Variety's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,133 out of 17777
  2. Mixed: 7,008 out of 17777
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17777
17777 movie reviews
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    • 24 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Outdoors
    Writer-executive producer John Hughes conjurs up a romance between Candy’s teenage son (Chris Young) and a local girl (Lucy Deakins), but that proves the film’s biggest letdown. Last third of the film is a real mess, as filmmakers try to whip up a crisis that will unite the family, with the redheaded twins getting lost in a mineshaft during a wild rainstorm. Despite all this, the Aykroyd-Candy pairing is charmed. Stephanie Faracy is excellent as Candy’s sweet, happy wife, and Bening is also savvy in her role.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bull Durham
    A fanciful and funny bush league sports story where the only foul ball is its overuse of locker-room dialog.
    • 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Poltergeist III
    Director/co-writer Gary Sherman demonstrates absolutely no interest in whether this film ever has a modicum of meaning as he rushes from one special effect to another. Even there, Sherman arrives too late.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Big Business
    A shrill, unattractive comedy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big
    A 13-year-old junior high kid Josh (David Moscow) is transformed into a 35-year-old's body (Tom Hanks) by a carnival wishing machine in this pic which unspools with enjoyable genuineness and ingenuity.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Funny Farm
    Director George Roy Hill shows little distinction with this material [from Jay Cronley’s book], but then again, the material here isn’t very distinctive. Some of the setups work better than others, though most are of the sitcom variety.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rambo III
    The battle scenes in Rambo III are explosive, conflagratory tableaux that make for wrenching, frequently terrifying viewing. Always at ground zero in the chaos is Rambo - gloriously, inhumanly impervious to fear and danger - whose character is inhabited by Stallone with messianic intensity.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crocodile Dundee II
    Crocodile Dundee II is a disappointing follow-up to the disarmingly charming first feature with Aussie star Paul Hogan. Sequel is too slow to constitute an adventure and has too few laughs to be a comedy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Willow
    Willow is medieval mishmash from George Lucas, a sort of 10th-century "Star Wars" tossed together with a plethora of elements taken from numerous classic fables. Even if Lucas has bastardized his own story with derivative and unoriginal elements, kids probably will love it. For MGM Pictures, b.o. should mean recoupment of its large investment.
    • 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is a disappointing thriller that wastes an oddball premise and offbeat point-of-view.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wings of Desire
    Wim Wenders returns to Germany with a sublimely beautiful, deeply romantic film for our times. (Review of Original Release)
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Critters 2
    Film perfectly weaves together the gruesome behaviour of these bloodthirsty creatures and the comic asides that keep things gliding along.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Two Moon Junction
    Two Moon Junction is a bad hick version of Last Tango in Paris down to the poor imitative scoring by Jonathan Elias. Sexual obsession might be the aim, but the result is anything but hot.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Above the Law
    With a couple dozen stunt persons and an earthy, warm and supportive partner (Pam Grier), Seagal kicks, kills and crushes with his skillful hands one handful after another of street hoods who try and thwart his mission.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lady in White
    This probably is as good a nightmare as any impressionable boy could have and still be suspenseful enough to get most adults’ hearts going.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Neighbor Totoro
    Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki has essentially padded a television half-hour into a sluggish theatrical feature.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Colors
    A solidly crafted depiction of some current big-city horrors and succeeds largely because of the Robert Duvall-Sean Penn teaming as frontline cops.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bright Lights, Big City
    This novel-cum-feature film (from Jay McInerney's book) is a distinctly morose and maudlin journey through one man's destructive period of personal loss.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beetlejuice
    Beetlejuice springs to life when the raucous and repulsive Betelgeuse (Keaton) rises from his moribund state to wreak havoc on fellow spooks and mortal enemies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Biloxi Blues
    Biloxi Blues is an agreeable but hardly inspired film version of Neil Simon's second installment of his autobiographical trilogy, which bowed during the 1984-85 season. Even with high-powered talents Mike Nichols and Matthew Broderick aboard, World War II barracks comedy provokes just mild laughs and smiles rather than the guffaws Simon's work often elicits in the theater.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach
    Miami field trip only brings a pastel backdrop to the insipid infighting of the boobs in blue.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Nikita
    Little Nikita never really materializes as a taut espionage thriller and winds up as an unsatisfying execution of a clever premise - a teen's traumatic discovery that his parents are Soviet spies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Vice Versa
    It is really Savage, best known for his role as the little boy in The Princess Bride, who is particularly winsome as the smart-alecky Dad stuck in his kid’s pint-size body.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prison
    Starring as the prison in this rough penal pic with its special effects-laden horror story is the 87-year-old Wyoming State Penitentiary, which has attracted tourists rather than cons since 1981. The structure takes on all the menace of the house in Amityville Horror or hotel in The Shining.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Frantic
    Frantic is a thriller without much surprise, suspense or excitement. Drama about an American doctor's desperate search for his kidnapped wife through the demi-monde of Paris reveals director Roman Polanski's personality and enthusiasm only in brief humorous moments.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hope and Glory
    Essentially a collection of sweetly autobiographical anecdotes of English family life during World War II.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    School Daze
    As a director, Lee fails to strike the right note between realism and fantasy, and the heavy subject matter just falls with a thud. As an actor, however, Lee does a good job creating a sort of black babe in the woods.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ironweed
    Unrelentingly bleak, Ironweed is a film without an audience and no reason for being except its own self-importance. It's an event picture without the event. Whatever joy or redemption William Kennedy offered in his Pulitzer prize-winning novel is nowhere to be found, surprising since he wrote the screenplay.
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