Variety's Scores

For 17,777 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:
17777 movie reviews
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nicholson embellishes fascinatingly baroque designs with his twisted features, lavish verbal pirouettes and inspired excursions into the outer limits of psychosis. It's a masterpiece of sinister comic acting.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pic [story by Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and Ed Naha] is in the best tradition of Disney and even better than that because it is not so juvenile that adults won’t be thoroughly entertained.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sings whenever Williams is onscreen.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghostbusters II is babyboomer silliness. Kids will find the oozing slime and ghastly, ghostly apparitions to their liking and adults will enjoy the preposterously clever dialog.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Even die-hard Trekkies may be disappointed by Star Trek V. Coming after Leonard Nimoy's delightful directorial outing on Star Trek IV, William Shatner's inauspicious feature directing debut is a double letdown.
    • Variety
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cage's over-the-top performance generates little sympathy for the character, so it's tough to be interested in him as his personality disorder worsens.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Renegades offers some rollercoaster thrills thanks to Jack Sholder's full-throttle direction but ultimately exhausts itself with unrelenting bedlam.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Harrison Ford-Sean Connery father-and-son team gives Last Crusade unexpected emotional depth, reminding us that real film magic is not in special effects.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    With Road House, United Artists hotwires Patrick Swayze a star vehicle shackled by a couple of flat tires in the script department. Ill-conceived and unevenly executed, pic essentially is a Western - a loner comes in to clean up a bar, of all things, and ends up washing and drying the whole town - but its vigilante justice, lawlessness and wanton violence feel ludicrous in a modern setting.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    With Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in the lead roles, See No Evil, Hear No Evil could only be a broadly played, occasionally crass, funny physical comedy .
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The basic material is as old as the hills, but Martin Amis, who wrote the original novel some 15 years earlier, explored it in fresh directions.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Earth Girls Are Easy is a dizzy, glitzy fish-out-of-water farce about three horny aliens on the make in LA. The two val-gals and their alien ‘dates’ take off for a weekend of LA nightlife, where the visitors’ smooth adaptation to Coast culture is intended by director Julian Temple and his screenwriters to affectionately skewer Tinseltown lifestyles.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Return of Swamp Thing is scientific hokum without the fun. Second attempt to film the DC Comics character will disappoint all but the youngest critters.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The picture would be genuinely hilarious were the subject matter not so overworked.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    K-9
    There are a few amazing moments (the dog’s rescue of Belushi in a bar). In between lingers lots of standard action-pic fare, plenty of toothless jokes and some down-right mangy dialog.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Putting the show over with a bang is Hunter, the epitome of energy in a tailormade feisty role. She very accurately judges the line between high and low camp in her climactic tapdance for the talent contest, entertaining but just klutzy enough to be authentic.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In spite of a script hobbled with cloying aphorisms and shameless sentimentality, Field of Dreams sustains a dreamy mood in which the idea of baseball is distilled to its purest essence.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Pet Sematary marks the first time Stephen King has adapted his own book for the screen, and the result is undead schlock dulled by a slasher-film mentality – squandering its chilling and fertile source material.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Somewhere lurking behind the scenes of She's Out of Control is the germ of a good idea. Despite some funny scenes, the sitcomish treatment of a father's anxiety over his teenage daughter's budding sexuality is mostly shallow and uneven.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Major League lacks the subtlety of Bull Durham or the drama of Eight Men Out, but for sheer crowd-pleasing fun it belts one high into the left-field bleachers...Though the plot turns are mostly predictable, they are executed with wit and style.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Though not always entirely credible, Dead Calm is a nail-biting suspense pic handsomely produced and inventively directed.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Dream Team is a hokey comedy that basically reduces mental illness to a grab bag of quirky schtick. Yet with a quartet of gifted comic actors having a field day playing loonies on the loose in Manhattan, much of that schtick is awfully funny.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A half-baked love story, full of good intentions but uneven in the telling.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Daniel Waters' enormously clever screenplay blazes a trail of originality through the dead wood of the teen-comedy genre.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Film’s saving grace is its scathing satirical sketches of fictional televangelist preacher Jimmy Lee Farnsworth.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It's a soggy recycling of gruesome monster attacks unleashed upon a crew of macho men and women confined within a far-flung scientific outpost.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A fitting final installment in Terry Gilliam's trilogy begun with Time Bandits and continued with Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen shares many of those films strengths and weaknesses, but doesn't possess the visionary qualities of the latter.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A potentially charming premise yields only a handful of chuckles.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Morgan Freeman's inspired performance as Joe Clark, the New Jersey principal who uses controversial methods to clean up a drug- and crime-ridden high school, makes it easier to forgive John Avildsen's rather glossy and simplistic treatment of a serious dilemma in the public school system.

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