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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    • 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.
  10. 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.
  16. 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Offence
    There's a powerful confrontation of authority and accused between police sergeant Sean Connery and suspected child molester Ian Bannen in Sidney Lumet's The Offence. A brilliant scene, however, does not in itself make for a brilliant overall feature.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Soylent Green
    The somewhat plausible and proximate horrors in the story of Soylent Green carry the production over its awkward spots to the status of a good futuristic exploitation film.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paper Moon
    Ryan O'Neal stars as a likeable con artist in the Depression midwest, and his real-life daughter, Tatum O'Neal, is outstanding as his nine-year-old partner in flim-flam.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coffy
    Jack Hill, who wrote and directs with an action-atuned hand, inserts plenty of realism in footage in which Pam Grier in title role ably acquits herself.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    Despite its anachronistic emulation of mid-1960s cynical spy mellers, Scorpio might have been an acceptable action programmer if its narrative were clearer, its dialog less 'cultured' and its visuals more straightforward.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scarecrow
    Scarecrow is a periodically interesting but ultimately unsatisfying character study of two modern drifters.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Theater of Blood
    Theatre of Blood is black comedy played for chills and mood and emerges a macabre piece of wild melodramatics.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sisters
    Sisters is a good psychological murder melo- drama, starring Margot Kidder as the schizoid half of Siamese twins, and Jennifer Salt as a news hen driven to terror in her investigation of a bloody murder. Brian De Palma's direction emphasizes exploitation values which do not fully mask script weakness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Godspell
    Original production’s appealing aspects have remained intact – a strong Stephen Schwartz score and an infectious joie de vivre conveyed by an energetic, no-name cast. So also, unfortunately, have its flaws – a relentlessly simplistic approach to the New Testament interpreted in overbearing children’s theatre-style mugging.
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