Variety's Scores

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For 17,832 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: 9,164 out of 17832
  2. Mixed: 7,031 out of 17832
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17832
17832 movie reviews
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  1. Dangerous Minds
    Pfeiffer tackles the part with obvious dedication, but she's thwarted from the get-go by the heavily proscribed nature of the role as written.
  2. Dead Man
    Like his previous efforts, Jarmusch's sidelong take on Western conventions relies upon quirky tone, hipsterish performances and a highly refined visual style to put it over.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Guarding Tess
    Comedy, pathos and thrills alternately collide, creating problems in both pacing and developing a consistent tone.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wayne's World
    Director Penelope Spheeris, with her first major studio assignment (and eight-figure budget), delivers a colorful but uneventful picture.
  5. Romeo + Juliet
    Although arresting in spots, it falls far short of bringing out the full values of the play, and doesn't approach the emotional resonance of Franco Zeffirelli's immensely popular 1968 screen version.
  6. Clockers
    A study of the urban dope-dealing culture and its toll on everyone who comes in contact with it, the picture has an insider's feel that is constantly undercut by the filmmaker's impulse to editorialize.
  7. Rob Roy
    This handsome, not unappealing look at a Scottish legend of nearly 300 years ago is too solemn, wooden and dour for its own good, and feels oddly of another era.
  8. This Boy's Life
    Unfortunately, after a relatively promising warmup, pic actually proceeds to flatten out the characters in the latter sections and to make them less dimensional and interesting than they initially seemed.
  9. Rumble in the Bronx
    Though Chan wins his usual stripes for death-defying... the movie ends on a dramatically unsatisfying note.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mary Reilly
    [A] muddled mix of melodrama and horror.
  11. White Squall
    Director Ridley Scott's lavish production isn't totally satisfying, coasting aimlessly at times before suddenly leaping to a more intense dramatic plane.
  12. The Basketball Diaries
    The Basketball Diaries is a weak-tea rendition of Jim Carroll's much-admired cult tome about his teenage drug addiction. Leonardo DiCaprio's committed lead performance deserves a better context than this gloss on the source material.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Tango in Paris
    Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is an uneven, convoluted, certainly dispute-provoking study of sexual passion in which Marlon Brando gives a truly remarkable performance.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Porky's
    If, by chance, Porky's should prove to be Melvin Simon's swan song in the film industry, it will either be perceived as a thunderously rude exit or a titanic raspberry uttered to audiences everywhere.
  15. Party Girl
    This trifle about a dizzy downtown New York scenester who gets a grip on her life is energized by several attractive characters and enough youthful pep to put it over as an upbeat diversion for teens and twentysomethings, though it has no more substance than bubblegum music.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Doors
    This $40 million look at Jim Morrison's short, wild ride through a rock idol life is everything one expects from the filmmaker - intense, overblown, riveting, humorless, evocative, self-important and impossible to ignore.
  17. The Distinguished Gentleman
    Uneven but occasionally quite funny political satire.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hoffa
    This grimly ambitious biopic goes no deeper than that, offering hardly a trace of psychology, motivation or inner life.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hamlet
    Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet is bland.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Two Jakes
    This oft-delayed sequel proves a jumbled, obtuse yet not entirely unsatisfying follow-up to Chinatown, rightly considered one of the best films of the 1970s.
  21. Nightwatch
    The new outing - which retains the essential twists of the original, a hit overseas that was never released Stateside - has been physically enhanced with American production values and a marquee cast, but much of the earlier film's humanity and mordant humor have been lost in translation
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Popeye
    It is more than faint praise to say that Popeye is far, far better than it might have been, considering the treacherous challenge it presented. But avoiding disaster is not necessarily the same as success.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Purple Rose of Cairo
    Tale is a light, almost frivolous treatment of a serious theme, as Woody Allen here confronts the unalterable fact that life just doesn't turn out the way it does (or did) in Hollywood films. For all its situational goofiness, pic is a tragedy, and it's too bad Allen didn't build up the characters and drama sufficiently to give some weight to his concerns.
  24. Sex and the City 2
    Part of the action occurs in the desert, which inadvertently proves apt, since the oases of enjoyable moments -- and they do exist -- suffer from being spaced too widely in what's otherwise a long, arid trek.
  25. Eat Pray Love
    Director Ryan Murphy's superficial take on Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful memoir is an exotic junk-food buffet that offers few lasting pleasures or surprises, let alone epiphanies.
  26. Takers
    A respectable but watered-down heist movie that, given the Los Angeles setting, either owes a debt to director Michael Mann or suggests an unusually violent and action-packed episode of "Entourage."
  27. Knight and Day
    A high-energy, low-impact caper-comedy that labors to bring a measure of wit, romance and glamour to an overworked spy-thriller template.
  28. Piranha 3-D
    The 32-year-old carnivorous fish franchise has lost none of its bite, serving up a fresh batch of spring-break revelers for the fearsome creatures to attack.
  29. The Killer Inside Me
    A film that should but doesn't get under your skin and give you the creeps.
  30. Survival of the Dead
    Steeped in fan-pleasing gore but woefully thin on ideas, originality (beyond new zombie-offing methods) or directorial flair.
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