Variety's Scores

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For 17,825 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: 9,159 out of 17825
  2. Mixed: 7,029 out of 17825
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17825
17825 movie reviews
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  1. Worth
    Though Feinberg is a singular figure in modern American history (few else could, or would, do his job), Worth hammers his story into a standard biopic template — Grinch Finds Heart — as though one man discovering empathy is truly priceless.
  2. His House
    A potent if unbalanced mashup of social-issues polemic and haunted-house horror.
  3. Lucky Grandma
    Although the entire film runs just 87 minutes, as Lucky Grandma unspools, Wong’s predicament starts to feel increasingly outlandish, making it difficult for Sealy to sustain the offbeat humor and strong momentum of the opening stretch.
  4. News of the World
    Suspense is not the film’s strong suit, and while the trek in between needn’t be dull, Greengrass has made it curiously unengaging.
  5. Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words
    Created Equal is structured as a monologue of self-justification, a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Into the Night
    The film itself tries sometimes too hard for laughs and at other times strains for shock. Goldblum is nonetheless enjoyable as he constantly tries to figure out just what he’s doing in all of this.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Revolution
    Watching Revolution is a little like visiting a museum - it looks good without really being alive. The film doesn't tell a story so much as it uses characters to illustrate what the American Revolution has come to mean. Despite attempting to reduce big events to personal details, Revolution rarely works on a human scale.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Back Roads
    Although both stars rise above script contrivances, they are somehow never an affecting romantic pair. All of their shared troubles would seem to make a great love story but they never share enough really intimate moments to carry it off.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Ninth Configuration
    The Ninth Configuration is an often confusing story concerning the effects of a new 'doctor' on an institution for crazed military men which manages to effectively tie itself together in the end. Problem is the William Peter Blatty film takes entirely too long to explain itself.
  10. Tesla
    Almereyda lays tracks to take Tesla in a dozen wild directions. . . . Yet, having ordered the audience onboard, Almereyda doesn’t go anywhere with the gambit.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who's That Girl
    Fortunately, Dunne’s playful personality eventually counter-balances Madonna’s shrillness, and their adventures together, while completely farfetched, finally become involving. What’s lacking is pure and simple good humor.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Missing in Action
    Writer James Bruner and director Joseph Zito have marshalled a formula pic with a particularly jingoistic slant: even though the war is long over, the Commies in Vietnam still deserve the smack of a bullet.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trancers
    Only Hunt in the femme role breaks through a script that rarely rings new.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Swing Shift
    With all the heartwarming heroics to choose from on the homefront in World War II, Swing Shift tries instead to twist some consequence out of a tawdry adulterous tryst by a couple of self-centered sneaks. But the writing and acting are too flat for the challenge.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Compromising Positions
    Falling midway between a campy send-up of suburban wives soap operas and a legitimate thriller, Compromising Positions, from the 1978 novel by Susan Isaacs, emerges as a silly little whodunnit that's a mild embarrassment to all involved.
  17. Balloon
    Balloon is decent entertainment to a degree, and that is mostly thanks to its handsome production values.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreamscape
    Film [from a screen story by David Loughery] centers on 'dreamlinking', the psychic projection of one person's consciousness into a sleeping person's subconscious, or his dreams. If that sounds far-fetched, it is.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Birdy
    Belying the lightheartedness of its title, Birdy is a heavy adult drama about best friends and the after-effects of war, but it takes too long to live up to its ambitious premise.
  20. The Salt of Tears
    It’s an exercise only for the most forgiving of Garrel acolytes — who should revel in its warm, tactile black-and-white lensing and throwback air of mournful romanticism, but would still be hard pressed to describe the whole as essential.
  21. Fatale
    The story provides basic satisfactions expected from its ilk — infidelity is punished, pure malevolent craziness likewise — even if more rotely than one might hope. Part of the reason there’s a diminished climactic payoff here is that Swank, credible enough early on, can’t quite summon the demented spark Val needs.
  22. The Trouble with Being Born
    Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble With Being Born inspires nothing but strange feelings, from unnerving horror to shocked admiration to visceral disgust to that specific type of disorienting nausea that comes from the fractional delay between your eye processing a well-composed image, and your brain comprehending the implications of the actions so coolly depicted.
  23. Funny Face
    Oddly, Funny Face feels more like a promising but overreaching debut than any of his earlier films, particularly at the level of its slender script, heavy as it is on banal, minimalist dialogue that doesn’t fuel the flickering chemistry between leads Cosmo Jarvis (“Lady Macbeth”) and appealing newcomer Dela Meskienyar as best it could.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Brother from Another Planet
    Pic is essentially a series of behavioral vignettes, and many of them are genuinely delightful and inventive. Once the Brother discovers the Harlem drug scene, however, tale takes a rather unpleasant and, ultimately, confusing turn.
  25. All the Dead Ones
    Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, collaborating as directors for the first time, channel the artificiality of late Manoel de Oliveira but without the enticing mystery, hampered by an understandable earnestness that yearns for a more subtle approach.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wildcats
    Michael Ritchie’s direction lacks his usual bite and eye for detail. There is nothing spontaneous about the action and football footage is also surprisingly dull.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Irreconcilable Differences
    Irreconcilable Differences begins strongly as a human comedy about a nine-year-old who decides to take legal action to divorce her parents. Unfortunately, this premise is soon jettisoned for a rather familiar tale of a marriage turned sour as shown step-by-step.
  28. The Intruder
    Perhaps the key issue, aside from the inherent silliness of the unsubstantiated mystical psychobabble that is fielded as an explanation for Inés’ “condition” is that Inés herself is not a particularly well-developed character.
  29. Malmkrog
    Even people reasonably familiar with Gnosticism, Manichaeism and its offshoots, early 20th century history and the works of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose writings Puiu adapted, will find this punishing film, with its theatrical construct and off-putting running time, a challenge with few lasting rewards.
  30. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    The result, though intermittently stirring and often luminously shot, represents something of a chore for all but the most ardent Jia completists — and even some of them may be left adrift by the literary scope of a film that does surprisingly little to contextualize its subjects for viewers unfamiliar with their work.
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