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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Falcon and the Snowman
    All the way through The Falcon and the Snowman director John Schlesinger and an exemplary cast grapple with a true story so oddly motivated it would be easily dismissed if fictional. Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn are superb.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heaven Help Us
    Very funny in spots and wonderfully evocative of Brooklyn, circa 1965, pic suffers somewhat by dividing its attention between outrageous pranks and realistic sketches of the Catholic school experience.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Killing Fields
    A story of perseverance and survival in hell on earth, The Killing Fields represents an admirable, if not entirely successful, attempt to bring alive to the world film audience the horror story that is the recent history of Cambodia.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Passage to India
    An impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel about the clash of East and West in colonial India.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fandango
    Fandango emerges as a quite promising feature debut by writer-director Kevin Reynolds, with its feet squarely within the overused boys-coming-of-age genre but its heart betraying an appealingly anarchic, iconoclastic bent.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blood Simple
    An inordinately good low-budget film noir thriller...Performances are top-notch all around, Walsh in particular conveying the villainy and scummy aspects of his character with convincing glee.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tuff Turf
    This modestly budgeted youth pic is a poor man's and partially musicalized Rebel without a Cause with a touch of The Warriors thrown in.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The River
    Stripped down to the bare essentials few people actually ever come into contact with, pic remains a rather private ordeal observed from the outside looking in. There is a victory at the end, but not a sense of lasting triumph.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Johnny Dangerously
    Stapleton is also well-cast in her cliched role, as are Peter Boyle as the good mobster Dundee and Joe Piscopo as the bad Vermin. Deliberately overworking the Cagney mannerisms, Michael Keaton is initially good, too, in the title role, as is Griffin Dunne as Johnny’s D.A. brother. Unfortunately, the material given all of them just gets worse and worse.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
    As a phenomenon, the hip-hop, breakdancing, sidewalk graffiti and rap music culture lends itself well to a comic book approach and to his credit director Sam Firstenberg doesn’t try to interject too much reality into the picture.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Flamingo Kid
    Dillon does a good job in his fullest, least narcissistic characterization to date.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Birdy
    Belying the lightheartedness of its title, Birdy is a heavy adult drama about best friends and the after-effects of war, but it takes too long to live up to its ambitious premise.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Micki + Maude
    Micki + Maude is a hilarious farce. For his part, Dudley Moore is in top antic form, and Amy Irving has never been better.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Starman
    There is little that is original in Starman, but at least it has chosen good models.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Runaway
    This Michael Crichton robotic nightmare is so trite that the story seems lifted from Marvel Comics, with heat-seeking bullets and a villain so bad he would be fun if the film wasn’t telling us to take this near-futuristic adventure with a straight face.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cotton Club
    Dramatically, Coppola and co-screenwriter William Kennedy, juggle a lot of balls in the air. The parallel stories of Gere and Hines’ professional rise prove more potent, thanks largely to a mixture of romance, music and gangland involvement. Hines and McKee generate real sparks in their relationship and latter adds an interesting dimension as a light-skinned singer trying to hide her racial origins.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dune
    Dune is a huge, hollow, imaginative and cold sci-fi epic. Visually unique and teeming with incident, David Lynch's film holds the interest due to its abundant surface attractions but won't, of its own accord, create the sort of fanaticism which has made Frank Herbert's 1965 novel one of the all-time favorites in its genre.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    2010
    In Peter Hyams’ hands [working from a novel by Arthur C. Clarke], the HAL mystery is the most satisfying substance of the film and handled the best. Unfortunately, it lies amid a hodge-podge of bits and pieces.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    City Heat
    City Heat is an amiable but decidedly lukewarm confection geared entirely around the two star turns.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beverly Hills Cop
    Beverly Hills Cop is more cop show than comedy riot. Expectations that Eddie Murphy's street brand of rebelliousness would devastate staid and glittery Beverly Hills are not entirely met in a film that grows increasingly dramatic.
    • Variety
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Supergirl
    Helen Slater is a find: blonde as Supergirl, dark-haired as Linda Lee, she’s an appealing young heroine in either guise. Screenplay is filled with witty lines and enjoyable characters, but Jeannot Szwarc’s direction is rather flat.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Nightmare on Elm Street
    A Nightmare on Elm Street is a highly imaginative horror film that provides the requisite shocks to keep fans of the genre happy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night of the Comet
    Night of the Comet is a successful pastiche of numerous science fiction films, executed with an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek flair that compensates for its absence in originality.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Missing in Action
    Writer James Bruner and director Joseph Zito have marshalled a formula pic with a particularly jingoistic slant: even though the war is long over, the Commies in Vietnam still deserve the smack of a bullet.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oh, God! You Devil
    The story didn’t need to get this involved and it winds up constantly trying to pull the picture apart, working against the comedy.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Small Affair
    No Small Affair is an okay coming-of-age romance [from a screen story by Charles Bolt] in which the believability of the leading characters far outweighs that of many of the situations in which the script places them.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Paris, Texas
    It’s indeed a beautiful film, one that will surely convince doubters that Muller is one of the cinema’s best cameramen. He gives the story a surface polish that hints of Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe Americana paintings. Some images are positively breathtaking.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Soldier's Story
    A Soldier's Story is a taut, gripping film which features many of the old fashioned virtues of a good Hollywood production - brilliant ensemble acting, excellent production values, a crackling script (adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning A Soldier's Play [1981] by its author, Charles Fuller), fine direction and a liberal political message.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Terminator
    A blazing, cinematic comic book, full of virtuoso moviemaking, terrific momentum, solid performances and a compelling story.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Body Double
    Brian De Palma lets all his obsessions hang out in Body Double. A voyeur’s delight and a feminist’s nightmare, sexpenser features an outrageously far-fetched and flimsy plot.
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