Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,786 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: 9,137 out of 17786
  2. Mixed: 7,013 out of 17786
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17786
17786 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Corporate Animals
    Corporate Animals is a character sketch in search of a plot.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wild Orchid
    What doesn’t work is the hold Rourke is supposed to have over Otis. Looking pudgy and puffy-faced, with a little gold earring, he is anything but an appetizing sex object...As Emily, Otis really is hypnotically attractive, but she plays the still-waters-run-deep country beauty with expressionless immobility. Bisset, always a class act, here bubbles over with caricatured joie de vivre.
  3. Blush
    Admirably acted and powered by a loopy internal rhythm, the film nonetheless wears out its welcome long before it’s done inflicting indignities on its heroine, arriving at its main point early and then repeating it again and again.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vanishing Point
    The action is almost entirely made up of one man driving a car at maximum speed from Denver to, hopefully, San Francisco, against various odds, from the police who try to intercept him, to the oddball individuals he meets along the way.
  5. Child's Play
    This is the new normal for horror movies: The screenplays have to seem hipper than the premise they represent, which puts “Child’s Play” in the weird position of pointing out and poking fun at all the ways it fails to make sense.
  6. Yesterday
    In Yesterday, [Boyle and Curtis] reduce the Beatles to the ultimate product by declaring, at every turn, “These songs are transcendent!” And it’s the fact that they keep telling us, rather than showing us (i.e., with musical sequences that earned their transcendence), that makes Yesterday, for all the timeless songs in it, a cut-and-dried, rotely whimsical, prefab experience.
  7. Coming 2 America
    For the most part, Coming 2 America falls back on familiar punchlines, serving up nearly word-for-word repeats of amusing bits from the original, but they don’t necessarily play the same in this context.
  8. The Kindness of Strangers
    Too much of the kindness in “Strangers” feels sentimentally story-dictated rather than born of profound human observation, leaving you with mild, woolly good feeling but little to contemplate or chew on.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rollover
    Although elegantly appointed and possessed of a provocative theme, Rollover is a fundamentally disappointing political-romantic thriller [from a story by David Shaber, Howard Kohn and David Weir] set in the rarified world of international high finance.
  10. Something
    Something has a few observations to make about the perils of contemporary parenthood, but instead of whipping them into tension it douses them in catch-as-catch-can thriller vagueness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Man Called Horse
    A Man Called Horse is said to be an authentic depiction of American Indian life in the Dakota territory of about 1820. Authentic it may be, but an absorbing film drama it is not.
  12. Breakthrough
    What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.
  13. Tell It to the Bees
    Within the film’s modest scale, the period trappings feel apt, and its aesthetic packaging is attractive enough. But particularly for a movie largely about repression, “Bees” is so full of forced emotions that it teeters on the brink of cliche-riddled camp.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Valley of the Dolls
    Parkins and Tate, the latter particularly good, suffer from under-emphasis in early reels, and corny plot resolution.
  15. Chance
    “Bambi” perhaps did it best, but Chance is on the opposite end of the spectrum in both overall tone and filmmaking skill. Though the message here is one everyone should hear, clichéd characters and a dark, derivative dirge of a story end up feeling more manipulative than motivational.
  16. El Chicano
    The problem here isn’t the fairly apparent budgetary limits — it’s the limitations of style and imagination.
  17. Lady and the Tramp
    It’s as creatively anemic and blandly calculated as, say, this summer’s billion-grossing “The Lion King.”
  18. Come to Daddy
    Moderately funny and strangely dated ... The blend of tired jokes and body horror here seems entombed in amber, as every lacerated scalp, loudly broken limb, and use of the C-word makes it feel that much less original.
  19. Georgetown
    It’s downright tricky to maintain the tone Waltz is going for here, but the story is consistently outrageous enough to keep us guessing, and Redgrave goes a long way to offset the lunacy of it all. ... But instead of getting more interesting as it goes on, Waltz’s performance grows tiresome.
  20. Lost Transmissions
    It doesn’t sentimentalize Theo’s illness (much) or pull back from how disconnected he can be. “Lost Transmissions” may even sound like it deserves props for its straight-up, objective view of mental illness. Except for one small detail: That stance ends up removing the basic dramatic motor of the film.
  21. Papi Chulo
    An egregiously miscalculated rent-a-companion comedy from Irish writer-director John Butler (“Handsome Devil”).
  22. Just Say Goodbye
    This melodrama, released to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Month, lacks the necessary polish to elevate not just its message, but also the actors’ performances.
  23. Trial by Fire
    Every line of dialogue in Trial by Fire is wrapped with so much exposition that the film feels tied to the train-tracks of good taste. Characters don’t converse, they simply say all their thoughts aloud.
  24. Perfect
    What it means, Alcazar leaves open for interpretation. He’s more a mood maker than a story teller, and the film feels like people watching at a fancy party and inhaling different wafts of perfume.
  25. Crawl
    Crawl has no pretense and not very much range; it’s “Jaws” set in an old dark house.
  26. Anna
    It’s nowhere near the embarrassment of Brian De Palma’s “Domino,” or any number of recent studio tentpoles. Nor is it fresh enough to pretend that audiences had missed out on something special if it had been buried altogether — except perhaps for Luss, who’s bound to get another shot.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Foxy Brown
    Even by the gutter-high standards of the genre, Foxy Brown is something of a mess. Jack Hill’s screenplay has peculiar narrative gaps.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tank Girl
    A classic case of kitchen-sink filmmaking, in which the principals have thrown everything into the stew, hoping enough will stick to the audience...What’s missing from the mix is an engaging story to bind together its intriguing bits. And Lori Petty as Tank Girl, aka Rachel Buck, has the spunk but, sadly, not the heart of the post-apocalyptic heroine.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Club Paradise
    Williams can be a terrific actor/comedian, but the spark isn’t there. Somehow, Murray might have come up with cleverer ways of getting back at complaining guests (Andrea Martin, Steven Kampmann), nerdy, sex-crazed weaklings (Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy, respectively) and the other expected amalgam of folks.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gun Crazy
    Script points up the physical attraction between Dall and Cummins but, despite the emphasis, it is curiously cold and lacking in genuine emotions. Fault is in the writing and direction, both staying on the surface and never getting underneath the characters.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »