Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Neighbor Totoro
    Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki has essentially padded a television half-hour into a sluggish theatrical feature.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Colors
    A solidly crafted depiction of some current big-city horrors and succeeds largely because of the Robert Duvall-Sean Penn teaming as frontline cops.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bright Lights, Big City
    This novel-cum-feature film (from Jay McInerney's book) is a distinctly morose and maudlin journey through one man's destructive period of personal loss.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beetlejuice
    Beetlejuice springs to life when the raucous and repulsive Betelgeuse (Keaton) rises from his moribund state to wreak havoc on fellow spooks and mortal enemies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Biloxi Blues
    Biloxi Blues is an agreeable but hardly inspired film version of Neil Simon's second installment of his autobiographical trilogy, which bowed during the 1984-85 season. Even with high-powered talents Mike Nichols and Matthew Broderick aboard, World War II barracks comedy provokes just mild laughs and smiles rather than the guffaws Simon's work often elicits in the theater.
    • 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »