Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    Helmer has obtained taut, impressive performances, notably from cast women.
  2. Guncrazy
    A shoot-'em-up exploitationer with a few interesting ideas floating around in it, Guncrazy lacks the exhilaration of a first-class lovers-on-the-run crime drama. After a promising beginning, competently made indie effort settles into a surprisingly somber mood that suppresses the possibilities latent in the story and actors.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Light Sleeper
    Paul Schrader has created a pointed companion piece to his earlier portraits of lonely outcasts (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo). Contemplative and violent by turns, this quasi-thriller about a long-time drug dealer leaving the business has a great deal to recommend it but could have been significantly better had Schrader done some fresh plotting and not relied on his standby gunplay to resolve issues.
  4. Porco Rosso
    Not only does this rank among Miyazaki’s finest achievements, it reflects his personal love of aviation, his political concerns and his fullest expression to date of a non-fantasy world resembling our own.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Naked Lunch
    Stretching himself with each new work, David Cronenberg has come up with a fascinating, demanding, mordantly funny picture.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grand Canyon
    [An] earnest, often moving but not totally successful film.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Prince of Tides
    Bringing her usual strengths of character to her role as Nolte’s psychiatrist/lover, Barbra Streisand marks every frame with the intensity and care of a filmmaker committed to heartfelt, unashamed emotional involvement with her characters.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Until the End of the World
    In the logistically taxing effort to get all this on screen, Wenders has sacrificed some of his customary poetry. And the grand emotion and obsession needed to carry the two lovers around the world isn’t apparent in Hurt and Dommartin.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    JFK
    Oliver Stone's JFK is electric muckraking filmmaking.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bugsy
    A melancholy and intimate gangster saga about a romantic dreamer with fatal flaws, Bugsy emerges as a smooth, safe portrait of a volatile, dangerous character. An absorbing narrative flow and a parade of colorful underworld characters vie for screen time with an unsatisfactory central romance.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Boy Scout
    There’s really nothing special about this entertaining if mindless shoot-’em-up other than an ample supply of amusing juvenile put-downs and elaborate action sequences.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night on Earth
    An easy to take followup to his previous pic Mystery Train. Beginning with an outer-space shot gradually zeroing in on planet Earth, the director covers in five separate segments his favorite theme of lonely people interacting but ultimately facing the great void alone.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hook
    Hook feels as much like a massive amusement park ride as it does a film. Spirited, rambunctious, often messy and undisciplined.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
    Weighed down by a midsection even flabbier than the long-in-the-tooth cast, director Nicholas Meyer still delivers enough of what Trek auds hunger for to justify the trek to the local multiplex.
    • Variety
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Double Life of Veronique
    Despite pic’s many-splendored outbursts of filmic creativity and intense emotion, final result, about the opposite destinies of a Polish girl and a French girl who look alike and have the same name and tics, remains a head-scratching cipher with blurred edges.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Beauty and the Beast
    A lovely film that ranks with the best of Disney’s animated classics, Beauty and the Beast is a tale freshly retold.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Addams Family
    Despite inspired casting and nifty visual trappings, the eagerly awaited Addams Family figures as a major disappointment. First-time director Barry Sonnenfeld never really gets past the skeletal plot, which plays like a collection of sitcom one-liners augmented by feature-film special effects.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kafka
    The story ultimately feels too conventional, and the portrait of the artist is too shallow to stand as a compelling or convincing evocation of a complex mind.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cape Fear
    A smart and stylish remake of the 1962 suspenser.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Man Tate
    Filled with small, telling moments rather than big events, film never really gets inside Fred’s head, but it neatly sketches the external aspects of his predicament.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Highlander II: The Quickening
    Audiences unfamiliar with the first film will be hard put to follow the action as it incoherently hops about in time and space.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People Under the Stairs
    A pretense of social responsibility and most of the necessary tension get lost in a combination of excessive gore and over-the-top perfs in The People Under the Stairs.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life Is Sweet
    As a precise observation of British types and a virtuoso piece of carefully observed ensemble playing, the film would be hard to beat.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Own Private Idaho
    The Shakespearean side of the story falls short due to Reeves' very narrow range as an actor.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Frankie and Johnny
    Frankie and Johnny is an all-star, high-gloss, feel-good romantic feature sitcom. Amiably written and performed but fearsomely predictable, this middle-of-the-road adaptation of Terrence McNally’s off-Broadway hit [the 1987Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune] invites audiences to indulge in watching beautiful movie stars play lonely little people struggling to find love.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homicide
    Mamet’s direction gives much of the film a bracing, refreshing tone as he works to express the shattering tensions of Gold’s work.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ricochet
    Screenplay [from a story by Fred Dekker and Menno Meyjes] offers unusually good dialog for the smooth-talking Washington and a number of scenes to savor. Pic threatens to become truly absorbing as Lithgow’s brilliant revenge scheme unfolds, but Ricochet soon abandons cleverness in favor of spectacle.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dogfight
    The bringing together of a soldier headed for Vietnam and a future hippie on the night before President Kennedy’s assassination represents a frightfully schematic screenwriting device. But Savoca underplays the character development to such an extent that the film has a muted, very modest impact.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Man in the Moon
    The performances are all on the money, but two are outstanding. Newcomer Witherspoon manages to strike exactly the right note as the tomboy on the verge of womanhood while Waterston works on several levels at once.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Necessary Roughness
    Essentially, this is a football version of the equally contrived and only slightly less hokey baseball comedy Major League.
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