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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Presumed Innocent
    Honed to a riveting intensity by director Alan Pakula and featuring the tightest script imaginable, Presumed Innocent is a demanding, disturbing javelin of a courtroom murder mystery.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Unbelievable Truth
    The Unbelievable Truth is a promising, reasonably engaging first feature of the art school film variety. Very consciously designed and stylized in all departments, pic has a minor-key feel to it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Freshman
    Pic’s weakest element is the recurring satire of film studies. Although Benedict is droll as an academic poseur, the mocking of film analysis is puerile and obvious.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Navy Seals
    Nifty performances make this routine action flick better than it probably has a right to be.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia expertly blends horror and tongue-in cheek comedy in the tale of a small California coastal town overrun by Venezuelan killer spiders. Frank Marshall’s sophisticated feature directing debut never indulges in ultimate gross-out effects and carefully chooses both its victims and its means of depicting their dispatch.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost
    An odd creation - at times nearly smothering in arty somberness, at others veering into good, wacky fun.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quick Change
    Bill Murray delivers a smart, sardonic and very funny valentine to the rotten Apple in Quick Change. Pic became Murray's directing debut after he and Franklin became too attached to the project to bring anyone else in. Material, based on Jay Cronley's book, is neither ambitious nor particularly memorable, but it's brought off with a sly flair that makes it most enjoyable.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
    Surprisingly funny and expectedly rude, this first starring vehicle by vilified standup comic Andrew Dice Clay has a decidedly lowbrow humor that is a sort of modern equivalent of that of the Three Stooges.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Die Hard 2
    Die Hard 2 lacks the inventivenes of the original but compensates with relentless action.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Days of Thunder
    This expensive genre film about stock car racing has many of the elements that made the same team's Top Gun a blockbuster, but the producers recruited scripter Robert Towne to make more out of the story than junk food.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    RoboCop 2
    This ultraviolent, nihilistic sequel has enough technical dazzle to impress hardware fans, but obviously no one in the Orion front office told filmmakers that less is more.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Betsy's Wedding
    Setting a buoyant, anything-could-happen tone from the outset, Alda as director creates what he’s striving for: a feeling of being caught up in the warm craziness of this family, as all its vivid characters push and tug to impose their will on the proceedings. His punchy, inpertinent script is equally good.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dick Tracy
    Though it looks ravishing, Warren Beatty's longtime pet project is a curiously remote, uninvolving film.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    An hilarious sequel featuring equal parts creature slapstick for the small fry and satirical barbs for adults. Addition of Christopher Lee to the cast as a mad genetics engineering scientist is a perfect touch.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Total Recall
    The fierce and unrelenting pace, accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek strain of humor in the roughhouse screenplay, keeps the film moving like a juggernaut.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Back to the Future Part III
    Recovers the style, wit and grandiose fantasy elements of the original. The simplicity of plot, and the wide expansiveness of its use of space, are a refreshing change from the convoluted, visually cramped and cluttered second part.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fire Birds
    Originally titled Wings of the Apache for the Apache assault helicopters prominently featured, Fire Birds resembles a morale booster project leftover from The Reagan era.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    Almodovar's inventive direction, superb lensing by Jose Luis Alcaine, a fine score by Ennio Morricone and top technical credits make pic a pleasure to watch.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Tales from the Darkside is significantly gorier than its namesake TV series, and has better production values.
    • Variety
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Last Exit to Brooklyn is a bleak tour of urban hell, a $16 million Stateside-lensed production of Hubert Selby Jr's controversial 1964 novel. But it doesn't hold a scalpel to the lacerating torrential prose that made the book so cringingly urgent.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wild Orchid
    What doesn’t work is the hold Rourke is supposed to have over Otis. Looking pudgy and puffy-faced, with a little gold earring, he is anything but an appetizing sex object...As Emily, Otis really is hypnotically attractive, but she plays the still-waters-run-deep country beauty with expressionless immobility. Bisset, always a class act, here bubbles over with caricatured joie de vivre.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Guardian
    Who knows what possessed director William Friedkin to straight-facedly tell this absurd 'tree bites man' tale, but it's an impulse he should have exorcised.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Q & A
    Key to film’s success is how the case gradually uncovers new layers of corruption and insidious racism, with escalating awareness (and danger) for Hutton. Nolte is outstanding, bringing utter conviction to the stream of racist and sexist epithets that pour from his good ole boy lips.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miami Blues
    This quirky and sometimes brutally funny film strings together terrific moments but never takes a point of view.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Crazy People
    Crazy People combines a hilarious dissection of advertising with a warm view of so-called insanity... Finished film is a credit to all hands.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Gods Must Be Crazy II
    Jamie Uys has concocted a genial sequel to his 1981 international sleeper hit The Gods must Be Crazy that is better than its progenitor in most respects.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    I Love You to Death
    I Love You to Death is a stillborn attempt at black comedy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    Albert is one of the ugliest characters ever brought to the screen. Ignorant, over-bearing and violent, it’s a gloriously rich performance by Gambon.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cry-Baby
    John Waters' mischievous satire of the teen exploitation genre is entertaining as a rude joyride through another era, full of great clothes and hairdos.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pretty Woman
    Roberts handles the transition from coarse and gawky to glamorous with aplomb.
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