Variety's Scores

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For 17,791 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: 9,139 out of 17791
  2. Mixed: 7,015 out of 17791
  3. Negative: 1,637 out of 17791
17791 movie reviews
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  1. First Kill
    Frankly, if forced to bet between John McClane and Anakin Skywalker, I’d take the “Die Hard” tough guy every time, but that’s just the underdog factor Miller is going for, staging a reasonably entertaining series of off-road chases and backwoods shootouts en route to that final confrontation.
  2. Death Wish
    All the new Death Wish is truly committed to is getting a rise out of the audience. It’s a first-person-shooter fantasy. The film’s only real view of justice is that it’s a blast.
  3. Middle Man
    Crowley’s thinly conceived debut feature only has one big joke, and everything around it is either long-winded setup or deflating letdown.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Running Man
    Format works only on a pure action level, with some exciting, but overly repetitious, roller-coaster style sequences of runners hurtling into the game through tunnels on futuristic sleds. Schwarzenegger sadistically dispatches the baddies, enunciating typical wisecrack remarks (many repeated from his previous films), but it’s all too easy, despite the casting of such powerful presences as Jim Brown and former wrestlers Jesse Ventura and Prof. Toru Tanaka.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dark Star
    Dark Star is a limp parody of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that warrants attention only for some remarkably believable special effects achieved with very little money. The dim comedy consists of sophomoric notations and mistimed one-liners.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Memoirs of an Invisible Man
    Main problem with this mildly entertaining special effects showcase proves as transparent as its title character -- namely that Chevy Chase, who can only play Chevy Chase, lacks leading-man qualities necessary to make this sort of Hitchcockian man-in-peril scenario work.
    • Variety
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pet Sematary II
    Pet Sematary Two is about 50% better than its predecessor, which is to say it's not very good at all. The latest incarnation relies more on gore than genuine chills and is sorely lacking in subtlety.
  8. Savage Dog
    Savage Dog is a good deal less than watertight in terms of logic and credibility, but Adkins’ blunt-force physicality is sufficiently impressive to make it entirely believable that Tillman could emerge victorious when battling bigger and/or bulkier opponents.
  9. Needful Things
    Moviegoers aren’t likely to be similarly spellbound, as Heston employs a too-slow buildup to an explosion of mayhem that incorporates gruesome violence with awkward attempts at dark humor.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Presidio
    Tug-of-war for dominance among the trio provides the interest in an otherwise ordinary crime story, as Harmon and Connery end up working to piece together clues in a convoluted smuggling caper.
  11. Escape from L.A.
    Nocturnal setting, uneven tone, abrasive score and only fitfully successful attempts at humor create a generally grim atmosphere, occasionally leavened by goofy ideas and flashes of explosive action.
    • Variety
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Land Before Time
    For the most part, pic is about as engaging as what's found on Saturday morning TV.
    • Variety
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    American Gigolo
    A hot subject, cool style and overly contrived plotting don’t all mesh in American Gigolo. Paul Schrader’s third outing as a director is betrayed by a curious, uncharacteristic evasiveness at its core.
  15. The 4th
    This pileup of frustrations is variably funny, often just mildly so, but rooting value is slight since floppy-haired Jamie is such a passive figure, one defined by little more than his constant cell-phone rambling and general brospeak.
  16. The Reagan Show
    The Reagan Show, unfortunately, isn’t the movie that it pretends to be. It’s a glib and scattered exposé.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blame It on Rio
    Central premise of a secret romance between Michael Caine and the love-smitten daughter of his best friend (Joe Bologna) while the trio vacations together in torrid Rio may be adventurous comedy. Zany comedic conflict, however, is offputting, even at times nasty, in this essentially dead-ahead comedy that sacrifices charm and a light touch for too much realism.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rising Sun
    Rising Sun waters down the more contentious aspects of Michael Crichton's controversial bestseller about Japanese influence in the United States, while remaining faithful to its mechanical plotting and superficial characterizations.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Runaway
    This Michael Crichton robotic nightmare is so trite that the story seems lifted from Marvel Comics, with heat-seeking bullets and a villain so bad he would be fun if the film wasn’t telling us to take this near-futuristic adventure with a straight face.
  20. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
    Is it an awful movie? Objectively speaking, no (although it does feature one of the worst endings ever inflicted on an audience). But as a Bond movie, it’s an abomination.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Beneath the Planet of the Apes
    This sequel to the 1968 smash, Planet of the Apes, is hokey and slapdash. The story [by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams] and Ted Post’s direction fall far short of the original.
  22. Air Doll (2009)
    Japanese helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ongoing interest in love, loss and souls in limbo is stretched way too thin in Air Doll, a beautifully lensed (by Taiwanese ace Mark Lee) and charmingly played (by South Korean icon Bae Du-na) modern fairy tale about an inflatable doll who takes on a life of her own. Recut to a trim 90 minutes, this fragile yarn would work perfectly and have a chance of an afterlife as a specialty item. In its present form, pic may not get much farther than the fest netherworld.
  23. Misfortune
    Misfortune is what it is, a small-budget neo-noir so generic that one half-expects to see a bar code rather than closing credits at the end.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Used Cars
    Scripters have provided very little context or societal texture for their unmodulated tale, which disagreeably seeks to find humor in characters’ humiliation, embarrassment and even death. Nonetheless Robert Zemeckis directs with undeniable vigor, if insufficient control and discipline.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Monkey Shines
    Monkey Shines is a befuddled story about a man constrained from the neck down told by a director confused from the neck up.
    • Variety
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Reds
    Reds bites off more than an audience can comfortably chew. Constant conflicts between politics and art, love and social conscience, individuals versus masses, pragmatism against idealism, take the form of intense and eventually exhausting arguments that dominate the script by Beatty and British playwright Trevor Griffiths.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Cannonball Run
    Cross-country race of the title comes off as almost entirely incidental to the star turns. Overall effect is akin to watching the troupe take a vacation.
  28. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    So much care has gone into each of the departments, from Guy Hendrix Dyas’ exquisite production design to Jenny Beavan’s micro-detailed costumes to composer James Newton Howard’s loving update of the Tchaikovsky score, and while any one of these elements might be tasteful in and of itself, it’s all too much to take in at once — the kind of overkill for which Liberace was known.
  29. Peter Rabbit
    Yes, it’s impressive from a visual effects standpoint.... However, had Potter lived to see what Hollywood has cooked up for her mischievous hero (who was sent to bed without supper in her own didactic tale), she almost certainly would have preferred for Peter (charmingly voiced by James Corden) and his three more cautious sisters...to have wound up in one of Mrs. McGregor’s infamous rabbit pies.
  30. Cleaner
    Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.
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