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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    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sniper
    Sniper is an expertly directed, yet ultimately unsatisfying psychological thriller. Luis Llosa’s first-rate action direction is undermined by underdeveloped characters and pedestrian dialogue.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Warlock
    Warlock is an attempt to concoct a pic from a pinch of occult chiller, a dash of fantasy thriller and a splash of 'stalk 'n' slash'. But what could have been a heady brew falls short, despite some gusto thesping from Richard E. Grant and Lori Singer.
  3. Dream Lover
    An overly abstract mystery about the difficulty of really knowing another person, "Dream Lover" is too rarefied for a popular thriller and too hokey for an art film. Directorial debut of notable screenwriter Nicholas Kazan displays more of an awareness of film's visual possibilities than a flair for them, and while there are any number of interesting ideas bouncing around here, pic falls between stools both artistically and commercially.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Memphis Belle
    Offering a romanticized view of heroism drawn from the Hollywood war epic, Memphis Belle is unashamedly commercial. Its moral fabric is thinner than that of other David Puttnam productions.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Nikita
    Little Nikita never really materializes as a taut espionage thriller and winds up as an unsatisfying execution of a clever premise - a teen's traumatic discovery that his parents are Soviet spies.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Donovan's Reef
    Donovan's Reef, for a director of John Ford's stature, is a potboiler. Where Ford aficianados will squirm is during that occasional scene that reminds them this effort-less effort is the handiwork of the men who made Stagecoach and The Informer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Arizona Dream
    Impeccably lensed in Alaska, New York and Douglas, Ariz, pic remains stuck in an awkward netherworld between slapstick and pathos.
  8. Shepherds and Butchers
    Dowds’ harrowed, haunted performance as a boy overwhelmed not just by the wolves to which he has been thrown, but the ones he claims have unconsciously emerged within him, gives the film its anxious emotional center.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henry & June
    In its depiction of Depression Paris and sexual candor, Henry & June succeeds. The central performances of Fred Ward, as the cynical, life-loving Miller, and Maria de Medeiros, as the beautiful, insatiable Anais, splendidly fulfill the director’s vision. Pic is less successful in gaining audience sympathy for these hedonists. Also, the character of June (Uma Thurman) is ill-defined.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Last Exit to Brooklyn is a bleak tour of urban hell, a $16 million Stateside-lensed production of Hubert Selby Jr's controversial 1964 novel. But it doesn't hold a scalpel to the lacerating torrential prose that made the book so cringingly urgent.
  11. Kid 90
    In many ways, Frye’s collage only makes sense to its maker, where someone else might have brought enough distance to put all this material in perspective.
  12. Love Potion #9
    Inspired by the 1959 hit song, Dale Launer’s Love Potion No. 9 is a light-hearted one-joke romantic comedy that tries too hard to be cute. Glib humor and emphasis on “feel good” values aim squarely at the dating crowd and twentysomething couples. But lack of real wit and comic vitality, absence of star names and sluggish pace make pic less appealing than it might have been.
  13. Voyagers
    Voyagers is a dutiful thriller about the beast within, but there’s not a lot of surprise to it. Even when the characters let themselves go, the drama remains in lockdown.
  14. Thunder Force
    In general le cinéma de Falcone is not a pretty (or hilarious) thing. Thunder Force is, at best, more a light chuckler than a laugher.
  15. Sound of Violence
    The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.
  16. Son
    Son never quite binds its tricky, episodic story into a persuasive or gripping whole.
  17. Next Door
    The film’s games of genre-shuffling and celebrity self-satire can’t override the essential tedium of its core conflict.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mannequin: On the Move
    The only real movement is offered by Meshach Taylor, a prancing decorator who returns from the original Mannequin for more stereotyped fun.
  19. Every Breath You Take
    The movie carries you along, and it’s got some high-tension moments, but there are one too many coincidental running-into-each-other-in-town close encounters.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Romeo and Juliet
    Rarely will audiences be moved to throat-gulping by the plight of the young couple. For all Hussey’s prettiness and Whiting’s shy charm it is clear that they do not understand one tenth of the meaning of their lines and it is a drawback from which the film cannot recover.
  21. The Good Traitor
    Fascinating backroom politics circa WWII are undermined by banal marital melodrama in Danish director Christina Rosendahl’s The Good Traitor, resulting in a so-so period drama that raises more questions than it answers.
  22. Six Minutes to Midnight
    Six Minutes to Midnight, helmed by Andy Goddard, wants to be a Hitchcockian thriller, but merely manages a familiar pastiche peopled with stock characters that should divert less-discriminating viewers.
  23. The Vault
    The Vault has all the external factors that heist movies require. Yet without quite being dull, somehow it misses the danger, esprit and camaraderie we need for such escapades to achieve liftoff.
  24. The Seventh Day
    The movie is diverting enough when it flirts with clerical politics, and that made me think it might be cool to make an exorcist film that dramatized the true-life ins and outs of the Catholic Church’s relationship to exorcism. There’s a major story there, and it could fuel a heady thriller. But The Seventh Day, having established Father Peter as a new kind of exorcist renegade, soon gets down to business as usual.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Renegades
    Renegades offers some rollercoaster thrills thanks to Jack Sholder's full-throttle direction but ultimately exhausts itself with unrelenting bedlam.
  26. The Tunnel
    Solidly crafted if a bit uninspired, Pål Øie’s thriller is like a horizontal, colder, sootier “Towering Inferno” minus the all-star-cast, though their soap-operatics are intact.
  27. Amundsen: The Greatest Expedition
    "Amundsen” is a visually stately yet naggingly underscripted movie that never quite finds its dramatic center.
  28. Consenting Adults
    Consenting Adults initially seems a little brainier than its brethren but soon gives way to the same cavernous lapses in logic and formula ending, though the cast and clear appeal of the genre could insure a strong opening and modest long-term box office life.
  29. Alien on Stage
    Amusing, but not outrageous, and while I’m glad Kummer’s camera was there to capture it, the movie doesn’t reveal enough about the performers’ backgrounds or personalities.
  30. Women Is Losers
    It’s a rewarding experience to watch Izzo thread a tricky line with ease here, emitting both a child-like innocence and gradual steeliness that slowly yet convincingly sharpens and matures. If only the film could deserve her level of commitment.
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