Variety's Scores

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For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
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  1. The Wings of the Dove
    Visually the film impresses, with Eduardo Serra's widescreen camerawork evocatively capturing the streets and interiors of London and a rain-swept Venice. Pacing is crisp, with little time wasted on inessentials. Dialogue is often caustically witty, and the relations clearly delineated.
  2. Bean
    Atkinson, who is in almost every scene, boasts a full-on comic personality that on the cinema screen is a bit daunting at times, and it's an open question as to whether the Carrey crowd will go for this seriously eccentric Brit.
  3. Eve's Bayou
    Anchored by a strong cast, including Samuel L. Jackson (also credited as a producer), Lynn Whitfield and Diahann Carroll, this talented debut by a black female writer-director is a well-made, if also old-fashioned, multi-generational drama.
  4. Mad City
    In actuality, however, what unfolds onscreen is a simplistic and obvious expose about the manipulative power of the news media that by now is so familiar that its cynical perspective is not likely to upset or provoke anyone.
  5. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    Undoubtedly the most wildly original and audacious documentary in this year's Sundance Film Festival, Kirby Dick's Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist is an uncompromising chronicle of the flamboyant poet and performance artist who died in 1996.
  6. An American Werewolf in Paris
    An enjoyably trashy blend of impressive special effects, low-key refs to Landis's movie, and sudden moments of horror breaking the jokey tone.
  7. Happy Together
    Maverick director Wong Kar-wai manages to pour old wine into new jars with Happy Together, a fizzy chamber yarn about two gay Hong Kongers in Argentina that's as slim as a bamboo flute but is his most linear and mature work for some time.
  8. Gattaca
    Gattaca, New Zealander helmer Andrew Niccol's impressive feature debut, is an intelligent and timely sci-fi thriller that, with the exception of some illogical plot contrivances, is emotionally engaging almost up to the end.
  9. A Life Less Ordinary
    Part kooky romance, part screwball comedy, part quirky fantasy and part Roadrunner cartoon, this is a movie that has everything except an involving storyline and characters.
  10. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    A polished genre piece with superior fright elements.
  11. The Devil's Advocate
    A fairly entertaining supernatural potboiler that finally bubbles over with a nearly operatic sense of absurdity and excess.
  12. The Maker
    Acreditable mix of character study and thriller elements, Tim Hunter's The Maker skirts but manages to elude several current genre traps - particularly those cliches surrounding both angstful-teen dramas and hip neo-noirs.
  13. Gummo
    Gummo is personal, honest and raw, but it's also erratic, self-indulgent and full of ideas that are not fully explored. [8 Sept. 1997, p.80]
    • Variety
  14. Best Men
    At heart, Best Men is a modest picture that harks back in many ways to U.S. movies of the late ’60s and early ’70s in its unconventional attitudes and anti-establishment tone. Pacing never lingers, and, unlike in Guncrazy, there’s no narrative fat; at the same time, there isn’t much emotional residue either. In short, it’s simply a quality B movie.
  15. Telling Lies in America
    Unswervingly sincere and dramatic without surprise or revelation, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' longtime pet project may be personal, but it offers little to audiences that hasn't been served up in quantity in the past.
  16. Boogie Nights
    Darkly comic, vastly entertaining and utterly original.
  17. Seven Years in Tibet
    Despite some magnificent widescreen lensing, faultless ethnographic detail and a timely sympathy for the plight of the Tibetan people, director Jean-Jacques Annaud's true-life tale about a self-obsessed Austrian mountaineer who learns selflessness in the Himalayas too rarely delivers at a simple emotional level.
  18. Gang Related
    A good, complex story unravels in disappointingly over-the-top fashion in "Gang Related." Premise, about two homicide cops caught in a trap of their own making, is a grabber that sustains interest for quite a while, and pic's exploration of the gray area where law enforcement and criminality overlap is intriguingly developed.
  19. Kiss the Girls
    Replete with smart, capable characters and crimes so bizarre that they lend the film a suspiciously lurid nature, this tony suspenser is hampered by the presence of a villain who is all too obvious from the very beginning.
  20. U Turn
    The stylistic fun Stone has in dramatizing this crime of passion thoroughly revitalizes the well-worked genre.
  21. The Ice Storm
    A well-observed and deftly performed examination of upper-middle-class emotional deep freeze, The Ice Storm is an intelligent, adult American film.
  22. The Peacemaker
    An uncommonly dour and even grim action thriller that globetrots as diversely as a James Bond film but offers a very limited view politically, emotionally and dramatically.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Soul Food
    Soul Food serves up family melodrama-cum-comedy that's tasty and satisfying, if not particularly profound or original.
  24. The Edge
    Although thin character motivation and some far-fetched plotting strain credulity in the late going, for the most part The Edge is a tense, visceral battle-of-wits thriller played out against a spectacular wilderness background.
  25. L.A. Confidential
    An irresistible treat with enough narrative twists and memorable characters for a half-dozen films.
  26. In & Out
    Aside from Dillon, who brightens every scene he's in, the delightful surprise here is Selleck, who brings wonderfully mischievous, energizing and self-deprecating qualities to the role of the dirt-digging but ultimately on-the-level broadcaster.
  27. Nenette and Boni
    Claire Denis comes up with her emotionally richest pic to date in Nenette and Boni, a multilayered look at unformed teen emotions and the mysterious, almost invisible ties that bind siblings.
  28. Going All the Way
    Given that the story’s trajectory isn’t very surprising, it’s up to the character details and local color to imbue it with life, and in this the film largely succeeds.
  29. The Myth of Fingerprints
    Proficiently written and directed by newcomer Bart Freundlich, handsome pic brandishes traditional qualities in the areas of acting, character revelation and middlebrow seriousness, but operates within a familiar and narrow emotional range that provides little surprise or excitement.
  30. The Game
    The film itself is limited by the material's nature as a brainy exercise and by its narrow focus; individual response will depend upon how tantalized one is by puzzles and games, as well as upon how off-putting one finds the central character, who is center-stage throughout.
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