKee reading), but the younger trio are strong, albeit restrained, in their roles. Corrin, so great as a wife betrayed in “The Crown” (they played Princess Diana), could do this role in their sleep, while Styles has the tricky task of making Tom’s betrayal feel tragic for all involved.
  3. Rounding
    While many movies these days feel stretched too thin to sustain their few real ideas, Rounding emerges in the end as a project that ought to have shed some surplus ideas to better focus on a few. Either that, or the compact pacing should’ve been eased to allow them all more breathing space.
  4. Paddington In Peru
    The result isn’t as formally or tonally characterful as the previous films, just as the script, more than before, feels bound to a well-worn template.
  5. Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
    The film, on balance, is cheery, sherbet-colored stuff, bursting with goodwill for all good people. What you remember from it, however, is each scene in which elder malevolence deliciously spoils the party.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Yanks
    Director John Schlesinger has done a beautiful job with both cast and craft in Yanks, a multiple love story set in England in World War II. Yet little that's exciting ever happens in the picture.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Beyond the Stars
    Despite the expense involved, the pic appears not to take itself too seriously. Principal characterizations are skin deep.
  8. Champions
    The performances come with certain limitations (the line readings sound memorized, never spontaneous), but as a whole, the movie makes memorable, three-dimensional characters of its players, and that’s a start.
  9. The Good Boss
    At two hours, rather intricately stuffed with subplots ranging from frivolous to grimly consequential, “The Good Boss” struggles to pick up the pace when required: The laughs are there, but more spaced out than they could be.
  10. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    “Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.
  11. Mack & Rita
    The film does, at minimum, convince us that most people would want to transform into Keaton if given the opportunity.
  12. Thunderbolts*
    As with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, what works here is the uneasy tension within a team that comes together out of necessity, rather than any natural sense of affinity.
  13. City Hall
    City Hall comes awfully close to delivering the goods within a fast-paced thriller framework. At its best, the picture conveys the visceral energy of city politics, in which problem-solving is more common than air. The dilemma for the film is that there are no happy endings, just reelection promises that have as much substance as ether.
  14. Extreme Measures
    This chilling look at emergency room politics wrestles contemporary medical ethics to an unsatisfactory draw. Similarly, its mix of real and exaggerated situations doesn't quite jell, making for a commercial diagnosis that's good but not great.
  15. Celtic Pride
    Not quite a three-pointer, but definitely more than an airball, "Celtic Pride" is an uneven but largely likable basketball-themed comedy that should lay up decent B.O. numbers and perform even better in the homevid arena.
  16. Causeway
    Causeway is a drama of redemption that’s both touching and a little arduous. Just because your characters are suffering doesn’t mean they have to mostly stop talking.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Objective, Burma!
    The film has considerable movement, particularly in the early reels, and the tactics of the paratroopers are authentic in their painstaking detail. However, while the scripters have in the main achieved their purpose of heightening the action, there are scenes in the final reels that could have been edited more closely.
  18. The Royal
    Short on homers but not humility, The Royal won’t vie with any sports flicks for flash, but it doesn’t steep its worthwhile lessons in sanctimony either.
  19. The Swan Princess
    Technically impressive but rather flat and languid storywise, Richard Rich's first feature since leaving Disney only serves to reinforce the stranglehold his old studio still has on the animation market. While a perfectly serviceable confection for small fry, "The Swan Princess" will likely have its neck wrung commercially by all the high-profile competition aimed at the children's/family market this holiday season.
  20. Cats Don't Dance
    Decked out with sharp and colorful design work, some well-drawn characters and six snappy Randy Newman tunes, this first entry from Turner Feature Animation goes down very easily but lacks a hook to make it anything other than a minor kidpic entry commercially.
  21. Quest for Camelot
    A lightweight but likable fantasy that offers a playfully feminist twist to Arthurian legends.
  22. Eye for an Eye
    A B movie that somehow won the lottery and got an A-movie cast and director.
  23. Kirikou and the Men and Women
    A broad-minded but pretty vanilla third film in the French toon series from Gallic helmer Michel Ocelot.
  24. The Rugrats Movie
    Aimed squarely at moppets with minuscule attention spans, “The Rugrats Movie” is a fast and frenetic animated feature that should delight young aficionados of the long-running Nickelodeon TV series.
  25. A Christmas Story Christmas
    A Christmas Story Christmas is like “A Christmas Story” with a softer center, but at least it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve had a glass of eggnog spiked with Long Island Iced Tea.
  26. The Nun II
    In some respects an improvement on its predecessor, in others not, this is finally one more good-enough if unmemorable entry sure to extend the series’ life in lucrative fashion.
  27. The Eternal Daughter
    This slight story examines the mystery of the mother-daughter bond without getting much closer to solving it, and when the mist clears is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.
  28. The Whale
    Most of The Whale simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.
  29. Women Talking
    The whole scenario is designed to get your blood boiling, while the resulting conversation can’t help but instill hope, as Polley gives these women a rare opportunity to reinvent their world.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sea Wolf
    Robinson provides plenty of vigor and two-fisted energy to the actor-proof role of Larsen, and at times is over-directed.
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