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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dragnet
    Dragnet tries very hard to parody its 1950s TV series progenitor but winds up more innocuous than inventive.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Spaceballs
    Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Unfortunately, what he does in Spaceballs, a misguided parody of the Star Wars adventures, isn't very funny.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Withnail and I
    Withnail & I is about the end of an era. Set in 1969 England, it portrays the last throes of a friendship mirroring the seedy demise of the hippie period, delivering some comic gems along the way.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Roxanne
    Aussie director Fred Schepisi, who has elsewhere handled much rougher material, does a professional job of creating a breezy atmosphere, but in the end it’s hopelessly sappy stuff.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Predator
    A slightly above-average actioner that tries to compensate for tissue-thin-plot with ever-more-grisly death sequences and impressive special effects.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witches of Eastwick
    With a no-holds-barred performance by Jack Nicholson as the horny Satan, it’s a very funny and irresistible set-up for anyone who has ever been baffled by the opposite sex.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Harry and the Hendersons
    Harry and the Hendersons is proof that the folks at Amblin Entertainment, a.k.a. Steven Spielberg’s production company, can’t keep using the same E.T. formula for every kiddie pic.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Stepfather
    The Stepfather is an engrossing suspense thriller that refreshingly doesn't cheat the audience in terms of valid clues and plot twists.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Untouchables
    The Untouchables is a beautifully crafted portrait of Prohibition-era Chicago.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tampopo
    A thoroughly offbeat but most enjoyable comedy on the subject of food.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Beverly Hills Cop II
    Beverly Hills Cop II is a noisy, numbing, unimaginative, heartless remake of the original film...Murphy keeps things entertainingly afloat with his sassiness, raunchy one-liners, take-charge brazenness and innate irreverence.
    • Variety
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ishtar
    Enter Charles Grodin, who upstages all involved via his savagely comical portrayal of a CIA agent.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    River's Edge
    Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge is an unusually downbeat and depressing youth pic. As group leader Layne, Crispin Glover could have used more restraint: he gives a busy, fussy performance. Others in the cast are more effective, with young Joshua Miller particularly Striking as the awful child, Tim.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prick Up Your Ears
    The script is witty, the direction fluid, with one of the homosexual orgy scenes in a public toilet almost balletic, and the depiction of the lovers’ life in their flat suitably claustrophobic. Gary Oldman is excellent as Orton, right down to remarkable resemblance, while Alfred Molina creates both an amusing and tormented Halliwell. Vanessa Redgrave takes top honors, though, as a compassionate and benign agent.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Gardens of Stone
    Gardens of Stone, Francis Coppola's muddled meditation on the Vietnam War, seems to take its name not so much from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery, where much of the action takes place, but from the stiffness of the characters it portrays.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Creepshow 2
    Tied together with some humdrum animated sequences, three vignettes on offer obviously were produced on the absolute cheap, and are deficient in imagination and scare quotient.
    • Variety
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Ninja 2: The Confrontation
    Script by actors Gary Conway (who plays the narcotics overlord) and James Booth trades heavily upon the notion of Americans inherent mental and physical superiority to native warriors, who are a dime a dozen, but in such a comic way that the viewer can laugh with it rather than at it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Life as a Dog
    An exquisite look at childhood, based loosely on Reidar Jonsson's 1983 novel about a rural-provincial 12-year-old equivalent of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Extreme Prejudice
    Extreme Prejudice is an amusing concoction that is frequently offbeat and at times compelling. Taut direction and editing prevail despite overstaged hyper-violence that is so gratuitous to be farcical.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Project X
    If nothing else, Project X is the ultimate film for monkey lovers. Some quite endearing chimpanzees share center stage with Matthew Broderick for nearly two hours here, and while they, and he, are engaging enough to watch, picture lets its manipulative strings show too clearly.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Secret of My Succe$s
    A bedroom farce with a leaden touch, a corporate comedy without teeth. What it does have is Michael J. Fox in a winning performance as a likable hick out to hit the big time in New York.
    • Variety
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blind Date
    Theme of pure mayhem works well because of chemistry between the main trio of actors, Willis, Basinger and her spurned ex-beau (John Larroquette).
    • Variety
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hanoi Hilton
    The Hanoi Hilton is a lame attempt by writer-director Lionel Chetwynd to tell the story of US prisoners in Hoa Lo Prison, in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Pic is a slanted view of traditional prison camp sagas, injecting lots of hindsight and taking right-wing potshots that do a disservice to the very human drama of the subject.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hollywood Shuffle
    Most amusing of these is a school for black actors, run by whites, of course, where the students are trained to shuffle, jive and generally fit the preconceived notion of what blacks are like. Another brilliantly conceived bit is Sneakin’ into the Movies, a takeoff of the Siskel & Ebert film reviewing TV show.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Raising Arizona
    As leisurely and disconnected as "Blood Simple" was taut and economical. While film is filled with many splendid touches and plenty of yocks, it often doesn't hold together as a coherent story.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Evil Dead II
    More an absurdist comedy than a horror film, Evil Dead II is a flashy good-natured display of special effects and scare tactics so extreme they can only be taken for laughs.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Swimming to Cambodia
    Spalding Gray's free-associating recollection of his experiences in Thailand during the making of The Killing Fields had an exhilarating immediacy which is mostly absent in this compressed filmed performance of Swimming to Cambodia.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tin Men
    The improbable tale of a pair of feuding aluminum siding salesmen, Tin Men winds up as bountiful comedy material in the skillful hands of writer-director Barry Levinson. Film is packed with laughs, thanks to taut scripting and superb character depictions by Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito and a fascinating troupe of sidekicks.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lethal Weapon
    Lethal Weapon is a film teetering on the brink of absurdity when it gets serious, but thanks to its unrelenting energy and insistent drive, it never quite falls.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Angel Heart
    Even if it may be a specious work at its core, Angel Heart still proves a mightily absorbing mystery, a highly exotic telling of a small-time detective's descent into hell, with Faustian theme, heavy bloodletting and pervasive grimness.
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