Absolutely the worst movie.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Bette Gordon's independent psychological thriller, written by feminist superheroine Kathy Acker, is a stunning noir experiment set in the sex shops of 1983 Times Square. A signifcant film about sexual difference, desire, and gaze. Watch it. And be sure to pay attention to the scenery of 1983 Times Square. It's a different world, aeons ago.

This movie was horrible. The description has nothing to do with what happens in this movie. The critical reviews just prove that critics have no taste. This movie is slow paced and goes no where. 80% of the movie is her following a guy around that bought her coke at the porn theatre she works at. The rest of the movie is disjointed discussions with her boyfriend or her selling tickets at the theatre. If you like really slow go nowhere movies that are the quality of a movie recorded from TV on your VHS player then this movie is for you. If you are looking for something with a good story, good acting or semi erotic (like this is advertised as) then look else where.

Variety was shot on the super-cheap on the streets of midtown NYC in 1983, which is for a short while part of its not exactly charm but precise and evocative mood. This is a Times Square that most wont recognize since the clean-up in recent years; it's dirty, loaded with porno theaters and video stores, and with some exceptions (like the Variety movie theater boss played by Luis Guzman) there's no lack of sleazy males. In this movie the main character, Christine (Sandy McLeod) seems to be a fairly normal girl just looking for a job and finds one at Jose's Variety theater at the ticket window. Little by little she becomes intrigued by the porno movies playing and by a mysterious gentlemen caller (Richard Davidson) who takes her out on a bum date to Yankee stadium, stranding her up as he just 'goes away' on some urgent matter.What follows is a series of scenes of her following him around- even going as far as to the Jersey shore where he does some mysterious "business" shaking hands with people outside of amusement parks- and little by little she sinks further into this porno-type of funk, like a misguided femme fatale sitting in her room and playing 45's in sultry clothes and purple lighting. Some of this sounds interesting because it is - Bette Gordon has a point to make here on the feminine condition in an Urban setting, kind of like a Taxi Driver only replacing the guns with more of the porn, and there are some effective scenes early on showing McLeod surrounded by this creepy but intriguing setting.But there's also passages that, I hate to admit, were just too dull to really be engaged. She follows this man to a fish market, and then we're treated to lots and lots of footage of fish and the like. Why? What does this really add to the atmosphere? It's like Gordon doesn't always know if she wants to make a neo-noir or a documentary, and the shuffle between the two forms (both engaging on their own) becomes confused. I also didn't care for those passages where Christine gives those ridiculously detailed descriptions/synopses of the porno movies she sees to her exasperated boyfriend (Will Patton), and McLeod in these scenes reaches her most annoying points. She's not a terrible actress throughout, but here she sounds like she's reciting remembered lines as opposed to acting, and one sympathizes with what Mark has to put up with. We're putting up with it too.There is a reason this has something of a very minor cult status, and that it even got Bette Gordon a re-release screening at the Tribeca film festival this year. It's very much a New York movie, made on the dirty streets, meant to capture that dingy side and to give some kind of naturalistic feeling of a strange woman in this environment. But its own mystery undercuts itself. Variety would work far better, maybe even be truly great, as a short film. At 100 minutes, for all of its little moments of pleasure (i.e. when Chrisitne imagines herself up on the screen in a room with the enigmatic criminal Louie) and John Lurie's intoxicating jazz, it's too long and too unfocused for what works well to really strike it home. Luis Guzman steals the show.

There is no doubt that feminism is what holds this movie together.Bette Gordon made this movie in the height of the feminist debate over pornography. She doesn't endorse or condemn porn in this movie."Variety" depicts a woman who uses porn as a tool of self-exploration.The movie is also a spoof of film noir. Gordon has fun with the genre by changing the sex of the main character to female. She lets her heroine play the amateur sleuth, which is traditionally a male character.Unlike many genre movies in which women are terrorized, there is no victim in "Variety." Gordon contends that pornography doesn't necessarily make women victims. It is so refreshing that Gordon never puts her heroine at the site of male violence.Gordon succeeds in keeping the viewer in suspense till the very end of the movie.