Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 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: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Journey of Natty Gann
    More a period piece of Americana than a rousing adventure, The Journey of Natty Gann is a generally diverting variation on a boy and his dog: this time it's a girl and her wolf.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Agnes of God
    Fonda’s relentless interrogating, mannered chain-smoking and enforced two dimensionality cause her to become tiresome very early on. She remains a brittle cliche of a modern professional woman. Bancroft gives a generally highly engaging performance as a religious woman too knowledgeable to be one-upped by even the craftiest layman.
  3. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    Beautiful, yet flawed film.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After Hours
    The cinema of paranoia and persecution reaches an apogee in After Hours, a nightmarish black comedy from Martin Scorsese. Anxiety-ridden picture would have been pretty funny if it didn't play like a confirmation of everyone's worst fears about contemporary urban life.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    American Ninja
    Director Sam Firstenberg stages the numerous action scenes well, but engenders little interest in the non-story.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flesh+Blood
    Flesh + Blood is a vivid and muscular, if less than fully startling, account of lust, savagery, revenge, betrayal and assorted other dark doings in the Middle Ages.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Compromising Positions
    Falling midway between a campy send-up of suburban wives soap operas and a legitimate thriller, Compromising Positions, from the 1978 novel by Susan Isaacs, emerges as a silly little whodunnit that's a mild embarrassment to all involved.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Teen Wolf
    Lightweight item is innocuous and well-intentioned but terribly feeble, another example of a decent idea yielding the least imaginative results conceivable.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volunteers
    Volunteers is a very broad and mostly flat comedy [from a story by Keith Critchlow] about hijinx in the Peace Corps, circa 1962. Toplined Tom Hanks gets in a few good zingers as an upperclass snob doing time in Thailand, but promising premise and opening shortly descend into unduly protracted tedium.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Return of the Living Dead
    Director Dan O’Bannon deserves considerable credit for creating a terrifically funny first half-hour of exposition, something in which he is greatly aided by the goofball performance of James Karen as a medical supply know-it-all.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bride
    While there is deliberate humor at times, most of it successfully produced by a lilting dwarf character who steals the movie (David Rappaport), the intention of the filmmakers is not camp. That’s both the pic’s virtue and, at the conclusion, its downfall.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Flyers
    American Flyers is most entertaining when it rolls along unencumbered by big statements. Unfortunately, overblown production just pumps hot air in too many directions and comes up limp.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Year of the Dragon
    Unquestionably, Cimino’s eye for detail and insistence thereon has paid off in his impressive recreation of Chinatown at producer Dino De Laurentiis’ studios in North Carolina. Crammed with an array of interesting characters, including the extras in the background, Dragon brims with authenticity.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pee-wee's Big Adventure
    Children should love the film and adults will be dismayed by the light brushstrokes with which Paul Reubens (one of three credited screenwriters, but star-billed under his stage name, Pee-wee Herman) suggests touches of Buster Keaton and Eddie Cantor.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Real Genius
    What lifts the production above the run-of-the-mill is swift direction by Martha Coolidge, who has a firm grasp over the manic material.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Weird Science
    Hughes’ true gift is at capturing the naturalistic rhythms and interaction between the boys with a great ear for dialog. Le Brock is just right as the film’s calm but commanding center.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes Part II
    It’s dull, formula terror pic cliches, with one attractive teenager after another picked off by the surviving cannibals.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fright Night
    Director Tom Holland keeps the picture wonderfully simple and entirely believable (once the existence of vampires is accepted, of course).
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Follow That Bird
    Simple premise has the slightly goofy yellow, eight-foot fowl Big Bird taken away from Sesame Street by the officious Miss Finch so he can grow up among his own kind, a bird family named the Dodos, in Oceanview, Ill.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kiss of the Spider Woman
    Some will find him (Hurt) mesmerizing, others artificially lowkeyed.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    National Lampoon's European Vacation
    Story [by John Hughes] of a frenetic, chaotic tour of the Old World, with Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo reprising their roles as determined vacationers, is graceless and only intermittently lit up by lunacy and satire.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Black Cauldron
    By any hard measure, the $25 million animated Cauldron is not very original. The characters, though cute and cuddly and sweet and mean and ugly and simply awful, don't really have much to do that would remain of interest to any but the youngest minds.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Day of the Dead
    Day of the Dead is an unsatisfying part three in George A. Romero's zombie saga. The acting here is generally unimpressive and in the case of Sarah's romantic partner, Miguel (Antonio DiLeo, Jr.), unintentionally risible.
    • Variety
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Coca-Cola Kid
    The mix of earthy symbolism, offbeat eroticism, the picaresque and the rough-and-tumble social, rather unpolitical satire now seems poured from a bottle that has been left uncapped overnight.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Explorers
    Throughout, director Joe Dante and writer Eric Luke load the proceedings with references to sci-fiers of an earlier day, such as War of the Worlds, This Island Earth, Journey to the Center of the Earth and many others, but this is nothing compared to what happens when the trio of youngsters finally take off into outer space and make contact with an alien race.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silverado
    Rather than relying on legendary heroes of Westerns past, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan with his brother Mark have used their special talent to create a slew of human scale characters against a dramatic backdrop borrowing from all the conventions of the genre.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    Gibson impressively fleshes out Max, Tina Turner is striking in her role as Aunty (as well as contributing two topnotch songs, which open and close the picture) and the juves are uniformly good.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Back to the Future
    Performances by the earnest Fox, the lunatic Lloyd, the deceptively passionate Lea Thompson, and, particularly, the bumbling-to-confident Glover, who runs away with the picture, merrily keep the ship sailing.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Red Sonja
    Red Sonja [based on stories by Robert E. Howard] returns to those olden days when women were women and the menfolk stood around with funny hats on until called forth to be whacked at.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pale Rider
    It’s all been seen before, but Eastwood serves it up with authority, fine craftsmanship and a frequent sense of fun. This film is graced not only by an excellent visual look and confident storytelling, but by a few fine performances, led by Eastwood’s own.
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