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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    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mary, Queen of Scots
    A large cast of excellent players appears to good advantage under the direction of Charles Jarrott. Superior production details and the cast help overcome an episodic, rambling story.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kidnapped
    An intriguing adventure piece set against that period in Scottish history when the English were trying to take over that country's rule.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Minnie and Moskowitz
    Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel play the title roles in Minnie And Moskowitz, an oppressive and irritating film in which a shrill and numbing hysteria of acting and direction soon kills any empathy for the loneliness of the main characters. John Cassavetes wrote and directed in his now-familiar home-movie improvisational and indulgent style.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Clockwork Orange
    A brilliant nightmare... The film employs outrageous vulgarity, stark brutality and some sophisticated comedy to make an opaque argument for the preservation of respect for man's free will - even to do wrong.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Harold and Maude
    Director Hal Ashby’s second feature is marked by a few good gags, but marred by a greater preponderance of sophomoric, overdone and mocking humor.
  6. Diamonds Are Forever
    Whatever connection Bond had to the real world has now been severed in favor of delivering the most satisfying possible experience for audiences, such as a throwaway scene of Q using an electromagnetic device to beat the slot machines or allowing homosexual henchmen Wint and Kidd to devise elaborate (and yet easily escapable) traps.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hospital
    The heavily sprayed-on sociological angle is that hospitals today treat patients like baggage.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bedknobs and Broomsticks
    The magic of Walt Disney lingers magnificently on in Bed knobs and Broomsticks.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nicholas and Alexandra
    Sam Spiegel comes up with a rarity: the intimate epic, in telling the fascinating story of the downfall of the Romanovs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Play Misty for Me
    When it’s not serving as an overdone travelog for the Monterey Peninsula-Carmel home environment of star, producer and debuting director Clint Eastwood, Play Misty for Me is an often fascinating suspenser about psychotic Jessica Walter, whose deranged infatuation for Eastwood leads her to commit murder. For that 80% of the film which constitutes the story, the structure and dialog create a mood of nervous terror which the other 20% nearly blows away.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    200 Motels
    The film is a series of surrealistic sequences allegedly inspired by the experiences of a rock group on the road. The incidents are often outrageously irreverent. The comedy is fast and furious, both sophisticated and sophomoric.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fiddler on the Roof
    Sentimental in a theatrical way, romantic in the old fashioned way, nostalgic of immigration days, affirmative of human decency, loyalty, bravery and folk humor.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Last Picture Show
    Notre Dame professor Edward Fischer has said that the best films, like the best books, tell how it is to be human under certain circumstances. Larry McMurtry did a beautiful job of this in his small novel (which he transferred to the screen), The Last Picture Show.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Daughters of Darkness
    Daughters of Darkness is so intentionally perverse that it often slips into impure camp, but Kumel and Seyrig hold interest by piling twists on every convention of the vampire genre.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    Producer and screenwriter have added enough fictional flesh to provide director William Friedkin and his overall topnotch cast with plenty of material, and they make the most of it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lawman
    Lancaster, as usual, is a highly convincing marshal, tough and taciturn. Ryan is also excellent as the faded, weak marshal with only memories. But it’s Cobb who quietly steals the film as the local boss who, however, unlike in many such films, is no ruthless villain.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Omega Man
    The Omega Man is an extremely literate science-fiction drama starring Charlton Heston as the only survivor of a worldwide bacteriological war, circa 1975. Thrust of the well-written story [adapted from Richard Matheson's novel] is Heston's running battle with deranged survivors headed by Anthony Zerbe.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Willard
    Some good jump moments and at least two stomach-churning murders committed by the rats with tight direction of Daniel Mann develop pic into sound nail-chewer.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    Some spectacularly beautiful Arctic footage, plus an exciting personal story of survival, make the production compelling and suspenseful.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Devils
    As if the story alone weren’t bizarre enough, Russell has spared nothing in hyping the historic events by stressing the grisly at the expense of dramatic unity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    The Panic in Needle Park is a total triumph. Gritty, gutsy, compelling, and vivid to the point of revulsion, it is an overpowering tragedy about urban drug addiction.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    An excellent combination of in-depth contemporary story-telling and personality casting.
  23. Shaft
    Directed by Gordon Parks with a subtle feel for both the grit and the humanity of the script. Excellent cast, headed by newcomer Richard Roundtree, may shock some audiences with heavy dose of candid dialog and situation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Walkabout
    Roeg's bag is photography, but pretty pictures alone cannot sustain - and, in fact, inhibit - this fragile and forced screen adaptation of a James Vance Marshall novel.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
    An okay family musical fantasy featuring Gene Wilder as an eccentric candymaker who makes a boy's dreams come true.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Carnal Knowledge
    Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowlede is a rather superficial and limited probe of American male sexual hypocrisies.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Klute
    Produced handsomely in New York, but directed tediously by Alan J. Pakula, the film is a suspenser without much suspense. Donald Sutherland shares above-title billing in a line-throwing, third-banana trifle of a part.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a disappointing mixture. A period story about a small northwest mountain village where stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie run the bordello, the production suffers from overlength; also a serious effort at moody photography which backfires into pretentiousness; plus a diffused comedy-drama plot line which is repeatedly shoved aside in favor of bawdiness.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Le Mans
    Marked by some spectacular car-racing footage, Le Mans is a successful attempt to escape the pot-boiler of prior films on same subject. The solution was to establish a documentary mood.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Anderson Tapes
    Scripter Frank Pierson with director Sidney Lumet has injected broadly comic aspects and the laughs work without reducing suspense.
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