Variety's Scores

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For 17,782 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: 9,136 out of 17782
  2. Mixed: 7,010 out of 17782
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17782
17782 movie reviews
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  1. The Babymakers
    Yet another attempt to mix raunchy excess and romantic-comedy sweetness in an anything-goes raucous farce, The Babymakers offers a few big laughs between ho-hum stretches of frenetic vamping.
  2. The Girl from the Naked Eye
    Gets one's attention but doesn't keep it, due to ill-cued flashbacks, groan-inducing dialogue and wooden performances.
  3. That's What She Said
    This crude, shrill day in the life of three ill-matched Manhattan women will prove as irksome to most viewers as it is to the protags.
  4. Home Run Showdown
    Home Run Showdown serves up an uninspiring premise — a competition among little-leaguers to catch the most outs at a home run derby — and goes downhill from there.
  5. Assassin's Bullet
    Much of this makes little sense, but it's hard to care.
  6. The Paperboy
    A risibly overheated, not unenjoyable slab of late-'60s Southern pulp trash, marked by a sticky, sweaty atmosphere of delirium and sexual frustration that only partly excuses the woozy ineptitude of the filmmaking.
  7. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    The low-budget production feels chintzy and impossibly square, even by tyke standards.
  8. Bringing Up Bobby
    A technically competent but painfully broad dramedy about a larcenous mother-and-son duo in the Midwest. This gender-flipped, latter-day "Paper Moon" lacks that film's judicious restraint, among other things, alternating hick Americana cartoonishness with maudlin appeals to the tear ducts.
  9. Electoral Dysfunction
    Satirist and "Daily Show" ex-contributor Mo Rocca's faux-disingenuous tone and nonstop jocularity dominate the documentary to quickly grating effect, significantly diminishing its impact.
  10. Trade of Innocents
    Unfortunately, with its unconvincing action, preachy script and flat performances, the picture winds up less moving than most typical journeyman documentaries on the subject.
  11. Smiley
    By-the-numbers slasher picture Smiley starts by borrowing the key concept of "Candyman," ends with a denouement heavily indebted to "Scream," and stuffs its middle with a dismayingly high quotient of lazy false scares.
  12. Tai Chi Zero
    Manages the curious feat of being at once relentlessly energetic and almost continually uninvolving; the title more or less sums up the amount of pleasure to be had here.
  13. Unmasked Judeophobia
    This transparent piece of propaganda blatantly overplays its hand.
  14. I Will Follow You Into the Dark
    For a supernatural thriller that spends so much time on material that is neither supernatural nor thrilling, there’s not nearly enough effort put into credible, complex character writing, leaving the cast only so much ability to fill in the gaps.
  15. Oldboy
    Lee and Protosevich have made a picture that, although several shades edgier than the average Hollywood thriller, feels content to shadow its predecessor’s every move while falling short of its unhinged, balls-out delirium.
  16. A Haunted House
    The hit-to-miss ratio is less than impressive throughout A Haunted House, a frenetic and freewheeling satirical comedy that only sporadically scores a bull's-eye while aiming at easy targets.
  17. Getaway
    Easily one of the dopiest major studio releases since Elie Samaha got out of the business.
  18. Black Rock
    Straining to be a distaff “Deliverance,” indie thriller Black Rock is unable to shock, much less convince.
  19. Saving Grace B. Jones
    Most of what Stevens has concocted here is hard to take, notably the characters' curious relationship with the rain that threatens to drown Missouri, and serves as a soggy metaphor. Sometimes it only rains in half the frame; sometimes people coming out of downpours are wet, sometimes they're not; sometimes they're wet and it's not raining.
  20. The Monuments Men
    Clooney has transformed a fascinating true-life tale into an exceedingly dull and dreary caper pic cum art-appreciation seminar — a museum-piece movie about museum people.
  21. The Counselor
    The script is nearly all dialogue, including several eloquent spoken passages toward the end, but it’s a lousy story, ineptly constructed and rendered far too difficult to follow.
  22. Baggage Claim
    Chemistry you can fake, but charm is far harder to pull off, and Baggage Claim never quite succeeds on that front.
  23. She's All That
    While there are a few good jokes and sight gags along the way, the main impression left by She's All That is how numbingly consistent its lack of originality is.
  24. Phantom
    The potential for screw-tightening suspense gets lost amid the ineffectual dramatics in Phantom, a feeble fictionalization of a crucial but little-known moment when a rogue Soviet submarine brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kafka
    The story ultimately feels too conventional, and the portrait of the artist is too shallow to stand as a compelling or convincing evocation of a complex mind.
  26. Lotus Eaters
    Picture has some redeeming features, like its glossy, fashion-shoot-inspired black-and-white look, and a clutch of respectable performances among some very poor ones from the toothsome young cast, but the script is a mess, the characters barely sympathetic.
  27. Annie
    The film replaces choreography with metronomic editing, while one-note overstatement drowns out character development.
  28. Gummo
    Gummo is personal, honest and raw, but it's also erratic, self-indulgent and full of ideas that are not fully explored. [8 Sept. 1997, p.80]
    • Variety
    • 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
  30. Filly Brown
    The resulting film is a trite piece of storytelling, with character development and plot points that feel not so much lived in as borrowed from other movies.
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