Variety's Scores

Select another publication »
For 17,765 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: 9,125 out of 17765
  2. Mixed: 7,004 out of 17765
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17765
17765 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rio Lobo
    Rio Lobo is the sort of western that John Wayne and producer-director Howard Hawks do in their sleep. But by no stretch of nostalgia does it match such previous Wayne-Hawks epics as Red River or Rio Bravo.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Story
    It is generally successful on all artistic levels, propelled by the best-selling Erich Segal novel written from the original screenplay.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gimme Shelter
    Captures that petulant omnisexuality that made many adults consider Jagger a threat to their daughters, sons and household pets alike.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Scrooge
    Albert Finney's remarkable performance in the title role; executive producer Leslie Bricusse's fluid adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol, plus his unobtrusive complementary music and lyrics; and Ronald Neame's delicately controlled direction which conveys, but does not force, all the inherent warmth, humor and sentimentality.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    Billy Wilder's enterprise is a strange one because of its shift in directions from quite good satire to straight spy stuff. It is in large part old-fashioned, in that it's mile-wide and ancient-history Sherlock Holmes, but it's also handsomely produced and directed with incisiveness by Wilder.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great White Hope
    A superior cast, headed by James Earl Jones encoring in his stage role, a colorful and earthy script, plus outstanding production, render film quite palatable.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tora! Tora! Tora!
    Both overall director Richard Fleischer and his Japanese counterparts do a dull job, and the monotonously low-key tone of scene after scene almost suggests that each was filmed without a sense of ultimate slotting in the finished form.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    The film’s nervewracking quality is consistent with its content. Nicholson’s performance is a remarkably varied and daring exploration of a complex character, equally convincing in its manic and sober aspects.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wild Child
    It progresses slowly but absorbingly. Truffaut underplays but exudes an interior tenderness and dedication. The boy is amazingly and intuitively well played by a tousled gypsy tyke named Jean-Pierre Cargol. Everybody connected with this unusual, off-beat film made in black-and-white rates kudos.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Take the Money and Run
    A few good laughs in an 85-minute film do not a comedy make. Basically a running gag about hero Allen's ineptitude as a professional crook, scatters its fire in so many directions it has to hit at least several targets. But satire on documentary coverage of criminal flop is overextended and eventually tiresome.
    • Variety
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Catch-22
    Low, cheap comedy mingles nervously with slick, high-fashion technical polish in a slow-boiling stew of specious philosophy and superficial characterization.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kelly's Heroes
    Nearly satirical in its overall effect, plot caroms between cliche dogface antics, detailed and gratuitous violence, caper melodramatics, and outrageous anachronism.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    This trashy, gaudy, sound-stage vulgarity about low life among the high life is as funny as a burning orphanage.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Two Mules for Sister Sara
    Two Mules for Sister Sara might have worked. But with Clint Eastwood as one of the mules, an American mercenary looking for a fast peso in old French-occupied Mexico, Shirley MacLaine as a scarlet sister disguised in a nun's habit, and Don Siegel's by-the-old-book direction, it doesn't.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Out of Towners
    The Out of Towners is a total delight.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Beneath the Planet of the Apes
    This sequel to the 1968 smash, Planet of the Apes, is hokey and slapdash. The story [by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams] and Ted Post’s direction fall far short of the original.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    Beau Bridges heads the uniformly excellent cast as a bored rich youth who buys a black ghetto apartment building and learns something about life.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Getting Straight
    Getting Straight is an outstanding film. It is a comprehensive, cynical, sympathetic, flip, touching and hilarious story of the middle generation [of the late 1960s] – those millions a bit too old for protest, a bit too young for repression.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    As a 16mm cinema verite of four rock musicians in a studio jamming a bit, trying to get their music together, clowning and rapping a little, and finally doing a brief concert, Let It Be is a relatively innocuous, unimaginative piece of film.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Man Called Horse
    A Man Called Horse is said to be an authentic depiction of American Indian life in the Dakota territory of about 1820. Authentic it may be, but an absorbing film drama it is not.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bloody Mama
    The best performance in the film, and one of the most outstanding screen portrayals in many moons, is that of Pat Hingle, playing a wealthy businessman kidnapped for high ransom.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boys in the Band
    Boys in the Band drags. But despite its often tedious postulations of homosexual case histories instead of realistic dialog, and the stagey posturing of the actors, the too literately faithful adaptation of Mart Crowley's off-Broadway swish-set piece has bitchy, back-biting humor, fascinating character studies, melodrama and, most of all, perverse interest.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Airport
    Airport is a handsome, often dramatically involving $10-million epitaph to a bygone brand of filmmaking. However, the ultimate dramatic situation of a passenger loaded jetliner with a psychopathic bomber aboard that has to be brought into a blizzard-swept airport with runway blocked by a snow-stalled plane actually does not create suspense because the audience knows how it's going to end.
    • Variety
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Patton
    War is hell, and Patton is one hell of a war picture, perhaps one of the most remarkable of its type ever made.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Magic Christian
    A spotty, uneven satire (from the novel by Terry Southern) with a number of good yocks, but insufficient sustained wit or related action.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
    The film is a good-enough example of its low-key type, with artwork rather better than usual (less obvious backcloths, etc.), a minimum of artless dialog, good lensing by Arthur Grant and a solid all round cast.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Honeymoon Killers
    Made on a very low budget by a writer-director Leonard Kastle, The Honeymoon Killers, based on the Lonely Hearts murder case of the late 1940s, is made with care, authenticity and attention to detail.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Molly Maguires
    The Molly Maguires, based on a Pennsylvania coal miners' rebellion of the late 19th century, is occasionally brilliant. Sean Connery, Richard Harris and Samantha Eggar head a competent cast.
  29. MASH
    In the end M.A.S.H. succeeds, in spite of its glaring faults, because Gould, Sutherland, Skerritt, Jo Ann Pflug as the delicious Lt. Dish, and Roger Bowen, as the goof-off commanding officer who is bright enough to recognize his junior officers' medical competence and stay out of their way, are all believable and bitingly funny in their casual disdain for the Army.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Reivers
    The Reivers is a nice bawdy film, sort of Walt Disney with an adult rating.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »