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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dark Star
    Dark Star is a limp parody of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that warrants attention only for some remarkably believable special effects achieved with very little money. The dim comedy consists of sophomoric notations and mistimed one-liners.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Gatsby
    The Francis Coppola script and Jack Clayton's direction paint a savagely genteel portrait of an upper class generation that deserved in spades what it got circa 1929 and after.
    • Variety
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Three Musketeers
    The Three Musketeers take very well to Richard Lester’s provocative version that does not send it up but does add comedy to this adventure tale [by Alexandre Dumas].
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Thieves Like Us
    Thieves Like Us proves that when Robert Altman has a solid story and script, he can make an exceptional film, one mostly devoid of clutter, auterist mannerism, and other cinema chic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blazing Saddles
    Although Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder head a uniformly competent cast, pic is handily stolen by Harvey Korman and Madeline Kahn. Kahn is simply terrific doing a Marlene Dietrich lampoon...Rest of cast is fine, although Little’s black sheriff doesn’t blend too well with Brooks’ Jewish-flavored comic style. Wilder is amusingly low-key in a relatively small role.
    • Variety
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Zardoz
    A brilliant premise which unfortunately washes out in climactic sound and fury.
  7. The Exorcist
    Just as some of the footage deepens what is already there, additions in final reel, though closer to Blatty’s wishes, restate the obvious or add a feel-good patina which pushes the film closer to our own audience-pleasing period than the more daring early ’70s. [2000 re-release]
  8. The Sting
    The Sting has all the signs of a blockbuster. Paul Newman and Robert Redford are superbly reteamed, this time as a pair of con artists in Chicago of the ’30s, out to fleece a bigtime racketeer brilliantly cast with and played by Robert Shaw. George Roy Hill’s outstanding direction of David S. Ward’s finely-crafted story of multiple deception and surprise ending will delight both mass and class audiences. Extremely handsome production values and a great supporting cast round out the virtues.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Magnum Force
    The story contains the usual surfeit of human massacre for the yahoo trade, as well as a few actual thoughts.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    After an extremely overdone prolog of violent mass murder on a bus, The Laughing Policeman becomes a handsomely made manhunt actioner, starring Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern in excellent performances as two San Francisco detectives.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Day of the Dolphin
    Mike Nichols' film of The Day of the Dolphin is a rare and regrettably uneven combination of ideas and action. George C. Scott stars as a marine scientist whose work with dolphins faces corruption by his own sponsors. The story climax strains belief, but Nichols is one of a handful of directors who can get away with occasional improbability.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sleeper
    The film is loaded with throwaway literacy and broad slapstick, and while it fumbles the end, the parade of verbal and visual amusement is pleasant as long as it lasts.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Papillon
    For 150 uninterrupted minutes, the mood is one of despair, brutality, and little hope. The script is very good within its limitations, but there is insufficient identification with the main characters.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is a salty, bawdy, hilarious and very touching story about two career sailors escorting to a naval prison a dumb boot sentenced for petty thievery. Jack Nicholson is outstanding at the head of a superb cast.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Don't Look Now
    Superior stuff...The performances are right on the button; Donald Sutherland is (unusually) at his most subdued, top effectiveness as the materialist who ironically becomes the victim of his refusal to believe in the intangible; Julie Christie does her best work in ages as his wife; while a superbly-chosen cast of British and Italian supporting players etch a number of indelibly vivid portraits.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Serpico
    Pacino dominates the entire film. His inner personal torment is vividly detailed. (Review of Original Release)
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Basically a student effort (Cronenberg was 26), pic tests the viewer’s patience and endurance even with its hour’s running time due to its emphatically dry, scientific narration and deliberate emotional distancing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Westworld
    Westworld is an excellent film, which combines solid entertainment, chilling topicality, and superbly intelligent serio-comic story values. Michael Crichton's original script is as superior as his direction.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Breezy
    Clint Eastwood's third directorial effort is an okay contemporary drama about middle-aged William Holden falling for teenage Kay Lenz. Associate producer Jo Heims' script works the problem over with perhaps too much ironic, wry or broad humor for solid impact.
    • 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.
  29. 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.
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