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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    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Basket Case
    Basket Case is an ultra-cheap monster film created by neophyte filmmaker Frank Henenlotter with a tongue-in-cheek approach.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Long Good Friday
    In many respects a conventional thriller set in London's underworld, The Long Good Friday is much more densely plotted and intelligently scripted than most such yarns.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eating Raoul
    The appeal of Paul Bartel’s tongue-in-cheek approach is that he manages to take his story to such a ridiculous extreme, remain genuinely funny and successfully tell his perverse story.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Porky's
    If, by chance, Porky's should prove to be Melvin Simon's swan song in the film industry, it will either be perceived as a thunderously rude exit or a titanic raspberry uttered to audiences everywhere.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Deathtrap
    Despite its intermittently amusing dialog, however, Deathtrap comes across as a minor entertainment, cleverness of which cannot conceal its essential artificiality when blown up on the big screen.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Victor Victoria
    A sparkling, ultra-sophisticated entertainment from Blake Edwards.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Missing
    Lemmon is superior as a man facing up to issues he never wanted to confront personally. Edgy and belligerent most of the time, Spacek is more constrained but she's fully believable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diner
    Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser and Timothy Daly are terrific as the friends as are Ellen Barkin and Kathryn Dowling as the two females involved with different group members.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Evil Under the Sun
    Apart from cutting down the number of characters, Hamilton and scripter Anthony Shaffer have also had the audacity to switch things around in the inevitable denouement scene. Poirot points right away at the guilty party, while the true suspense is put into the how’s and why’s that follow.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Death Wish II
    Charles Bronson, as the avenging vigilante Paul Kersey, is turned loose this time on the creeps of Los Angeles and the results are every bit as revolting as in the original 1974 jackpot fantasy.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Swamp Thing
    Short on thrills and laughs...Craven tries in vain, through old-fashioned characters and dialog, to re-create the ’50s B-monster movie. The film’s only asset for adult audiences is Barbeau, who is thoroughly believable and a feisty, rough ‘n’ tumble heroine, able to beat up most bad guys or outrun them through the swamp.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shoot the Moon
    A number of high-powered artists fail to coalesce their talents in Shoot the Moon a grim drama of marital collapse which proves disturbing and irritating by turns.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Barbarosa
    Australian director Fred Schepisi does a careful job of bringing the western legend to light with endearing performances from actors Willie Nelson and Gary Busey.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Quest for Fire
    Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest for Fire is an engaging prehistoric yarn that happily never degenerates into a club and lion skin spinoff of Star Wars and resolutely refuses to bludgeon the viewer with facile or gratuitous effects.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Border
    Despite Jack Nicholson's multi-leveled performance, The Border is a surprisingly uninvolving film.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cannery Row
    This long-in-the-works adaptation of John Steinbeck's waterfront tomes [Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday] displays more appreciation for the values inherent in the material than it does ability to breathe life into it.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Beast Within
    There does come a time when Clemens has to get out of his body and get on with being a bigtime monster. Thanks to Thomas R. Burman’s make-up effects, this sequence actually creates chills as the boy’s head bubbles and bursts and his skin pops and stretches.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Das Boot
    A descent into the pit of hell with slim odds of ever returning.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Personal Best
    Personal Best offers audiences a lot to like in solid characterizations, plus some shock that is a Robert Towne trademark. What they probably won't share, however, is his tedious fascination with physical perfection.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
    Night Warning is a fine psychological horror film. As the maniacally possessive aunt and guardian of a 17-year-old boy, Susan Tyrrell gives a tour-de-force performance.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pennies from Heaven
    Almost as if he were directing Pinter, Herbert Ross has actors speak a line, then wait two beats before delivering the next phrase. Technique smothers such ordinarily lively performers as Martin, Peters and Harper.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Taps
    Taps labors at an unbearably slow pace to an inevitable, depressing conclusion.
    • Variety
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Reds
    Reds bites off more than an audience can comfortably chew. Constant conflicts between politics and art, love and social conscience, individuals versus masses, pragmatism against idealism, take the form of intense and eventually exhausting arguments that dominate the script by Beatty and British playwright Trevor Griffiths.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Absence of Malice
    Absence of Malice is the flipside of All The President's Men, a splendidly disturbing look at the power of sloppy reporting to inflict harm on the innocent.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sharky's Machine
    Directing himself in Sharky’s Machine, Burt Reynolds has combined his own macho personality with what’s popularly called mindless violence to come up with a seemingly guaranteed winner [from the novel by William Diehl].
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Neighbors
    Other than a few laughs the reason for the film is a little puzzling. Ultimately it is Belushi and Aykroyd that make the picture work. When they hit the comedic mark, as they more often than not do here, nothing else seems to matter.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rollover
    Although elegantly appointed and possessed of a provocative theme, Rollover is a fundamentally disappointing political-romantic thriller [from a story by David Shaber, Howard Kohn and David Weir] set in the rarified world of international high finance.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On Golden Pond
    The film’s most moving interlude, (spoiler omitted), is saved for the end, and both Fonda (pere) and Hepburn are miraculous together here, conveying heartrending intimations of mortality which are doubly powerful due to the stars’ venerable status.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ragtime
    The page-turning joys of E.L. Doctorow's bestselling Ragtime, which dizzily and entertainingly charted a kaleidoscopic vision of a turn-of-century America in the midst of intense social change, have been realized almost completely in Milos Forman's superbly crafted screen adaptation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Road Games
    Road Games is an above-average suspenser concerning an offbeat truck driver who winds up stalking a murderer. Stacy Keach's characterization of the amusing, poetry-spouting man is particularly endearing but the film builds all too effectively to a rather disappointing climax.
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