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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    • 87 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Eraserhead
    Eraserhead is a sickening bad-taste exercise made by David Lynch under the auspices of the American Film Institute. Like a lot of AFI efforts, the pic has good tech values (particularly the inventive sound mixing), but little substance or subtlety.
    • Variety
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boys in Company C
    The Boys in Company C is a spotty but okay popcorn trade drama about five young Marines and how their lives were changed by duty in the Vietnam war. Laden with barracks dialog and played at the enlisted man's level, the Raymond Chow production, directed well by Sidney J. Furie, features strong performances by some very fine actors.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Duellists
    It does not quite achieve a more lusty visual feel for the times and the strange relations of these two men to themselves and to the women in and out of their lives.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Coma
    Coma is an extremely entertaining suspense drama in the Hitchcock tradition. Robin Cook's novel is adapted by Crichton into a smartly paced tale which combines traditional Hitchcock elements with contemporary personal relationships.
    • Variety
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Opening Night
    Gena Rowlands turns in another virtuoso performance as the troubled actress. Cassavetes’ highly personal work will please his coterie of enthusiasts, but for general audiences it will be viewed as shrill, puzzling, depressing and overlong.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Choirboys
    When Robert Aldrich's filmmaking is good, it's very, very good; and when it's bad it's awful. This cheap-looking ultra-raunchy alleged comedy about policemen leaves no stone unturned in its exploitation of vulgarity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gauntlet
    In a major role reversal, Clint Eastwood stars in The Gauntlet as a person who might be on the receiving end of the violence epitomized in his famed Dirty Harry film series.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Saturday Night Fever
    The clumsy story lurches forward through predictable travail and treacle, separated by phonograph records (or vice versa).
  9. The Goodbye Girl
    The Neil Simon script evolves a series of increasingly intimate and sensitive character encounters as the adults progress from mutual hostility to an enduring love. Performances by Dreyfuss, Mason and Cummings are all great, and the many supporting bits are filled admirably.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Semi-Tough
    Semi-Tough begins as a bawdy and lively romantic comedy about slap happy pro football players, then slows down to a too-inside putdown of contemporary self-help programs.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Turning Point
    The Turning Point is one of the best films of its era. It's that rare example of synergy in which every key element is excellent and the ensemble is an absolute triumph.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Heroes
    A poorly-written melodrama.
    • Variety
  13. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Steven Spielberg's film climaxes in final 35 minutes with an almost ethereal confrontation with life forms from another world; the first 100 minutes, however, are somewhat redundant in exposition and irritating in tone.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    1900
    Bertolucci’s ambitious generational canvas is elaborately constructed.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pete's Dragon
    Pete’s Dragon is an enchanting and humane fable which introduces a most lovable animal star (albeit an animated one).
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Damnation Alley
    Damnation Alley is dull, stirred only occasionally by prods of special effects that only seem exciting compared to the dreariness that proceeded it. What's worse, it's dumb, depending on its stereotyped characters to do the most stupid things under the circumstances in order to keep the story moving.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    In Looking for Mr Goodbar, writer-director Richard Brooks manifests his ability to catch accurately both the tone and subtlety of characters in the most repellant environments - in this case the desperate search for personal identity in the dreary and self-defeating world of compulsive sex and dope. Diane Keaton's performance as the good/bad girl is excellent.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Excellent cast performs well, but not well enough and Paul Schrader's story is strong, but not strong enough. In sum, it neither rolls nor thunders.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Oh, God!
    Oh, God! is a hilarious film which benefits from the brilliant teaming of George Burns, as the Almighty in human form, and John Denver, sensational in his screen debut as a supermarket assistant manager who finds himself a suburban Moses.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Julia
    Fred Zinnemann’s superbly sensitive film explores the anti-Nazi awakening in the 1930s of writer Lillian Hellman via persecution of a childhood friend, portrayed in excellent characterization by Vanessa Redgrave in title role. Richard Roth’s production is handsome and tasteful.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bobby Deerfield
    Bobby Deerfield is a brilliantly unusual love story, told in a European fashion which makes the Sydney Pollack film at first irritating, then intriguing, finally most rewarding and emotionally satisfying.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    This film, about a homicidal orphan girl, is farfetched nonsense with precious little to appease shriek freaks. Laird Koenig's screenplay from his novel is riddled with unsuspended disbelief - coincidences, gimmicks.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Kentucky Fried Movie
    The Kentucky Fried Movie boasts excellent production values and some genuine wit, though a few of the sketches are tasteless.
  24. The Spy Who Loved Me
    Triple X posed an ideal opportunity for the series to rectify its dismissive treatment of women until this point, putting a lady on equal footing with Bond. To its credit, the film does feature a bit of screwball badinage between the two (a clunky bit about female drivers, unfortunately), but it has yet to introduce a single female character who doesn’t want to sleep with our hero.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes
    Wes Craven’s blood-and-bone frightener about an all-American family at the mercy of cannibal mutants is a satisfying piece of pulp.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Orca
    Orca is man-vs-beast nonsense. Some fine special effects and underwater camera work are plowed under in dumb story-telling.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The People That Time Forgot
    Special effects add to the suspense as the group encounter all manner of hair-raising beasties and erupting fire in braving the dangers of the cavemen in an attempt to find their quarry.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Greased Lightning
    Greased Lightning is a pleasant, loose and relaxed comedy starring Richard Pryor in an excellent characterization based on real-life racing driver Wendell Scott.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Empire of the Ants
    Periodic moments of good special effects are separated by reels of dramatic banality as players flounder in flimsy dialog and under sluggish direction.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sorcerer
    William Friedkin's Sorcerer is a painstaking, admirable, but mostly distant and uninvolving suspenser based on the French classic The Wages of Fear [from the novel by Georges Arnaud]. Friedkin vividly renders the experience of several men driving trucks loaded with nitro through the South American jungle, yet the characters are basically functional. 'Sorcerer' is merely the name of one of the trucks.
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