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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    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Midway
    The June 1942 sea-air battle off Midway Island was a turning point in World War II. However, the melee of combat was the usual hysterical jumble of noise, explosion and violent death. Midway tries to combine both aspects but succumbs to the confusion.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silent Movie
    The slender plot of Silent Movie [from a story by Ron Clark] is basically a hook for slapstick antics, some feeble and some very fine (notably a wonderful nightclub tango with Anne Bancroft). Harry Ritz, Charlie Callas, Henny Youngman, and the late Liam Dunn are standouts.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Hard Men
    The Last Hard Men is a fairly good actioner with handsome production values and some thoughtful overtones. Charlton Heston and James Coburn are both fine as a retired lawman and his half-Indian nemesis matching their wits in 1909 Arizona along the way to one last bloody confrontation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Missouri Breaks
    The trouble with The Missouri Breaks is that one is seriously drawn to it on its upfront elements, but leaves with a depressing sense of waste. As a film achievement it’s corned beef and ham hash.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment, Part II
    That's Entertainment, Part II is a knockout. The very handsome and polished sequel to That's Entertainment! transforms excerpts from perhaps $100 million worth of classic Metro library footage into a billion dollars worth of fun, excitement, amusement, escapism, fantasy, nostalgia and happiness.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stay Hungry
    Underneath it all is a lurching and poorly defined film concept.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All the President's Men
    Some ingenious direction by Alan J. Pakula and scripting by William Goldman remove much of the inherent dramatic lethargy in any story of reporters running down a story.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Family Plot
    Family Plot is a dazzling achievement for Alfred Hitchcock masterfully controlling shifts from comedy to drama thoughout a highly complex plot. Witty screenplay, transplanting Victor Canning's British novel, The Rainbird Pattern, to a California setting, is a model of construction, and the cast is uniformly superb.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bad News Bears
    The Bad News Bears is an extremely funny adult-child comedy film. Walter Matthau stars to perfection as a bumbling baseball coach in the sharp production about the foibles and follies of little-league athletics.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Lipstick
    Lipstick has pretensions of being an intelligent treatment of the tragedy of female rape. But by the time it's over, the film has shown its true colors as just another cynical violence exploitationer.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Robin and Marian
    Robin and Marian is a disappointing and embarrassing film: disappointing, because Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn, the brilliant Robert Shaw, Richard Harris and a screenplay by James Goldman ought to add up to something even in the face of Richard Lester's flat direction; embarrassing, because the incompatible blend of tongue-in-cheek comedy, adventure and romance gives the Robin Hood-revisited film the grace and energy of a geriatrics' discotheque.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    True to form, John Cassavetes challenges a Hollywood cliche: that technology is so advanced even the worst films usually look good. With ease, he proves that an awful film can look even worse.
  13. Taxi Driver
    It’s a powerful film, an excellent credit for Scorsese, and a terrific showcase for the versatility of star Robert De Niro.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dog Day Afternoon
    The entire cast is excellent, top to bottom. Dog Day Afternoon is, in the whole as well as the parts, film-making at its best.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hustle
    The film’s drawbacks are simply a lack of some restraint, since otherwise all the elements are present for a sensational, hardhitting human story.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killer Elite
    The Killer Elite is an okay Sam Peckinpah actioner starring James Caan and Robert Duvall as two modern mercenaries who wind up stalking each other in a boringly complex double-cross plot [from the novel by Robert Rostand].
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Barry Lyndon
    Ryan O'Neal's excellent performance captures the shallow opportunism endemic to the title character who is brought down as much by his own flaws as by the mores of the ordered social structure of 18th-century England. Casting, concept and execution are all superb.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Man Who Would Be King
    Whether it was the intention of John Huston or not, the tale of action and adventure is a too-broad comedy, mostly due to the poor performance of Michael Caine.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
    Brilliant cinema theatre.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hard Times
    The production has a very handsome mid-1930s New Orleans period flavour but the cast can’t lick the script.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    Orson Welles has reworked the docu material of Francois Reichenbach on noted art forger Elmyr De Houry, made for TV about 1968, into an intriguing, enjoyable look at illusion in general and his own, Clifford Irving’s and De Houry’s dealing with it in particular.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Rocky Horror Picture Show
    Most of the jokes that might have seemed jolly fun on stage now appear obvious and even flat. The sparkle's gone.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Three Days of the Condor
    The film is a perfect contemporary example of an old studio formula approach to filmmaking. Basically a B, it has been elevated in form – but not in substance – via four bigger names, location shooting and more production values. Sometimes the trick works, but not here.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love and Death
    Love and Death is another mile-a-minute visual-verbal whirl by the two comedy talents, this time through Czarist Russia in the days of the Napoleonic Wars.
    • Variety
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Farewell, My Lovely
    Farewell, My Lovely is a lethargic, vaguely campy tribute to Hollywood's private eye mellers of the 1940s and to writer Raymond Chandler, whose Phillip Marlowe character has inspired a number of features. Despite an impressive production and some firstrate performances, this third version fails to generate much suspense or excitement.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    The Drowning Pool is stylish, improbable, entertaining, superficial, well cast, and totally synthetic. Stuart Rosenberg’s direction is functional and unexciting.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Race with the Devil
    As followup by 20th-Fox to its surprise success with last year’s Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, this Peter Fonda-Warren Oates meller should do okay with action audiences, since it includes the requisite road chases and other hyped-up thrills, some of them slickly executed by director Jack Starrett. Otherwise the production is a sloppy, cynical blend of second-hand plot elements.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cooley High
    Cooley High is pitched as a black American Graffiti, and the description is apt. Furthermore, you don't have to be black to enjoy it immensely. The Steve Krantz production is a heartening comedy-drama about urban Chicago high school youths, written by Eric Monte.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    Norman Jewison's sensational futuristic drama about a world of Corporate States stars James Caan in an excellent performance as a famed athlete who fights for his identity and free will.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bite the Bullet
    Bite the Bullet is an excellent, literate action drama probing the diverse motivations of participants in an endurance horse race.
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