Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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  1. Young Ones
    The sophomore effort from Jake Paltrow (“The Good Night”) gets so bogged down in its primal tale of murder and revenge that the most intriguing elements become little more than futuristic window dressing.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Razor's Edge
    Tonally inconsistent and structurally awkward, film does develop some dramatic interest in the second half, but inherent power of the material is never realized.
  3. Pushing Tin
    Unfortunately, story's tension climaxes a half-hour before the film is over, and thereafter dissipates much of the charge and good will generated up to that point.
  4. Swing Vote
    Picture's comic smarts and affecting daddy-daughter drama provide a sturdy platform for its heartfelt advocacy of informed voting and responsible citizenship.
  5. Choke
    Palahniuk's antic absurdism is duly present, but the hurtling pace and barely-underlying nihilism that transferred to screen so vividly in "Fight Club" aren't much in evidence here.
  6. Lisa Frankenstein
    Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.
  7. Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.
  8. Novo
    A bizarre combo of upscale French erotica studded with good-humored kinky sex scenes.
  9. Wish
    Wish self-consciously packs 85 years of animated magic into a portable Disney fable. Does that make it a summation or a pastiche? A movie marbled with pop history or overstuffed with Easter eggs? One that launches the next Disney century or is stuck in the last one? Maybe all of the above.
  10. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    This tediously metatextual exercise conjures few inspired jolts of its own.
  11. The Protagonists
    Newcomer Luca Guadagnino deserves credit for his choice of an unconventional model, by Italian standards, for his English-language debut feature, but it's a model in which approach and material are at odds. [22 Nov 1999, p.87]
    • Variety
    • 47 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Coming to America
    Coming to America starts on a bathroom joke, quickly followed by a gag about private parts, then wanders in search of something equally original for Eddie Murphy to do for another couple of hours. It's a true test for loyal fans.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    1492: Conquest of Paradise
    All Ridley Scott's vaunted visuals can't transform 1492 from a lumbering, one-dimensional historical fresco into the complex, ambiguous character study that it strives to be.
  14. Asphalt City
    The flamboyantly heavy, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-it-ends drama of Black Flies isn’t much fun to sit through, but I think that’s ultimately because the movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake.
  15. Cargo
    Its provocative subject matter, though seriously treated, qualifies it as a dark-horse candidate for latenight cable.
  16. All In: The Poker Movie
    Loaded with history, interviews, hole-cam drama and some rather grand digressions, Douglas Tirola's picture seems a bit late for the poker craze, and at any rate will be preaching largely to the converted.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prison
    Starring as the prison in this rough penal pic with its special effects-laden horror story is the 87-year-old Wyoming State Penitentiary, which has attracted tourists rather than cons since 1981. The structure takes on all the menace of the house in Amityville Horror or hotel in The Shining.
  18. Return of the Living Dead III
    A pedestrian and gruesome, but never really scary, story of how the undead zombies interact with the living.
  19. Peaceful
    The film is too emotionally blunt not to wring tears (or at least a solid lump in the throat) where required, though they don’t always feel artfully earned. Either way, at over two hours, it’s a long trudge toward an inevitable end.
  20. Where the Truth Lies
    Atom Egoyan's most mainstream and genre-oriented picture in his 20-year career applies a thick noir lacquer to a jumbled, time-jumping tale of a young female journalist prying the facts out of the aging entertainers and their cronies.
  21. The Shipping News
    Seems to be playing the author's music, but like a string quartet that plays a half-beat off.
  22. Sordid Lives
    When Sordid Lives does what it does best -- showing Southern gals in the full flight of rabid self-denial -- it's as screamingly funny as this subgenre can get.
  23. The Legend of Bagger Vance
    A lightweight, modestly engaging yarn sporting reductive mystical and philosophical elements that are both valid and borderline silly.
  24. The Last Shot
    Contains most of the elements of a "Get Shorty"-type romp without the character depth and wit.
  25. Who Killed Bambi?
    Delivers only annoyance and impatience.
  26. I Am David
    An unusually intelligent adventure film scaled for younger viewers, which never leaves adults behind.
  27. Luther
    Proceeds like a stultifying history pageant rather than a movie with a pulse of its own.
  28. Shall We Dance
    An unabashedly old-fashioned entertainment loaded with traditional dancing and music.
  29. Halloween (2007)
    Leaves nothing to the imagination: Michael Myers is always right there in plain sight, committing mayhem sans suspenseful buildup or mystique.
  30. Midway
    The film’s drama is B-movie basic. But the destructive colliding metal-on-metal inferno of what war is makes Midway a picture worth seeing.
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