Variety's Scores

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For 17,807 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 2.4 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: 9,148 out of 17807
  2. Mixed: 7,022 out of 17807
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17807
17807 movie reviews
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  1. Mimic
    Del Toro clearly knows his way around the camera, but the shadowy eeriness that saturates the early going slowly becomes monotonous and winds up being just dull, and even partially obscures the action in the long underground finale.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    Reeves, with his beguilingly blank face and loose-limbed, happy-go-lucky physical vocabulary, and Winter, with his golden curls, gleefully good vibes and 'bodacious' vocabulary, propel this adventure as long as they can.
  3. Phenomenon
    Instead, director Jon Turteltaub has taken the easiest road, emerging with a soppy, soft-headed disease-of-the-week-style piece that sentimentalizes or opts out of every interesting issue the script raises.
  4. Home for the Holidays
    But Foster is unable to give the episodic, fragmented film a coherent feel; her prosaic, sometimes irritating picture proceeds scene by scene, with the requisite climaxes and anticlimaxes along the bumpy road.
  5. The Crossing Guard
    Much of the film plays awkwardly, its tone veering undecidedly between volatile drama and contemplative psychological study.
  6. Congo
    Whatever John Patrick Shanley's script may have tried to do in adapting Crichton's book, it clearly feels as if the picture were edited to leave the action sequences in while removing any connecting material that might have helped them make sense.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
    Seemingly clueless as to how best to utilize Carrey, or make humorous hay out of its pet-loving shamus' central character, Ventura fails to place either Carrey or Ace in the winner's circle of memorable screen crazies.
  8. True Lies
    Yet even with its ribald laughs and spectacular action sequences (clearly seeking to up the ante on the latter front), the movie gets mired in a comedic midsection that wears the audience down, sapping their energy before the film shifts to a chaotic third act that just doesn't know when to quit.
  9. Spanking the Monkey
    The story is undoubtedly weird, but perhaps more so on paper than on the screen, since Russell and his actors have played it mostly straight in attempting to confer psychological validity on all the untoward developments.
  10. Return to Paradise
    None of the characters is given much depth or meaningful backgrounding, leaving the capable thesps with plenty of anguish and emotion to play but not much else.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fire
    The third feature from this Indian-born writer-director... is an underwhelming effort that adds little new to the debate over arranged marriages and fails to ignite much interest in the problems faced by two frustrated New Delhi wives.
  12. Hush
    Unfortunately, almost everything about the film is so unbelievable and misjudged that only the most gullible audiences will feel any transporting thrill at the end other than from the movie finally being over.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Family Thing
    The handful of powerful speeches here do little, however, to offset story weaknesses that also include soft-edged characterizations, a faintly patronizing air regarding the black characters and a general avoidance of the issue most viewers will want to see addressed.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mrs. Winterbourne
    As calculated as the cries of 'Go Ricki!' on its star's talkshow, Mrs Winterbourne is a sappy, old-fashioned and predictable vehicle for actress-turned-talk maven-turned-actress-again Ricki Lake that delivers requisite warmth but few laughs. Lake's ebullient charm and solid performances by Shirley MacLaine, Brendan Fraser and Miguel Sandoval provide some highlights.
  15. Unstrung Heroes
    A coming-of-age piece that is slight to the point of anemia, Unstrung Heroes sports a willful eccentricity that almost immediately becomes annoying.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hair
    The spirit and elan that captivated the Vietnam protest era are long gone, and what Forman tries to make up with splash and verve fails to evoke potent nostalgia.
  17. The Hudsucker Proxy
    The Hudsucker Proxy is no doubt one of the most inspired and technically stunning pastiches of old Hollywood pictures ever to come out of the New Hollywood. But a pastiche it remains, as nearly everything in the Coen brothers' latest and biggest film seems like a wizardly but artificial synthesis, leaving a hole in the middle where some emotion and humanity should be.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flashdance
    Watching Flashdance is pretty much like looking at MTV for 96 minutes. Virtually plotless, exceedingly thin on characterization and sociologically laughable, pic at least lives up to its title by offering an anthology of extraordinarily flashy dance numbers.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Shining
    The crazier Nicholson gets, the more idiotic he looks. Shelley Duvall transforms the warm sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric.
  20. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
    Pic stays on the surface, without attempting any exploration of painful depths. Result is at best amusing; at worst, uninvolving, often confusing, and sometimes a little boring.
  21. Wyatt Earp
    If you're going to ask an audience to sit through a three-hour, nine-minute rendition of an oft-told story, it would help to have a strong point of view on your material and an urgent reason to relate it. Such is not the case with Wyatt Earp, a handsome, grandiose gentleman's Western that tries to tell evenhandedly more about the famous Tombstone lawman than has ever before been put onscreen.
  22. Friday
    Rather like a cross between "Up in Smoke" and an episode of "The Jeffersons, Friday is a crudely made, sometimes funny bit of porchfront humor from the 'hood.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Conan the Barbarian
    Director John Milius does a nice job of setting up the initial story.... But for whatever reasons, [Schwarzenegger] has a minimum of dialog and fails to convey much about the character through his actions.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    First Blood
    Director Ted Kotcheff has all sorts of trouble with this mess, aside from credibility. Supposedly, the real villain here is society itself, which invented a debacle like Vietnam and must now deal with its lingering tragedies. But First Blood cops out completely on that one, not even trying to find a solution to Stallone's problems.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Deathtrap
    Despite its intermittently amusing dialog, however, Deathtrap comes across as a minor entertainment, cleverness of which cannot conceal its essential artificiality when blown up on the big screen.
  26. Demolition Man
    A noisy, soulless, self-conscious pastiche that mixes elements of sci-fi, action-adventure and romance, then pours on a layer of comedy replete with Hollywood in-jokes.
    • Variety
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Uncommon Valor
    All of the top talent involved - especially Gene Hackman - is hardly needed to make Uncommon Valor what it is, a very common action picture.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Boomerang
    The film might have worked if the thoroughly selfish characters were striving after something.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kindergarten Cop
    The polished comic vision that gave Twins, Arnold Schwarzenegger's comedy breakthrough, a storybook shine completely eludes director Ivan Reitman here. Result is a mish-mash of violence, psycho-drama and lukewarm kiddie comedy.
  30. Renaissance Man
    Marshall has tried to do too much, dealing with certain subplots too sparingly to deliver on their promise.
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