Variety's Scores

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For 17,771 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 2.5 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: 9,130 out of 17771
  2. Mixed: 7,005 out of 17771
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17771
17771 movie reviews
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    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wiz
    Director Sidney Lumet has created what amounts to a love letter to the city of New York, which he equates with Oz.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
    Only saving grace is the satire pic’s opening titles, a clever lampoon of theatre trailers and advertising pitches, including a mid-credit title card that boasts, ‘This space for rent’. There’s also a tongue-in-cheek parody of disaster pic music, sung in a deep basso voice, but that’s over in about two minutes. Thereafter it’s all downhill, rapidly.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Boys from Brazil
    With two excellent antagonists in Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil presents a gripping, suspenseful drama for nearly all of its two hours - then lets go at the end and falls into a heap.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goin' South
    Picture starts off promisingly enough with Nicholson as a hapless outlaw who makes it across the border but the posse cheats and comes across after him causing his horse to faint. But it never jells, as Nicholson continues to sputter and chomp, acting more like her grandfather than a handsome roue out to overcome her virginity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Midnight Express
    Midnight Express is a sordid and ostensibly true story about a young American busted [in 1970] for smuggling hash in Turkey and his subsequent harsh imprisonment and later escape. Cast, direction and production are all very good, but it’s difficult to sort out the proper empathies from the muddled and moralizing screenplay which, in true Anglo-American fashion, wrings hands over alien cultures as though our civilization is absolutely perfect.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Death on the Nile
    Death on the Nile is a clever, witty, well-plotted, beautifully-produced and splendidly acted screen version of Agatha Christie's mystery. It's old-fashioned stylized entertainment with a big cast and lush locations.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bloodbrothers
    Bloodbrothers is an ambitious, if uneven probe into the disintegration of an Italian-American family [from the novel by Richard Price]. Under Robert Mulligan's forceful direction, sharply-drawn characters clash, scream and argue, but fail to resolve any of their or the film's conflicts.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paradise Alley
    It’s an upbeat, funny, nostalgic film populated by colorful characters, memorable more for their individual moments than for their parts in the larger story.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Up in Smoke
    What’s lacking in Up in Smoke is a cohesiveness in both humor and characterization. Once the more obvious drug jokes are exhausted, director Lou Adler lets the film degenerate into a mixture of fitful slapstick and toilet humor.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Days of Heaven
    A dramatically moving and technically breathtaking American art film, one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1970s.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Piranha
    This is one film where the fish win.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Interiors
    Watching this picture a question keeps recurring: what would Woody Allen think of all this? Then you remember he wrote and directed it. The film is populated by characters reacting to situation Allen has satirized so brilliantly in other pictures.
    • Variety
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eyes of Laura Mars
    Eyes of Laura Mars is a very stylish thriller [from a story by John Carpenter] in search of a better ending.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who'll Stop the Rain
    Film has a hardnose progression and solidity in its characterizations. Nolte earns his star stripes here, displaying presence and perceptiveness in socking home his character, while Weld and Moriarty are also effective.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Animal House
    Steady readers of the National Lampoon may find National Lampoon's Animal House a somewhat soft-pedalled, punches-pulled parody of college campus life circa 1962. However, there's enough bite and bawdiness to provide lots of smiles and several broad guffaws.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hooper
    Individually, the performances in this story of three generations of Hollywood stuntmen are a delight. And Hal Needham’s direction and stunt staging are wonderfully crafted.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Driver
    Director Walter Hill and stunt coordinator Everett Creach have engineered a number of car chases and they are fabulous, if you like car chases.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
    Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band will attract some grown-up flower children of the 1960s who will soon find the Michael Schultz film to be a totally bubblegum and cotton candy melange of garish fantasy and narcissism.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Pink Panther
    Revenge of the Pink Panther isn't the best of the continuing film series, but Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers on a slow day are still well ahead of most other comedic filmmakers.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Foul Play
    Foul Play revives a relatively dormant film genre - the crime-suspense-romantic comedy in which low-key leading players get involved with themselves while also caught up in monumental intrigue. The name missing from the credits is Alfred Hitchcock. Writer Colin Higgins makes a good directorial bow.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Swarm
    Killer bees periodically interrupt the arch writing, stilted direction and ludicrous acting in Irwin Allen's disappointing and tired non-thriller.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bad News Bears Go to Japan
    Producer Michael Ritchie (who directed the first installment) and writer-creator Bill Lancaster encore with Japan resulting in a more vigorous film than the sodden Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heaven Can Wait
    Heaven Can Wait is an outstanding film. Harry Segall's fantasy comedy-drama play, made in 1941 by Columbia as Here Comes Mr Jordan, returns in an updated, slightly more macabre treatment.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Convoy
    Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy starts out as Smokey and the Bandit, segues into either Moby Dick or Les Miserables, and ends in the usual script confusion and disarray, the whole stew peppered with the vulgar excess of random truck crashes and miscellaneous destruction.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Grease
    Grease has got it, from the outstanding animated titles of John Wilson all the way through the rousing finale as John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John ride off into teenage happiness.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jaws 2
    Despite a notable but effective change in story emphasis, Jaws 2 is a worthy successor in horror, suspense and terror to its 1975 smash progenitor.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Damien: Omen II
    Alas, Little Orphan Damien, lucky enough to be taken in by a rich uncle after bumping off his first pair of foster parents, can’t resist killing the second set, too, along with assorted friends of the family. Damien is obviously wearing out his welcome.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cat from Outer Space
    The fun, as usual with Disney pix, comes in the believable sight gags provided along the way. Also as usual, it’s a good cast of veterans and nothing to tax them beyond their abilities, all ably kept in pace by director Norman Tokar.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Capricorn One
    Capricorn One begins with a workable, if cynical cinematic premise: the first manned space flight to Mars was a hoax and the American public was fooled through Hollywood gimmickry into believing that the phony landing happened. But after establishing the concept, Peter Hyams' script asks another audience - the one in the theatre - to accept something far more illogical, the uncovering of the hoax by reporter Elliott Gould...In general, it is a script of conveniences.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Wednesday
    A rubber stamp wouldn’t do for John Milius. So he took a sledgehammer and pounded Important all over Big Wednesday. This film about three Malibu surfers in the 1960s has been branded major statement and it’s got Big Ideas about adolescence, friendship and the 1960s.
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