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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    • 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.
  18. 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.
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