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. Nobody's Fool
    In Nobody’s Fool, Tiffany Haddish is just furious and funny enough to make you wish that the rest of the movie wasn’t a droopy romantic comedy without the comedy.
  2. Boarding School
    Boarding School includes an odd mix of narrative elements within a classically Grimm child-endangerment scenario that would work best played as a modern fairy tale. Yet Yakin chooses to pace the film more slowly as a serious drama, which keeps the suspense from building real momentum and exacerbates the script’s implausibilities.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    American Ninja
    Director Sam Firstenberg stages the numerous action scenes well, but engenders little interest in the non-story.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Police Academy 6: City Under Siege
    Director Peter Bonerz and writer Stephen J. Curwick (the latter taking his second Academy shift) both cut their teeth on TV sitcoms, and it shows. Rarely has a film cried out so desperately for a laughtrack.
  5. Our House
    What this still modest yet considerably slicker upgrade gains in surface gloss and FX, it loses in psychological intensity and suspension of disbelief — qualities heightened by the prior film’s handmade origins.
    • 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    RoboCop 3
    This latest widget off the RoboCop assembly line is a bit better than the first sequel, which amounts to damnation with faint praise. Limiting the gore, but not the carnage, in pursuit of a PG-13 rating and more youngsters, pic remains a cluttered, nasty exercise that seems principally intent on selling action figures.
  8. The Night Eats the World
    The very definition of a well-made movie that nonetheless really needn’t have been made at all, Rocher’s entry into the canon will attract a few zombie completists, but provide little fun for the average genre buff and underwhelming reward for art-house audiences.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
    Although their duel offers original effects-laden thrills and stunts, it’s too little and too late.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stella
    The semitragic Stella Dallas shows her years in this hopelessly dated and ill-advised remake.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Crime...
    SCTV alum Eugene Levy makes his feature-film directing debut with a film that, ironically, would have provided ample fodder for a Second City spoof as a group of US stars chews its way through Italy and France in search of a movie.
  12. Leave It to Beaver
    Fuzzily conceived and blandly executed, Leave It to Beaver is neither fish nor fowl. Not exactly a straight-faced homage to the classic TV series, but far short of an outright parody, this exceedingly mild comedy plays like the product of a committee that never reached a consensus on which direction to take.
  13. I Still See You
    Newcomers will find this adapted tale’s fantasy logic arbitrary, its plot convoluted, and the sum effect wildly unconvincing without being nearly so fun.
  14. Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie
    Even under the best of circumstances, it would be late in the day for another bigscreen adventure from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But coming so soon after the well-received reissue of George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, the high-camp cheesiness ofTurbo: A Power Rangers Movie is especially unimpressive.
  15. My Favorite Martian
    Martian is loud, busy and altogether pointless. Worse, it’s simply not as engaging as the show that inspired it.
  16. Larger Than Life
    Harmless, but also, unfortunately, almost entirely mirthless, this putative comedy about an unsuspecting man obliged to transport a pachyderm cross-country aspires to a winsome charm that never crystallizes, leaving what’s onscreen to wilt before it ever blossoms.
  17. Forever Mine
    Paul Schrader hits a low water mark with Forever Mine, a strenuously straight-faced film noir wanna-be that edges perilously close to self-parody.
  18. Bel Canto
    Between its minimal setup and frantic denouement, the middle stretch of this pleasingly multilingual movie sags shapelessly, as the hostages and even their captors gradually bond across cultural and linguistic barriers, with music — of course — as the language that binds them.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It's Alive
    Stomach-churning.
  20. Where Hands Touch
    Amandla Stenberg carries the magnetism she brought to her breakthrough role in the YA romance “Everything, Everything,” but she’s betrayed by a stilted rendering of a rarely illuminated piece of history.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eddie and the Cruisers
    A mish-mash of a film, combining elements of the ongoing nostalgia for rock music of previous decades with an unworkable and laughable mystery plotline.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Screwballs
    A poor man's "Porky's". This compendium of horny high school jokes set in 1965 is full of youthful exuberance and proves utterly painless to watch, but it is so close in premise and tone to its model that negative comparisons can't help but be drawn.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    8 Million Ways to Die
    What could have been a better film delving into complexities of one tough-but-vulnerable alcoholic sheriff out to bust a cocaine ring, instead ends up an oddly-paced work that is sometimes a thriller and sometimes a love story, succeeding at neither.
  24. Our Time
    Die-hard acolytes will argue that the camerawork transcends or even complements the storyline; most everyone else will wonder what happened to an auteur whose work was awaited with such eager anticipation.
  25. American Dharma
    What you see in American Dharma isn’t investigative filmmaking — it’s a toothless bromance.
  26. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
    The emotions of the stories have been lost. We could be watching the standard ghoulish CGI effects that take place in any horror movie of the week.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Child's Play 3
    Noisy, mindless sequel.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Return of the Living Dead II
    Billed as a comedy/horror flick, Return of the Living Dead Part II is neither scary nor funny and adds salt in the wound with an obnoxious soundtrack of grating rock music.
  29. 55 Steps
    August, whose English-language films have seldom compared well to his distinguished Scandinavian ones, can’t elevate this material much above the flat, pat TV-movie earnestness it seems content to aim for.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    King Kong Lives
    Director John Guillermin loses all control of the pic.
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