Variety's Scores

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For 17,847 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 2.3 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: 9,172 out of 17847
  2. Mixed: 7,036 out of 17847
  3. Negative: 1,639 out of 17847
17847 movie reviews
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    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Serpent and the Rainbow
    A better-than-average supernatural tale [inspired by Wade Davis’ book] that offers a few good scares but gets bogged down in special effects.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    Regarded as essentially unfilmable by many observers, so Philip Kaufman has pulled off a near-miracle in creating this richly satisfying adaptation.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    She's Having a Baby
    She's Having a Baby is an oddly uneven and quasi-serious look into the angst of the early years of a contemporary marriage that parallels TV's thirtysomething. There are many comedic setups which, if they were with less architypically drawn characters, might have delivered the laughs with the refreshingly innocent joy that has been the hallmark of other John Hughes pics.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cherry 2000
    A tongue-in-cheek sci-fi action pic which owes a considerable debt to the Mad Max movies, Cherry 2000's greatest asset is topbilled Melanie Griffith, who lifts the material whenever she's on screen.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Morning, Vietnam
    From the start, the film bowls you over with excitement and for those who can latch on, it’s a nonstop ride.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Moonstruck
    Carried by snappy dialog and a wonderful ensemble full of familiar faces.
    • Variety
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    *batteries not included
    Batteries Not Included could have used more imaginative juices to distinguish it from other, more enchanting Spielbergian pics where lovable mechanical things solve earthly human dilemmas. Still, it’s suitable entertainment for kids.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Broadcast News
    Enormously entertaining, Broadcast News is an inside look at the personal and professional lives of three TV journlists.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Overboard
    Overboard is an uninspiring, unsophisticated attempt at an updated screwball comedy that is brought down by plodding script and a handful of too broadly drawn characters. Only element that occasionally lifts pic is the work of the redoubtable Goldie Hawn, who gives a gem of a performance.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Wall Street
    Watching Oliver Stone's Wall Street is about as wordy and dreary as reading the financial papers accounts of the rise and fall of an Ivan Boesky-type arbitrageur.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Throw Momma from the Train
    A fun and delightfully venal comedy. Very clever and engaging from beginning to end.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Empire of the Sun
    It is up to young English thesp Bale to engage the viewer's interest, which he does superbly.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Manon of the Spring
    Manon des Sources is the poignant, but more dramatically wobbly, followup to Jean de Florette, producer-director Claude Berri's risky two-film adaptation of a novel by Marcel Pagnol, who, unsatisfied with his own next-to-last feature in 1952, expanded it as a two-part novel.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Planes, Trains & Automobiles
    John Hughes has come up with an effective nightmare-as-comedy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Disaster-prone duo of Steve Martin and John Candy repeatedly recall a contemporary Laurel & Hardy as they agonizingly try to make their way from New York to Chicago by various modes of transport.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    3 Men and a Baby
    3 Men and a Baby is about as slight a feature comedy as is made - while at the same time it's hard to resist Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg shamelessly going goo-goo over caring for an infant baby girl all swaddled in pink.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flowers in the Attic
    V. C. Andrews novel of incestuous relationships and confined childhood always has been a superb candidate for a film treatment, but director Jeffrey Bloom has taken this narrative and squeezed the life from it. Performances are as stiff and dreary as the attic these children are imprisoned in.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sign 'o' the Times
    Posing, pouting and pirouetting with androgynous abandon, pushing his guitar into ethereal, upper-register soundstorms and giving supple voice to songs of sensual and emotional free-fall in an anomic contemporary world, Prince provides music video addicts with a pure fix of visual and aural synchronicity.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Running Man
    Format works only on a pure action level, with some exciting, but overly repetitious, roller-coaster style sequences of runners hurtling into the game through tunnels on futuristic sleds. Schwarzenegger sadistically dispatches the baddies, enunciating typical wisecrack remarks (many repeated from his previous films), but it’s all too easy, despite the casting of such powerful presences as Jim Brown and former wrestlers Jesse Ventura and Prof. Toru Tanaka.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cry Freedom
    Cry Freedom personifies the struggle of South Africa's black population against apartheid in the evolving friendship of martyred black activist Stephen Biko and liberal white newspaper editor Donald Woods. It derives its impact less from epic scope than from the wrenching immediacy of its subject matter and the moral heroism of its appealingly played, idealistic protagonists.
    • Variety
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
    What raises Death Wish 4 above the usual blowout is a semi-engaging script and sure pacing by veteran action director J. Lee Thompson.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Less Than Zero
    Only Downey elicits the kind of sympathy to distinguish this drama from a photojournalist essay of the kind that might run in Vanity Fair. Of the secondary roles, James Spader as Downey’s pusher is terrifically smarmy. Unfortunately, this sick relationship doesn’t become involving until the last third of the film, when Downey really begins to fall apart and is forced into male whoring to pay his drug debts. Visually the picture is a treat.
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