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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    • 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.
  18. 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
    Good looking production is above average family entertainment, enhanced to great measure by zesty, but never show-off, direction by Robert Butler, in a debut swing to pix from telefilm.
  21. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
    Is it an awful movie? Objectively speaking, no (although it does feature one of the worst endings ever inflicted on an audience). But as a Bond movie, it’s an abomination.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Topaz
    Topaz tends to move more solidly and less infectiously than many of Alfred Hitchcock's best remembered pix. Yet Hitchcock brings in a full quota of twists and tingling moments.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cactus Flower
    Cactus Flower drags, which is probably the worst thing that can be said of a light comedy. It's due to sloppy direction by Gene Saks and the miscasting of Walter Matthau opposite Ingrid Bergman.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hello, Dolly!
    An expensive, expansive, sometimes exaggerated, sentimental, nostalgic, wholesome, pictorially opulent $20 million filmusical [from the 1964 Broadway production, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman] with the charisma of Barbra Streisand in the title role.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marooned
    The film is superbly crafted, taut and a technological cliff-hanger.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
    A film with Jane Fonda as a hard-as-nails babe. It becomes, in a recreated old ballroom, a sordid spectacle of hard times, a kind of existentialist allegory of life.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Z
    Z is a punchy political pic [from the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos] that mixes action, violence, and conspiracy on a robust, lavish scale.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Film has a basic storyline, character elements and dialog for what might have been a superior drama and possibly a great western. But Andrew McLaglen's direction, seems to consist of splicing together cliches, static camera work and Central Casting of the bit parts.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Downhill Racer
    Redford contributes a sensitive, interesting portrayal. His interpretation is many-faceted and probing. Hackman’s characterization is virile and thoroughly human.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goodbye, Mr. Chips
    M-G-M's reproduction of Goodbye, Mr. Chips as a big-budget musical [music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse] with Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark is a sumptuous near-miss that trips on its own overproduction.
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