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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fist of Fury
    Lee has a good deal of aggressive boyish charm. However, pic is archaically simple-minded in its storyline and marginally professional in its production. Lo Wei’s direction is a juvenile match for his own screenplay.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Way of the Dragon
    Dragon is noteworthy more for the martial arts action than for narrative, which is all its fans probably want anyway.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, who produced A Boy Named Charlie Brown, focus most of their attention on the independent beagle who is the despair of his master, Charlie Brown.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask
    Allen's gift is in the depiction of a contemporary intellectual shlump who cannot seem to make it with the chicks always tantalizingly out of reach. That persona could well have served him once more as the focus for a good bit of caustic comedy on today's sexual mores.
    • Variety
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Super Fly
    Best that can be said for this quickie is its unpretentiousness in not seeking any pseudo-sociological meaning or theme, or assuming any airs that one is supposed to be enriched or provoked by it all. It's strictly action-adventure, alternating, like clockwork, drugs-sex-violence for its duration with hardly a plot line to hold it together.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fat City
    Huston catches the feel of the community with a lean, no-nonsense economy, a hard-boiled but humanly alert feeling which raises the tale from a purely naturalistic lowlife depiction of the characters to make a statement on the life style of the drifters and those who accept a moderate place in the smalltown hierarchy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deliverance
    In the depiction of sudden, violent death, there is the rhapsodic wallowing in the deadly beauty of it all: protruding arrows, agonizing expiration, etc. It’s the stuff of which slapdash oaters and crime programmers are made but the obvious ambitions of Deliverance are supposed to be on a higher plane.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joe Kidd
    Not enough identity is given Clint Eastwood in a New Mexico land struggle in which no reason is apparent for his involvement, but John Sturges' direction is sufficiently compelling to keep guns popping and bodies falling.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Le Samouraï
    It is intermittently successful.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hannie Caulder
    Welch, with genteel modesty, makes the character for many rather ingratiating though others undoubtedly will find her plain ludicrous.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
    The Planet of the Apes series takes an angry turn in the fourth entry, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Candidate
    The Candidate is an excellent drama starring Robert Redford as a naive liberal political novice who wises up fast...Redford’s superior acting talents, which not-often-enough are tapped by the scripts he decides to do, are nearly all on display herein in a virtuoso peformance.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Frenzy
    Armed with a superior script by Anthony Shaffer, an excellent cast, and a top technical crew, Alfred Hitchcock fashions a firstrate melodrama about an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex-strangulation murders.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    Performances are dull. Whatever sociological, political or dramatic motivations may once have existed in the story have been ruthlessly stripped from the plot, leaving all characters bereft of empathy or sympathy. There’s hardly a pretense toward justifying the carnage
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    John Hough has given Tudor Gates’ script [based on a characters created by J. Sheridan Le Fanu] a good pace and directed so that audiences can take it as straight horror or as a slight send-up.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Other
    An outstanding example of topflight writing structure and dialog, enhanced to full fruition by a knowing director.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeremiah Johnson
    The film has its own force and beauty and the only carp might lie in its not always clear exegesis of the humanistic spirit and freedom most of its characters are striving for.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Play It Again, Sam
    The placid direction of Herbert Ross keeps Allen in the spotlight for some good laughs, several chuckles and many smiles.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fritz the Cat
    Excellent animation and montage shore up a plot which has a few howls, several chuckles and many smiles.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Godfather
    Overlong at about 175 minutes (played without intermission), and occasionally confusing. While never so placid as to be boring, it is never so gripping as be superior screen drama.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Pink Flamingos
    Around the above premise spins the nitwit plot of the poorly lensed 16mm picture Pink Flamingos – one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Slaughterhouse-Five
    Slaughterhouse-Five is a mechanically slick, dramatically sterile commentary about World War II and afterward, as seen through the eyes of a boob Everyman. Director George Roy Hill's arch achievement emphasizes the diffused cant to the detriment of characterizations, which are stiff, unsympathetic and skin-deep.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Frogs
    Cast is generally firstclass and Milland’s presence, though comparatively brief, is always commanding.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Silent Running
    Silent Running depends on the excellent special effects of debuting director Douglas Trumbull and his team and on the appreciation of a literate but broadly entertaining script. Those being the highlights, they are virtually wiped out by the crucial miscasting of Bruce Dern. Production lacks dramatic credibility and teeters on the edge of the ludicrous.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What's Up, Doc?
    The script and cast are excellent; the direction and comedy staging are outstanding; and there are literally reels of pure, unadulterated and sustained laughs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cabaret
    It is literate, bawdy, sophisticated, sensual, cynical, heart-warming, and disturbingly thought-provoking.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Hot Rock
    Peter Yates’ direction and uniformly good cast partly overcome a William Goldman script [from Donald E. Westlake’s novel] that has many exciting and funny bits, but lacks a clear, unifying thrust.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cowboys
    The story [from a novel by William Dale Jennings] is long and episodic, and its gentle treatment makes the length something of a hindrance to maximum enjoyment.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Harry
    Strip away the philosophical garbage and all that's left is a well-made but shallow running-and-jumping meller. Don Siegel produces handsomely and directs routinely.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Straw Dogs
    Director Sam Peckinpah indulges himself in an orgy of unparalleled violence and nastiness with undertones of sexual repression in this production.
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