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
  1. Jaws
    Robert Shaw [is] absolutely magnificent as a coarse fisherman finally hired to locate the Great White Shark; and Richard Dreyfuss, in another excellent characterization as a likeable young scientist.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nashville
    Nashville is one of Altman’s best films, free of the rambling insider fooling around that sometimes mars entire chunks of every second or third picture. When he navigates rigorously to defined goals, however, the results are superb.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bug
    Its last half is largely static, and the film never revives much interest.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wind and the Lion
    Generally literate and very commercial period action drama, well written and better directed by John Milius.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Breakout
    Director Tom Gries and the entire cast perform as though they all had better things to do.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Eiger Sanction
    Eastwood, who also directs and according to studio did his own mountain climbing without doubles, manages fine suspense. His direction displays a knowledge that permits rugged action.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Return of the Pink Panther
    All hands seem to be having a ball, especially Schell, whose unabashed amusement at Clouseau’s seduction attempts often matches an audience’s hilarity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    French Connection II
    Hackman’s performance is another career highlight, ranging from cocky narc, Ugly American, helpless addict, humbled ego and relentless avenger.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Fortune
    The Fortune is an occasionally enjoyable comedy trifle, starring Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty as bumbling kidnappers of heiress Stockard Channing, who is excellent in her first major screen role. Very classy 1920s production values often merit more attention than the plot.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smile
    Smile is a hilarious but ultimately shallow putdown of teenage beauty contests.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Day of the Locust
    Magnificent production, combined with excellent casting and direction, make The Day of the Locust as fine a film (in a professional sense) as the basic material lets it be. Nathanael West's novel about losers on the Hollywood fringe has lost little of its verisimilitude in adaptation.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death Race 2000
    Script, from an Ib Melchior story, makes its satirical points economically, and director Paul Bartel keeps the film moving quickly.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Basically an excuse for set pieces, some amusing, others overdone.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Supervixens
    Russ Meyer’s Supervixens is an overlong and overly violent skin pic whose interest lies in its pretentions to be more than a skin film.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brannigan
    Car chases, booby traps, etc round out the formula plot turns.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Escape to Witch Mountain
    Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann are happy choices as the orphans.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tommy
    Ken Russell's filmization of Tommy is spectacular in nearly every way. The enormous appeal of the original 1969 record album by The Who has been complemented in a superbly added visual dimension.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night Moves
    Night Moves is a paradox: a suspenseless suspenser, very well cast with players who lend sustained interest to largely synthetic theatrical characters.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shampoo
    All the excellent creative components do not add up to a whole. There are, however, strong elements in the film. Warden’s performance is outstanding. He makes the most of a script and direction which gives his character much more dimension than the prototype cuckold.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Great Waldo Pepper
    The Great Waldo Pepper is an uneven and unsatisfying story of anachronistic, pitiable, but misplaced heroism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
    Perhaps the film is a triumph of controlled and deliberate mediocrity, but it still closer resembles a clumsy carbon of a bad satire on the original.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wilby Conspiracy
    The Wilby Conspiracy [from Peter Driscoll’s novel] is a good action melodrama about apartheid in South Africa. It was made in Kenya. The stars Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine are relentlessly stalked by Nicol Williamson, superb as a coldly dedicated and brutal policeman out after racial agitators.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Stepford Wives
    Bryan Forbes’ filmization of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives is a quietly freaky suspense-horror story.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Strongest Man in the World
    The students of Medfield College unintentionally zap the laws of nature with unexpected and sometimes hilarious results.
  25. The Man with the Golden Gun
    Enjoyment requires denying the increasingly problematic truth about Bond: As heroes go, 007 represents a bygone notion of the privileged white man taking what’s his and leaving destruction in his wake.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Black Christmas, a bloody, senseless kill-for-kicks feature, exploits unnecessary violence in a university sorority house operated by an implausibly alcoholic ex-hoofer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Front Page
    The Front Page, with a featured spot by Carol Burnett, sure looks good on paper. But that's about the only place it looks good. The production has the slick, machine-tooled look of certain assembly line automobiles that never quite seem to work smoothly.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Towering Inferno
    The Towering Inferno is one of the greatest disaster pictures made, a personal and professional triumph for producer Irwin Allen.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Young Frankenstein
    Young Frankenstein emerges as a reverently satirical salute to the 1930s horror film genre.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Godfather: Part II
    Al Pacino again is outstanding as Michael Corleone, successor to crime family leadership.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore takes a group of wellcast film players and largely wastes them on a smaller-than-life film – one of those ‘little people’ dramas that make one despise little people.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lenny
    Bob Fosse's remarkable film version of Julian Barry's legit play, Lenny, stars Dustin Hoffman in an outstanding performance.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Woman Under the Influence
    This is a disturbing portrait of a slightly-mad housewife. Its serious treament of a downbeat subject is hypoed by a fine performance from Peter Falk and a bravura one from Gena Rowlands.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Earthquake
    Mark Robson's Earthquake is an excellent dramatic exploitation extravaganza, combining brilliant special effects with a multi-character plot line which is surprisingly above average for this type film. Large cast is headed by Charlton Heston, who comes off better than usual because he is not Superman, instead just one of the gang.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Phantom of the Paradise
    A very good horror comedy-drama about a disfigured musician haunting a rock palace. Brian De Palma's direction and script makes for one of the very rare backstage rock story pix, catching the garishness of the glitter scene in its own time.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Airport 1975
    Jack Smight’s direction has the refreshing pace of a filmmaker who knows his plot can crash unless he hurries.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Benji
    One of the wonders of the production, told simply and with no pretense of grandiose style, is the manner in which Benji – real name Higgins – performs. In this case, it isn’t a dog performing, but a dog acting, just as humans act. Much of the footage is shot from about 18 inches above the ground, upward from Benji’s point of view, and innovation is fascinating.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Gambler
    The Gambler is a compelling and effective film. James Caan is excellent and the featured players are superb. However, it is somewhat overlong in early exposition and has one climax too many.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It's Alive
    Stomach-churning.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Big Bad Mama
    Big Bad Mama is mostly rehashed Bonnie and Clyde, with a bit more blood and Angie Dickinson taking off her clothes for sex scenes with the crooks in her life.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Phase IV
    This one didn't get the bugs worked out before release. It's another in the Hollywood cycle of films based on every kind of creature enlarged by radiation.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Longest Yard
    The Longest Yard is an outstanding action drama, combining the brutish excitement of football competition with the brutalities of contemporary prison life. Burt Reynolds asserts his genuine star power, here as a former football pro forced to field a team under blackmail of warden Eddie Albert.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    A pleasant film about an old man who rejuvenates himself on a cross-country trek. Script is a series of good human comedy vignettes, with the large supporting cast of many familiar names in virtual cameo roles.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wicker Man
    Anthony Shaffer penned the screenplay which, for sheer imagination and near-terror, has seldom been equalled.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    Bring Me the Head of Alfred Garcia is turgid melodrama [from a story by Frank Kowalski and Sam Peckinpah] at its worst.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    California Split
    The film is technically and physically handsome, all the more so for being mostly location work, but lacks a cohesive and reinforced sense of story direction.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Death Wish
    Poisonous incitement to do-it-yourself law enforcement is the vulgar exploitation hook on which Death Wish is awkwardly hung.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment!
    An outstanding, stunning, sentimental, exciting, colorful, enjoyable, spirit-lifting, tuneful, youthful, invigorating, zesty, respectful, dazzling, and richly satisfying feature documentary commemorating its filmusicals.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Chinatown
    An outstanding picture.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Parallax View
    The Parallax View is a partially-successful attempt to take a serious subject - a nationwide network of political guns for hire - and make it commercially palatable to the popcorn trade - via chases, fights, and lots of exterior production elements.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Herbie Rides Again
    Another fat plug for the Volkswagen 'bug' as the runaway (literally) titular star.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
    Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is an overlong, sometimes hilariously vulgar comedy-drama, about the restaging of a difficult safecracking heist. Debuting director Michael Cimino obtains superior performances from Clint Eastwood, George Kennedy, Geoffrey Lewis and especially Jeff Bridges.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Daisy Miller
    Daisy Miller is a dud. Cybill Shepherd is miscast in the title role. Frederic Raphael's adaptation of the Henry James story doesn't play. The period production by Peter Bogdanovich is handsome. But his direction and concept seem uncertain and fumbled.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    With more than a third of the footage devoted to spectacular chases and collisions deftly staged by stunt coordinator Al Wyatt, there’s little time left to hint at the reasons for Fonda’s increasingly unappetizing monomania.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Windmill
    All principal players are well cast, but the production fizzles in its final half-hour because the story premise gets clobbered by clumsy and ineffective resolution and execution.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Lords of Flatbush
    Not too much finesse distinguishes the script, which carries neither warmth nor particular interest for the various characters.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Conversation
    A major artistic asset to the film - besides script, direction and the top performances - is supervising editor Walter Murch's sound collage and re-recording.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sugarland Express
    Unfortunately, the film degenerates in final reels to heavy-handed social polemic and sound-and-fury shootout.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Foxy Brown
    Even by the gutter-high standards of the genre, Foxy Brown is something of a mess. Jack Hill’s screenplay has peculiar narrative gaps.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
    An Arabian Nightish saga told with some briskness and opulence for the childish eye, yet ultimately falling short of implied promise as an adventure spree.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dark Star
    Dark Star is a limp parody of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that warrants attention only for some remarkably believable special effects achieved with very little money. The dim comedy consists of sophomoric notations and mistimed one-liners.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Gatsby
    The Francis Coppola script and Jack Clayton's direction paint a savagely genteel portrait of an upper class generation that deserved in spades what it got circa 1929 and after.
    • Variety
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Three Musketeers
    The Three Musketeers take very well to Richard Lester’s provocative version that does not send it up but does add comedy to this adventure tale [by Alexandre Dumas].
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Thieves Like Us
    Thieves Like Us proves that when Robert Altman has a solid story and script, he can make an exceptional film, one mostly devoid of clutter, auterist mannerism, and other cinema chic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blazing Saddles
    Although Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder head a uniformly competent cast, pic is handily stolen by Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn. Kahn is simply terrific doing a Marlene Dietrich lampoon...Rest of cast is fine, although Little’s black sheriff doesn’t blend too well with Brooks’ Jewish-flavored comic style. Wilder is amusingly low-key in a relatively small role.
    • Variety
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Zardoz
    A brilliant premise which unfortunately washes out in climactic sound and fury.
  67. The Exorcist
    Just as some of the footage deepens what is already there, additions in final reel, though closer to Blatty’s wishes, restate the obvious or add a feel-good patina which pushes the film closer to our own audience-pleasing period than the more daring early ’70s. [2000 re-release]
  68. The Sting
    The Sting has all the signs of a blockbuster. Paul Newman and Robert Redford are superbly reteamed, this time as a pair of con artists in Chicago of the ’30s, out to fleece a bigtime racketeer brilliantly cast with and played by Robert Shaw. George Roy Hill’s outstanding direction of David S. Ward’s finely-crafted story of multiple deception and surprise ending will delight both mass and class audiences. Extremely handsome production values and a great supporting cast round out the virtues.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Magnum Force
    The story contains the usual surfeit of human massacre for the yahoo trade, as well as a few actual thoughts.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    After an extremely overdone prolog of violent mass murder on a bus, The Laughing Policeman becomes a handsomely made manhunt actioner, starring Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern in excellent performances as two San Francisco detectives.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Day of the Dolphin
    Mike Nichols' film of The Day of the Dolphin is a rare and regrettably uneven combination of ideas and action. George C. Scott stars as a marine scientist whose work with dolphins faces corruption by his own sponsors. The story climax strains belief, but Nichols is one of a handful of directors who can get away with occasional improbability.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sleeper
    The film is loaded with throwaway literacy and broad slapstick, and while it fumbles the end, the parade of verbal and visual amusement is pleasant as long as it lasts.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Papillon
    For 150 uninterrupted minutes, the mood is one of despair, brutality, and little hope. The script is very good within its limitations, but there is insufficient identification with the main characters.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is a salty, bawdy, hilarious and very touching story about two career sailors escorting to a naval prison a dumb boot sentenced for petty thievery. Jack Nicholson is outstanding at the head of a superb cast.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Don't Look Now
    Superior stuff...The performances are right on the button; Donald Sutherland is (unusually) at his most subdued, top effectiveness as the materialist who ironically becomes the victim of his refusal to believe in the intangible; Julie Christie does her best work in ages as his wife; while a superbly-chosen cast of British and Italian supporting players etch a number of indelibly vivid portraits.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Serpico
    Pacino dominates the entire film. His inner personal torment is vividly detailed. (Review of Original Release)
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Basically a student effort (Cronenberg was 26), pic tests the viewer’s patience and endurance even with its hour’s running time due to its emphatically dry, scientific narration and deliberate emotional distancing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Westworld
    Westworld is an excellent film, which combines solid entertainment, chilling topicality, and superbly intelligent serio-comic story values. Michael Crichton's original script is as superior as his direction.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Breezy
    Clint Eastwood's third directorial effort is an okay contemporary drama about middle-aged William Holden falling for teenage Kay Lenz. Associate producer Jo Heims' script works the problem over with perhaps too much ironic, wry or broad humor for solid impact.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Way We Were
    A distended, talky, redundant and moody melodrama, combining young love, relentless 1930s and 1940s nostalgia, and spiced artifically with Hollywood Red-hunt pellets. The major positive achievement is Barbra Streisand's superior dramatic versatility, but Robert Redford has too little to work with in the script.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Charley Varrick
    Charley Varrick is a sometimes-fuzzy melodrama but so well put together that it emerges a hardhitting actioner with a sock finale.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Paper Chase
    The Paper Chase has some great performances, literate screenwriting, sensitive direction and handsome production. Timothy Bottoms is excellent as the puzzled law student, Lindsay Wagner is very good as his girl, and John Houseman, the veteran legit and film producer-director-writer, is outstanding as a hard-nosed but urbane law professor.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Badlands
    Badlands is a unique American fairy tale...and it's an impressive debut.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mean Streets
    Scorsese is exceptionally good at guiding his largely unknown cast to near-flawless recreations of types. Outstanding in this regard is De Niro.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bang the Drum Slowly
    The baseball version of Brian’s Song has reduced more than a few tough guys to tears.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Plains Drifter
    High Plains Drifter is a nervously-humorous, self-conscious near satire on the prototype Clint Eastwood formula of the avenging mysterious stranger. Script has some raw violence for the kinks and some dumb humor for audience relief. Eastwood’s second directorial effort is mechanically stylish.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    Film carries all the explosive trappings that make for a hit in its intended market and is glossed with a melodramatic narrative to take full advantage of its theme.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jesus Christ Superstar
    Norman Jewison's film version of the 1969 legit stage project in a paradoxical way is both very good and very disappointing at the same time. The abstract film concept veers from elegantly simple through forced metaphor to outright synthetic in dramatic impact.
  89. American Graffiti
    Of all the youth-themed nostalgia films in the past couple of years, George Lucas’ American Graffiti is among the very best to date. Set in 1962 but reflecting the culmination of the 1950s, the film is a most vivid recall of teenage attitudes and mores, told with outstanding empathy and compassion through an exceptionally talented cast of relatively new players.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    White Lightning
    Joseph Sargent’s direction is particularly effective in the light and auto-chasing sequences, latter a field day for stunt drivers and occasionally incorporating humorous bits of biz. Reynolds is quite up to all the demands of his smashing role.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Day of the Jackal
    The major asset of the film is that it succeeds in maintaining interest and suspense despite obvious viewer foreknowledge of the outcome.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last American Hero
    After a fumbling start which looks like bad editing for TV, The Last American Hero [based on two articles by Tom Wolfe] settles into some good, gritty, family Americana, with Jeff Bridges excellent as a flamboyant auto racer determined to succeed on his own terms and right a wrong to his father, played expertly by Art Lund.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cleopatra Jones
    Cleopatra Jones is a good programmer with the offbeat twist of having a sexy woman detective as the lead character. The script incorporates a slew of action set pieces, capably directed by Jack Starrett.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cahill U.S. Marshal
    Wayne carries out characterization realistically and gets firm support right down the line.
  95. Live and Let Die
    The most significant Bond ingredient missing from Live and Let Die is Q, whose gadgets still play a central role. The film also offers a few key additions, including an illuminating glimpse of Bond’s home.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    A very fine film about real people on the fringes of both crime and law enforcement.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Playtime
    Tati is not an active satirist nor does he use slapstick. He has assimilated the greats but is an individual comic talent who builds meticulous gags founded on a gentle, anarchic individualism that is always sympathetic, personal and, above all, funny and constantly inventive.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dillinger
    Pace is sometimes reduced during events sandwiched in between actual gunfire sequences of Dillinger’s career, but there can be no criticism of Milius’ ability to keep such action sequences at top-heat.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Legend of Hell House
    Richard Matheson's scripting of his novel Hell House builds into an exceptionally realistic and suspenseful tale of psychic phenomena.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
    Coburn offers more of his smiles as testimony to the wizardry of Old West dentistry, while Kristofferson ambles through his role with solid charm. Neither conveys the psychological tension felt between the two men whose lives diverge after years of camaraderie.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »