Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 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: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    State of Grace
    State of Grace is a handsomely produced, mostly riveting, but ultimately overlong and overindulgent gangster picture.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Hunter Black Heart
    Clint Eastwood's film isn't an African adventure epic, as those unaware of Peter Viertel's 1953 book may surmise from the title. It's an intelligent, affectionate study of an obsessive American film director who, while working on a film in colonial Africa, becomes sidetracked by his compulsion to hunt elephants.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Repossessed
    Nonstop silliness keeps this frightless spoof of The Exorcist entertaining enough to keep an undemanding audience happy.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hardware
    Hardware veers loonily out of control and becomes a black comic exercise in F/X tour-deforce that’s ceaselessly pushing itself over the top.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Postcards from the Edge
    Mike Nichols' film of Carrie Fisher's novel Postcards from the edge packs a fair amount of emotional wallop in its dark-hued comic take on a chemically dependent Hollywood mother and daughter (Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep).
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goodfellas
    Simultaneously fascinating and repellent, Goodfellas is Martin Scorsese's colorful but dramatically unsatisfying inside look at Mafia life in 1955-1980 New York City.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Killer
    This extremely violent and superbly made actioner demonstrates the tight grasp that director John Woo has on the crime meller genre, and his ability to twist the form into surprisingly satisfying shapes. The picture creeps up on an audience. Melodramatic from the start, it finally goes over the top to deliver a solid emotional punch.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    After Dark, My Sweet
    Director-cowriter James Foley has given this near-perfect adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel a contempo setting and emotional realism that make it as potent as a snakebite.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witches
    The wizardry of Jim Henson's Creature Shop and a superbly over-the-top performance by Angelica Huston gives The Witches a good deal of charm and enjoyment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pump Up the Volume
    Writer-director Allan Moyle's story about a shy high school student who galvanizes an Arizona suburb with a rebellious pirate radio show has rambunctious energy and defiant attitude.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Exorcist III
    Since The Exorcist was one of the most frightening films ever and Exorcist II one of the goofiest, chances favored The Exorcist III to fall somewhere in between, though not nearly far enough up the scale to rival the original.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wild at Heart
    Joltingly violent, wickedly funny and rivetingly erotic, David Lynch's Wild at Heart [based on the novel by Barry Gifford] is a rollercoaster ride to redemption through an American gothic heart of darkness.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Air America
    Spectacular action sequences and engaging performances by Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr make this big-budgeter entertaining and provocative.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Two Jakes
    This oft-delayed sequel proves a jumbled, obtuse yet not entirely unsatisfying follow-up to Chinatown, rightly considered one of the best films of the 1970s.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flatliners
    Flatliners is a strikingly original, often brilliantly visualized film from director Joel Schumacher and writer Peter Filardi.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Metropolitan
    Metropolitan succeeds on several levels, offering rich, sparkling dialog, distinct characters and an intriguing peek into a seldom seen milieu.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mo' Better Blues
    Personal rather than social issues come to the fore in Mo' Better Blues, a Spike Lee personality piece dressed in jazz trappings that puffs itself up like Bird but doesn't really fly. More focused on the sexual dilemmas of its main character than on musical themes, pic might well be subtitled He's Gotta Have It.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Guns II
    Although it's more ambitious than most sequels, Young Guns II exhausts its most inspired moment during the opening credits and fades into a copy of its 1988 predecessor - a slick, glossy MTV-style western.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Problem Child
    The film marks an atrocious bigscreen debut for actor and episodic TV director Dennis Dugan.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Presumed Innocent
    Honed to a riveting intensity by director Alan Pakula and featuring the tightest script imaginable, Presumed Innocent is a demanding, disturbing javelin of a courtroom murder mystery.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Unbelievable Truth
    The Unbelievable Truth is a promising, reasonably engaging first feature of the art school film variety. Very consciously designed and stylized in all departments, pic has a minor-key feel to it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Freshman
    Pic’s weakest element is the recurring satire of film studies. Although Benedict is droll as an academic poseur, the mocking of film analysis is puerile and obvious.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Navy Seals
    Nifty performances make this routine action flick better than it probably has a right to be.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia expertly blends horror and tongue-in cheek comedy in the tale of a small California coastal town overrun by Venezuelan killer spiders. Frank Marshall’s sophisticated feature directing debut never indulges in ultimate gross-out effects and carefully chooses both its victims and its means of depicting their dispatch.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost
    An odd creation - at times nearly smothering in arty somberness, at others veering into good, wacky fun.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quick Change
    Bill Murray delivers a smart, sardonic and very funny valentine to the rotten Apple in Quick Change. Pic became Murray's directing debut after he and Franklin became too attached to the project to bring anyone else in. Material, based on Jay Cronley's book, is neither ambitious nor particularly memorable, but it's brought off with a sly flair that makes it most enjoyable.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
    Surprisingly funny and expectedly rude, this first starring vehicle by vilified standup comic Andrew Dice Clay has a decidedly lowbrow humor that is a sort of modern equivalent of that of the Three Stooges.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Die Hard 2
    Die Hard 2 lacks the inventivenes of the original but compensates with relentless action.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Days of Thunder
    This expensive genre film about stock car racing has many of the elements that made the same team's Top Gun a blockbuster, but the producers recruited scripter Robert Towne to make more out of the story than junk food.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    RoboCop 2
    This ultraviolent, nihilistic sequel has enough technical dazzle to impress hardware fans, but obviously no one in the Orion front office told filmmakers that less is more.
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